1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East. Tom Segev. New York: Metropolitan Books. 2005. 670 pages.
In 1967, when a pivotal war was won, someone found a skeleton in a Palestinian desert; there was a tree growing from it. In Israel’s national psyche, the skeleton became the bones of Absalom Feinberg, a “handsome Zionist spy, who set off to help the British wrest Palestine from the Turks and disappeared in the desert in 1917.” Feinberg was a legend already to the Israelis prior to the 1967 Six-Day War, but in October ‘67, when the war was done, the discovery of these bones made him tangible to the people — and “seemed to reinforce the founding aphorism of Zionism: If you will it, it is no legend.”
“Or at least, that was what Israel decided to believe.”
“Or at least, that was what Israel decided to believe,” wrote Segev, and a short line buried deep in the book seemed to me to epitomize an era — perhaps an epoch.
Barely one page after describing the bones of Absalom, deconstructing the aftermath, Segev cites a post-war pamphlet from the office of the Prime Minister called “Know What To Say.” The official talking points included this: “The fact is that until this day no Arab ruler has shown a willingness to reach a peace treaty with Israel.” To which Segev remarked: “Or at least, that was what Israel decided to believe.” He then contradicts this party line, noting that two of the three “enemies” of Israel, the Egyptian president and the Jordanian king had each offered some basis for accord. But Israel held to its own alternative facts.
Not that it mattered then or would have mattered before. Israel was itching for war, looking for reasons, hoping one of its neighbors would provoke in the slightest of ways and the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces, would do what it had been trained to do — kill Arabs. Despite its name, the IDF was not a defensive force, wrote Segev; it was an offensive one and wanted something to do.
From the beginning, then, as I understand it: Israel was always unhappy with the borders drawn for it by the UN Partition Resolution of 1947, carved from the land of the Palestinian people, believing it should instead have the whole territory. Arab peoples were unhappy too, about being displaced, about losing home and territory, about losing control of holy sites. In a war that Israel called its War of Independence and the Palestinians simply called Nakba, the Catastrophe, Israel emerged with expanded borders — the UN parcels plus some land that was supposed to be for the Palestinians — and 750,000 Palestinians were left homeless, refugees.
But Israel wasn’t satisfied, because it didn’t get the whole territory. Yitzhak Rabin, who was by the 1960s deputy chief of staff of the IDF, described his ideal boundaries — the Jordan River, the Litani River and the Suez Canal, which would encroach on Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt. This book, by Israeli journalist Tom Segev, is a dissection, in some cases moment by moment, of what happened next.
In 1967, after months of grumbling and bickering internally, convincing its people that Egypt’s Nasser was the new Hitler, Israel preemptively attacked Egypt, then Jordan and Syria, occupying the West Bank, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula.
Segev’s narrative takes the us deep into the weeds, covering the war, the before and the after, including: a recession that substantially changed Israeli life; Israel’s relationship with Diaspora Jews, especially those in America who had an outsized impact on Israeli and American politics; the desire of Israeli leaders to create a European city in Palestine vis-å-vis the desire of the Israeli people to be ever more like America; the shifting Israeli ideas about what borders should be; the shifting justifications for attacking Egypt, Syria and Jordan; and the shifting Israeli government itself, which negotiated key leadership changes within days of war.
Of 600 pages, only 80 are about the war itself. Fully the first half describes life in Israel leading up to war: the growing desire of the people for war, the growing patriotism/nationalism, the angst over the paucity of diaspora Jews who actually wanted to live in this nation they were trying to build, the racism and fear that fed the Jewish mood, the foreign money that supported the Zionist dream; plus debates among leaders about how war might bring an end to recession, the leadership conflicts over whether war was necessary, and dickering over who would be best to run the government during such a time. Eshkol, Dayan, Meir, Begin, Rabin, Ben-Gurion: so many familiar names with distinctive flaws, desires and party agenda.
Nearly one third of the book is devoted to the aftermath of war, which seemed in some ways a cartoonish “oh my god we won; what do we do now?” To occupy or not to occupy? To settle or not to settle? What shall we call this war? Who gets the credit? How do we enshrine the national telling? What are we going to do with all these new refugees (350,000 more)? And how do we maintain our global reputation as oppressed underdogs whilst we gather the considerable spoils of war?
Not to spoil the ending, but they called it the Six-Day War, settled and settled and continue to settle, and did virtually nothing with the refugees. As to the question of how they have maintained their global reputation as underdogs while gathering the spoils of war, I simply don’t know.
The post-war post-mortem involves credit-taking, blame-shifting, lie-telling, ass-covering. Legislative maneuvering and classified acknowledgements of war crimes. Moshe Dayan emerged as the prototype of post-war shape-shifting. He was a hero or he was out of the loop, depending on which suited his purposes. “It’s nice to be in power,” he said.
Segev quotes Prime Minister Levi Eshkol: “First, I don’t know what I want. Second, I would like to do something.” Writes Segev: “It would be difficult to find any statement that better expressed Eshkol’s position on almost everything at any given time.” The kind of leader you want in a time of national crisis, I would think.
I worried from the outset that I was in for 600 pages of pro-Israel propaganda, but that turned out mostly not to be the case. Segev seemed to be committed to a historic accounting, even when that made iconic leaders look foolish, egomaniacal or hopelessly incompetent. There were moments, however, when he dropped the ball and showed his own bias — or just got lazy — as in referring to Palestinians as terrorists and referring to Palestinian pushback as “terrorism” instead of “resistance.” He makes the point that Israel itself led the world to use this language of terror, (and the European/American world quickly complied), but he seems to use it himself unnecessarily. He also writes of homes and villages “abandoned” by the Palestinians, when it would be more accurate to say homes and villages from which the Palestinians were driven by Israelis, homes and villages that were destroyed by Israeli forces, or occupied by Israeli civilians eager to claim the new territory, eager to establish the “population centers” that would be essential for control (and which are still used as a means of control). Eshkol’s frequent post-war question of the person he assigned to relocate the refugees was “How many Arabs have you driven out so far?”
There were other conflicts in this narrative — among leaders, as I noted, but also between religious and secular Jews, between American Jews and Israeli Jews (who thought American Jews weren’t real Jews); between Ashkenazis (European) and Mizrahim (Eastern/North African) Jews, between settlers and diaspora. Because there is always someone to blame, to exploit, to despise.
Regarding the racism of the lighter-skinned Ashkenazis, Zionism was “a project conceived in Europe by Europeans and for European Jews,” wrote Susan Abulhawa for Aljazeera. European Jews needed the Asian and Middle Eastern Jews to bolster their numbers (for overpowering the Arabs), but they didn’t have to like them. Diaspora Jews weren’t moving in (and how awful it must feel to create a new country and then find out no one wants to live there), so Jews from Germany, Poland, Russia and beyond recruited to their cause darker skinned Jews from Iraq, Morocco, Iran, Egypt, Tunisia, Syria. And then treated them badly — not unlike white America’s treatment of Black and Latinx people who still in some ways suit the larger white purposes. Segev delves into the racist policies with some energy, though Abulhawa gave a clearer understanding of where the term came from.
In one instance, it was a Communist Jew who pushed back against the disparate treatment of the Mizrahim. Though rarely is it spoken, in my own reading of the American labor and social justice movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, it was often the Communists who were most persistent about racial equity. In fact, notes Segev, “The Zionist movement had adopted liberal democratic ideas from the first. But … forced to choose between humanistic socialist principles and the national interest, they usually chose the latter.” Even Mapai, the democratic socialist workers party, eventually threw in with the hawkish nationalism.
It is also worth noting that, in Segev’s telling, this battle for the land is only tangentially a religious battle, though it plays quite biblically in the world imagination. In the time before the war, Israel was growing as a secular state, to the chagrin of some elders. As the war approached and in the aftermath, the language of God’s desire for Israel to have the land became more amplified, as everyone got religion. So many biblical touchstones. Saul, Rachel, the patriarchs, Joshua, David, Rahab, the glory days. “Jewish statehood as it had been 1897 years earlier.” There was even reference to a pillar of fire leading them, per the Exodus. Victory was clearly God’s doing. “Or at least, that was what Israel decided to believe.”
One official “toyed with the idea of purchasing lands and orchards in Gaza and settling Jews there; he would give them stores and barbershops, he said dreamily. It would be just like the old days in Palestine: they would give a loan to an Arab, he would lose the money, and then they would buy up his lands.” Which I remember specifically reading about in various books of the bible, and never in a complimentary way.
But the part of the bible that didn’t get a lot of attention was the wilderness sojourn and God’s drumbeat of the lesson that Israel was not to become like Egypt under Pharaoh. Israel was supposed to be a new kind of people, devoted to welcome and well-being, said God in the wilderness. And then, according to the book of Joshua, Israel’s step one in becoming that sort of people was to commit genocide in “the promised land.” That’s hard to reconcile.
The book was helpful in a lot of ways, especially in understanding the national psyche of Israel and the generational angst that plagues them.
I also gained more understanding of US policy and participation in the colonialism — a pre-existing political bet made in this era by Lyndon Johnson and his secretaries of state and defense, Rusk and McNamara, tainted by concerns of the contemporaneous US war in Vietnam, and egged on by Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas and other prominent American Jews who supported politically and financially the establishment of an Israeli state, but who didn’t actually want to live there. “People of their own free will had chosen the Diaspora over the Homeland. There could be no greater blow to the Zionist ego.”
But I also gained more righteous empathy for the Palestinian people, who, like so many victims of American settler colonialism, were forced to give up everything — often leaving home with nothing, under threat of immediate destruction, then walking thousands of miles in search of someone who would take them in, so many dying on the way. Living in camps in poverty without rights or employment, facing constant discrimination and surveillance, considered a security risk. Camps that began before this war and continue to this day.
Among the very many historical documents and perspectives which shaped Segev’s telling of the war, there was a diary of a soldier, who commented that the Arab soldiers he encountered in the war were about 20 years old — the first generation born in exile. He questioned whether the two peoples were destined to have a new war in each new generation. Every 10-20 years, said another.
It doesn’t have to be so. But averting ongoing war requires that Israel give up its Zionist dream to “populate as much territory as possible, with as few Arabs as possible,” and acknowledge that the land is to be shared, that the common good includes both Arabs and Jews.
I don’t imagine that happening. In the aftermath of war, one of the ongoing and intensely debated questions was what to do about the refugees and the Palestinians remaining in the occupied territories. (Official statements at the time were that Israel lacked funds to resettle Palestinians, causing them to beg from other countries; documents declassified since have shown they had ample money but didn’t want to spend it.) We have seen over the decades the unchanging answer — make life as miserable as possible and hope they leave.
Racism is a heinous thing. We know this because white America has inflicted it in every generation. The Middle Passage, the Trail of Tears, concentration camps now at our border and in our history, genocide, labor exploitation, forced sterilizations and medical malpractice, economic oppression and sex trafficking. We know what this is like. We know what it does. And yet we continue to support Israel, to fund its deadly Zionist dream by billions of dollars every year.
“If you will it, it is no legend.” I’m confident Israel isn’t done willing greater control over the land of Palestine. The question remains to what degree the US will continue to support their kingdom-building. So far, “what Israel decided to believe” has become what we have decided to believe as well. I can’t imagine it will change anytime soon.
At 2,500 words this is a long review, but at 670 pages, or about 320,000 words, 1967 is a hefty read. There are unnumbered maps and photos that contribute to fuller understanding, and, in addition to 85 pages of endnotes and indexing, Segev frequently includes extraneous detail at the bottom of pages, marked by asterisks. I found this extra material quite interesting and not always extraneous. Despite all that, I still had to ask Siri a bunch of stuff. Plan to take your time. And if you read it, I welcome your thoughts.