What Did Ben-Gurion Really Say?

In the immediate wake of the Six-Day War?

 In refutation of the continuing untruths and misrepresentations  promulgated by the New York Times, Martin Kramer has the answer:

    • We are now in possession of the Sinai peninsula, the West Bank of the Land of Israel, the Syrian heights east of the Jordan river, Gaza, and the Old City of Jerusalem and its environs.

    • We must be prepared to discuss peace with all our neighbors who fought us: Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq. However, I am not sure the other side is prepared for that.

    • If Egypt agrees to conclude a peace treaty with Israel—and commits to our freedom of navigation, not just in the straits of Eilat, but also in the Suez Canal—we will be ready to evacuate the Sinai desert immediately after the signing of the treaty.

    • We will not discuss the Old City of Jerusalem and its environs with anyone. It was the capital of Israel at the time of King David, and so it will remain forever. The State of Israel will safeguard the holy places of the Christians and Muslims not less than [past] Muslim rule, or the rule of the Crusaders.

    • We will propose to the inhabitants of the West Bank to choose representatives with whom we will conduct negotiations on a West Bank autonomy (excluding Jerusalem and its environs), which will be tied to Israel in an economic alliance, and which will have its outlet to the sea via Haifa or Ashdod or Gaza.

    • A Jewish army will be stationed on the western bank of the Jordan river to protect the independence of the autonomous West Bank.

    • The Gaza Strip will remain in Israel, and efforts will be made to resettle its refugees in the autonomous West Bank, or in other Arab territory, with the assent of the refugees and the assistance of Israel.

    • If Syria agrees to sign a peace treaty, and commits to preventing attacks on Israeli settlements by Syria’s inhabitants and from within its territory, we will evacuate the Syrian [Golan] heights now in our hands.

    • All the Jews who lived in Hebron and its surroundings will be allowed to return to their former homes, even after the West Bank is granted internal autonomy.

    • We will propose a peace treaty to King Hussein between Israel and the East Bank of the Jordan, and will agree to give it an outlet to the Mediterranean, like that given to the West Bank.

Read all of Martin Kramer's article here

A Wee Dropping from the Foreign Office Camel Corps

From 1969 until his death in April 1974 at the age of 61, Welsh-born Trefor Ellis Evans held the
prestigious Woodrow Wilson Professorship of International Politics at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth (now known as the University of Aberystwyth).

Previous to taking up that post Evans had been a career diplomat.  To quote his obituary in The Times of 19 April 1974, he was

"one of the most accomplished Arabists in the Foreign Service, and by virtue of his understanding of and sympathy with the Arabs, had been able to fill with distinction a number of different posts in Arab countries.  Born in 1913, he was educated at Cowbridge and Balliol, where he graduated in 1934, later taking a doctorate of philosophy at Hamburg.  In 1937 he entered the Levant consular service, and after two years learning Arabic at Beirut, and a spell at Alexandria,he spent from 1941 to 1945 at the Embassy in Cairo. For much of this time he was private secretary to Lord Killearn, for whose forcefulness he conceived a strong admiration, and whose wartime diaries he was, 30 years later, to edit for publication. In 1945 he became British consul at Damascus ... and later served successively at Aleppo, Beirut, and the Foreign Office.

In 1952 he returned as oriental counsellor to Cairo, where the Nasserite revolution had just ousted King Farouk; four taxing years of servicethere were ended by the Suez adventure of 1956.  After two years at Berne, he became in 1959 consul-general at Algiers...and in 1962 ... he was appointed the first British ambassador to the new [Algerian] state. In 1964 he was transferred as ambassador to Damascus, and in 1967 to Baghdad...  In 1969, after some soul-searching, he resigned from the Foreign Service to fill the chair of international politics at the University of Wales."

This series of tweets, by a current academic at the same department at Aberystwyth, is interesting.

Fossilised it may be, but that wee dropping of Evans's is oh so typical of the Foreign Office "Camel Corps" mindset that continues to infest the FCO to the present day.

And what effect and legacy had Evans, one feels entitled to ask, over the young minds he encountered at a department generally conceded to be the top one of its kind in the United Kingdom, and who may have become diplomats, journalists, or academics in their turn?

A Personal Memory of Being a Spectator of the Six-Day War, by Brian Goldfarb

To mark the 50th anniversary of the Six Day War of 1967, I'm honoured to present a very interesting guest blog by retired British academic Brian Goldfarb.

It's entitled "A Personal Memory of Being a Spectator of the Six-Day War: From a Great and Safe Distance".

(The photos of aspects of the war, added by me, Daphne, are from this documentary.)

Writes Brian Goldfarb:

On Monday, 5 June, 1967, the day the Six Day War broke out, I drove south from the north-east of England towards London, where I had been born and grown up, to spend the summer vacation at my parents’ home, no longer, in a very real sense, my home, although I would stay there on and off, for the next two years until I got married.

Now there’s a line for the opening of an autobiography! Which this is not.

I had just finished the first year of my first “proper” job since graduating, teaching undergraduate Sociology at a Polytechnic in the same north-east of the first sentence. I decided to stop off at my alma mater in the East Midlands, to break the journey.

I was, of course, as a Jew, a Labour voter, and a good trade unionist (had I been an Israeli citizen and voter, I would have been a natural Mapai voter), well aware of the tension that had been building up in the Middle East over the previous few weeks, as Nasser ratcheted up the tension in the region, not least by ordering the UN buffer force out of the Sinai Peninsula and closing the Straits of Tiran (leading from the Indian Ocean to Eilat), and of the fear that war might erupt at any moment. The detail, however, belongs, and can be found, elsewhere.

By early afternoon, I was sitting in what would have been, in term time, the student coffee bar, but was, now, empty of all but a few Faculty and graduate students. Among the Faculty were two Eastern European Jewish emigrés – typical of Daniel Snowman’s Hitler’s Emigrés, as his excellent book is entitled – the Professor of Sociology and the Senior Research Fellow, both pretending (as it turned out) to be disinterested in what transpired in the Middle East.

Whereas, the year before, I would not have dared to sit at the same table as them and they would have deemed it impolitic for me to do so (but both would have been too polite to say so), now, as a graduate of the University and a teacher of Sociology to boot, and thus part of the University’s sociology teaching mafia, it was entirely acceptable for me to join them.

There was tension in the air: I felt it, because I too was tense. The conversation, however, avoided the obvious topic.

Until, at about 3.00 pm, someone entered the room with the first edition of the local evening paper. This reported that the Israeli Air Force (IAF) had, effectively, destroyed the Egyptian Air Force on the ground in a first strike carried out shortly after the Egyptians had returned after their dawn patrols.

The tension at our table dropped by many degrees, and the emigrés could go back to pretending that they cared less about what happened in the Middle East. After all, Israel had survived and the rest was detail*.

But I knew better.

By the time I reached my parents’ home early that evening and caught up with the news, it became clear that, indeed, the rest was commentary. Michael Elkins, the American-born BBC Middle East Correspondent, was reporting that (to paraphrase his words) "to those familiar with the first three days of the 1956 Sinai campaign, the names would be very familiar". We must bear in mind that he had to contend with Israeli military censorship, anxious not to give too much away. My response was along the lines of "My God, they (the IDF) are cutting through the Egyptians like a hot knife through butter". And indeed they were.

By the end of fighting that day (after the initial air strikes starting at 07.46), the IAF had destroyed most of the Egyptian air force (at least 150 aircraft destroyed on the ground) and the IDF had cut off the Gaza Strip from the rest of Egypt and were advancing into the Sinai Peninsula at pace.

I would only add, at this point, that many years later, I read a memoir by the great (British and "sane left") journalist James Cameron, who was a notable friend of Israel and was in Israel at the time. He noted that the first press conference of the war took place that evening (Monday 5th June). The military press attache entered the room, barely repressing a smile, and reported the figures of Egyptian aircraft destroyed (mostly on the ground) for very few Israeli losses. The entire press corps, hard-bitten foreign correspondents of many years standing, supposedly neutral to a man and woman, promptly burst into applause.

At this point, I have to note, my personal memory is no longer pin-sharp on the order of events (come-on people, it was 50 years ago! How good is your memory of 50 years ago, if you are at least 60 years old?). For example, I had thought that the attack on the Jordanian-held (occupied, if one is a stickler for an ultra strict reading of the maps drawn up in the 1920s and 30s and/or a right-winger, neither of which I am) West Bank didn’t begin until at least a day later. However, with the aid of a couple of websites (links below**), and without re-reading the books I have on this matter, I find that Israel retaliated (you read that right) against the Jordanians on the first day of the war.

 It appears (and I knew this much later) that the Israelis had used "back channels" to warn King Hussein against joining in the fighting, not wishing to fight a two-front war, even with internal lines of communication and supply (the IDF could move men, materials and other equipment around very easily without long, circuitous journeys). He preferred to believe Nasser’s claims of being close to victory over the "Zionist entity", and paid for his naivety.

It would seem that a little more than an hour after the Israelis had destroyed the Egyptian air force (although Nasser would take quite some time to admit that even to his allies), the Jordanians started shelling both Jerusalem and central Israel, as well as both Jordanian and Iraqi aircraft "trying" (at least one of the sources says: the implication is that the few aircraft left defending Israeli air-space drove them off) to bomb Tel Aviv and other targets. Further, by midday, while the Jordanians had captured the UN HQ in Jerusalem (presumably in East Jerusalem: they never got to West Jerusalem), the IAF bombed airfields in Jordan by 12.30, an airbase in Iraq by 13.00 and a number of airbases in Syria, allegedly destroying most of the Syrian air force.

By this time, half-way through the first day, Israeli High Command (and politicians, including the "old man", i.e., Ben Gurion) were convinced (rightly, as we now know) that fighting a war on three fronts, while risky, was a risk that had paid off.

So, by the end of the first day, the IDF was well into the Sinai (although it took unto until 13.00 the following day to complete the conquest of Gaza), had destroyed three air forces (the Jordanians flew no more sorties of any significance, although the Egyptians managed one or two, until the IAF destroyed the final base far to the south of Egypt) and had started to advance into the West Bank, which hadn’t been in the High Commands plans before the Jordanians decided to intervene.

Perhaps the most emotive event for us oldies took place at 03.00 the following morning, when Latrun was captured. Anyone who has seen the film Cast A Giant Shadow (starring Kirk Douglas) will be aware how sweet this victory would have been (the film was released, fortuitously, in 1966).

I recall being glued to the television for that week, although memories are hazy. The record tells me that it took little more than three days to capture the West Bank. For most Jews, especially those not of a military cast of mind, the most significant event, after the destruction of the enemies armies, was the capture of the Old City of Jerusalem, which happened by mid-morning of 7 June: my wife-to-be was working in Israel at the time and hitched a lift in an army vehicle (one could do that then) to Jerusalem on the first day the Western Wall was opened (and long before it was divided into men’s and women’s sections) and, as one would expect, still remembers the thrill of that day. It took a day longer to take the Sinai, and the most devastating event (both for the Egyptians and for the loss of life in the whole campaign) was the closing by the Israelis of the Mitla and Jiddi Passes in the Sinai by early evening of the 3rd day of the war, which led to a terrible slaughter of Egyptian troops desperately trying to escape westwards towards the Suez Canal.

That I do remember. And not, all these years later, fondly. If only there had been another way to persuade Nasser to go for a cease fire earlier...

No-one expected the Syrians to intervene, but they did. Mostly, they directed artillery barrages on Israeli population centres in the North (hardly surprising). Having held off until then, Moshe Dayan, the Minister of Defence, ordered, for Day 5 (9 June) an attack on the Golan Heights. I still remember, all these years later, watching a retired UK Brigadier Michael(?) Peters describe watching the Israeli tanks charge up the Heights, hardly tank country, as though they were facing a routine exercise on level ground.

It took a mere two days for the IDF to destroy the Syrian army and drive a huge wedge into Syria. The wedge is such that, if Assad were stupid enough to attack Israel, the IDF could be destroying his Presidential Palace in Damascus within an hour: the road is open to the IDF.

In the late 1980s, we were members of a group taken on to the Golan Heights. We stepped into the Syrian observation trenches overlooking the Huleh Valley. It lay below us, exposed to artillery fire at any time and, in principle, a determined military drive into Israel. Asked if we would give the Heights back, to a person we said no.

The minimum requirement would be a stable regime in Damascus able to guarantee a peace treaty. Oddly, after all these years, and especially since Syria started to fall apart five or six years ago, the Druze who dominate on the Golan Plateau are starting to accept Israeli identity cards and turn their attention to studying (for the young adults) within Israel, alongside their Israeli Druze counterparts.

Although written with help from a couple of timelines, this is a slice of memory. I hope it rings true.

 *This is an obscure reference to the Talmudic tale that Rabbi Hillel was asked by a non-Jew to explain Judaism while standing on one leg. He responded, saying "Do unto others that which you would have them unto you", then lowered the raised leg. "But what about everything else?" the non-Jew exclaimed. "The rest" Hillel said, "is commentary."

**The links I mentioned above are this and this

In For The Kill: Turning Americans against Israel after the Six Day War

"When Israel won her stunning victory in the Six-Day War of June 1967, the American public's reaction brought no joy to the Arab functionaries and sympathizers who had been trying, in a desultory way, to cultivate a body of pro-Arab sentiment in this country. Insofar as Americans had any opinion on the Middle East crisis at all-- and nearly one-half had none—they favored Israel over the Arab states in a ratio of nearly 14 to 1.
 
In moments of candor, Arab diplomats have since acknowledged that inept information methods had much to do with their failure to influence U.S. attitudes. Today, Arab propaganda is being stepped up in tempo and volume, and is becoming increasingly professionalized. (Four Arab governments--Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Republic—retain professional public relations counsel in this country.) The clumsy, unselective approaches of yesteryear are being replaced by more sophisticated techniques aimed at particular audiences— such as church groups, the student left, or the disaffected blacks."

Thus begins a report prepared in July 1969 for the American Jewish Committee that throws a fascinating light on how Arab propagandists reacted to the challenge of turning American public opinion against the Zionist Entity. 

Titled "Arab Appeals to American Public Opinion Today" the report continues: 

 "Israel clearly continues to enjoy vast good will in America today. Yet in the battle for Americans' minds, the Arabs who, after all, enjoy the same rights as do proponents of any other viewpoint, will no doubt make the most of their opportunities....

Up to the time of the Six-Day War, much Arab propaganda focused on Biblical and legal reasons against the existence of a Jewish state per se. Since then the emphasis has shifted to moral arguments against Israel as an actual entity. Israel is charged with heinous crimes against Arabs within and without her borders, and the Palestine refugee problem is brought up again and again.... [My emphasis here and below]

Official Arab propaganda in this country, as typified by the output of the Arab Information Center, differs quite markedly from Ameri can gutter anti-Semitism with its mythology of omnipresent plots and takeovers. Ostensibly appealing to reason and humanity rather than fear or hysteria, the official line proclaims that Arabs have nothing at all against Judaism and oppose only the "aggressive ideology" of Zionism.

A variety of pamphlets with titles like Zionism and the Bible argue that God did not promise Israel exclusively to the Jews. The old legal arguments, too, are still being hashed over: Britain, it is said, had no right to write the Balfour Declaration and betrayed prior agreements with the Arabs in doing so; President Truman was pressured by wealthy Zionists into approving the UN's Palestine partition plan of 1948; the Zionists, supported by the West, dispossessed the Palestinian people, and in defiance of the UN forced them to lead the desperate lives of stateless refugees.

But since 1967 these arguments have been supplemented by shriller claims. Israel's whole history is now depicted as a series of broken promises and aggressive acts. Even while exploiting the world's sympathy, it is alleged, Israel prevents peace in the Middle East and continues to violate the UN human rights conventions in her treatment of Arab refugees as well as her own Arab citizens. Israel, another accusation runs, has created a distorted image of the Arab by making the world see the Middle East through jaundiced Zionist eyes.

The favorite topic since 1967 has been the status of the Arab refugee, the issue most likely to elicit sympathy, and most easily interpreted in terms of "good guys" vs. "bad guys." Because the ranks of the displaced furnish many or most of the Arab terrorists bent on "liberating" their native soil, the press in the United States has been devoting greater and increasingly sympathetic atten-tion to the refugees. This, the Arab propagandists say, is the part of the emerging "reappraisal" of the Middle East situation which "Zionist control" of the news has supposedly prevented until now....'

This is a fascinating document, illuminating the situation that prevails today in the United States and indeed in other parts of the Western world, especially the English-speaking world.

What particularly interests me is the light the report sheds on the dissemination of anti-Israel propaganda within the Churches:

'An intensive campaign is underway to bring about what one Arab Christian leader has called a "Copernican mental change" in the attitudes of American churches toward Israel. In this campaign, the Arabs and their supporters employ not only anti-Zionism, but also religious anti-Semitism—from sophisticated theological arguments to Nazi slurs and medieval superstitions like the blood libel. Substantial headway has been made, especially among Protestant leaders.

Arab Christians, some under pressure from their governments, use their influence to undermine Western Christian support of Israel. So do American churchmen in the Middle East. A group of Protestant and Orthodox clergymen, operating from Beirut and New York, has prepared and widely distributed a "master strategy plan" calling, inter alia, for cooperation with existing pro-Arab groups and boy- cotts of tours to the Holy Land.

Clergymen, mostly Protestant, have set up national and local organizations to lobby before Congress and to sway public opinion through film showings, pamphlets and letter-to-the-editor campaigns. Perhaps the best known such group is Americans for Middle East Under-standing (New York)—a citizen organization headed by a Presbyterian minister, the Reverend Humphrey Walz, which states that its aim is to create a better understanding of how Middle East Affairs affect the interests of the U.S. The group issues a bimonthly journal, The Link.

The Arabs' efforts among organized Christianity have been greatly stepped up since the Six-Day War and now constitute a comprehensive, systematic and well-financed strategy which makes earlier approaches to the churches appear amateurish by contrast. In June 1968, Metropolitan Philip Saliba, the Syrian Antiochian Orthodox Church's Archbishop of New York and North America, reportedly urged Arab nations to double their contributions for "information centers" in the U.S. to $20 million per year (Al Hayat, Beirut, May 28, 1968).

The desired "Copernican mental change" was recently defined by a Lebanese Orthodox leader, Gabriel Habib, who is the Middle East Secretary for the World Student Christian Federation and for the Youth Department of the World Council of Churches. He called for an end to the "scandalous association" of Christianity with Israel, whose existence he called "a new form of Western aggression or a crusade against the Arabs and Islam" (Ecumenical Press Service, December 19, 1968).

The World Council of Churches, a federation of 235 Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox denominations, has been subjected to steady pressure. In the wake of the Six-Day War, seven Arab Christian patriarchs and clergymen, from Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, called on the Council to condemn Israeli "aggression," and on the "conscience of the Christian West" to recognize that Israel should "cease to exist as a racial state" (June 19 and 27, 1967). The Council responded by sending its Associate General Secretary, Father Paul Verghese, then Bishop-elect of the Syrian Orthodox Church of India, to the Middle East. His mission, as he put it in his report, was to "express solidarity" with the Arabs, "ascertain ... the needs of suffering people," and interpret the "convictions and feelings" of Arabs to the Council.

To help sway Catholic opinion, •the head of the Egyptian Coptic Church, Patriarch Kyrillos VI, reportedly planned to visit Pope Paul VI in the spring of 1969, in a bid for a "unified stand" on the Arab cause and the "liberation" of Jerusalem (Religious News Service, January 8, 1969). The Patriarch's attitude toward Jews is typified by a statement he made at the time of the Second Vatican Council: "The Coptic Church proclaims the Jews' responsibility throughout the ages for crucifying Christ."....'

The report concludes: 

"The impact of all this is not readily measured. Thus far ... it would appear that among those Americans who take any interest in the matter at all, a majority nearly as overwhelming as it was just after the Six-Day War in 1967 remains favorable to Israel. Elsewhere in the Western World, too, Israel apparently retains the sympathies of the bulk of the population. But there are some signs of a shift in this attitude.

In the United States particularly, mounting disillusionment over Vietnam and growing pressures for neutralism may create new openings for Arab spokesmen. Champions of the Arab cause, both covert and official, can be expected to redouble their efforts in the months ahead, in a determined drive to wean Israel's friends among the American public from their present sympathies and to turn the uncommitted into supporters of the Arab hard line against Israel."

Read the entire document here
 (Hat tip: Y.S.)

"Yerushalayim (Jerusalem) Is A Magic Word For The Jew"

To Jewish readers: Chag Pesach Sameach.

Tomorrow is the first day of Passover, and consequently this blog will take a brief rest.

In view of the time-honoured Seder wish "Next Year in Jerusalem!" and to give non-Jewish readers a glimpse of the seminal, visceral importance of Jerusalem to Jews and Judaism, I'm posting below an address given by the late Rabbi Dr Israel Porush of Sydney one year after the Six Day War, which saw Arab-occupied Jerusalem liberated by Israeli troops, and which ensured Jews access  to that supreme holy site, the Kotel (Western Wall), which had been off-limits to them since 1948.

Rabbi Dr Porush (1907-91)  represented the Religious, Mizrachi, stream within the Zionist movement.  He was born in Jerusalem into an Ashkenazi family that had resided there for a number of generations, and he combined Jewish scholarship with secular learning: as well as possessing a rabbinical diploma from the famous Hildesheimer Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin he had a university PhD in mathematics.  Before taking up his post as minister of Sydney's venerable Great Synagogue (served 1940-75) he was minister of the Finchley Synagogue in London.  In Australia he was active in many communal institutions and in 1943 founded the New South Wales Council of Christians and Jews.

This is what he had to say in that address, entitled "Golden Jerusalem":

'.... Israel stood alone in that hour of crisis, surrounded by a ring of modern armour of terrible deadliness, and beleaguered by the armies of seven nations who were united in the hate of Israel and in their sinister plot to destroy it.  The rest of the world played cynically a waiting game.  Is it surprising that we view with a measure of cynicism the advice given us by our friends now?

And what of Churches?  Not a word of comfort in the hour of danger, not a sound of condemnation of the threats to our existence.  The so-called ecumenic spirit, or the so-called dialogue between Church and Synagogue, which was promoted in some quarters, especially in the United States, has suffered a setback from which it will not so easily recover.

Did I say Israel stood alone? Israel never stands alone: “The Guardian of Israel never slumbers nor sleeps”; and the people of Israel in all their dispersion were roused as never before in prayer and in action and stood united by the side of Medinat [the State of] Israel.

....The Jewish citizen-soldier knew what the stakes were, and he was ready for every sacrifice.  And many hundreds of the cream of Israeli youth paid the supreme sacrifice upon the altar of Jewish survival ….

….[We] offer thanksgiving to the Almighty for the wonderful delivery of Israel from danger and fear, for the retreat of the enemy beyond wider and safer frontiers, and for the transformation that has taken place in the whole security situation of Medinat Israel ….

But who can be unaware that our deepest emotions and our profoundest sensitivity revolve around the liberation of Jerusalem, which has been restored to its rightful owners after nineteen centuries of dispossession?  ….

Yerushalayim (Jerusalem) is a magic word for the Jew.  It is pronounced in awe.  It conjures up associations and feelings in our ears that no other word does, and that no other nation or religion can remotely experience.  To us, Yerushalayim personifies the presence of God in our midst, the Schechinah.  It is the soul of our people.  It is the national and religious centre of all Israel, whether in its glory or in its ruin.  Jerusalem is eternal; it can never die or be destroyed.  Wherever the Jew settles in the four corners of the earth, Jerusalem is alive in his heart and near to his life.

 Jerusalem is mentioned 630 times in the Bible, as the city of God, the Capital of the Nation, the seat of the Temple, the centre of piety and learning, and also as the emblem of the Kingdom of God that will ultimately rule on earth.

When the captives of Judea sat by the rivers of Babylon weeping over their humiliation, and their captors invited them to sing one of the songs of Zion, they repliued: "How can we sing the song of the Lord in a profane land?” and they swore, “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning; let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I remember thee not; if I set not Jerusalem above my chiefest joy.”

Throughout the 1,900 years of exile there was never a time, with the possible exception of two brief periods, when Jews did not live in Jerusalem, at times facing great peril, at times massacred by fanatics.

 Our prayers were always directed towards Jerusalem.  Already Daniel, we are told, recited his three daily services with his face towards Jerusalem, and so have done all Jews in the Synagogue to this day.  There is not a service, there is not a Simchah [celebration], there is not a meal, when we do not remember Jerusalem and pray for its restoration.  And when we sit in mourning over its destruction, we mingle sorrow with hope, and grief with glorification, and lament with pledges of eternal loyalty to Zion, as is reflected in the moving Ode of Judah Halevi:

Though art the house of royalty, thou art the throne of the Lord …. O, who will make me wings, that I may fly afar and lay the ruins of my cleft heart among thy broken cliffs … Happy is he that waiteth, that cometh nigh and seeth the rising of the light, when on him thy dawn shall break – that he may see the welfare of thy chosen, and rejoice in the rejoicing when thou turnest back unto thine olden youth.

…. Jerusalem is the physical capital of the nation and at the same time the spiritual centre of all Israel wherever they live.

…. Yerushalayim is the emblem of the eternity of Israel as the people of God.  We would

indeed betray our raison d’être and our mission among men if we were to think of Yerushalayim in secular or political terms only.

 Jerusalem must return to its old destiny as “Ir Shalem”, which means on the one hand “The City of Peace”, but also on the other “The City of Completion, or Unity”.  It is unthinkable that the unity between the people of Israel and its spiritual cradle will ever be allowed to be severed again.

 The attachment of a people for 3,000 years as intense as that as the Jews to Yerushalayim cannot be set aside by international decree.  None need be afraid that the Jews would deal ungenerously or restrictively with the Holy Places and legitimate interests of other religions and communities.  We have proved that already.

…. Our Rabbis also speak of Yerushalayim as the “metropolis of the world”.  There is undoubtedly also a universal facet in the image of Jerusalem, embracing the whole of humanity, and that goes back 2,500 years, to the days of our prophets who prophesied in the name of God that the messianic order on earth would begin with the restoration of Jerusalem, and that Jerusalem would become then the fountainhead of a new mode of living which would lead the world out of the morass of strife, hate and division towards brotherhood, righteousness and peace:

And many people shall go and say: "Come ye, and let us go up to the Mountain of the Lord, to the House of the God of Jacob; and He will teach us His ways, and we will walk in His paths.  For out of Zion shall go forth the Law, and the word of the Law from Jerusalem.  And he shall judge between the nations, and shall decide for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

Jerusalem is more relevant to the ultimate salvation of humanity than Athens and Rome, because it taught the world the supremacy of righteousness, brotherhood, and charity.  And even if the complete fulfillment of this ideal state of affairs would have to wait for the fullness of time, the inspiration of this vision could stimulate now the troubled peoples of the earth towards a more just and peaceful order of life. 

In our immediate context we could in our imagination envisage a Middle East in which goodwill, mutual respect and harmony would prevail between the Jews and the Arab nations, initiating an era of peace and prosperity that would be a blessing to all.  We know that this is the constant aspiration and the constant yearning of the Yishuv, and that Israel’s search for peace comes not only from practical considerations, but also from deep-seated convictions – the emblem of the Israeli Army is characteristically a sword wreathed in an olive branch – and from the unshaken trust in the teachings of our prophets and the ideals of our tradition….'

Essential Viewing About The History Of The Israel-Arab Conflict (video)

Danny Ayalon, Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister, with a history lesson much needed that should be heeded:

In the Shadow of '67: A Voice From Israel's Past

I've found two interesting items that appeared in the leftwing London weekly New Statesman on 31 July and 14 August 1970.  The earlier of the two was an open letter to the then Israeli Foreign Minister, Abba Eban.  It was written by the prominent Labour MP Richard Crossman, a steady friend of Israel who features in an earlier post of mine: http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2010/11/british-plans-for-resettlement-of.html

In his well-meaning open letter, Crossman, who had just become editor of the New Statesman, a post he left in 1972, urged the Israelis to relinquish the territories as soon as possible:

"....Your military ascendancy is a wasting asset, just as the territories you have occupied become heavier liabilities the longer you hold them.  I know you did not want this military ascendancy.  I know that your occupation of the West Bank was not premeditated, that you recognise that the Suez Canal is not your natural frontier.  I also know that any peace initiative you now take involves a military risk.  But in a year's time the risk will be even greater.  The vision of Arab-Jewish accord which was so fervent in 1948 and which has grown today, will grow dimmer still.

....An Israel which aped the ethos of a Prussian state would be a contradiction in terms...."

Replied Abba Eban, with his customary courtesy yet with incisive firmness:

".... You are clearly anxious about the effects of victory on Israel's character and conduct: and you have a picture of an Israel dominated by formidable 'soldiers' who are hostile to cease-fire and recalcitrants to political initiatives.  Now it is better that the editor of the New Statesman should be agitated than that he should be complacent: but when you get worried about whether we 'ape the ethos of a Prussian state' your agitation carries you much too far.  One of the disadvantages of your status in the last six years is that you could not come to Israel very often.  the public 'media' on which you had to rely are more fascinated by violence than by peaceful action.  For these reasons you, like others, have not seen Israel in a full length mirror. All Israeli life is lived today in the memory of the peril we faced in 1967.  Every one of us had good reason to fear the very worst that can befall a man, his family, his home and his nation.  In our people's history many things are too strange to be believed: but nothing is too terrible to have happened.  We have vigorously survived the danger with consequent injury to our martyr's image.  And if you ask me as you seem to do, 'What have you gained by victory?' I answer simply: 'Everything that we would have lost without it.' [My emphasis]

....[T]his abnormailty [occupation] was not sought: it was created by war, and it can be cured by peace.  Peace would replace cease-fire lines by negotiated and agreed boundaries to which armed forces would be withdrawn: and in any solution which my present Cabinet colleagues would endorse, the majority of the two million Palestinian Arabs on both sides of the river would be the citizens of an Arab state (beginning on our newly negotiated eastern frontier), whose structure, name and regime they would be free to determine.

I do not know how long the attainment of peace will take: but you really need not worry lest we have become Prussian by the time it comes about.  When you come to see us, you will not find us paralysed or obsessed by war.  You will find that 40,000 Arabs from neighbouring lands vistied the West Bank this summer.  You will be astonished in Jerusalem by an unceasing contact of Jews, Arabs, and thousands of all faiths which puts the segregation and fanatical exclusiveness of the Jordanian occupation to shame.  [My emphasis.] You will find a vast flow of visitors from Israel from all over the world.  You will see hundreds of the future leaders of developing countries studying here.  Israel, of course, is a society which has its imperfections: but these are redeemed by the free and lucid criticism of them as well as by the constant quest for improvement.  In short: you will find that you are as far from Prussia as you can get in the modern world.

 The main achievement of Israel since 1967 is to have remained a fighting nation without becoming a warrior stae.  Nor do I think you will find us dominated by 'soldiers'. I put the word in quotation marks because it conjures up a special breed which does not belong to our experience.  We have nothing here but civilians, some of whom are temporarily under arms.  We may show you a pilot who shot down eight aircraft bringing in the fruit from a kibbutz orchard...."

This was a period when the Left had already entered upon that slippery slope into hypocritical tunnel-visioned Israel-bashing that has become such a pit of putridity today.  For Eban went on to observe (and his strictures regarding Nasser surely have a resonance today in view of the threat posed to peace nd stability in the wake of the downfall of Mubarak and the lurking presence in the wings of power of the Muslim Brotherhood):

"If you find that the diversity, turbulence, paradox and indiscipline of our democracy are from Prussia I may suggest that you write your next open letter to President Nasser.  An authoritative socialist voice calling Nasser to the peace table is overdue.  There has been too much indulgence of [George] Habash [founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and mastermind of the trick of hijacking airliners] and Arafat and their exclusivist fantasies about a purely Middle East without a sovereign Israel as part of its memory, reality and hope.  There has been too much docile acceptance by part of the Left of a rampant Israelophobia with its ugly Stuermer-like expression portraying Israel as lying outside the human context.  In your letter, if you feel like writing it, you could remind President Nasser that the idea of an israel-Egyptian treaty as the gateway to a new era of peace and development in the Middle East would evoke his better days.  For Israel respected the progressive ideals of the Egyptian revolution in its early phase.  All this has been corrupted by the senseless war against Israel...."

Since A Slim Israeli Waistline Courts Death ...

In view of the 44th anniversary of the Six Day War, David Singer, a Sydney lawyer and foundation member of the International Analysts Network, has written one of his typically thoughtful and thought-provoking articles on the Middle East. 

Entitled "Palestine – an Arab West Bank is a lost cause," the article recalls, to quote its author, "some of the significant events that led to Jordan’s loss of the West Bank in that War ending 19 years of uninterrupted occupation" and demonstrates  "why all of the West Bank – or its equivalent area – will never again return to Arab control".

At the beginning of the article Singer notes his indebtedness to http://www.sixdaywar.co.uk/timeline.htm and notes that that website in general "should be required reading for all who wish to understand why international pressure to  return all of the West Bank to the Arabs must fail". (I've added the illustrations, and that website is my source for the two Arab cartoons, produced in the early stages of the war when it was assumed that Nasser would succeed in his vow to push Israel into the sea; the second cartoon is how a cartoonist in a Syrian newspaper imagined the fate awaiting Tel Aviv.)

As usual, David Singer's article comes via the antipodean J-Wire service.

Writes Singer:

'Jordan’s path down the road to its disastrous loss of the West Bank began on 30 May 1967 – 6 days before the start of the Six Day War.  This was the fatal day that Jordan signed  a five year mutual defence treaty with Egypt, thereby joining the military alliance already in place between Egypt and Syria. Jordanian forces were given to the command of an Egyptian General.

Jordan’s King Hussein had been caught up in the Arab euphoria and vitriol emanating from Egypt’s President Nasser who had declared on 28 May 1967:

“We will not accept any…coexistence with Israel.…Today the issue is not the establishment of peace between the Arab states and Israel….The war with Israel is in effect since 1948”.

Such was the mood of Jordan’s population that Jordan’s Army Commander-in-Chief General Sharif Zaid Ben Shaker warned in a press conference that :

“If Jordan does not join the war a civil war will erupt in Jordan”.

The West Bank had been unified with Transjordan in 1950 and the country renamed Jordan after  unanimous ratification by a Parliament comprised equally of representatives from the West Bank and Transjordan.  No demand was made in the next 17 years for the creation of a separate Palestinian Arab State – even though all the Jews living there had been driven out by six invading Arab armies in 1948.

On 31 May 1967 President Aref of Iraq declared:

“The existence of Israel is an error which must be rectified. This is our opportunity to wipe out  the ignominy which has been with us since 1948. Our goal is clear – to wipe Israel off the map”

Al Akhbar – Cairo’s daily newspaper correctly summed up Jordan’s involvement on the same day:

“Under the terms of the military agreement signed with Jordan, Jordanian artillery, coordinated with the forces of Egypt and Syria, is in a position to cut Israel in two at Qalqilya, where Israeli    territory between the Jordan armistice line and the Mediterranean Sea is only 12 kilometres wide”.

What was true in 1967 remains as valid in 2011.  Israel’s vulnerable waistline of only 12 kilometers would return again with all of the West Bank under Arab control.

On 5 June Israel made its pre-emptive strike against Egypt. That same morning, Israel sent a message to Jordan’s leader King Hussein via the US State Department, the UN and the British Foreign Office, saying that, despite the outbreak of war, it would not attack the West Bank if Jordan maintained quiet on that front.

Jordan ignored Israel’s appeal to avoid conflict  and  launched immediate multiple attacks on Israel

• civilian suburbs of Tel-Aviv were shelled by artillery;
• Israel’s largest military airfield, Ramat David, was shelled;
• Jordanian warplanes attacked the central Israeli towns of Netanya and Kfar Sava;
• thousands of mortar shells rained down on West Jerusalem hitting civilian locations indiscriminately, including the Hadassah Hospital and the Mount Zion Church;
• Israel’s parliament building (the Knesset) and the Prime Minister’s office, each in Israeli-controlled West Jerusalem, were targeted;
• 20 Israelis died in these attacks; 1000 were wounded. 900 buildings in West Jerusalem were damaged.

All this happened before Israel reacted militarily against Jordan, or moved at all into the West Bank.
The Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 242 on 22 November 1967 recognizing  that secure and recognized boundaries needed to be drawn between Israel and its neighbours to  ensure the Arabs would not be tempted to again try and cut Israel in two in the future as the first step in any attempt to wipe Israel off the map.

Egypt and Jordan eventually came to realise the folly of their action. Both entered into peace treaties with Israel in 1979 and 1994 respectively. Syria refused to join them. But the current upheaval in Egypt, Jordan and Syria now put the continued operation of these two treaties at real risk.

Jordan withdrew all its claims to the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1988. The Palestinian Authority (PA) was created in 1993 as a result of the Oslo Accords – stepping into the void left by Jordan.

The PA has since then sought  to undo the 1950 reunification and substitute the creation of a Palestinian Arab State in all of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza for the first time in recorded history

The PA is now threatening to approach the United Nations in September to achieve this outcome. The UN’S  abject surrender to an Egyptian diktat was the catalyst that led to the Six Day War.

UN Secretary General U Thant had of his own volition agreed to Nasser’s demand that  the United Nations Emergency Force be withdrawn on 18 May 1967 – just seven hours after Egyptian ambassador Kony had informed U Thant:

“Egypt has decided to terminate the presence of the United Nations Emergency Force from the territory of the United Arab Republic and Gaza Strip. Therefore I request that the necessary     steps be taken for the withdrawal of the Force as soon as possible.”

Britain made its position very clear when its Foreign Secretary George Brown stated:

“UNEF was established with the full concurrence of the United Nations…any decision to withdraw the force should be taken in the United Nations after full consultation with all the countries involved – it should not be taken as the result of some unilateral decision.”

It is unthinkable and immoral that Jordan’s heinous conduct should be rewarded by the United Nations now ignoring  Security Council Resolution 242 and returning Israel to the vulnerable 1967 armistice lines.
That the UN might seek to do so in clear contravention of its own resolution and international law – specifically the Montevideo Convention 1933 – would certainly not surprise. Treachery knows no bounds when it comes to double standards by the UN in dealing with Israel.

Jordan paid a high price for joining in an alliance with Egypt and Syria – the loss of  the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Those pre-June 1967 halcyon days are not going to return in 2011 – either for Jordan or the PA.'

The Jewish Thought Series: The Meaning of the Month of Iyar

       This article by Avraham Reiss of Jerusalem is crossposted from http://jcwatch.wordpress.com/

The purpose of this article is to search for meaning in the occurrence of three important events in Jewish History in the month of Iyar: the War against Amalek, Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence and the Six Day War . The article was originally written in Iyar 5733, a few months before the Yom Kippur War.  Avraham Reiss, Jerusalem, Nisan 5754.

I
The Shulchan Aruch cites a list of days upon which it is fitting to observe rites of mourning because of disasters that befell our ancestors on those days. The Shulchan Aruch finishes by saying that “in the future, G-d will transform these days into days of rejoicing”.

This "prophecy" has begun to be fulfilled, for amongst the days recommended for mourning, is the 28th day of Iyar, the day upon which the Prophet Samuel died; a day which in our lifetime suddenly became a day of great rejoicing. On this day in 1967, the Old City of Jerusalem, with the Western Wall and the Temple Mount, were returned to the Jewish Nation at the climax of an amazing war.

Closer study of the circumstances preceding the death of Samuel, reveal to us that it was not by mere chance that these two events (Samuel’s death and the return of Old Jerusalem to Israeli ownership) occurred on the same date.

II
The Gemara (Masechet Ta’anit) tells us that Samuel requested from G-d that King Saul (who was anointed by Samuel) would not die during Samuel’s lifetime, in the same way that Moshe and Aharon did not live to see the death of their successor, Joshua.

G-d then asked: "What shall I do? Samuel does not want King Saul to die first, and if Samuel dies now people will say he died young because of sins [Samuel was 52 when he died, the Gemara tells us], and if neither of them die now the time for the Monarchy of David to begin will have arrived, and no two Monarchies are allowed to encroach upon each other’s decreed time span by even so much as the breadth of a hair."

G-d therefore said: "I will make him look old".  (Samuel will die now, but he will become aged-looking before he dies, so people will not say he died young because of sins).

We see from this that Samuel’s death was brought about with the express purpose of expediting the Monarchy of David. The 28th Day of Iyar, the day upon which the city of Jerusalem, David’s capital, was returned to the Jewish Nation, to the State of Israel, is obviously a great milestone in the final stages of our final Redemption.

III
The aforementioned Gemara explains that the whole purpose of removing the Monarchy from Saul and transferring it to David, was because of King Saul’s failure to destroy the descendants of Amalek.

In order to increase the depth of our understanding, we ask here two questions:

(1) Why was Saul chosen as king in the first place, when he was not of the House of David, or of the Tribe of Judah, from where a king must be chosen?

(2) If already chosen, why was only a partial failure in the war against the descendants of Amalek considered sufficient reason to remove the Monarchy from Saul, and to transfer it to David?

IV

The Shlah (Shnei Luchot HaBrit) explains that Saul was originally chosen as king in order that he would fight against the nation of Amalek, this because Saul was of the tribe of Benjamin. (It is interesting to note, since we are discussing the 28th of Iyar, that Saul was the 28th generation after Benjamin!). Benjamin was the only tribe which did not bow down to Esau, for the simple reason that at the time of Yaakov’s meeting with Esau Benjamin had not yet been born. This, the fact that Benjamin had not bowed down to Esau, gave him (Benjamin) a unique spiritual advantage over Esau compared with all the other tribes, empowering him with the strength to vanquish Esau in battle; thus it was a descendant of Benjamin, Saul, who was chosen to defeat the Amalekites, descendants of Esau, in the time of Samuel and Saul.

All this is even hinted at in Saul’s very name, says the Shlah; Saul, in Hebrew, Sha-ul, means "borrowed", and hints that although the Monarchy of Israel belongs to a descendant of the tribe of Judah, it was "borrowed" by Saul in order that he should vanquish Amalek’s seed. When Saul failed to kill all of the Amalekites as commanded, by leaving their king alive, he had failed in his mission, and there was thus no longer a reason for allowing the Monarchy to be personified by one who was not of the tribe of Judah.

V
However, we must still ask why the mitzvah of destroying all remnants of the seed of Amalek is regarded as so important that for this purpose the monarchy was at first awarded to one who was not of the tribe of Judah?

As a simplistic answer, we could say that the matter had already been decided by our Sages when they said in the Gemara:

"Israel were commanded to perform three mitzvot when they entered the Land of Israel:

1. To appoint a king

2. To destroy the seed of Amalek

3. To build the Temple in Jerusalem"

There, the Gemara states that these three mitzvot must be performed in the above order, and the Rambam brings this as a decisive halachah.

According to this, we could simplistically state that King Saul, by not completing the mitzvah of destroying the seed of Amalek, was hindering the process of performing the third mitzvah, the building of the Temple. The second mitzvah had not been performed in its entirety, since Saul had left some Amalekites alive, and so the Temple could not yet be built.

This could be regarded as sufficient reason, at a simplistic level, for removing Saul from the monarchy.

(Incidentally, since Saul was not of the tribe of Judah, one might say that the first mitzvah, to appoint a king, had not been performed in it’s entirety either, for the mitzvah of appointing a king requires that he be of the tribe of Judah).