In 1967, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt was at the zenith of his power and popularity, he was the unchallenged leader of the Arab world, the hero of pan Arabism, one of the most important African leaders and a very important voice in the non-aligned movement. President Nasser has implemented very ambitious social and economic reforms in Egypt. His foreign policy was mostly pragmatic and sensible except for the occasional outbursts against the west, but whith the total hostile and uncompromising vis-a-vis with Israel, which came to regard him as the number one enemy. During the early hours of June 5, 1967, Israel launched a highly coordinated pre-emptive air and land attacks against Egypt and Jordan, which resulted in few hours time in incapacitating them and guaranteed the Israelis of complete superiority in the skies and allowed them to end the war in six days at the end of which they had acquired territories four times the size of historical Palestine.
Palestine’s identity has been a hotly disputed topic between the Arabs and the Jews for a very long time, the Jews claimed that Palestine was theirs by a divine order a land promised to them by the lord himself were they will have their homeland, but the Arabs have also been there for many centuries. In 1898, Theodor Herzl a Jewish journalist in Vienna, a very active Zionist started working on forming the organization which would in due time realize that dream. The Zionist movement gained during the early decades of the 20th century a great deal of strength in Europe and in America, which helped a large number of Jews especially from Eastern Europe to immigrate to Palestine at a time when the majority of the population were Arab Muslims who inhabited mainly the country side whilst the larger towns had a mixture of Arabs and Jews. The new arrivals from outside Palestine and the increasing amount of land the Jews started to buy from local Arabs and the larger tracts they were able to acquire from absentee land lords which resulted in the displacement of Arab peasants from their previous lands resulted in a great deal of animosity and friction between the two which was responsible for increasingly serious and bloody confrontations. These confrontations did not discourage the Jews from pursuing their policy of land acquisition, which allowed them within few years to establish a very expanded presence in Palestine.
Herzl sought to get a permission from the Ottoman Empire of which Palestine was a part to establish his cherished homeland there, but he was denied his request. By the end of the First World War and the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire control of Palestine shifted to Britain under the guise of a league of nations mandate which was to last until 1948, the British were more receptive to the Zionist demands and issued the famous Balfour declaration in 1917 in which they pledged their readiness to help the Jews in establishing a state of their own in Palestine and during the years of their occupation of Palestine they always favored the Jews over the Arabs, which fed into the already great resentment against the presence of the Jews. The Jews themselves were never satisfied and conducted some very atrocious attacks against both the Arabs and the British. With the approaching end of the British mandate over Palestine Britain handed over the problem to the United Nations, which passed on November 29, 1947, resolution number 181. The resolution called for the partitioning of Palestine into two parts for each of the Jews and Arabs to establish states of their own on their allotted lands, the Jews accepted the resolution, but the Arabs rejected it.
On May 15, 1948, the British mandate over Palestine expired and on the same night the leaders of the Jewish community in Palestine declared their independence and proclaimed the establishment of the state of Israel which was immediately recognized by the American President Harry Truman. The newly proclaimed state was rejected by the Arabs and went into war against it, a war which continued from 1948 to 1949 with intermittent cease fires until it died down at the end of which the Jews were able to add more lands to those they have already been granted under the UN resolution. The war was lost but it has already intensified an already very serious conflict and led to more wars between the Arabs and the Jews, it also laid the ground for the emergence in Egypt of Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Gamal Abdel Nasser [1918-1970] was born in a small village in Alexandria Egypt where his father was a postman. Gamal attended secondary school in Cairo and from there he went to the Royal Military Academy from where he graduated in 1938 during his time there he established friendships with future core members of the Free Officers Revolutionary group, which was able to overthrow of King Faruk I in 1952 that Allowed Muhammad Naguib to assume the title of provisional president of the newly declared republic. Although Nasser was the true leader and in 1954 Assumed control of the government, he negotiated a plan for British withdrawal from Egypt, and crushed the Muslim Brotherhood after a failed assassination attempt, he Represented Egypt at the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, promoting a policy of nonalignment. In 1956, he was elected president of Egypt one month after his election the United States withdrew its offer of providing the funding for the construction of the Aswan high dam. Nasser responded by nationalizing the Suez canal which precipitated the famous Suez crisis in 1956. In 1967, Nasser called for the removal of United Nations forces from the Sinai Peninsula, which were placed as part of the settling of the Suez crisis isolating Israel and inciting the Six-Day War in which Egypt suffered heavy losses.
During the late fifties and most of the sixties of the last century, a growing resistance to the Jewish state that was spearheaded by the Palestinians was getting increasingly bold and causing increasing trouble to Israel due to the support it was receiving from Nasser and were staging their attacks from Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. Retaliating against these attacks the Israelis struck a Palestinian base in Jordan in November 1966 killing 18 and injuring 54, there was a huge outcry in the Arab world against the atrocity and Nasser was under great pressure, he reacted by closing the gulf of Aqaba. The situation deteriorated very rapidly, the drums of war were beating increasingly on both sides, but the Israelis pre-empted the situation by launching on the 5th of June 1967, a simultaneous strike at Egypt and Jordan during the first few hours of which they succeeded in almost completely wiping out the Egyptian air force and assured them of a complete supremacy of the skies which was followed by a rapid advance of their land forces in both theatres which inflicted very heavy losses on the armies opposing them. The Syrians entered the conflict two days after the start of the war and were treated similarly and at the end, six days from the beginning Israel has gained at least four times more territory than the size of historical Palestine. The Israelis have won a stunning victory, but the Arab Israeli conflict became even more serious. Nasser was never able to regain his previous stature and he died in September 1970, we are told from a heart attack.
The six day war was an event of truly historical dimensions, many lessons should have been learned from it especially by the two main antagonists which does not seem to have been the case, even the stunning Israeli military victory at the end of the six-day war did not resolve the age long--and the very bitter ethnic-religious conflict between the Arabs and the Jews. It did not bring the Israelis the peace and security they so critically need for their progress and prosperity. Dialogue and the readiness to shake the hand of your adversary, I think is a better option.
Dr. Najeeb Hanoudi
Baghdad, June 05, 2003
email:
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
|
