1967 and memory
Nov 13th, 2008 by MESH
From Martin Kramer
How did the outcome of 1967 change the way Arabs think about themselves and the world? It was the late Malcolm Kerr, one of America’s leading Arabists at the time, who perfectly summarized the consensus. (Kerr was a UCLA professor, later president of the American University of Beirut, who was killed there in 1984.) He put it thus, in a famous passage written only about four years after the 1967 war:
Since June, 1967 Arab politics have ceased to be fun. In the good old days most Arabs refused to take themselves very seriously, and this made it easier to take a relaxed view of the few who possessed intimations of some immortal mission. It was like watching Princeton play Columbia in football on a muddy afternoon. The June War was like a disastrous game against Notre Dame which Princeton impulsively added to its schedule, leaving several players crippled for life and the others so embittered that they took to fighting viciously among themselves instead of scrimmaging happily as before.
I leave aside the identification of the Arabs with Princeton. Kerr was a Princetonian, but so am I, and I would have preferred to identify the Arabs with Columbia, for all sorts of reasons. But it is the way Kerr contrasts pre-1967 with post-1967 Arab politics that is striking—and misleading. Even in 1967, Arab politics hadn’t been “fun” in a very long time: as early as the 1940s, they had become a serious and deadly game of costly wars and bloody coups. True, Kerr was writing in the aftermath of Black September in Jordan, a time when Arab politics seemed to have come completely unhinged. But the idea that 1967 put an end to the “good old days” of Arabs “scrimmaging happily” was a pure piece of nostalgic romance in the grand Arabist tradition.
Unfortunately, such nostalgia is seductive. For years, it has been at the root of a notion that persists even today: if we could somehow undo the 1967 war—if we could undo the injury inflicted in those six days—we could put the Middle East back to where it was in the “good old days.” In this view, the Arabs and the world could have “fun” again if only we could erase the Arab memory of that war—by erasing its every consequence.
But the “good old days” analysis is entirely false, and not only in its distortion of Arab politics prior to 1967. It is false because it overlooks how the 1967 trauma trimmed the ideological excess of the pre-war period, and opened the way to pragmatic Arab acceptance of Israel.
That ideological excess, known as pan-Arabism or Nasserism, rested upon a prior sense of injury, in which 1948 played the major part. In that earlier war, Israel succeeded in defeating or holding off an array of Arab armies, and three quarters of a million Palestinian Arab refugees ended up in camps. The injury of 1948 was so deep that, over the following twenty years—Kerr’s “good old days”—there was no peace process. The Arabs nursed their wounds and dreamed only of another round.
1948 also had a profoundly destabilizing effect on Arab politics. Three coups took place in Syria in 1949, and often thereafter; Jordan’s King Abdullah was assassinated (by Palestinians) in 1951; Free Officers toppled the monarchy in Egypt in 1952. Everywhere, the 1948 regimes were faulted for their failure to strangle Israel at birth. Military strongmen seized power in the name of revolution, and promised to do better in the next round. Those “good old days” were in fact very bad days, during which Arab politics became militarized in the certainty and even desirability of another war with Israel.
In 1967, the other war came, and these regimes suffered a far more devastating defeat, delivered in a mere six days. Unlike 1948, when they had lost much of Palestine, in 1967 they lost their own sovereign territory. The shock wave, it is generally assumed, was even greater.
Yet what is telling is that the regimes didn’t fall. Nasser offered his resignation, but the crowds filled the streets and demanded that he stay on—and he did. The defense minister and air force commander of Syria, Hafez Asad, held on and ousted his rival two years later, establishing himself as sole ruler. King Hussein of Jordan, who had lost half his kingdom, also survived, as did the Jordanian monarchy. The only regime that failed to withstand the shock waves of 1967 was Lebanon’s, and Lebanon hadn’t even joined the war. Kerr wrote that 1967 had left the Arab players “crippled for life.” In the three Arab states that lost the war, the regimes survived, the leaders ruled for life, and they are now being succeeded by their sons.
What explains the fact that 1967 didn’t destabilize the Arab system as 1948 did? It is true that even before 1967, these regimes had started to harden themselves. The evolution of the Arab state as a “republic of fear” dates from the decade before 1967, and this probably helped regimes weather the storm. Unlike in 1948, there weren’t many refugees either—the Arab states lost territory, but the war was quick, and most of the inhabitants of the lost territory stayed in their homes.
But I believe the reason 1967 didn’t destabilize the Arab order is this: Arab regimes and peoples drew together in the fear that Israel could repeat 1967 if it had to, and that it might show up one day on the outskirts of Cairo or Damascus (as it threatened to do in 1973), or come right into an Arab capital (as it did in Beirut in 1982).
The memory of 1967 thus became the basis of an implicit understanding between the regimes and the peoples: the regimes will avert war, and in return the people will stay loyal, even docile. The regimes have upheld their end, by gradually coming to terms with Israel, and by leaving the Palestinians to fight their own fight. Pan-Arabism—which largely meant sacrificing for the Palestinians—faded away because no Arabs were prepared to risk losing a war for them. The skill of rulers in averting war has helped to secure and entrench them.
I call this understanding implicit—it doesn’t have an ideological underpinning. Pragmatism rarely does. But the evidence for it is that no Arab state has entered or stumbled into war with Israel in over thirty years. The memory of the 1967 trauma has been translated into a deep-seated aversion to war, which underpins such peace and stability as the region has enjoyed. 1967 thus marks the beginning of the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict—the conflict between Israel and Arabs states, which had produced a major war every decade. 1973 marks the end of the end, in which two Arab states stole back some honor and territory, precisely so they could lean back and leave Israelis and Palestinians to thrash out their own differences. This narrower Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a sore, but its costs have been limited compared to a state-to-state war.
It is important to note that pan-Arabism did survive elsewhere in the Arab world, where its illusions continued to exact a very high cost. I refer to Baathist Iraq, which wasn’t defeated in 1967, and where pan-Arabism continued to constitute one of the ideological pillars of the regime, vis-à-vis Iran and the West. There it also led to miscalculation, war, and defeat, on a truly massive scale. The Iraq wars—there have been three in the last three decades—provide a striking contrast to the relative stability in Israel’s corner of the Middle East—a stability which rests, I suggest, on the Arab memory of 1967, which restructured Arab thinking in the states surrounding Israel, away from eager anticipation of war, and toward anxiously averting it.
So in regard to Arab politics, I have offered a possible revision of the usual view of 1967: perhaps its memory, far from making the Arabs angry and volatile, underpins the stability of the Arab order and regional peace. If so, then perhaps we should recall it as a year of net benefit all around—as compared, say, to 1979, the year of Iran’s revolution, or 2003, the year of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The impact of 1967 was to create a new balance, and push ideology to the margins of politics. The impact of 1979 and 2003 has been to unbalance the region and strengthen radical ideologies. 1967 ultimately produced a process that led to the finalizing of borders between states. The combined impact of 1979 and 2003 threatens to erase borders from the map.
The risk today, over forty years later, is not that the consequences of 1967 are still with us. It is that memory of 1967 is starting to fade, and its legacy is being eroded. I am struck by the subtitles of the two leading books on 1967. Michael Oren’s is June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East. Tom Segev’s goes even further: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East. If only it were so. The problem is that the Middle East continues to be remade and transformed by subsequent events, whose legacy is much more damaging than the legacy of 1967.
What then happens when the Arab world is dominated by generations that no longer remember 1967 or, more importantly, no longer think Israel capable of reenacting it? What memories are replacing the memory of 1967? The 2006 summer war in Lebanon? (To rework Kerr’s analogy, that was like Columbia playing Notre Dame to a draw.) Without the memory of that defeat of forty years ago, the ranks of the Islamists could swell with people who imagine victory. Without the fear of war, peoples could turn away from those rulers who have made peace—away from the implicit understanding that underpins order. Will it be possible to build stability and peace on other memories, or other promises?
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While as a Columbia man I naturally bridle at the Princeton-centric and anti-Columbian analogies of Malcolm Kerr and Martin Kramer, I also disagree with both of their analyses of the Middle East since 1948.
Kerr had lamented in 1971 that “[s]ince June, 1967, Arab politics have ceased to be fun.” Kramer quite rightly takes him to task, pointing out that the raging instability of the Arab world between 1948 and 1967 was anything but “fun,” but then posits, contrariwise, that the elements of stability that have been present since at least 1973 (the last Israeli-Arab state war) reflect a stabilizing dynamic introduced by Israel’s conquests in 1967. Consequently, he warns, attempts to undo 1967 by an Arab generation that remembers not Dayan, Rabin and Co. would likely destabilize the “implicit understanding that underpins order.” Translation: Tamper with the 1967 borders at your peril.
Even though it’s clear that Kerr used “fun” with a huge measure of irony, he was making a point that Kramer rightly picked up on. For Arabists of his generation, the serial coups, counter-coups and radical ideologies from 1948-67 did seem like the Middle East that they loved, albeit writ on the larger canvas of independence and developing oil wealth. They could recognize that the many of the traditional dynamics and elites still held sway, along with a somewhat traditional (and for them attractive) way of life. Of course, for Palestinians it was in no way “fun,” and Israelis never participated in the game at all. But it is clear that Kerr was thinking of neither in his flip remark.
However, Kramer’s view is similarly narrow. The fact that state-to-state war between Arab states and Israel has been virtually eliminated (though one could quibble about confrontations such as with Lebanon in 1982 and 2006 and with Syria in 1982 as well) means primarily that Middle Eastern states are increasingly irrelevant to their populations as an expression of their ideology and deepest feelings. Rather, I would argue that the generally accepted view of increasing instability is correct, and that the relative stability of Israeli borders since 1967 is to a considerable degree a cause of that Arab and Muslim instability.
Of course the huge losses of life of 1967 (among Arabs) and 1973 (on both sides) have been avoided. And it is true that after 1973 the immense humiliation of 1967 was partially redeemed. However, the perception that the Arab leadership is perfectly willing to virtually forget about the Palestinians has not been accepted by their populations. That is why peace with Israel by the rest of the Arab League can only happen when a settlement bearing some resemblance to the Arab League Peace Initiative (API) takes place. Arab heads of government know that their populations will not stand for less.
While the caricature of the API solving all the Mideast’s problems is just that, settlement of the conflict is in fact a precondition to solving virtually any of them. This is not because of the obduracy of Arab states; rather, it is because their leaders recognize that their countries may be ungovernable if the Palestinians appear to have had an unjust settlement forced on them.
Kramer worries about the fate of the Middle East entrusted to those who remember not 1967. In fact, that is irrelevant. The children of the ruling classes now ascending to leadership want peace with Israel for their own good reasons. Most of them have moved on from the conflict. But they know their populations haven’t. It is the Islamist leaders who are calling for Israel’s destruction who remember 1967, as do their followers, both the absolutely committed and the much larger groups of hangers-on.
And it is the hangers-on who are most important, since how they swing will determine whether moderation or radicalism will be dominant in the next generation. Contrary to what Kramer implies, the former is not a precondition for Israeli-Palestinian peace; rather, it can only be a (hoped-for, but by no means certain) consequence. The latter will continue to feed on the consequences of 1967, since that is indirectly the single most important source of destabilization and radicalism today, adding fuel to the others.
There is a growing school of thought in Israel today, primarily on the left, which views the Six-Day War as, in retrospect, a nearly unmitigated disaster. In my view, that is simplistic. The shock to the Arab states was, in retrospect at least, largely salutary. It took the Yom Kippur War for Israel to learn that the Egyptians, at least, had absorbed that lesson, and that led to Egyptian-Israeli peace. And the peace has held, despite the return to the 1967 border.
Gradually, the same lesson was absorbed by the rest of the Arab states, and the API is the clearest manifestation of it. The good that could be wrung out of 1967 has already become part of the regional fabric. Only the evil remains, i.e., the borders and the occupation. It is only by readjusting them to include the reality of full Palestinian independence that the entire region can start to move on. While Arab politics will never revert to the “fun…good old days” which Kerr remembered, the memories of 1967 may eventually fade away. And that, pace Kramer, will be to the good.
Paul L. Scham is executive director of the Gildenhorn Institute for Israel Studies at the University of Maryland at College Park and an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington.
Being neither of Princeton nor of Columbia, but rather a graduate of the American University of Beirut, and at the time that Malcolm Kerr was assassinated there, I feel entitled to borrow from both parties here. I can accept much of what Paul Scham says, but also feel a need to throw in two major qualifiers based on my reading of developments in the Middle East.
I agree with Scham that the 1967 war was really a mixed bag for Israel: It taught Arab states to worry about future wars, making them more likely than ever before to negotiate with Israel; but it also so discredited the Arab states and Arab regimes, that non-state actors began emerging who viewed 1967 as a defining moment for Arab inconsequence that needed to be transcended. Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians since that time have been, in my view, disastrous if the objective of Israeli leaders is to arrive at true normalization with the region.
But there are two points that I’m more skeptical about. Scham writes: “While the caricature of the [Arab Peace Initiative] solving all the Mideast’s problems is just that, settlement of the [Palestinian-Israeli] conflict is in fact a precondition to solving virtually any of them.”
I’m not sure. Scham’s argument speaks to the centrality of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the minds of Arab populations. That’s partly true of course, but we need to examine more closely the causes of this. This attitude goes beyond a sense of the injustices inflicted on the Palestinians; the centrality of the Palestinians’ fate is also, and I would say mainly, the result of the Arabs’ alienation from their own leaderships and from domestic politics in general. In backing the Palestinians, they also make a strong statement against those governing them. That is why I feel that at the heart of the Arabs’ sense of anomie is the abject failure of the Arab state. That’s the essence of the problem, and while attitudes toward Palestine are often the most public manifestations of that disgust, they are not necessarily indicators of where the solution really lies.
The problem is that Arab citizens are the prisoners and victims of despotic regimes that neither respect them nor afford them even the barest essentials of a political life. Citizens are permitted only to be indifferent, only to express themselves in favor of the tyrannical fathers ruling over them. In that context, I am not sure that Palestine is in and of itself at the core of the Middle East’s conflicts. Certainly Arab regimes have long used Palestine to justify suffocating security establishments and to deflect their population’s anger away from their own shortcomings. But I also believe that if Arab societies become more open, if states engage in democratic reform, Palestine will recede as prime shaper of Arab attitudes.
Indeed, I don’t feel confident that if the Palestinian-Israeli conflict were resolved, with Arab despotisms left in place, we would see deep change in the nature of Arab societies. I don’t imagine that peace would lead fewer young men to join militant Islamist groups (probably the contrary would happen), nor that Arab citizens would be able to voice their opinions more easily. No one can doubt the importance of Palestine, but as the Iraqis showed in the aftermath of the 2003 war, just as the Kuwaitis did in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf war, Arab societies will turn against the Palestinians, often very unjustly, when they feel they have paid a heavy domestic price for having shown sympathy for the Palestinian cause.
A second point I’m skeptical about is whether we can legitimately stick to the template of the 1990s when discussing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict—or more broadly the post-1967 period. Scham writes: “It is only by readjusting [borders and the Israeli occupation] to include the reality of full Palestinian independence that the entire region can start to move on.”
Again, I really do wonder. We still speak of the conflict as if the post-Oslo context were somehow relevant. It may be in some distant, intellectual way, but all the evidence suggests that Palestinian-Israeli dynamics are changing very rapidly. On both sides of the divide those unwilling to make the required concessions for peace can veto any final settlement. The current signs are that Israel, even with a center-left government, is politically incapable of making peace with the present Palestinian partner; and nothing suggests that by February, when Israelis vote once again, things will become any easier. By the same token, Hamas has no interest in peace, believing the armed struggle can deliver much more, while the Palestinian Authority is incapable of imposing a settlement on all the Palestinian factions. Things will get worse next January, when the PLO and Hamas fight over whether Mahmoud Abbas is still president.
The more relevant questions are: What borders will Hamas accept and the Israelis agree to? Or, what borders will Hamas accept from a Likud-led government, and Israel agree to offer a Hamas-led Palestinian leadership? Indeed, as Hamas gains power over Palestinian society, if in fact it does, what international legitimacy will the Palestinians retain as a people meriting a return of at least a part of their ancestral land? These are all legitimate questions that need to be answered before we can adopt Scham’s hopeful phrase as fact. Yet no answers are forthcoming.
To borrow from another phrase made popular in the 1980s by Israeli geographer Meron Benvenisti: We may already be past midnight on a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, at least a solution familiar to us. In that event, should we continue to stubbornly assume that such a solution is the precondition to unlocking the Middle East’s problems? Or should we begin to resolve those other problems independently, particularly the problem of the illegitimate Arab state, and not hold them hostage to a conflict bound to go on and on, whatever optimists say?
Michael Young is a member of MESH.