by Gideon Marcus

Even now, it's hard to believe. Little Israel, surrounded, outnumbered, and all but written off as doomed a week ago, has emerged triumphant over its neighbors, occupying an area unequalled in size since the days of King Solomon.

How did we get here?

Prelude to a Clash

A month ago, this conflict hardly seemed inevitable. Yes, the Syrians and Israelis had tangled. IDF planes shot down six Arab MiGs in a single dogfight after Israeli forces raided to stop the flow of terrorists into the country. After that, it seemed things would calm down. Certainly, Defense Minister Dayan seemed relaxed during Israel's 19th Independence Day celebration.

But behind the scenes, the Syrians were panicking. Convinced that some eleven Israeli brigades were poised at their border (there were likely not as many companies), Syrian strongman Salah Jadid pleaded with Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser to agitate a preemptive invasion. The timing was perfect: the Soviet Union could secure greater influence with its Arab client states, and Nasser could regain stature, his support flagging dangerously over his expensive boondoggle war in Yemen vs. Saudi Arabia.

Nasser quickly ordered the UN peacekeeping forces stationed on the Egyptian/Israeli border to leave, which Secretary General U Thant unilaterally ordered. Then Nasser deployed the better part of 100,000 troops to the Sinai. On May 31, he invited Jordan's King Hussein, whom he'd only three weeks before derided as an imperialist puppet, to join the alliance. Hussein, who had been succored by American support late last year, must have been a reluctant partner. Yet, there he was in Cairo, all smiles for the camera.

All Arabia was inflamed with a passion to "drive the Jews into the sea" and "erase Israel from the map". Nasser just needed a pretense to invade. He aimed to provide it. Late last month, Egypt and Saudia Arabia closed off the Strait of Tiran, the southern end of the Gulf of Aqaba. This is one of Israel's crucial lifelines, and Prime Minister Levi Eshkol made it clear that this blockade constituted an act of war.

Shut down Aqaba

Arab exiles, enthusiastic to wipe Israel off the map

Of course it was. But Israel, now virtually abandoned by its former allies, the French, and receiving tepid support from America (tied down with its own foreign conflict), seemed at long odds to win this fight.

Strike first

There is a maxim among wargamers — it is better to strike first at 1 to 2 odds than second at 3 to 1. On the morning of June 5, 1967, Israeli planes sortied over the skies of Egypt and Jordan. It was an unprecedented tactic: fully 100% of the IDF's planes were committed, and no targets of opportunity were allowed. They were to destroy the Arab air forces on the ground. Not the support facilities, not the pilots, just the planes.

They did just that, guaranteeing uncontested control of the sky for the remainder of the operation. When Syrians launched a raid on Haifa, and Iraqi planes tried to penetrate Israeli air space, those nations, too, were savaged.

An Israeli armored column made a frontal assault on Egypt's defenses in Sinai, bolstered since the '56 war. Simultaneously, Israeli forces headed toward Kabanya, Jenin, and Latrun in the West Bank. This latter did not have to have happened. Indeed, that morning, Eshkol made an impassioned plea to Hussein not to honor his commitment to the Egyptian alliance. Jordan entered the war anyway.

The cream of Jordan's might

By the next day, it was clear the Egyptians had underestimated the Israelis. The IDF tanks under General Tal made it halfway across the northern coast of Sinai while other columns broke the Egyptian lines, savaging the artillery positions behind. In Jordan, the Israelis pushed further into the northern West Bank, and east to Deir Nizam and Ramallah. But their primary target was the ancient capital of the Jews: Jerusalem.

The IDF plows into the Sinai

The next morning, Israeli paratroopers (including my niece-in-law's brother) aided ground troops in a daring assault on the city. By early morning, Jews were once again at the foot of the Wailing Wall after nearly two decades of enforced separation. That evening, a bedraggled Jordanian King, a man who had lost half of his country, agreed to a UN ceasefire.

Heading for the West Wall

Israeli parachutists gaze in wonder at the remains of their Temple

King Hussein announces a cease-fire

In Egypt, Tal's forces reached the Suez while Israeli planes and armor savaged Nasser's vehicles in the Mitla Pass. By the next day, the IDF had secured all of the Sinai.

Egyptian wreckage in the Mitla Pass

Only one tragedy mitigated the exult of victory–on the 8th, Israeli jets attacked the U.S.S. Liberty, a communications ship close off the Mediterranean coast of the Sinai. What it was doing there is still unknown, but at the time, the IDF believed it to be a Soviet ship guiding Egyptian guns. 10 Americans were killed in the strike. The Israeli government immediately apologized for the error.

The Liberty limps home

With Egypt and Jordan out of the fight, now it was the turn of Syria, regarded in the West as the instigator of the whole affair. At first, it seemed Israel might not invade, fearing Soviet reprisals. But the threat of the Golan Heights was too great, and the Syrians at the border too hostile to ignore. On June 9, with the other two fronts of this latest conflict wrapped up, Israeli forces plunged toward Damascus. By the next day, the Syrian forces were smashed and the Golan was in Israeli hands.

Israelis in the Golan Heights

Syrians surrender

Whither the Holy land

Which brings us to today: the Arab world is humiliated, Israel controls twice the land it did a week ago (though I can't imagine they'll keep any of it if '56 be any precedent). Several hundred thousand Arabs exiled and born of exiles from the former mandate, identifying as Palestinians and whipped into a fury at the prospect of reclaiming the Holy Land, now find themselves under Jewish authority.

Israelis clear the "Gaza Strip", home to 300,000 "Palestinian" Arabs

At the UN Security Council

Moreover, the Egyptians have already received new planes from the Soviets by way of other Arab countries. There are concerns that Nasser may launch round two later this month or next month.

Israel is alive. Israel is triumphant. But what now?

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An Undeserted Desert

The beaches in Gaza smell like San Francisco, except the water is warmer and no great fog banks cloud the views of the rolling Mediterranean Sea. But the feeling of a bustling city, full of creative minds, just on the brink of something incredible – it's the same. Families fish for squid and sardines here, frying them in open-sided kitchens right on out the sand. Some fishermen go out at night, turning on floodlights to lure them to the surface, tentacles drifting up as they seek the stars. The call-to-prayer echoes over the city; some people stop what they're doing to pray, and some do not. It's a mixed city, mostly Muslim with an Orthodox church dating back to the 1100s, named for St. Porphyrios, a 4th century CE bishop of Gaza.

People here feel a deep connection to this soil, whether they were born here or flew in on the morning El Al flight from SFO. There's a reason the unofficial Palestinian anthem is Ibrahim Tuqan (1905-1941)'s poem "Mawki" or "My homeland." ("Glory and beauty, sublimity and splendor / Are in your hills, are in your hills / Life and deliverance, pleasure and hope / Are in your air, are in your air.")

There are few things that everyone agrees about, when it comes to fights over this bit of dirt. Three major religions – four if you add in Baháʼí folks – call it "the Holy Land," so when I was traveling in the region, I sometimes took to calling it that to avoid fights.

One thing everyone agrees on is that the current modern fight over this land is asymmetrical. Now, no one will agree in whose favor it is asymmetrical. Is it "little Israel" against the eight Arab League nations? Is it a tiny Palestinian village now trapped in territory suddenly controlled by an Israeli army that, 19 years before, forced 750,000 Palestinians to flee their homes during what that community calls the Nakba or Catastrophe? The same army that has now conquered land where about a million more Palestinians and other non-Israelis currently live – many of whom are fleeing by the tens of thousands as I write?

(Many of my Palestinian friends still carry the keys to the homes they were forced out of, hanging by cords around their necks. I think about that a lot.)

A Premeditated War

In 1955, in a speech before the Knesset, former Israeli Minister Menachem Begin said: 

"I deeply believe in launching preventive war against the Arab states without further hesitation. By doing so, we will achieve two targets: firstly, the annihilation of Arab power; and secondly, the expansion of our territory."

"Expansion of our territory" brings to mind colonialism; up until fairly recently, some of the founding advocates for a modern state of Israel comfortably used the language of colonialism to justify their project. In Nachman Drosdoff's fascinating 1962 self-published biography of Ahad-Ha'am (one of the foremost pre-state Zionist thinkers) Drossdoff describes a "Lovers of Zion" meeting in Odessa in 1901 where the colonial intentions of those meeting were clear and central to their work.

As I've written about before in a much less serious context, colonialism often relies on the lie of empty land. Of open territory for one people to expand freely into without harm or consequence.

The problem is, there is no part of the Holy Land that is empty: empty of history, empty of culture, empty of language, and certainly not empty of people. A desert is rarely deserted; though the Negev or Sinai can look barren, there are families who traverse it, who know the wells, the stories, the wadis.

Families Flee Fighting

Those families watched as Israeli fighter pilots zoomed overhead in those lovely pictures in the piece above, blasting away at air fields; just as the families in Gaza watched soldiers from the United Arab Republic retreat before Israeli forces last week, leaving terror and questions in their wake.

Just as Minister Begin hoped for 12 years ago, "Arab power" has in many ways been annihilated; and Israel's territory has certainly been expanded. But for the close to a million Palestinians and other non-Israelis now living under Israeli control, what does that mean? Will families no longer be able to fish? Will the call-to-prayer be silenced? Will Israel force more families out of their homes, into camps, into neighboring countries, doubling the number of people made stateless by the what impacted communities would call the Nakba?

Dark Days Ahead for Poets (But Still There is Starshine)

And what will it mean for the poets? For Khairi Mansour, who friends expect to be deported from the West Bank this year? For Salma Khadra Jayyusi, who has stopped writing her second poetry collection because of this war? For Rashid Husain or Tawfiq Zayyad, who have already spent time in Israeli prisons?

It is not just Palestinian poets who I worry for, but Israeli poets and writers too. When Nathan Alterman wrote "Al Zot" ("On That") in the Israeli newspaper Davar in 1948, he was speaking out against violence against Palestinians during the events they would call the Nakba. He wrote:

"Across the vanquished city in a jeep he did speed–
A lad bold and armed, a young lion of a lad!
And an old man and a woman on that very street
Cowered against a wall, in fear of him clad.
Said the lad smiling, milk teeth shining:
"I'll try the machine gun"…and put it into play!
To hide his face in his hands the old man barely had time
When his blood on the wall was sprayed.

We shall sing, then, about "delicate incidents"
Whose name, don't you know, is murder.
Sing of conversations with sympathetic listeners,
Of snickers of forgiveness that are slurred."

When Alterman published his poem, David Ben-Gurion asked for permission to reprint it, to send it as a cautionary tale to Israeli Defense Forces soldiers; could Prime Minister Levi Eshkol do the same today? I worry for Moshe Erem, a Tel Aviv City Councilman, who in 1948 protested against thousands of Palestinian residents being held in barbed-wire encircled camps, saying:

"This arrangement will instantly compare Ajami to a closed, sealed ghetto. It is difficult to accept the idea that evokes in us associations of horror…Barbed wire is not a one-time project; it will always be in their vision and will serve as an inexhaustible source of bubbling poison. And for the Jewish residents the wire fence will not add social 'health.' It will increase feelings of foul superiority, and perpetuate separations that we do not want to erect."

Those separations seem even higher than ever, 19 years later, after the battles detailed so carefully above. I wonder how much higher still they will climb with the triumphalist, with-us-or-against-us narratives Israel is spinning about this war. I wonder what room those victory stories leave for peace; for protest; for poetry; for any light to get in at all.

I don't know what will come next. But as I've watched my friends' countries get bombed this past week, I've been thinking a lot about one of Fadwa Tuqan's poems (the still-living sister of the Palestinian poet I quoted at the top). The poem is titled "Face Lost in the Wilderness" and ends:

"A rush and din, flame and sparks
lighting the road –
one group after another
falls embracing, in one lofty death.
The night, no matter how long, will continue
to give birth to star after star
and my life continues,
my life continues."

Translated by Patricia Alanah Byrne with help of Salma Khadra Jayyusi and Naomi Shibab Nye.

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