348. How 1967 Changed The Middle East Forever (Part 3)

23:06Anita:But what is the Arab Muslim perspective on that decision? I mean, how is that, or was that received and is that received today, that decision? You know, I think that for public opinion, there was nothing that Israel did that was going to get praise. However, for the rulers of Jordan, King Hussein in particular, it was, if you think about it, throwing an olive branch across the River Jordan to say, we may have taken the holy city from the kingdom of Jordan, but we're going to allow you to retain this important legitimate role of providing for Islam's holy sites in Jerusalem. And that remains under Jordanian control right until the 1980s, and in that sense, preserves the legitimacy of Jordan in Jerusalem.

23:54William:And the Israeli nationalist religious groups did not like what Dayan did, and indeed do not like today the status that is still there as a result. No, I think there's always been pushback. And I think the symbolic importance of Jerusalem has been played on by Israeli political leaders. One thinks about Sharon visiting the Temple Mount in 2000 sparking the second intifada, you can see how in contemporary politics, these issues remain hotwire issues. Now, on one hand, the Israelis put these buildings back under the Waqf and do not take total control of them. On the other hand, they make an immediate move on the area around the Western Wall.

24:41William:Tell us what happened to the Moroccan quarter, Eugene. Well, as you know, Oh, well, the Moroccan quarter was a medieval network of houses connected by small alleyways under the shadow of the Western Wall and were home to, I think, about 500 or 600 families. So it was a clearly inhabited part of the town. But because of its proximity to the Western Wall and the centrality and importance of that Jewish shrine to Israel, the Moroccan quarter becomes one of the first casualties of Israel's occupation and unification of Jerusalem. They literally go in days after the occupation of the city and bulldoze the Moroccan quarter to create an open plaza, which is visible to visitors today, and also create a space within which the Jewish quarter of the old city might be modernized and expanded and a couple of destroyed synagogues rebuilt.

25:40So it was re-establishing the Jewish presence and clearing out the North African quarter.

25:45William:We should say that in 1948, when the Jordanians take control, they destroy the synagogues. I mean, we haven't made that clear. And this, in a sense, is a tit-for-tat for that, just as the synagogues were destroyed in 1948 under Jordanian rule, so under Israeli rule, the Moroccan quarter is demolished. On the 7th of June, Israel takes the old city. On the night between the 10th and the 11th, the Moroccan quarter is bulldozed. 650 families kicked out.

26:14Anita:It's very, very quick.

26:16William:We are going to take a break now, and after that, we're going to come back and focus in on Jordan.

26:33Anita:Welcome back. So just before the break, we were talking about how you have this entire quarter, the Moroccan quarter, which is bulldozed. And you were also talking about how Moshe Dayan's decision to leave some of the most important sites of Islam under Muslim control was almost as a, I suppose, an olive branch. You said throwing olive branches, didn't you, at Jordan. I want to talk about Jordan a little more right now, because before the war, Jordan administered the West Bank. What happens? Because there seems to be a transformation of what Jordan is, and what Jordan stands for, and how powerful Jordan is in this region in a very short space of time.

27:17Jordan is a paradox. It's a small, under-resourced, relatively poor country that that would normally have been overthrown by the kind of revolutions that brought down monarchies through the region. Think about 1958 in the fall of the Hashemite monarchy to an officer's coup in Iraq. And yet, the Jordanians were able to enter the 1967 war with Egypt, suffer total defeat, lose the West Bank, lose East Jerusalem, suffer the influx of an estimated 200 ,000 refugees coming from the West Bank into Jordan, joining hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had already been settled in Jordan as refugees from the 1948 war.

28:05At this point, Palestinians probably represent over 60 % of the total population of the kingdom of Jordan on the east of the river Jordan. And yet, with such a volatile mix, the kingdom is able to survive. It goes from being a British client state in the immediate post-Second World War period to increasingly passing under the protection of the United States of America, which sees Jordan as one of the moderate pro-Western Arab states, important to preserving America and its European allies' interests in the region. And I think that the Israelis had viewed Jordan going back to the collusion of pre-1948, where Amir Abdullah, the ruler of Transjordan, was in regular contact with a Jewish executive in Palestine.

28:55That relation, even after the assassination of King Abdullah in 1951, is preserved and extended under his grandson and successor, King Hussein of Jordan, who keeps an open line of dialogue with the Israelis and becomes, without exception, the most trusted Arab leader that Israel has on its borders.

29:15Anita:But I mean, that is such a huge political spectrum to cross. First, you are shoulder to shoulder with NASA, and then you are shoulder to shoulder with the Americans. I mean, that's what I suppose the Americans would think, that Jordan is the country, the only country we can do business with. Did that carry the people of Jordan along with the decision of the state? Well, Jordan entered a period of very turbulent politics in the 1960s and 70s. So, before, during, and after the June War, you would say that Jordan was a cauldron. It was at full boil. And many were writing the obituary of King Hussein in real time and were astonished by his survival.

30:02In a sense, what Hussein manages to do is remain shoulder to shoulder with the Arab countries while preserving the support as a client of the West. And he's actually drawn closer to Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser in the aftermath of defeat in 67. These two leaders who'd suffered terrible defeat, reinforcing each other and all the animosities that Nasser had shown King Hussein before June 67 were really put aside. And in the last three years of Nasser's life, He and Hussein really collaborated, worked together. They understood each other's position. And I think that that really helped support Hussein into a transition into the 1970s, where he would face very serious challenges, not least from a nascent political movement led by Palestinians that saw Jordan as an inconvenient political reality.

31:00William:Tell us about the PLO. We mentioned them earlier in the last episode, but tell us, in a sense, the two different elements that matter to us now, the Palestine Liberation Organization on one hand and Fatah on the other. Tell us about those two and the distinction between them. Well, you'll remember, Willie, from our last episode, we talked about the sort of creation of the PLO. The PLO is a sort of Arab League creation. And it was very much created as an organ by which Nasser and other Arab leaders would be able to exercise control over a growing Palestinian movement. That Palestinian movement was probably at its strongest far away from the front line with Israel in places like Qatar and Kuwait, where organizations like Fatah emerged.

31:48Fatah associated with Yasser Arafat, arguably the most famous and charismatic of the Palestinian leaders in the 1950s down to the present day. And yet, the PLO was not really an organization made by Palestinians for Palestinians. It was made by the Arabs to control Palestinians. And that's what's going to begin to change in the aftermath of defeat in 1967. Because just as the Arab states were discredited, so too the PLO, as a creation of the Arab League, looked weak, indecisive, and was overtaken by far more activists, far more radical Palestinian movements, animated by Arab defeat to argue that it now fell to Palestinians to liberate their own country, and that the Arab failure in 67, however devastating that was, created a kind of opportunity, an opening for Palestinian movements to take the initiative and pursue the liberation of their country with their own hands.

32:50Anita:But I mean, the Arab League isn't entirely supine in 1967, because you have in Khartoum, in Sudan, this Arab League summit where you have the famous three no's which are issued. No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel. I mean, that's what they said. So, I mean, they're not, you know, doing nothing. But what you're saying is that Palestinians said, well, that's just not enough. Well, there's two ways to look at the three no's, and one is the obvious denial, that if you don't note that Israel exists, that it'll somehow go away. So that head in the sand aspect of Khartoum's three no's has driven a lot of dismissal of the Arab position.

33:37But crucially, what it doesn't say is no to diplomacy. And where there would be scope to work with the international community to try and negotiate a resolution to the differences between Israel and its Arab neighbors and respecting the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people, I think the Khartoum summit still left open the possibility for diplomacy. And there'd be a lot of diplomacy in the aftermath of 1967, not least led by the United States or by the United Nations, putting forward a vision of two states set out by Security Council Resolution 242 in a land for peace basis for resolving the conflict.

34:19So in a sense, no to recognition, no to engagement with Israel, but not no to diplomacy.

34:27William:Eugene, but the Palestinians are typically not present at Khartoum. The Arabs are still doing the thing that they did in 1948 of representing the Palestinians for them. They do not offer the Palestinians any form of representation at this conference, which is exactly what happened in 1948, that all the Arabs said, we'll do this for you, but in the end, were defending their own interests, not that of the Palestinians. The ordinary Palestinians are the eternal losers in this story. I think this is part of what convinces the armed movements like Fatah, that they need to take the initiative. They have to take the political situation in hand, because were they to wait for the invitation from the Arab leadership, then the question of Palestine would go unaddressed for longer yet.

35:18And so we see a new era where not just Fatah, but a whole host of Palestinian militias. You have the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, led by Dr. George Habash. Who's a Marxist Christian. Is that right? Who's a Marxist Christian, medical doctor, trained in the American University Hospital in Beirut. You have Naif al-Hotme, who is leader of another Marxist-aligned democratic front for the liberation of Palestine, and a host of other different factions emerging, each with their own formula for how to liberate Palestine and to bring the Palestinian question forward. because the thing that's really striking, Will, is how Palestine is just not on the map.

36:01It's not being discussed. The name is not in the headlines. And there's a sense that Palestine is erased, is forgotten. And all of these activists are looking for ways to bring Palestine back into the agenda.

36:13William:And Egypt's principally focused on getting the Sinai back. The Syrians are principally focused on getting the Golan back. Jordan wants Jerusalem and the West Bank back. And no one is saying, there should be a Palestinian state. We've got to have a two-state solution now for the Palestinians. And this is, in a sense, a major missed opportunity. This could have been with better management and more foresight. I mean, easier to say that in retrospect, but this was a moment when you really could have had a two-state solution, and it didn't happen. No, but in a sense, that reflects the ways in which the Palestinians went from being a people, a national group, to becoming refugees.

36:53And in a sense, since 1948, the notion of legitimate Palestinian national rights had really been in abeyance. And I think Arab calls for the total liberation of Palestine, the redemption of Palestine, were rejected by the international community because they implied the destruction of Israel.

37:11William:But Eugene, just to clarify, there is by this stage a very strong sense of Palestinian identity, which perhaps there hadn't been in earlier decades. Palestinian identity was being created in all the centers of the Palestinian exile. And so the Beirut I moved to in the early 1970s, the Palestinian camps were hotbeds of activism. And they had papered the walls of Beirut with the posters of their national claims and of their political visions. So, you know, in Lebanon, it was just omnipresent. If you look at Kuwait, you had almost a parastatal institution where the government of Kuwait allowed the very large Palestinian community living in Kuwait to be taxed and the tax revenues to be channeled to the PLO to help advance Palestinian national aspirations.

38:08So, you know, Palestinian identity was being driven by poets. Mahmoud Darwish, the very famous Palestinian poet, is creating a literary corpus alongside people like Hassan Canafani, one of the great Palestinian novelists and journalists of the time, great spokesperson for the Palestinian cause. So, you know, there is an identity, a culture, a political existence that is emerging from the ashes of the total loss of Palestine with a whole new invigorated energy that, in a sense, is the other side of the weakness and lack of resolution of the Arab states defeated after 1967. The Palestinians are vitalized.

38:53The Arab states are supine.

38:55Anita:Right. We've mentioned Resolution 242. Now, this is a United Nations Security Council resolution. It's passed in November 1967. What does it actually say? What does it promise? What is meant to happen after this resolution? You know, 242 remains the founding principle of a two-state solution. And so we have this mistaken identity that it's a well-crafted resolution. The two faults with it, Anita, basically it calls for the return of Arab territory occupied in the 1967 war in return for the full recognition and normalization of relations between the Arab states and Israel. In a nutshell, that's it.

39:37But the two flaws are, one, the return of territories occupied. Territories is not definitive enough. It didn't say all territories occupied, which has meant that Israel has been able to retain land in the Golan Heights or in the West Bank and claim that it satisfied the requirements of 242 by the deal that would later cut with Egypt under Camp David Accords of 1978 and returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egyptian rule. It returned Arab territories. It satisfied 242. Matter closed. And the second is, it never mentions the Palestinians. It does talk about refugee rights. But if you think about it, were Israel to return the territories occupied in June 67, that would have meant East Jerusalem and the West Bank going back to Jordan.

40:24That would have meant Sinai and the Gaza Strip going back to Egypt. Golan, of course, going back to Syria. But where is Palestine in that? Resolution 242 is the death knoll of Palestinian national aspirations. And so for the Palestinians, reading the text carefully, it motivates them to take action against 242, which would erase their name from the map forevermore.

40:48William:And just to clarify, who's in charge of Israel at this man. Ben-Gurion is retired by this point, doesn't he? This figure that has guided the Yishuv towards statehood and has been this extraordinary founding father of the state. He's now in a retirement home. Who's taken over from him? So the prime minister at the time of the 67th War, of course, is Levi Eshkol. And Eshkol, a mild-mannered man who in many ways was not the wartime leader the Israelis had wanted. We mentioned last episode how in his speech before war breaks out of June 67, rather than inspiring confidence among Israelis, his slightly stammering and halting delivery left them worried that they were in the hands of someone who could not lead them to victory.

41:35William:And his labor, this is the crucial point though, isn't it? The occupation begins under the labor It's not a Likud enterprise, the occupation. It's something, and indeed, crucially, the first settlements, which remain the main issue today in the West Bank. The settlements are founded not by the Likud, but by the Labour Party. So remember that, you know, right through its founding decades, the state of Israel was dominated by a group of European Zionist immigrants from the Eastern European Ashkenazi Jewish community, as opposed to the Arab world, Sephardi, or Mizrahi Jews who come to represent, you know, numerically a larger share of the Israeli population, and who increasingly would put their support behind conservative parties such as the Likud, it's really not until 1977 that Menachem Begin will break Labour's control over Israeli politics and bring Likud into power.

42:36William:And let's just go now to the founding of the first settlement, because this, again, is this crucial moment in many ways of no return, because from this point, the settlers just accelerate and grow and grow and grow as they are doing this very week. So the first to be founded is in September 1967, in the months immediately after the Six-Day War. And it's the re-establishment of a settlement which had existed before, Kepha 'ed Zion. And then soon after that, the focus goes to Hebron, which is to this day one of the most tense and difficult wounds in this whole conflict.

43:18Anita:And is Hebron such a cauldron because of the same reasons that we discussed with parts of Jerusalem?

43:25William:It's been a cauldron earlier. I mean, this terrible massacre in 1929 is one of the first massacres of Jews under the British mandate. And it's always remembered as this place where many innocent people were killed. and in Passover 1968, a group under Rabbi Moshe Levinger arrive in Hebron at Passover. They check into a hotel as tourists and then announce that they won't leave. And various officials are said to try and get them out. And eventually, years later, you get the founding of Kiriata Arba, which remains one of the most sort of militant of all the settlements in the West Bank to the state.

44:03William:Tell us about that, Eugene. Well, I mean, Kiriata Arba has been associated with religious Zionism, many of whom see the place of Hebron as special because of the Tube of the Patriarchs, where it's a place of veneration by Muslims as well as Jews, and where because it's been a center of Jewish living for centuries past, became of symbolic importance. And we should say that these are places where Jews and Muslims prayed together for centuries with a fair degree of peaceful interaction up until the 1920s with the growth of tension after the Balfour Declaration. And they then become the same places which had been places where these two communities meet together and pray side by side or separately, but in the same building in other cases, become major centers of friction in the aftermath of 1917.

45:02But, you know, I would say going right back to the British mandate, in essence, Palestine became a zero-sum game where the idea of doing things together is abandoned in a rush for winner takes all. And so having re-established a presence for the Jewish community in Hebron after Israel's occupation of the West Bank in 1967, those who were religious Zionists sought to use the opportunity of Israel's military might to force Hebron out of Arab control and to reestablish it under Jewish control. And that will lead right to the occupation of some of the oldest buildings, the historic center of Hebron, which becomes a real battleground and divided territory between very aggressive Jewish settlers and the surrounding Palestinian community, which has led to a maze of covered alleyways to protect people from bottles and excrement being flung.

46:04And it's really quite an intense place. But all this is started in the aftermath of 1967 and will continue to metastasize, driving a deeper wedge between Palestinians and Israelis through these points of contact with settlements.

46:20William:Tom Segev in his wonderful book, 1967, having described this great military victory that Israel wins in 67, ends by calling it a Pyrrhic victory, meaning that there's such a cost to this victory that it's almost a defeat in his view. And his argument is that the occupation, it becomes immediately this burden for Israel, which will drive its politics and cause friction for the decades to come. Do you agree with that? I don't think there's any doubt that the occupation of June 1967 provided Israel the opportunity to acquire territory that it wanted for historic and religious reasons, Judea and Samaria, that it wanted for strategic reasons to fill in the narrow waste of Israel that left the country vulnerable to being cut in half by hostile forces.

47:16But the challenge that Israelis faced was if you keep the land, you keep the people. And so how to live with Palestinians under the context of an occupation to get their cooperation to living under occupation has been something which has led to increasingly repressive measures and a conflict between Palestinians and Israelis over territory and over legitimate national rights that remains unresolved down to the present day. And the Settleder Movement has been the single most damaging aspect of Israel's relations with Palestinians under occupation.

47:51Anita:Tom Sekeff's argument also is that, you know, this just happened and nothing was planned. If it had been planned, if some thought had been put into this, this might have been avoidable. I mean, do you think so? Looking at those first years after 67, were there moments when you look at the books that you study or the papers that you study, If you've just gone left instead of right or taken that road instead of that one, we would be looking at a very different region right now. You know, Anita, the last chance for peace has been proclaimed on so many turning point occasions that I've kind of discounted the idea that there was that one moment where if we'd done the right turn, we could have solved this situation.

48:34And I still believe, though this is something that we'll all debate, that the only way to resolve the differences between Palestinians and Israelis is by two states. And I do believe there's a way to achieve that, even with the advanced state of the settler movement today in which 700 ,000 Israelis are living on occupied territory in the West Bank. I think that the only way that the two people will be able to live at peace with each other is if their national rights are respected mutually. were there times where it would have been easier? For sure. And if we look at the sort of the chart of the development of settlements in the West Bank, it does start haltingly in the 1960s and 70s.

49:16It really accelerates in the 1980s and 90s. Ironically, accelerates most in the period after the Oslo Accords, which were leading towards a two-state solution between Palestine and Israel. But I mean, I think at this early period here, it would have been easy enough to have kept those who were religiously committed to establishing bridgeheads in the occupied territories, because I think that combination of religion and nationalism is the most dangerous of all. And I don't think they'll ever be an Israeli state strong enough to force the religious nationalists to abandon their position in the West Bank.

49:51I think those people are likely to continue to live in the West Bank, in Judea and Samaria, as they would call it, even if you were to concede statehood to Palestine in those territories.

50:03Anita:Sobering. And we aren't even sort of all the way through this fascinating conversation with Eugene Rogan. If you can't wait for the next episode, you know what to do. go to empirepoduk.com, empirepoduk.com, where we continue. But till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnon.

50:21William:And goodbye from me, William Durham.