Abstract

This chapter examines the reaction of the Israeli political-military elite to the Arab spring. Israel has always presented itself as an island of democracy in a sea of authoritarianism. One would have therefore expected Israel to welcome the pro-democracy movements that began to sweep through the region in early 2011. In fact, the reaction has been negative at all levels of Israeli society. Two main factors are put forward to explain this negative reaction. The first factor has to do with the politics of identity. Israelis think that their values and their culture make them part of Europe and they have no desire to become part of the Middle East. The second factor is the fear that the transition from dictatorship to democracy will generate instability and undermine Israel’s security. The article focuses more specifically on the impact of the Arab Spring on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It shows how turmoil around its borders has led Israel to stiffen further its terms for a settlement with the Palestinians. It concludes that the Arab Spring has widened the gulf between Israel and its Arab neighbours and deepened its conflict with the Palestinians.

In early June 1967, Israel won the swiftest and the most spectacular military victory of its entire war-filled history. Defence Minister Moshe Dayan quickly branded it the “Six-Day War” in a conscious allusion to the six days of the Creation in the book of Genesis. With a few exceptions, Israelis regard this war as a defensive war, a morally justified war, and a war of no-choice, a war imposed on them by their predatory Arab foes. In the Arab world, this war is viewed as a wilful act of aggression with a secret agenda of territorial expansion. The widely held view is that during the summer of 1967 Israel was ready for war, well prepared, and only waiting for an opportunity to launch it. Many Egyptians go further and claim that Israel laid a trap for Gamal Abdel Nasser and that Nasser fell into it. Jordanians believe that there was a trap and consider it part of an Israeli strategy to draw the neighbouring Arab states into a war for which they were not prepared. The notion that Israel was constantly planning and plotting to capture the West Bank is central to the Jordanian understanding of the origins of the war. In a speech on 25 January 1967, King Hussein declared that “the enemy's present objective is the West Bank; after that it will be the East Bank and after that they will expand throughout the Arab homeland to achieve their aims and ambitions.” This view of Israel's conduct in 1967 is entirely consistent with the predominant Arab perception of themselves as the innocent victims and of Israel as an inherently aggressive and expansionist state, an outpost of Western imperialism. The reality is more complex on both sides of the equation.

The purpose of this chapter is to reexamine the Arab claims of a premeditated war plot in the light of the evidence that is now available. Why did Israel launch a surprise attack on 5 June 1967? What were its war aims? Did they include territorial expansion at the expense of its neighbours? Was this a defensive or an offensive war? Was it a war of choice or a war of no-choice? These are some of the main questions to be explored here. Fortunately, the primary sources available regarding Israel's conduct in 1967 are extraordinarily rich. Israel emulated Britain's thirty-year rule for the review and declassification of official documents and applied it in an admirably liberal fashion. The primary sources regarding the June War that have been declassified include the verbatim records of Cabinet meetings; the papers of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the verbatim records of the meetings of the Israel Defence Force (IDF) General Staff, the papers of the Chief of Staff, and the minutes of countless consultative meetings involving military and civilian officials. Whatever one might think of Israel's policy towards the Arabs, it is very much to its credit that it allows researchers such remarkably free access to its internal records.

The June 1967 War was a turning point in the evolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict and a watershed moment in the history of the modern Middle East. A vast literature on this war, popularly known as the Six-Day War, covers the subject from all angles. But the time has come for reassessment. Many previous accounts deal with the military operations on the Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian fronts during the period of 5–10 June 1967. In this volume, the focus is not on the military operations but on the political aspects of the conflict, especially during the prolonged period of crisis that eventually erupted in all-out war. The aim is to reconstruct in some detail and in some depth the history of this fateful war from the perspective of its principal protagonists. These include the great powers and the regional powers. A major theme of the volume is the relationship between the great powers and their local allies on the road to war.

The contributors to this volume are area specialists. One of its strengths is that the authors have examined recently declassified material not only in English, French, and Russian but also in Hebrew and Arabic. The volume, however, is not merely a collection of articles with up-to-date material regarding different aspects of the war by different scholars. All the contributors were guided by the same overarching plan. Our collective aim has been to reinterpret the history of the June 1967 War by drawing as much as possible from the official documents and primary sources now available in all the relevant languages.

Jordan was a reluctant belligerent in the third Arab-Israeli war. The principal decision maker on the Jordanian side was King Hussein bin Talal who had ascended the Hashemite throne in 1953 at the tender age of eighteen. Hussein was the heir to a Hashemite legacy of moderation and pragmatism towards the Zionist movement that went back to his grandfather, King Abdullah I, the founder of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Hussein was also the heir to an even older Hashemite legacy of leadership in the struggle for Arab independence and unity. This legacy went back Hussein's great-grandfather, Hussein the Sharif of Mecca, who staged the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire in World War I. King Hussein's foreign policy was essentially a balancing act between the conflicting claims of Arab nationalism and coexistence with Israel. During the Suez Crisis of 1956, Hussein's commitment to Arab nationalism led him to side with Egypt against Israel. He even offered to open a second front against Israel, but President Gamal Abdel Nasser dissuaded him. After Suez, the pragmatic strand in Hussein's foreign policy came to the fore, and in 1963 he initiated a secret dialogue with Israel's leaders. This dialogue across the battle lines enabled Jordan and Israel to reach a modus vivendi, a state approaching de facto peace.

Jordan's entry into the war against Israel in 1967 alongside the radical Arab regimes calls for an explanation. The explanation offered here is that an ill-considered Israeli military attack upset the delicate balance and launched Jordan on the slippery slope that led to its participation and disastrous defeat during the Six-Day War. It is essential to distinguish Israel's intentions from King Hussein's perceptions. Israel had no intention and no plan to attack Jordan. Hussein misperceived Israel's intentions and these misperceptions guided, or rather misguided, his subsequent policy. The attack destroyed Hussein's faith in Israel's peaceful intentions, although Israel harboured no plans of aggression. It left him feeling that his country was isolated and vulnerable and drove him into a rapprochement with Egypt within the framework of the United Arab Command (which had been set up in 1964) in order to counter the perceived Israeli threat. The alliance with Egypt, however, quickly embroiled Hussein in a war that he neither wanted nor anticipated.

“A nation,” said the French philosopher Ernest Renan, “is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors.” Throughout the ages, the use of myths about the past has been a potent instrument of forging a nation. The Zionist movement is not unique in propagating a simplified and varnished version of the past in the process of nation-building. But it does provide a strikingly successful example of the use of myths for the dual purpose of promoting internal unity and enlisting international sympathy and support for the state of Israel.

The traditional Zionist version of the Arab–Israeli conflict places the responsibility on the Arab side. Israel is portrayed as the innocent victim of unremitting Arab hostility and Arab aggression. In this respect, traditional Zionist accounts of the emergence of Israel form a natural sequel to the history of the Jewish people, with its emphasis on the weakness, vulnerability, and numerical inferiority of the Jews in relation to their adversaries. The American Jewish historian Salo Baron once referred to this as the lachrymose view of Jewish history. This view tends to present Jewish history as a long series of trials and tribulations culminating in the Holocaust.

The War of Independence constituted a glorious contrast to the centuries of powerlessness, persecution, and humiliation. Yet the traditional Zionist narrative of the events surrounding the birth of the state of Israel was still constructed around the notion of the Jews as the victims. This narrative presents the 1948 War as a simple, bipolar, no-holds-barred struggle between a monolithic and malevolent Arab adversary and a tiny, peace-loving Jewish community.

The first edition of The War for Palestine was published by Cambridge University Press in 2001. The success of this book surpassed all our expectations. It received considerable critical acclaim; it sold over 8,000 copies; and it was translated into three languages – Arabic, French, and Italian. The book was a first attempt to encourage the rewriting of the history of 1948 from Arab and Israeli perspectives alike. It originated as a series of lectures held at the Middle East Centre of St. Antony's College, Oxford, in the autumn of 1998. Its aim was to re-examine the role of all the local actors in the struggle for Palestine in the light of old and recently declassified archival resources. The contributors to this volume came from different backgrounds: some from Israel, some from the Arab world, and some from the West. Regardless of our provenance, we were all united by a commitment to explore, with the help of the best evidence we could find, the causes, the course, and the consequences of this fateful war. Our common purpose was to understand, not to impute shame or allocate blame.

It was Edward Said, a long-time friend of the Middle East Centre in Oxford, who first suggested to us the idea of bringing Arab and Israeli scholars together to rewrite the history of the Palestine War. Edward himself wrote eloquently, in his contribution to this volume and in other places, on the need for Arab intellectuals to come to terms with their history and on the importance of looking simultaneously at both sides of the hill, of writing history contrapuntally, as he liked to put it.