The Israel of my imagination was formed in 1967, the year of my birth. It feels bold to admit it, but the Israel that stirred my young Jewish heart did not come from the Bible, nor even from the remarkable post-Holocaust journey home.
What shaped my soul were the events of June 1967, when the minority of Jews won a miraculous and heroic victory in Israel, as Jews in the Diaspora huddled together, breathless for news, and then rose in celebration.
That victory formed the Zionism of my childhood home, a Zionism that was not only compassionate and moral, but also mighty and powerful.
Forty years later, the image of Jews drawn together in fear, tension and then elation for Israel seems old fashioned, sadly from another time.
Israel’s image in the world, even among Jews, is no longer of an underdog fighting for its rights. It has become — unfortunately and often wrongly, but too frequently — that of a self-serving, oppressive colonialist power.
That juxtaposition between these views is particularly striking as the Jewish world celebrates the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War, which began on June 5, 1967.
Every journalist and Israel scholar, it seems, has taken this anniversary as an opportunity to analyze the legacy of the war.
Jewishness revived
In a recent Jerusalem Post article, three Shalem Center scholars discussed this topic and presented some insights well worth pondering.
Michael Oren — author of “Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East” (2002, Oxford University Press) — said the war had two major results for Israel.
First, “it helped forge an alliance between the United States and Israel…. American leaders woke up on June 5, 1967, and they realized that Israel is a regional superpower and is a very valued ally in the Cold War,” said Oren, a senior fellow at the Shalem Center.
“The other major impact,” he continued, “was the reuniting of the State of Israel with the Land of Israel.” By returning biblical lands, like Bethlehem, Jericho and Hebron, and by reuniting Jerusalem, the war “really confronted the State of Israel with its Jewishness. Everything that transpired after that — the settlement question of a greater Israel — is a direct result of that.”
Yossi Klein-Halevi, the New Republic correspondent in Israel, credits the war with empowering Soviet Jews “to begin resisting the Soviet policy of forced assimilation.”
“It happened precisely because Soviet Jews drew strength and courage from Israel and the example of the Six Day War. Had there not been that model of heroism that the Six Day War presented, Soviet Jews would have eventually disappeared,” said Klein-Halevi, also a senior fellow at the Shalem Center.
He credits the war for a spiritual transformation within Judaism, too. After the war, he said, “it suddenly became possible again, even for [Holocaust survivors], to speak about faith in God.”
“If you could get angry at God for his silence, for not saving the Jews during the Shoah, then you had to forgive God once he seemed to have intervened and saved the Jews in Israel,” he said.
The war’s legacy is not purely positive, to be sure. Of the flood of articles being printed these weeks, many point to the negative effects on Israeli society and politics of its control over the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights, and its annexation of East Jerusalem.
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Said Klein-Halevi: “We became a country with an unwanted population of over 2 million Palestinians, which has been a disaster for Israeli society. It’s been a moral, demographic disaster. It’s been a disaster for the cohesiveness of the Israeli Jewish population.”
Added Oren: “It has given the not-so-few people in the world who deny our legitimacy as a state a means for denying our legitimacy as a state.”
Indeed, 40 years after the war, scholars, pundits and activists, particularly from the political left, have become increasingly comfortable rejecting the moral legitimacy of Israel’s founding, denouncing Israel’s existence as an act of imperialism.
It has become easy to find articles that reject the two-state solution and embrace a “one-state solution,” which would spell the end of a Jewish national homeland.
But, among the Israel-hating screeds, there are voices of loving criticism and genuine concern. Here, many miles from Jerusalem, we would be wise to act like the Israelis and consider not only the celebration of our 1967 victory but also the analyses that challenge us.
There must be space in our community conversations for all these opinions. Beyond fear, beyond the “I’m a better Zionist than you” game, is a range of ideas that may be the ladder out of our current conflicts. Therein we may find the way to bring peace at last to Israel and the Middle East.
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