Free The Unmaking of Israel by Gershom Gorenberg

intended to “impress Arab opinion”; instead he inflamed public pressure for war. Israel’s original battle plan, essentially defensive, aimed at seizing part of the Sinai to trade it for reopening the straits. Conquests were not the objective, Shlaim writes.
    When Israel launched its preemptive attack on Egypt on June 5, the government expected a one-front war. But war unleashes chaos. Defense minister Moshe Dayan ordered his generals to stop twelve miles short of the Suez Canal, but when the Egyptian army collapsed, Israeli armor rolled to the waterway. Israel’s offensive against Jordan began only after Jordanian artillery bombarded Israeli cities and bases. The objectives grew from seizing corners of the West Bank, to taking everything up to the mountain ridge, to conquering the entire West Bank. Dayan talked the cabinet out of attacking Syria. He then changed his mind, exceeded his authority, and ordered an invasion. In the midst of the fighting, northern front commander General David Elazar told Yigal Allon, now a cabinet minister, that he too had exceeded his orders, sending his troops farther forward than he was supposed to. In six days, Israel conquered the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights.
    Years later, Azaryahu described the resulting political dilemma. “We had no goals for the war . . . and therefore no one knew what to do with the gains of the war.” War had not been an extension of policy. The empire was an accident. A policy had to be invented after the fact.
    The government of national unity set up on the war’s eve was unfit to do that. It included everyone from Mapam on the left to Menachem Begin on the right. Galili and Allon represented Ahdut Ha’avodah, the socialist party with visions of the Whole Land of Israel. Within the prime minister’s Mapai party were people representing almost every view on the future of the conquered land. It was a government of national confusion.
    The paralysis went deeper than disagreements between parties. The national mood—to be precise, the mood of the Jewish majority—mixed prewar dread and postwar hubris. This did not foster calm judgment.
    Proponents of keeping the land argued from security and history. The Sinai would protect Israel from Egypt, they asserted. The West Bank gave Israel strategic depth; keeping the Golan would prevent Syrian artillery from using the heights to bombard Israeli communities. As for history, Jerusalem’s Old City and its holy sites, the Western Wall and the Temple Mount, were part of the spoils. So were Hebron, Bethlehem, and a host of other places whose biblical past intoxicated secular Jews along with Orthodox ones.
    Against the celebration of conquest stood sobering concerns. America had committed itself before the war to the “territorial integrity” of all Middle Eastern countries, and wanted Israel to cooperate in a diplomatic solution. If the Arab countries were sufficiently eager to get their land back, they might sign peace treaties with Israel in return for a withdrawal.
    Most important was the problem of Israel’s own character. In 1967, Israel had a population of 2.7 million people, of whom 400,000 were Arabs. Annexing the West Bank and Gaza would add another 1.1 million Arabs, and the Arab birth rate was higher. If Israel remained a democracy, how long would it be a Jewish state?
    Eshkol’s government did reach a quick consensus to annex East Jerusalem. The city’s emotional resonance overwhelmed other concerns. The area added to the state was much larger than the Jordanian municipality of Jerusalem. Among other things, it took in the former sites of Atarot and Neveh Ya’akov, Jewish farming villages north of the city that had fallen in 1948. Arabs in the annexed land were granted the status of permanent residents of Israel, but not citizenship. According to the Israeli journalist Uzi Benziman, a cabinet committee concluded that international law forbade imposing one