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| Author: | Michael Mandelbaum, Christian Herter Professor, Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University |
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June 25, 2002
Newsday
Overshadowed by the ongoing terrorist attacks and now President George W. Bush's proposed peace plan, an important Mideast anniversary passed almost unnoticed this month.
Thirty-five years ago, on June 5, 1967, war broke out between Israel and three of its Arab neighbors. In a mere six days, the Israelis captured the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the West Bank of the Jordan River from the Kingdom of Jordan. The Six Day War's outcome set the stage for all subsequent relations between Arabs and Israelis. In time for this anniversary a book has appeared that - drawing on interviews and archival research in Israel, Egypt, the United States and Russia - gives as complete an account of the 1967 war as is ever likely to be written. In addition to providing the definitive history of that conflict, Michael B. Oren's "Six Days of War" offers a valuable perspective on the current troubles in the region. The differences between the 1967 war and the homicide bombing attacks against Israeli civilians are striking and demonstrate that some progress has been made in reducing the violence and containing the dangers of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the past 35 years.
But there are also similarities between the two, which shows that full peace will require changes that have not yet taken place.
The 1967 war was waged by powerful modern armies trained, equipped and sent into battle by sovereign states. A military victory by the Arab side would have put all of Israel at risk. The current campaign of terror, vicious though it is, is the work of a small group of people supported by a Palestinian authority that, unlike Egypt, Syria and Jordan in 1967, has neither an army nor an air force. It can make life difficult and dangerous for individual Israelis, but it cannot destroy Israel.
The Six Day War, moreover, unlike the current violence, was played out in the shadow of the Cold War. The Israeli and American governments had to calculate their military and political initiatives so as to avoid provoking the Soviet Union, which sided with the Arabs. Military intervention in the Middle East by Moscow could have led to a dangerous confrontation with the United States. No such danger hangs over the current violence.
As well as differences between the conflict of 1967 and 2002, there are similarities. Both were provoked by a reckless, aggressive Arab leader who violated commitments he had solemnly made. Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser started the Six Day War by ordering the removal of United Nations personnel from the Sinai Peninsula, where they had been stationed with his approval as part of the settlement of the Arab-Israeli War of 1956, and by closing to Israeli shipping the Straits of Tiran, located at the tip of the peninsula and Israel's outlet to the Mediterranean Sea, which he knew was an act of war.
The current violence is the responsibility of the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. When Israel offered him a Palestinian state on 97 percent of the West Bank and Gaza in 2000, he refused, made no counteroffer, then orchestrated and encouraged attacks on Israeli civilians, in violation of the Oslo agreements he had signed with former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1993.
Both Nasser and Arafat believed that their policies of aggression would suceed. Nasser vastly overestimated the military capacities of the Arab armed forces and just as dramatically underestimated Israel's military prowess, thereby leading the Arab countries to one of the most sweeping defeats in modern military history.
Arafat believed that a campaign of terror would force Israel to leave the West Bank without his having to make peace, just as the Israelis had withdrawn their military forces from southern Lebanon in 1999, where they had been stationed to prevent terrorist attacks on northern Israel. And he calculated that the international community would prevent the Israeli army from taking decisive measures against his terrorist infrastructure. On both counts he, like Nasser before him, turned out to be wrong.
Yet both Arab leaders survived their disastrous failures. Nasser remained president of Egypt until his death in 1970; Arafat continues as the head of the Palestinian Authority. The man who succeeded Nasser after his death, Anwar Sadat, did sign a peace treaty with Israel, which suggests that replacing Arafat may open the way to an Israeli-Palestinian settlement.
But while new Palestinian leadership is a necessary condition for the end of the conflict, as Bush's speech yesterday made clear, the precedent of the 1967 war and its aftermath suggests it may not be a sufficient one.
The Israeli-Egyptian peace is, by Egypt's choice, a cold one, with virtually no contacts between the two societies. It did not come until 1979, 12 years after the Six Day War. And even this cold peace was not possible until, halfway through that period, in 1973, Israel and the Arab countries had gone to war yet again.
Michael Mandelbaum is a professor of American foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
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