How the 1967 Six-Day War Reshaped the Mideast
It was not just Egypt's Air Force that was destroyed in the course of this battle. What lay mortally wounded was the myth of secular Arab nationalism. The old order in the Arab world of monarchs and emirs and feeble semiparliamentary regimes had lost the war of 1948, and this had become its shame and burden. Now these "New Men" in Cairo and Damascus had been shown to be braggarts and pretenders. The road to Cairo, Damascus, and Amman lay open before Israel's Army. But Israel had its hands full with one great, taxing outcome of its victory: its acquisition of the territories of mandatory Palestine and its control over the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Wars have cunning; the Palestinians, defeated and dispersed in 1948, were the unintended beneficiaries of this new war. The defeat of the standing Arab armies had rid them of the shame of their own debacle in 1948. For Israel, now sovereign over the land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean, there had come a monumental change: The "first republic" (1948-1967) had been an overwhelmingly secular polity, its center of gravity, and demography, in Tel Aviv and along the Mediterranean coast. The new country that emerged out of this war was now in possession of Jerusalem and of Hebron and Jericho--lands suffused with religious meaning. Israel's secularism would now have to duel with the religious pull of these new territories.
At the remove of four decades, we should not overdo the importance of that Soviet report about the phantom Israeli brigades. At the heart of the war lay the willful Arab refusal to accept Israel's legitimacy and statehood.A discerning Moroccan historian, Abdullah Laroui, once described the Arab view in haunting terms: "On a certain day, everything would be obliterated and instantaneously reconstructed, and the new inhabitants would leave, as if by magic, the land they had despoiled; in this way will justice be dispensed to the victims, on that day when the presence of God shall again make itself felt." But the magic failed. Israel's victory in 1967 delivered a message: that the state that had fought its way into the world in 1948 is there to stay.
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