Blocking a port (All tarde to the east) and moving forces into Sinai (breaking the cease-fire agreement of 56) is not a reason to wage war?
I fail to see a better reason without waiting to be shot at. Which would just get Israel more soldiers killed in the fighting.
BTW, There was a documentary called “six days in June” and several articles I read through the years that find evidence that the USSR was the main cause of the war. They pushed Egypt to the blockade and fed some fake force movement reports to Syria and Israel. Their goals was presumably strengthening their position in the middle east. (In any way, the 7 days war is deeply related to the cold war)
Not that I think it really changes who started what, both sides were happy to fight one another at the time.
The blockade was a legal justification, that’s for sure. Whether it was a strong justification? I’m not so sure. But I probably wouldn’t sit waiting with my enemies on my borders while I had the chance to neutralize them.
The problem comes, however, with the justification for holding onto the Occupied Territories. Keeping millions of people subjugated under military rule for nearly half a century because Egypt blockaded one of your ports?
I guess the problem a lot of people have with the 1967 war was proportionality. Destroying the blockade, preemptively bombing the troops on the border, even an incursion and temporary occupation would probably be acceptable to most. Permanent occupation, planting hundreds of thousands of people in settlements across the occupied land and placing the occupied people under repressive military rule however…
Yeah I saw your earlier message, but I thought “made rational” and “no complanits” were different. My bad.
Of course holding the territory in the long run was a bad idea, but keep in mind there wasn’t really a good way for Israel to back out from it. All these countries didn’t want peace with Israel at the time. Giving back Sinai to Natzer would have been a seriously stupid idea. Same goes for other countries, it took 10 more years and a radical regime change for Israel to make peace with Egypt (To be honest, Sadat tried going for a peace treaty right when he become the PM as early as 1970 and Israel pretty much refused)
Jordan didn’t want this territory later on as well.
So it’s not obvious that Israel could give it all back without hurting itself strategically.
Yeah, but I’m not sure that “strategic benefit” washes with many people as a good reason to subjugate millions of people under military rule. It was strategically beneficial for the Soviet Union to hold the Eastern European nations under puppet communist dictatorships - as a buffer against the invasion it, quite reasonably, expected from the Western European nations that loathed it and had invaded it before.
Did anyone support the Soviet’s right to subjugate Eastern Europeans for almost half a century?
That’s a good synopsis, but I think you left a couple of things out. The Arabs kicked the UN out in anticipation of attacking Israel. Jordan handed over control of their army to Egypt and Nasser himself said, “The armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria are poised on the borders of Israel … to face the challenge, while standing behind us are the armies of Iraq, Algeria, Kuwait, Sudan and and the whole Arab nation. This act will astound the world. Today they will know that the Arabs are arranged for battle, the critical hour has arrived. We have reached the stage of serious action and not of more declarations.” The saber-rattling and massing of troops meant that Israel had to mobilize their troops, which would have crippled their economy if they had to sustain that mobilization. That, combined with the blockade, really threatened Israel’s economic stability.
No doubt that both sides contributed to it, but in May & June 1967, Israel had been backed into a corner and had to go to war. They couldn’t sustain the cost of mobilizing a quarter of a million troops to defend against the massing armies of the Arabs.
Well it wasn’t the only option they had. There were peace talks going on even as the Israelis planned their attack. It’s possible that it could have been resolved without conflict, but we will never know.
I’d probably have attacked the armies, but only after the peace talks failed, and only then with a limited remit. The idea of taking the land and settling it with hundreds of thousands of people, while restricting the basic human rights of the occupied, would be abhorrent to me.
That’s probably not realistic.
The problem with that is that Israel couldn’t sustain its mobilization for very long, but they really couldn’t demobilize with over a quarter million troops massing on their border. The risk of waiting on the peace talks was any prolonged talks would essentially either cripple the Israeli economy or force them to start to demobilize. So their choices became pretty narrow pretty quickly: either they continued with peace talks knowing that their position would continue to get weaker while their opponent would get stronger or they had to strike preemptively. Remember, they had been talking for a while and there wasn’t any reason to think that a quick settlement could be made. In essence, waiting wasn’t really an option for Israel.
As for the land, well…that’s war. Land changes hands all the time in war and the civilians on the losing side always get the shaft. However, UN Resolution 242 was supposed to resolve the land issue, but the Arabs clearly broke that agreement (see: Khartoum Resolution) and then attacked again in 1973. So it’s not hard to see why Israel decided to hang on to some of the land - in their view, they never got what they were supposed to get from 242 in exchange for giving the land back.
You are ignoring the elephant in the room: the settlers.
If you are going to annex land, you absorb the population. You don’t settle the land with your own citizens, while depriving the original inhabitants of their basic human rights… for half a century.
I either agree with, or accept as a valid argument, most of what Israel did in the Six-Day war. Settling hundreds of thousands of people on the land, however, has no justification.
Er, are you talking about settlers before or after the Six Day War?
It’s not that there was no justification. There were/are plenty of reasons, though whether the ends justified the means is plenty debatable. Israel had no reason to negotiate while the Palestinians and other Arab countries continually called for the destruction of Israel. Remember, it wasn’t until 1993 - over 25 years after the Six Day War - that the PLO agreed that Israel had the right to exist and accepted resolution 242. You’re most certainly not going to treat people kindly and give them resources when their stated aim is to wipe you from the face of the Earth and have tried to do just that on a number of occasions.
Lest you think I’m sticking up for Israel, it’s deplorable what Israel did in the wake of the Six Day War. There’s plenty of evil on both sides and both sides are (more or less) equally responsible for what it is today.
Did the US make a mistake negotiating treaties with the USSR during the cold war?
Methinks you missed the point of that paragraph and the preceding posts.
Also, it’s hard to negotiate with someone who won’t negotiate with you.
Are you justifying the settlement of annexed land while crushing the human rights of the original inhabitants for half a century?
Even the Soviets gave the citizens of territories it siezed equal rights with other Russians. Would the USSR have been justified in treating Estonians like dirt because they opposed the Soviet Union and wanted to send all the Russians back home again?
I can support a lot of what Israel has been forced to do, but the settlements are just wrong. They are the sole reason that no peace can be found, even if the Palestinians were to become less militant: because how can anyone expect Palestinians to accept any deal where hundreds of thousands of Israelis exist in their country, and how can Israel force those settlers to leave?
Shiroko
1655
History shows that Israel can force them to leave, in the face of a negotiation (Evacuation from Sinai) or just when it feels it’s a good move (Disengagement from Gaza and several settlements in the west bank).
Just moving a couple of settlements from Gaza caused huge rifts in Israeli society. Support went from just over 50% in favour of removing those settlements to about 80% against. That’s just two settlements in Gaza. Imagine removing the hundreds from what is considered holy land by many of the settlers living on it.
What point? Was the USSR actually less certain about destroying the capitalist west than Palestine supposedly is about destroying Israel? My observation is that lots of people make special-pleading arguments about Israel; you can see this by applying any one of the zillions of historical parallels. Example: “Israel had no reason to negotiate while the Palestinians and other Arab countries continually called for the destruction of Israel”, while historically exactly this happens all the time and works out fine - US/USSR, for example. You also hear this sort of thing about nukes and Iran.
If you don’t think Palestinians want to negotiate, sure, but that’s quite a different thing from what you originally stated.
It was much more than two settlements, there were 5 only in the west bank.
Also, most of the objection to that was the fact it was a one sided move that did not assure the future protection of Israel from attacks from Gaza.
Sharon who made this move would have won the elections still, Olmert won with a similar agenda, to remove more settlements. The plan was dropped after the 2006 war when Olmert’s government had to switch its goals to simple survival.
So I definitely think such a move is plausible again.
But it was a small dismantlement, and public support collapsed afterwards, in the face of harrowing images of Jews being forced from their homes by Jewish soldiers, and the quarter of a million protesters who came out in Jerusalem. After that support was down to about 20%, which is pretty much just the Arabs. I think public opinion has recovered since, but the West Bank will be a much tougher assignment than Gaza.
There were about 8000 settlers in the 2005 withdrawal. There are over 300,000 settlers in the West Bank outside of Jerusalem.
Dejin
1660
Clearly we should have just let the Nazis take over Europe. As it was we sat on the sidelines for far too long.
Please don’t tell me that you’re someone who thinks we can just get rid of the army and everyone will just play nice with us. If you aren’t one of those people and you do realize that an armed force is necessary, then you’re a hypocrite.
Soldiers are people who put their lives on the line and put up with relatively low pay to protect your country. Yes, there are some bad apples, and sometimes horrible things happen. Other times the civilian government puts them in situations they shouldn’t be in, or orders them to places were they weren’t really needed. That doesn’t change the fact that the vast majority of them sacrifice for the rest of us – whether they are sacrificing their lives, their blood, or just the opportunity costs of being in the armed forces instead of being in a better paying civilian job.
Yes, sometimes they kill people. Sometimes they have to do that, and I’m sure it scars many of them forever. Sadly they do that in part to protect scum bags like you who do not appreciate their sacrifice.
