Home | 1946-21st Century

JEWS and ARABS from WW2 to 1979

Israelis emerged from the war of June 1967 (the Six-Day War) relieved and elated. They cheered, shouted, cried and embraced each other in the streets. There was a new sense of power of the state of Israel and a belief that new times had started. It influenced Jews elsewhere. Israel's leading diplomat, Abba Eban, noticed a sudden proliferation of yarmulkes on the streets of Paris, London and New York. He noticed children in the United States playing "Jews and Arabs" rather than cowboys and Indians.

Israel emerged from the war occupying Egypt's Sinai Desert, the Gaza Strip, Jordan's West Bank, and Syria's Golan Heights. And Israel took control over the whole of Jerusalem's east side, Israel's Minister of War, Moshe Dayan, having announced Jerusalem's liberation. The Israelis had followed through on their threat made against Jordan at the beginning of the war. In trying to keep Jordan out of the war, they had warned King Hussein that if he joined the other Arab states in attacking Israel that they, Israel, would take the entire city.

On June 29th, the Israelis destroyed the barriers and dismantled the checkpoints that had existed between the smaller, western part of the city -- dominated by Israel since the 1948 war -  and the larger eastern half of the city that had been ruled by the Jordanians. The United Nations had intended Jerusalem to be a united international city. Now it was united but under Israeli rule. A century earlier, Jerusalem had been around 73 percent Arab. It had been only 40 percent Arab in 1944. In wake of the War of 1967 many Arabs had fled, and now the Muslims population in Jerusalem was down to 21 percent of a total of 263,307 (12,646, or 5 percent, of whom were Christian). Jerusalem had once been a city of little interest to the Israelis -- second at least to its major urban center, Tel Aviv. But by now Jerusalem was acquiring a new significance associated with the religious heritage of Jews.

Israelis went to the old Jewish Quarter on the eastern side of the city, from which Jews had been expelled in 1948, and they found their synagogues destroyed. They went to the Western (Wailing) Wall, denied them by the Jordanians despite the armistice agreement they had signed in 1949. There, against the Wall, the Jordanians had built a latrine, and the Israelis cleaned their holy place. The Western Wall was now accessible to all Israelis. And the Israelis left the Muslim holy places accessible to Muslims. Dayan announced that they had "not come to conquer the holy places of others. He ordered troops to take down a flag they had placed above the Muslim holy places, and he visited the al-Aqsa Mosque -- the third holiest place in Islam.

The Muslims did not see the Israelis as liberators from Jordanian rule. Palestinians caught advocating independence had been silenced or sent to concentration camps by the Jordanians, and Jordan had sent its Bedouin soldiers against Palestinian demonstrations. The Israelis were making themselves dominate over the Palestinians, but in Jerusalem they were giving the Palestinians a new freedom of sorts. The mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, allowed them to build a monument dedicated to Palestinians who had fallen fighting Israel in the War of 1967. But old resentments against the Jews did not die easily. Palestinians were free to visit their former neighborhoods in western Jerusalem and they were not molested, while Israeli soldiers were subject to attacks when entering eastern Jerusalem.

In the wake of military victory, many Israelis were looking forward to a "Greater Israel." Some of this was religious, a desire to gain land that had belonged to Jews in the first millennium BCE. Many believed that victory had been the work of God -- a common view that had existed around much of the world, including the United States. Advocates of a Greater Israel rejected the international aspect of Israel's founding, which recognized a partition between Jews and Palestinians. Some of those advocating a Greater Israel spoke against concerns over world opinion. They spoke of the world being fundamentally against the Jews and of humanity being divided between Jews and gentiles (the goyem). Some of them looked upon isolation from the rest of the world as an opportunity to reduced temptations of assimilation and secularization.

Many secular Jews were also enthusiastic for a greater Israel. Among them, the former prime minister, Ben Gurion, enthusiastically campaigned for more people from abroad to settle in Jerusalem. Settlements began in Palestinian areas, some of them in areas that Jews had been driven from in recent decades. The new prime minister of Israel, Golda Meir, refused to stop expansion of settlements, and she encouraged immigration to Israel. She saw "Palestine" as a British invention and recognized that in the recent past Arabs identified with a larger Islamic territory. She spoke of not returning the occupied territories because there was nobody willing to negotiate with Israel to return the territories to. And she bemoaned the fact that the Arabs were unwilling to allow the Jews a little sliver of land while they had so much more land for the Arabs to live on. Golda Meir was joined by Moshe Dayan who spoke of the U.S. Declaration of Independence as containing no mention of territorial limits and said that "We are not obliged to fix the limits of the State," [note]  bringing to mind for some the expansion against American Indians.

In considering territory, security was a consideration for the Israelis. The PLO was active and dangerous. The pre-war borders were described as indefensible - described as "Auschwitz borders" by Abba Eban. While some Israeli leaders favored withdrawal from newly occupied lands, Israel's Minister of Defense, Dayan, was adamant about keeping control of them for security and as something to bargain with, with hostile neighbors. Dayan was pessimistic about Israel's neighbors, believing that they would strike again when it suited them.

Israeli military commanders were to manage Palestinian as well as Israeli affairs in the territories. In 1949, the Fourth Geneva Convention on Rules of War had  adopted laws that governed the treatment of civilians in territories under military occupation. It had outlawed, among other things, the resettlement by an occupying power of its own civilians on territory under its military control. But Israel rejected the claim that they were occupying the territories.

In November, 1967, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 242, aimed against Israeli occupation of lands taken during the War of 1967. But the resolution did not mention Israel specifically. Israel rejected the claim that they were occupying the territories and considered the resolution irrelevant.

please continue

to navigation links at the top

Copyright © 2001 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.