40 years since Arab-Israeli war

Written by Salim Mansur
See Website for Bio | See Website for Salim Mansur Archives
Saturday, June 02, 2007

Forty years ago this month Israel’s defence force dealt a fatal blow to Arab war-mongers and the Pan-Arabism of the Egyptian dictator, Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Through the preceding weeks Arab preparations for a final showdown with Israel had gathered unchecked steam.

Arab intent to annihilate the Jewish state was never masked following the uneasy truce reached through the UN efforts in 1949 between the two sides.

But internal Arab politics as ever remained divisive, and the strident call for Arab unity by dictators in Egypt and Syria barely hid the reality of deeply entrenched quarrels within their world.

An axiom of modern Arab politics is the greater the internal division among Arabs, the more strident is Arab rhetoric against Israel. In May, 1967, this stridency reached its peak when Nasser announced on May 22 the closure of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, which triggered the Six Day War.

In the morning of June 5, 1967, the Israeli air force preemptively struck and within a few hours the entire Eygptian air force lay in ruins. The war Arab dictators had been announcing on radio for weeks was over even before their people had awoken fully from night’s slumber.

Nasser never recovered from the military disaster brought about by his recklessness. Several weeks later in September in Khartoum, Sudan, Nasser—joined together with other heads of Arab states—offered a petulant response to Israel. This was the three “noes”—“no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it, and insistence on the rights of the Palestinian people in their own country.”

In the four decades since the Middle East has been turned upside-down in pursuit of Palestinian rights that were barely acknowledged by Arab leaders before June 1967. This pursuit became an excuse for the dreadful regression of the Arab world into a malaise of brutally repressive order (Syria, for instance) and blood-soaked anarchy as in Gaza.

Anwar Sadat succeeded Nasser and planned the limited war of October 1973 to redeem Egypt’s lost honour. Sadat then negotiated a peace agreement with Menachem Begin of Israel which remains in place.

Jordan’s King Hussein, regretting his strategic blunder of joining forces with Nasser and losing the West Bank to Israel, expelled the trouble-making Palestinians from his domain after a bloody shootout in September 1970.

In receiving those Palestinians, Lebanon has not recovered from the disaster visited upon that once easy-going Levantine state.

Palestinians, goaded by brutally corrupt leaders, went from hijacking airplanes, murdering Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic of 1972, making common cause with genocidal dictators of the Third World, vowing fealty to Communist rulers in Moscow, to spreading terror through suicide-bombings and murdering each other in their quest for “liberation” from Israeli occupation.

The UN Security Council, in an extraordinary feat of unity, worked out the blueprint of trading land for peace in its resolution 242 of November 1967.

Western powers becoming convinced that providing Palestinians with a state would make for peace in the region, despite contrary evidence, have pursued this mirage of a policy even as it contributes its share to the spread of self-inflicted misery in the region.

Yet the unvarnished truth of the Middle East remains unaltered and unspoken since June 1967 even as Arab nationalism got exchanged for Islamist-jihadism.

Palestinians are responsible for their misery, and their rights among Arab leaders have no more merit than those of the greater suffering people of Darfur, except to malign Jews and taunt the West.

©2005-08 - Salim Mansur, BA, MA, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Western Ontario.  He is also a columnist at Canada’s Sun Media.  His column appears here with Salim Mansur’s express permission by special arrangement with him.

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