The West Bank - A Past with No Future

The Six-Day War, in all that pertains to Jordan and the Palestinians, was an Israeli Pyrrhic victory to end all Pyrrhic victories – a catastrophe in the guise of a success that trapped the country in perpetual crisis with no conceivable off-ramp, undermining both the state’s democratic foundations and its Jewish demography, ultimately threatening its very existence.

We are now on the eve of the 59^th anniversary of that war, which began on 5 June 1967. Without doubt, the Six-Day War, and the war that preceded it in 1948, are the key events in the century-and-a-half-old Zionist-Arab conflict and, possibly, in the history of the Middle East. 1948 saw the establishment of a Jewish state plump in the middle of the Arab and the wider Muslim worlds, on a territory the Arabs and Muslims have grown to cherish. In the past I have written extensively about 1948. Here I would like to tackle what happened in May-June 1967 - events, it appears, not many people actually know - and their subsequent effects, and, perhaps, offer a thought or two about what might have happened but didn’t.

It began on 13-14 May, when President Gamal Abdel Nasser sent the lead elements of Egypt’s armored divisions across the Suez Canal into the Sinai Peninsula, the Egyptian land-mass along Israel’s southern border that had been demilitarized, by agreement between Nasser and the international community in the wake of the Israeli-British-French-initiated Sinai-Suez War of October-November 1956. The massive May 1967 Egyptian troop build-up was monitored by Israeli intelligence and rapidly sent Israel onto a war-footing, with a mass mobilization of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reservists. (The IDF was, and is, composed of one third conscripts and professionals, and two-thirds reservists, who in the past served some 30 days a year in uniform.)

Why exactly Nasser, a dashing, charismatic gambler, initiated that military demarche is not completely clear – Egyptian state papers remain sealed. What is clear is that hostilities between Israel and Egypt’s ally, Syria, had been escalating and Damascus feared a major IDF offensive, possibly aiming at toppling the Syrian regime, which for years had trained and dispatched Palestinian guerrillas\terrorists into Israel on sabotage missions, occasionally attacked Israeli farmers and military units along the border, and threatened Israel’s water supply by attempting to divert the sources of the Jordan River.

A major input on the road to the Six-Day War was Moscow’s messaging in the second week of May to both the Egyptian and Syrian rulers, that Israel, was massing troops along the border and intent on striking toward Damascus. Mystery still surrounds Moscow’s behavior as Israel’s flat denials of any aggressive intentions were supported by UN reports to all and sundry, after the organization’s inspectors had carefully surveilled the border area, stating that there was no preparatory massing of Israeli forces.

Nasser, however, acted as if he believed the Soviet warnings and decided to exploit the situation re-militarize Sinai, showboat his support of his Syrian ally and deter the Israelis from possible action in the north.

But Nasser then went much further. On 16 May he ordered UNEF (the United Nations Emergency Force), the international buffer force that since 1957 had monitored the Egyptian-Israeli border and kept the peace, to evacuate Sinai. To Israeli anger and Western astonishment, the UN immediately complied, and on 22 May Nasser played his ace, announcing the closure of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping and air traffic, cutting off Israel from the Red Sea and blocking trade with Africa and Asia.

Nasser’s moves and the heady, loudly-publicized anti-Zionist demonstrations they generated around the Arab world, which now seemed to believe that the end of the Jewish state was at hand, initially met with Israeli hesitation and plummeting national morale. Israelis began digging mass graveyards to meet the anticipated war and casualties; public feeling was of imminent existential threat. The IDF brass (and CIA analysts) may have believed that the army would make short shrift of the Arab armies, but this did not radiate down to the public at large; a few even packed their bags and caught flights out of the country.

The Egyptian blockade of an international maritime lane, coming on top of the continuous prevention of Israeli shipping since 1948 through another waterway, the Suez Canal, was a brazen breach of international law and was rightly seen in Israel as a casus belli. American President Lyndon Johnson and other western leaders toyed with the idea of sending an international “flotilla” to prise open the straits. But no flotilla materialized. Still, Israel’s leaders, headed by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, hesitated, giving the international community a fortnight to somehow engineer a diplomatic solution.

But nothing happened. Meanwhile, the open-ended IDF mobilization strained the country’s economy, and other Arab states began committing to join Nasser’s challenge to the Jewish state. As the Egyptian army dug in in Sinai, Israel’s generals, almost on the verge of mutiny, pressed the politicians for a green light. And something like it, later defined as a “yellow light,” began to flicker from Washington. On 2-3 June Eshkol and his ministers reluctantly gave the IDF the go-ahead though not all were convinced by the generals’ assurances that the army would swiftly prevail.

But it did. On the morning of 5 June Israel struck. In a three-hour operation by its 200 or so combat aircraft, the Israel Air Force (IAF) surprised the Egyptians and destroyed their (much larger) air force on the ground while armored columns charged into Sinai and the Gaza Strip. In four days the IDF reached the Suez Canal and the Egyptian army lay in ruins in the sands. As it turned out, the conquest of the peninsula gave Israel the card that was translated twelve years later into peace with Egypt. So the Six-Day War was not all loss.

Nonetheless, catastrophe was around the corner. A few days before the Israeli and Egyptian armies engaged in Sinai, Jordan’s King Hussein signed a mutual defense pact with Nasser, formally passing control of Jordan’s army to Egyptian command. On the morning of June 5, ignoring Israeli warnings not to join the fight, Hussein – after being told by Nasser that his army had invaded Israel and that his air force was bombing Tel Aviv – ordered his troops to fire on (Israeli) west Jerusalem and Tel Aviv’s suburbs. Perhaps he believed Nasser; or perhaps he feared that his people – overwhelmingly of Palestinian origin – would take to the streets if he failed to join the anti-Zionist crusade.

The IDF was eager to avoid a multi-front war (though it did have Syria also in its sights). Hours after the Jordanians opened fire, the Israelis, through the UN and US, again warned the Jordanians to stay out, promising not to attack Jordan if it ceased fire. But the Jordanian kept shooting. At noon, Israel reacted. The IAF destroyed the (minuscule) Jordanian air force and a few hours later IDF ground forces invaded the northern West Bank and crossed the border into east Jerusalem. The battle lasted three days. Initially, IDF orders were to neutralize the positions targeting or threatening Israeli territory. But gradually, impelled by the momentum of battle and tactical considerations, the IDF overran the whole of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which had been annexed by Jordan during 1948-1950.

This conquest changed the course and dynamics of Middle Eastern history. In 1948, the Palestinians and the Palestinian “problem” had been virtually knocked out of history. Now, the problem was back at the top of the international and regional agendas, with most of the Palestinians under Israeli rule. That rule, an occupation, was to haunt and shape Israel during the next 50 years.

The West Bank’s pre-war 750,000-strong Palestinian population, like the Egyptian-ruled Gaza’s 350,000-400,000 Palestinians, were placed under Israeli military government, and east Jerusalem, with 66,000 Palestinians, was annexed. In addition, Israel had some 350,000 Arab citizens, who today number some 2.1 million and call themselves “Palestinians.”

The shock of the defeat and the humiliation of the Arab states reinforced Islamist numbers and passions; if the Arab states could not take care of Israel, perhaps Allah and his warriors could. 1967 and the seemingly endless occupation and repression of the Palestinians that followed provided the Islamists a rallying point around which to mobilize their anti-Western grievances and energies, and 1967 certainly invigorated Islamism among the Palestinians.

The war also dramatically hardened the positions of the surrounding Arab states. In September 1967 their leaders meeting in Khartoum, Sudan, unanimously resolved not to negotiate with Israel and not to recognize or make peace with it. During the following months and years Israel planted Jewish settlements in the Golan Heights (which the IDF had conquered at the tail-end of the Six-Day War), northeastern Sinai and the Gaza Strip.

The Egyptian-initiated “War of Attrition” along the Suez Canal during 1968-1970 failed to dislodge Israel from Sinai and in October 1973 Egypt and Syria surprised the IDF and simultaneously attacked across the Suez Canal and on the Golan Heights. The IDF quickly turned the tide and, after 18 days of combat, with Israel on the brink of complete victory, Washington, pressured by Moscow, intervened and brokered negotiations that eventually generated the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979. Israel gave up the Sinai Peninsula (and uprooted its Sinai settlements) in exchange for peace (and a demilitarized Sinai). But Israel and Syria failed to make peace and Israel retained the Golan Heights.

Far from the public eye, underlying the protracted negotiations, was the Israeli cabinet meeting of 19 June 1967, in which the ministers secretly agreed to withdraw from Sinai and the Golan in exchange for peace with Egypt and Syria, on condition that these areas remain demilitarized. (It is unclear whether this decision was conveyed in real time to the Arab governments.) But, crucially, the ministers were unable to agree on the future of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Israeli public opinion, which had barely thought about the West Bank and East Jerusalem during the pre-1967 years, was astonished and elated by the speedy victory and conquests of the Six-Day War. After all, the hill-country of the West Bank and east Jerusalem was where the Jewish people, religion and statehood were born, albeit 2,000-3,000 years ago, and the Israeli cabinet, which had expanded into a National Unity Government on the eve of the war to include the right-wing Herut Party (eventually renamed the Likud), was split. Some ministers were willing to withdraw from the West Bank or parts of it in exchange for peace with Jordan; one or two may have been willing to give up east Jerusalem. But others, mainly from the religious parties and Herut but also including Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, were unwilling to give up these territories, for ideological-historical reasons or out of military-strategic considerations (the West Bank hills dominate the coastal plain and west Jerusalem, Israel’s demographic heartlands).

Henceforward, the government – still led by Eshkol and his social-democratic Mapai Party – began referring to the West Bank, somewhat inaccurately, as the biblically named “Judea and Samaria.” On the ground, the government swiftly began establishing new settlements in the territory. The re-settlement of the area known as the Etzion Bloc between Bethlehem and Hebron, where four Jewish settlements had been leveled by the Jordanian army and their Palestinian auxiliaries back in May 1948, began already in September 1967. The initiative was spearheaded by the sons of the pre-1948 settlers evicted by the Arabs. During the following years, under pressure from right-wing and religious elements who often employed devious stratagems and deception, the socialist-led government gradually expanded the settlement enterprise, at first to the peripheries of the West Bank, especially along the Jordan River, and to the Hebron area and east Jerusalem’s periphery. Eventually, dozens of settlements, including full-blown cities, would sprout up throughout the West Bank, with over 500,000 settlers (or 700,000, if one includes Jerusalem’s new suburbs). This demographic transformation rendered a withdrawal from the West Bank and east Jerusalem, by any future Israeli government, virtually inconceivable. So did the thought of a prospective West Bank-based Palestinian state, which, like the Gaza Strip, might fall into Islamist hands and serve as a launch-pad for (a shrunken) Israel’s destruction.

Over the decades, many Israelis settled in the West Bank, where land and construction were cheap. But driving the settlement enterprise from the start were the redemptionist-messianic passions unleashed by the “miraculous” Six-Day War victory, which took hold particularly among the young National Religious Party cohorts. They viewed the victory as God-given and a divine command to redeem, annex and resettle the newly-occupied core areas of the Promised Land. (A few historians, like Tom Segev in his book 1967, would invert the history and claim that messianic and expansionist passions swept Israel before June 1967, propelling the IDF conquests. This is a distortion. These passions, while latent in small circles of the pre-1967 IsraeIi public, were a product, not a driver, of the Six-Day War.)

Today, some three million Palestinians live, under continuing military government, alongside the West Bank settlers. Another 2.1 million live in the 40% of the Gaza Strip still ruled by the Hamas (the Jews who had settled in the Strip from 1970 were all uprooted and moved by the Israeli government to Israel and the West Bank in 2005). Another 400,000 Arabs live in East Jerusalem.

Many settlers secretly or not so secretly hope that these numbers might eventually change through a coerced or “voluntary” expatriation of West Bank-east Jerusalem Arabs. But this is extremely unlikely. The international community, and many Israelis, will not allow it - much as the Trump-Netanyahu transfer “plan” for Gaza’s Arabs during the recent war came to nought. No one, not in the Arab world or anywhere else, wants Palestine’s Arabs and most of them will probably prefer to remain (sumud, they call it) in Palestine, even in Gaza’s miserable tent encampments.

In other words, the number of Arabs living between the river and the sea (including Israel’s Arab minority) is and will likely remain about equal to the number of Jews, meaning that the state that is emerging is effectively bi-national and not demographically “Jewish” – and if most of its Arab inhabitants remain bereft of basic rights, as they are today, it will not be “democratic.”

Meanwhile, the protracted occupation of the Palestinian-inhabited territories has corrupted and changed Israel in a variety of ways. Corruption is evident in most spheres of Israeli life, starting with the government’s serial appointment of absolutely corrupt and unqualified officials to top positions and its efforts to neuter the country’s judiciary, sabotage media independence and impoverish its cultural community and output, the rampant dehumanization of the “other,” the polarization of wealth, the politicization of the police force, the general brutalization of behavioral norms, the pervasiveness of protection rackets and their attendant stream of murders, especially in the Israeli Arab community, and the proliferation of traffic accidents due to a flouting of the law. This over-arching corruption is in personified in Benjamin Netanyahu, on trial these past six years on bribery and fraud charges, who has steadily milked the state’s Treasury for his personal and family’s benefit.

Some of Israel’s critics maintain that the corruption was inherent from the start in the Zionist enterprise, which they define as a “settler-colonial” movement. I disagree. Indeed, by most measures the Zionist movement and Israel before 1967 were paragons of civic virtue; one or two ministers and officials even committed suicide when a whiff of corruption attached to their person. Today, ministers and officials bask in its awful light. June 1967 was the watershed.

Most Israelis in and immediately after 1967 never imagined that the occupation would or could last for decades, let alone for half a century. During 1967-1977, before it lost power, the ruling Mapai Party (later renamed the Labor Party) hesitantly inched toward some form of compromise. The Israelis ignored the Palestinians, who were represented by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) which was formally and publicly dedicated to Israel’s destruction and opposed a two-state compromise (as their leaders had done vis-à-vis the Zionist enterprise before 1948). So moderate and left-wing Israelis looked to Jordan in hope of compromise. Yigal Allon, a senior Labor Party leader, proposed returning most of the West Bank to Jordan in return for peace (the Allon Plan). But King Hussein wanted a complete Israeli withdrawal as well as east Jerusalem and the Israeli leaders proved unwilling. Indeed, Mapai officially failed to endorse the Allon Plan.

In 1977 the Likud took power and serious thinking about peace was put on hold. But after Labor’s Yitzhak Rabin took power in 1992, peace efforts resumed. By then, after the IDF’s expulsion of the PLO from Lebanon in 1982 and the failure of the First Intifada (the Palestinian rebellion against the occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip), the PLO began to signal at least a pretended willingness to compromise and Jordan washed its hands of the West Bank. But the Israeli-PLO talks – the Oslo process - came to nought. A renewed peace effort, in 1999-2000, by Labor’s Ehud Barak and President Clinton also failed after Arafat rejected the offered two-state compromise, and a Second Intifada in the territories followed. This one, spearheaded by Hamas and Fatah suicide bombings inside Israel, left 5,000 dead, most of them Palestinians, also failed to eject Israel from the West Bank.

But Hamas attacks eventually drove Israel out of the Gaza Strip. And some two decades later, after consolidating its hold over Gaza, Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing some 1200 Israelis and taking 251 hostage, triggering an Israeli-counter-offensive that left tens of thousands of dead Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and hundreds in the West Bank besides, and ignited a multi-front Islamist offensive against Israel, involving Iran, the Hezbollah of Lebanon and the Houthis of Yemen.

None of this has brought an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank any nearer. Rather, Israel’s grip on the territory and east Jerusalem tightened over 2023-2026, with greater repression of the Arab inhabitants, and more and expanded settlements. Indeed, for the past three years the settlers, backed by the Netanyahu government and the security forces, have uprooted dozens of Palestinian communities in the West Bank, especially in the southern Hebron hills and in the Jordan Valley. More generally, the Israeli-Islamist battle has hardened hearts on both sides of the divide and there is little, if any, willingness to compromise by either side.

The likely historical upshot of the Islamist war on Israel, which has not yet ended – Israel and the Hezbollah are still battling along the Israel-Lebanon border and the Israel-Iran and Israel-Hamas conflicts may re-ignite momentarily – is a continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the 50+ per cent of the Gaza Strip currently controlled by the IDF. The settlement enterprise in the West Bank will expand, with more dispossession of its Arab inhabitants, and there will be growing pressure by the Israeli Right to renew Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip and, possibly, settlement in southern Lebanon as well. There are even right-wing activists pressing for Israeli settlement in the southeastern corner of Syria now occupied or intermittently patrolled by IDF units.

Washington appears uninterested in the fate of the West Bank and Trump himself may believe that Israeli annexation and a displacement of at least some of its inhabitants is preferable to the current chaotic situation. Western Europe will no doubt continue to condemn Israel’s policies in the territory but short of the imposition of severe anti-Israeli sanctions nothing will halt the steady advance toward de facto if not de jure Israeli annexation of the territory.

A change in American and Israeli administrations, meaning a Democratic presidential and congressional victory in 2028 and an opposition parties’ victory in the forthcoming Israeli elections, scheduled for October 2026, may change all this. But I wouldn’t hold my breath. American administrations, Republican and Democratic, have rarely been able to pressure Israel to the extent of changing basic Israeli policy – and certainly not on something as existential as the fate of the West Bank. And the current hardline Israeli mindset and accompanying demographic trends make a major internally-propelled change in Israeli policy, even if the opposition somehow wins in October, equally unlikely.

Equally unlikely is a change in Palestinian politics, bifurcated for decades between so-called secular parties (Fatah-PLO) and Islamists (Hamas, Islamic Jihad). Almost all Palestinians continue to regard Zionism as a robber ideology and Israel as an illegitimate polity, with Palestine, “from the river to the sea,” as solely their patrimony and with the Jews having no right to any part of the land. The Israel-Hamas war has only accentuated this outlook. In general, despair governs the Palestinian heart and mind, and despair rarely generates something positive.

To this one must add the following thought: A sovereign Palestinian state comprising the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem (in total some 2,000 square miles) cannot really answer the basic needs and aspirations of the Palestinians. Given their dispersion and, in large measure, statelessness, the Palestinians, simply put, require a much larger slice of the earth, one with at least sufficient land to comfortably absorb many of their refugee concentrations, especially those living statelessly in Syria and Lebanon. In this sense, what Barak and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and the Clinton administration offered in the 2000s and what Trump very vaguely hinted at in 2005 is insufficient to curb the Palestinians’ expansionist aspirations. The only polity that might fit the bill would be a state comprising the West Bank, east Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the territory east of the Jordan River, currently the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The establishment of such a state, governed by its majority population, might, conceivably, reduce the Palestinians’ desire to eventually conquer the territory that in 1948-1949 became the Jewish state. The creation of a Palestinian “mini-state” (West Bank, Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem) will not do that.

Which leads one to speculate about what might have been. Following the UN General Assembly resolution of 29 November 1947, the Palestinians – instead of attacking the Jewish community in Palestine, starting the very next day – might have accepted the territory awarded them by the international community and set up a Palestinian Arab state bounded by a Jewish state to the west and Hashemite-ruled Jordan to the east. They didn’t. Such a construct – perhaps augmented down the road by a union of the West Bank-Gaza-east Jerusalem and Jordan – might have resulted in a lasting peace. Possibly.

Alternatively, immediately after the Six-Day War, Israel, led by a more far-seeing and resolute government, could have reached a deal with King Hussein and withdrawn its forces - or unilaterally withdrawn its forces without a deal - back to the 1949 armistice lines and left the West Bank and East Jerusalem to King Hussein’s beneficent ministrations. The territory’s Palestinian population, quiescent and unrebellious under Jordanian rule during 1948-1967, would probably have accepted the return of Arab (Hashemite) rule and gotten on with their lives – and the Palestinian national movement (the PLO) would possibly withered on the branch, leaving the Middle East a much more peaceful place (though the rise of Islamist fundamentalism, the problem of Gaza’s stateless, impoverished inhabitants living under continued Israeli rule, and the region’s assorted tribal and ethnic aspirations and differences would still have continued or arisen to roil the pot).

So much for backward-looking fantasies. But realistically looking forward, continued Israeli occupation of the Palestinian-inhabited territories can only lead to despair and further corruption and disfigurement of Israel’s democracy, and it is politically untenable. The inconclusive war with Iran will likely leave Iran free to clandestinely pursue its nuclear agenda, meaning nuclear bombs, and continue to back – with money and, if possible, arms – its proxies in the region, which can be expected to disrupt the peace of its Sunni-ruled neighbors and periodically harass Israel with bouts of warfare that Israel’s economy and society will find increasingly, and perhaps impossibly, challenging.

(Syria also joined the war on 5 June by shelling Israeli settlements and border positions in the Galilee. That afternoon, the IAF destroyed the Syrian air force and on 9-10 June IDF ground forces, no longer riveted to the Egyptian and Jordanian fronts, occupied the Golan Heights in southeastern Syria.)