Israel 1967 to Hamas

The bad guys keep coming.

Nov 16, 2023

Signalizer—Israel 1967 to Hamas: The bad guys keep coming.

This is the fourth installment of my Israel series, a project that provides historical perspective and moral clarity on the Israel-Hamas war. Previous installments:

Jewish Roots in Israel: An overview of the Jewish people’s ancient connection to Israel, from 4,000 years ago to the State of Israel’s birth in May 1948.

Israel 1967: The pivotal Six-Day War, how it came to pass and how the Jews defended their national home so successfully that its territory expanded.

Israeli Settlements: Why Israel began settlements in territories it won in the defensive Six-Day War, the areas it still settles today, and whether settlements are an effective defensive strategy.

Today, I’ll look at the major Arab-Israeli armed conflicts since 1967, attempts at negotiated peace, and whether the emergence of Islamic terrorists, hell-bent on the destruction of Israel, can be separated from the Arab cultures that repeatedly create them. Is it possible to root them out permanently?

After the Six-Day War, Israel was “waiting for a telephone call” from Arab leaders wanting, at long last, to discuss peaceful coexistence. Israel refused to give up territory it won in June 1967 and return its borders to the vulnerable armistice lines it won in 1948, but vowed to be “unbelievably generous in working out peace terms,” in the words of Foreign Minister Abba Eban. Everything was negotiable.

But Arabs had no interest in negotiating. Hostilities broke out at the Suez Canal just three weeks after the war ended. Israel had gained only territory, not a peaceful coexistence.

In the sour mood following their wholesale defeat in the Six-Day War, Arab states convened an Arab League summit on 29 August 1967 in Khartoum, Sudan. They regrouped into a united front against Israel, and issued the Khartoum Resolution, nicknamed “The Three No’s,” which vowed:

No recognition of Israel,
No negotiations with Israel,
No peace for Israel.

On 23 November 1967, the Associated Press reported that Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser called for Israel to evacuate all areas of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria that it captured in the Six-Day War, adding, “What has been taken by force cannot be recovered without force.”

Thus began the War of Attrition. Over the next few years, Egypt and its allies started skirmishes by land, sea, and air. Israel bombed Arab artillery positions, shot down an Egyptian MiG-21, sank Egyptian torpedo boats, and carried out other strikes. Egypt shot down an Israeli Mirage III, sank the Israeli destroyer INS Eilat, bombed Israeli forces on the east side of the Suez Canal, and engaged in other fights. While most of the Arab fighting came from Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), others joined as well. By the time the War of Attrition ended with an August 1970 ceasefire, thousands had been killed on both sides.

Two years later came the Munich massacre. Palestinian terrorists from the Black September group infiltrated the Olympic Village at the Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany. They killed two Israeli athletes and took nine others as hostages, all of whom were killed. The Palestinians murdered six Israeli coaches, five Israeli athletes, and a West German police officer.

Israel responded by bombing PLO bases in Lebanon and Syria. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir formed Committee X, a cadre of government officials including herself tasked with devising an Israeli response. The committee decided that, to deter future violence against Israel, the country needed to assassinate the terrorists who supported and/or carried out the Munich massacre. It made clear to Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad, that the objective was to “kill the [Black September] members and create terror within the terrorists’ organizations.”

Mossad did so, over a period of two decades. Its efforts are dramatized in Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film Munich, in which one character concludes, “There is no peace at the end of this.”

A year after the Munich massacre came the Yom Kippur War. On 6 October 1973, an Arab coalition led by Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur. Fighting raged across the Sinai Peninsula, Golan Heights, and Suez Canal for more than two weeks. The initial clash left Israel losing for the first time in its history, as recounted by Noam Weissman at Unpacking Israeli History:

“They faced major losses in the opening days of the war. In fact, half of Israel’s casualties came in only the first three days of the war. Sari Nusseibeh, a Palestinian public intellectual, describes the Palestinian atmosphere as one of exuberance that [Egyptian President Anwar] Sadat’s army breached what many thought was Israel’s impenetrable Bar-Lev line which separated Egypt from Israel.”

After initially being knocked off-balance, Israel rallied to halt Egypt’s incursion into the Sinai and push Syrians back to the previous ceasefire lines, then formed a counter-offensive all the way to the outskirts of Damascus, the Syrian capital, close enough to shell it with artillery.

While Israel emerged from the Yom Kippur War victorious again, it was disturbed by the early success of the Arab attack. With Arabs relentless in their desire to eliminate Israel, their forces would continue working toward that end, with a population much bigger than Israel’s, financial support from the Arab oil industry, and military assistance from Russia. It was possible, Israel needed to admit, that a day could come when it did not win a war with the Arabs. The result would be Israel blinking out of existence. That sober realization led to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

It was about this time that Golda Meir, Israel’s prime minister during the Yom Kippur War, said what remains to this day the most succinct explanation of Middle East violence:

“If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel.”

With that, the long—and so far, fruitless—peace process began.

In September 1978 came the Camp David Accords. Brokered by US President Jimmy Carter over 12 days of negotiations between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland, the accords paved the way for …

The 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty. The nations agreed to recognize each other as sovereign states, end the on-and-off war they’d fought since 1948, and return the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt after all Israeli forces had withdrawn. Hopes were high that this signaled the end of the turmoil, but it was not to be.

December 1987 brought the first intifada, or Palestinian uprising. The target of Palestinian ire was Israel’s settlement program in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, now at the 20-year mark since settlements began after the Six-Day War. Pockets of violence from the intifada dragged on for nearly six years, killing and injuring thousands. Had both sides had enough? Commentators suggested as much when another attempt at peace was made.

The Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995, so named for their secret beginnings in Oslo, Norway, were signed in Washington, DC and Taba, Egypt, respectively. The PLO, led by Yasser Arafat, agreed to recognize the State of Israel. Israel, led by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, agreed to recognize the PLO as the governing body of the Palestinian people. The Oslo Accords created the Palestinian National Authority to usher in self-governance in parts of the Gaza Strip and West Bank. This went nowhere.

Extremism on both sides ruined the idea. A Jewish man in his 20s, who opposed the Oslo Accords, fatally shot Yitzhak Rabin. The assassin said he acted on orders from God to prevent Jewish holy land from passing into the hands of Palestinians. With Rabin gone, and for such a reason, the Palestinian side seethed.

According to Mohammed Dajani at The Washington Institute, Palestinian extremists immediately began waging war against the Oslo Accords to derail the peace train, and ultimately pressured their leader into disrupting the process of reconciling the two sides with competing claims to the territory:

“Under pressure from Palestinian extremists, Arafat came to feel that the Oslo Accords failed to fulfill his political ambitions … Thus, he shifted back to being a disrupter of peace rather than a peacemaker.”

After the Oslo agreements collapsed, in came the second Intifada in 2000. Suicide bombings and thousands of rocket attacks by Palestinians led to retaliations by Israel, and the back-and-forth killed many on both sides until 2005, when Israel agreed to withdraw from Gaza, leaving it under the self-governance of the Palestinian people.

Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. Its plan was first outlined by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2003 and approved by the Knesset in February 2005 as the Disengagement Plan Implementation Law. Sharon said the purpose was to boost the security of Israelis, lower demands on the Israel Defense Forces, and reduce friction between Israelis and Palestinians.

Against the wishes of many Israelis, particularly those who had settled in Gaza, Israel removed all settlements from the Gaza Strip. Settlers who would not accept compensation from the government and voluntarily vacate were evicted by Israeli security over a one-week period. More than 8,000 Jewish settlers were relocated from Gaza, and almost all Israeli security forces exited. As a precaution, Israel maintained control over Gaza’s air and sea space, monitored six of seven land crossings, and enforced a security buffer zone within the territory.

With that, the first phase of Gazan self-governance began, and the newly freed Gazans … elected Hamas in 2006.

Gazans elected the Hamas terrorist group to govern them, and it took control in 2007. The group’s name in Arabic translates to “Islamic Resistance Movement,” an ominous start for the new government. From the moment of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, peaceful coexistence looked unattainable.

Hamas terrorists wove their assets into civilian society, including through tunnels from Egypt, making some Israelis question the wisdom of having given back the Sinai. Hamas launched rockets at Israel on a regular basis. In 2008, the barrage became so bad that Israel responded by invading Gaza, a situation that rings familiar today.

At the ten-year anniversary of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, The Washington Post reported that many Israelis believed all they got for the trouble of uprooting more than 8,000 Jewish settlers from their Gazan homes were more rockets. Three wars in six years made the idea of Israel having “disengaged” from Gaza look like a joke, with Gazans having desecrated two dozen synagogues then busied themselves making terrorists:

“Gaza today is governed by the Islamist resistance movement Hamas, branded a terrorist organization by the United States and Europe. The last elections in Gaza occurred almost a decade ago.”

Israel and the United States needed to reinstate travel and trade restrictions to keep the terrorists at bay. Any notion of having the less militant Palestinian Authority take over governance was dismissed as clueless. A former director of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs told the Post, “The Palestinian Authority without Israeli protection won’t last five minutes. They exist by Israel’s bayonets.”

For this reason, Israel distrusts a two-state solution. The tiptoeing into such waters produced more bloodshed in and around Gaza, including for Gazan civilians. The West Bank is relatively calm these days, but if Israel withdrew from it the way it withdrew from Gaza, Hamas would wipe out the Palestinian Authority and start digging terrorist tunnels.

Mohammed Dajani at The Washington Institute sounds a frustrated if not hopeless take on the situation:

“How can we advance peace when none of the Arab universities has a center for teaching the thought, practice, and study of peace? When most of the publications focus on conflict rather than peacebuilding? When the educational curriculum teaches hatred, enmity, and death rather than celebrating life, moderation, and reconciliation? When terrorists and extremists are celebrated and peacemakers and moderates are labeled traitors? We need to change our mindset and culture to achieve peace.”

That is a tall order.

As far from Palestine as the Islamic Center of South Florida, the message for Muslim extremists is to destroy Israel. In a 12 October 2018 sermon, Imam Hasan Sabri explained what he called the position of a believing Muslim about the Palestinian cause:

“That Palestine in its entirety is Islamic land, and there is no difference between what was occupied in 1948 and 1967. There is no difference between this village or that village, this city or that city. All of it is Islamic waqf land that was occupied by force. The responsibility for it lies with the entire Islamic nation, and the [Palestinians] should benefit from this land. If a land is occupied or plundered, it should be liberated from the occupiers and plunderers, even if this leads to the martyrdom of tens of millions of Muslims. This is the ruling, and there is no room for discussion or concessions.”

Waqf is a Muslim concept referring to a permanent dedication of land or other property to God, thus Sabri was saying that God deeded all of Palestine to Muslims. As the India Times explains, “In Islamic law, a waqf property is permanently dedicated to Allah, and once a property is dedicated as waqf, it remains as waqf forever signifying that a waqf is perpetual, inalienable, and irrevocable in nature.”

How can Israel negotiate with that?

If we assume that Arabs will not stop attacking Israel, and that Israel will not stop defending itself, what are the options for peace in the Middle East?

The most common idea is a two-state solution, in which Palestinians receive sovereign territory in Gaza and the West Bank connected by a secure corridor through Israel. But given Gaza’s disastrous results from self-governance, this looks naive. What would be the difference between a new sovereign Palestinian state and the experiment of granting Gaza limited independence? Remember, step one for the Gazans was to elect terrorists.

Small wonder, then, that just prior to Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel that sparked the current Israel-Hamas war, Pew Research found that only 35% of Israelis think “a way can be found for Israel and an independent Palestinian state to coexist peacefully,” a decline of 9 percentage points since 2017 and 15 points since 2013.

If a two-state solution is impossible, what else might work?

Israel 1967 to Hamas

The bad guys keep coming.

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