Occupied by thoughts of 1967

Published in the Jewish Chronicle

This is my last month as a 30-something. As if that’s not reason enough for angst, there’s another fact about turning 40 that I don’t like. No, it’s not my hairline or my ability to dance at parties without looking ridiculous. It’s Israel, specifically a turning point in Israel’s history that is now as old as I am. I am talking about the Six Day War.

For I was born in 1967, a year etched into the Israeli and Jewish psyche. At the time, and for the first few years of my life, that number seemed almost mystical in its power.

It was the year of the liberation of Jerusalem, the year the Jewish David took on the Arab Goliath and won, the year Israel exorcised the demons of the Holocaust by showing the world that the Jewish people were not doomed to be history’s victims, but could rise up as its victors. For a while, 1967 did not even have to be explained: it was a simple, four-digit shorthand for redemption.

But that did not last long. By the time I was 20, travelling around Israel, talking to men and women my own age about the legacy of 1967, the year had become associated with a turnaround that could have been lifted from Greek mythology. What had once seemed like a great blessing had instead, over two decades, come to look like a dreadful curse.

For now Israelis understood that the territories Israel had won that year were not just fairytale places from a Biblical dream, but home to a Palestinian population that had no desire to live under Jewish rule. They were not just Judea and Samaria, but the West Bank and Gaza. Shortly after the 20th anniversary the first intifada erupted, as if to remind Jews that what they saw as liberation was, to the Palestinians, a military occupation.

Back then, arguing the politics with other young idealists, I imagined the occupation was a temporary phenomenon. That it had lasted 20 years was shocking enough. But it was surely too intolerable to endure. The moral cost it was exacting — turning every Israeli teenager into a jailer, a checkpoint guard, a ruler of a hostile people — was too high.

The damage it was doing to Israel’s standing in the world, making the Jewish state not a member of the family of nations, as the first Zionists had dreamed, but a pariah, was too painful.

And, most crudely, it was clear that the occupation represented an impossible demographic danger, eventually leaving Israel ruling over a land containing equal numbers of Jews and Arabs.

Either such a state would no longer be Jewish, or it would no longer be a democracy — denying citizenship to millions of Arabs. Surely the status quo couldn’t hold.

Yet here we are, the occupation as old as I am. Forty years on and it’s as entrenched as ever. Two reports in the Israeli press this week make the point. One showed that the number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank had increased by six per cent last year, more than quadruple the rate of increase of the previous year: now there are just short of 270,000 settlers in the West Bank, not including the many more who live in East Jerusalem, also won in 1967. And the building goes on.

The other was the finding of the Israeli human rights group, Gisha, that Israel had not really let go of Gaza, despite the 2005 disengagement. Yes, the settlements have gone, but in other ways Israel has actually tightened its grip on Gaza, by heavily restricting freedom of movement of both goods and people, in and out. Gisha said the resulting “economic and humanitarian crisis in the Strip [was] of a severity unknown” in all the years of occupation.

Is there any way out? Israel’s prime minister Ehud Olmert seems to be flailing, as if badly out of his depth. This week he admitted that the unilateral withdrawals from Lebanon and Gaza had been failures, and that negotiation was better.

Yet he has only met his Palestinian counterpart once — last month — and has so far failed to make good on the promises he made to him. There is no strategy, no plan and no vision. And the one outside player who could make a difference, the American president, is too weak and too blind to act.

So Israel is left saddled with this curse, one that eats away at its own moral and physical existence every day. I have a wish for my 40th birthday: that in the next 40 years diaspora Jews will put a fraction of the energy they put into defending Israel’s image abroad, into ridding the country of this terrible burden.

Because if we don’t, I genuinely fear that by the time of my 80th birthday there’ll be no Israel left to defend.

Posted on January 12, 2007 12:36 PM

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