How the Six-Day War Changed Israel and the Jews

Yossi Klein Halevi discusses the impact of the 1967 war on Israeli society, recent shifts in Israeli politics, and his own memories from a half-century ago. (Interview by Calev Ben-Dor.)

My most primal memory was in the latter part of May 1967, watching the news with my father, a Holocaust survivor from Hungary who constantly carried that experience with him. We saw crowds of demonstrators chanting “death to Israel” and waving banners imprinted with skulls and cross-bones, which, as a fourteen-year-old boy, made a very deep impression on me. Both my father and I had this same dread that some version of the Holocaust was about to re-occur. And that feeling was repeated across the Jewish world, from Moscow to Tel Aviv. . . .

[The dread] of May 1967 was followed by the victory in June 1967. So there was an emotional trajectory from relief when we realized that Israel was not going to be destroyed, to joy and pride at the defeat of our enemies, and finally ecstasy—even a kind of religious ecstasy for many Jews—at the reversal: from destruction to redemption. It was a re-enactment, [in a sense, of the story] of Purim—the reversal of a genocidal threat, [with] the evil Haman hanging on the gallows that were intended for [the heroic] Mordechai. The euphoria was a combination of realizing we had just witnessed the greatest military victory in Jewish history as well as the restoration of those parts of the land of our past that had been denied to us.

Before the Six-Day War, Israel didn’t possess a single significant Jewish holy site. Thus, in some way, the state had been emptied of its religious content, of its soul. After the war we experienced the return to the Western Wall, to the tombs of the Matriarchs and Patriarchs in Hebron, and to Rachel’s tomb near Bethlehem as a restoration of everything that had been taken from us. My parents’ generation had no access to their own ancestral graves—either because they were forced to leave them behind (as was the case for Jews from the Arab world) or because they didn’t even exist (in the case of many Holocaust survivors). So to return to the graves of the first Jews was some kind of compensation for everything that had been denied for generations.

I remember powerful but conflicting emotions converging. Not only sitting with my father in anguish about the possibility of another Holocaust, but also standing with my father at the Western Wall and seeing him become a religious Jew again. After World War II he had stopped praying, yet after the Six-Day War he felt he could forgive God, which reflects a very Jewish way of navigating one’s relationship with God. My father never stopped believing in God but didn’t think He deserved the prayers of the Jewish people. Yet at the Western Wall my father made his peace with God, and became a devout Jew. What happened to my father also played out in the Jewish people.

Read more at Fathom

More about: Holocaust, Israel & Zionism, Judaism, Purim, Six-Day War, Western Wall

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF