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Making David into Goliath. Joshua Muravchik
Читать онлайн.Название Making David into Goliath
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isbn 9781594038464
Автор произведения Joshua Muravchik
Издательство Ingram
Triumphant on the battlefield and in the diplomacy, Israel basked in the world’s admiration and enjoyed a golden moment of peace and security. But the fruits of victory, however sweet, contained the seeds of bitter trials ahead.
Soviet enmity, which Israel had endured since a few years after the 1948 UN partition vote and the subsequent withdrawal of Britain from the area, grew fierce. Although hostile, the Kremlin had previously attached little importance to Israel. But the crushing defeat Israel had inflicted on a pair of Soviet clients armed with Soviet weapons was a huge blow to Moscow’s prestige. In the Cold War contest for the allegiance of third world countries, the USSR had overnight suffered a steep slide in its appeal. And, to boot, the Soviet state no longer appeared all-powerful to its own downtrodden subjects, above all its Jews.
Natan Sharansky recalls:
The Six-Day War had made an indelible impression on me as it did on most Soviet Jews, for, in addition to fighting for her life, Israel was defending our dignity. On the eve of the war, when Israel’s destruction seemed almost inevitable, Soviet anti-Semites were jubilant. But a few days later even anti-Jewish jokes started to change, and throughout the country, in spite of pro-Arab propaganda, you could now see a grudging respect for Israel and for Jews. A basic eternal truth was returning to the Jews of Russia – that personal freedom wasn’t something you could achieve through assimilation. It was available only by reclaiming your historical roots.63
The movement that stemmed from this, of which Sharansky was to become the living symbol, challenged the totalitarian grip of the Communists as never before. Lashing back, the Soviet propaganda machine went into overdrive in blackening the names of Israel and Zionism.
The Soviet backlash against Israel’s triumph was mirrored in the West by de Gaulle. Perhaps because his stance on the war had evoked more dissent and criticism than he was accustomed to, or perhaps because Israel had ignored his stricture not to strike the first blow (and thus committed the “crime of lèse-Gaullism,” Raymond Aron quipped), the French president lashed out furiously at the Jews. He is probably the only Western head of state to have done this since Hitler. He called them “an elite people, self-assured and domineering.” His foreign minister, Maurice Couve de Murville, later explained implausibly that this was intended as a “tribute to their exceptional qualities,”64 but Aron, probably the leading French political thinker of his age and a largely deracinated Jew, was moved to pen a short book protesting what he took as de Gaulle’s deliberate reintroduction of anti-Semitism into French public discourse.65
Whatever bigotry de Gaulle exhibited, the motive for his reversal of France’s alliance with Israel was not emotional but the coldest of realpolitik. The Arabs had numbers and oil. De Gaulle explained:
In this region, where France has always been present and active, I naturally intend to re-establish our position. The political and strategic importance of the Nile, Euphrates, and Tigris basins, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf is all the greater now that, thanks to oil, it is coupled with an economic weight of the first order. Everything bids us to return to Cairo, Damascus, Amman, Bagdad, and Khartoum, as we stayed in Beirut, as friends and as partners.66
For the moment, de Gaulle was out of step with the rest of the West, but the other Europeans would soon begin to feel the same pulls he did. As Raymond Aron put it: “Once again, General DeGaulle realized before others which way the immediate future would go.”67
Finally, Israel found itself in the awkward role of occupier. This was a label that the Arabs had placed on it since 1948, and on the Zionists even before that, in the belief that any Jewish sovereignty or even substantial settlement in Palestine was illegitimate. Thus, the six hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand Arabs who had fled or been chased from Palestine to surrounding countries in 1948 had been kept in camps rather than absorbed as Israel had absorbed the Jewish refugees from Arab lands. The purpose of this heartless policy was to dramatize the insistence that these people be returned to their homes in what had now become Israel. The “right of return” was an expression of the defeated Arab nations’ determination to undo the outcome of the 1948 war.
Now, having vanquished Egypt, Syria, and Jordan yet again, Israel became overlord of millions of Arabs. As Israeli leaders imagined it, this situation would not last long, only until the neighboring countries agreed to grant them acceptance in return for most of the land captured in the Six Day War. But, in their humiliation, the Arabs were more determined than ever to defy Israel. So the temporary became increasingly permanent. And, as time passed, the once nebulous sense of national identity among Palestinians, the bulk of whom were now under Israeli rule, began to crystallize. Thus, not only did the Israelis occupy territory that the Arabs claimed as theirs, but they had become “occupiers” in a second, more fraught sense—standing between another people and its national aspirations.
*Not all Israeli utterances were pacific. Two weeks earlier, military chief of staff Yitzhak Rabin had reacted to some guerrilla actions emanating from Syria by threatening, “We may well have to act against centers of aggression and those who encourage it.” For this bellicose outburst he was dressed down so severely by David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s iconic first prime minister who was still active although he had been succeeded in office by Eshkol, that Rabin apparently had a brief nervous breakdown.
The Arab Cause Becomes Palestinian (and “Progressive”)
Israel would never again enjoy the degree of sympathy it experienced in 1967. The simplest reason was that Israel would never again seem so endangered. The devastating prowess demonstrated by Israel’s fighting forces gave it an aura of invulnerability.
The implications of this new image were compounded by another transformation resulting from the war. Until 1967, Israel was pitted against the Arabs, who held an advantage in terms of population of roughly fifty to one, and in terms of territory of more than five hundred to one, as well as larger armies and more wealth and natural resources. The Six Day War, however, set in motion a redefinition of the conflict. No longer was it Israel versus the Arabs. Now it was Israel versus the homeless Palestinians. David had become Goliath.
The altered perspective that made Israel look big instead of small was accompanied by a shift in ideological appearances that was no less important. The Arab states were seen as autocratic and reactionary. But, the groups that came to speak for the Palestinians presented them as members of the world’s “progressive” camp.
These twin transformations stemmed from the crystallization of the idea of a Palestinian nation in the second half of the twentieth century. The absence of a widespread sense of Palestinian nationhood before then may surprise those who came to the “Mideast conflict” in the 1970s or later, when Palestinian national aspirations came to be seen as the quintessence of the principle of self-determination. But, in historical context, it is easy to understand. Most of the countries of the Middle East, with Egypt the most notable exception, were modern creations—their borders drawn by colonial rulers—and the development of their national identities works in progress. And so it was with Palestine, except that there the process was strengthened by the presence of a hated enemy against whom the Palestinians could define themselves and make their cause sacred to their brother Arabs.
Traditionally, most of the people in the region identified