Indecision as Strategy
Adam Shatz
- The Bride and the Dowry: Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians in the Aftermath of the June 1967 War by Avi Raz
Yale, 288 pp, £25.00, July, ISBN 978 0 300 17194 5
During
the first 19 years of Israel’s statehood, its leaders gave little
thought to the Palestinian question. Two-thirds of the Palestinians were
driven out in 1948; those who remained were placed under a draconian
military government and didn’t cause much trouble. Then came the Six Day
War of 1967. In a pre-emptive strike launched on 5 June, Israel
inflicted a devastating defeat on Nasser and his Arab allies, and vastly
expanded the territory under its control, capturing the Gaza Strip and
the Sinai from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and
the Golan Heights from Syria. These were lands Israel’s leaders had long
coveted: only the Sinai has since been fully restored to Arab
sovereignty. But when the guns fell silent on 10 June, the Jewish state
found itself responsible for 1.4 million Arabs it didn’t want. Most were
Palestinians, hundreds of thousands of them refugees who had been
displaced during the 1948 war. As Levi Eshkol, who was prime minister at
the time, put it: ‘We won the war and received a nice dowry of
territory, but along with a bride whom we don’t like.’ Israel had to
decide what to do with the bride, and what to do with the dowry. The
Middle East still lives in the shadow of the decisions Israel made – and
those it didn’t – in the first few years of the now 45-year-old
occupation. Much more at link
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