In the Shadow of the Six-Day War

[bemildred]

On June 5, 1967, war broke out between Israel and three Arab states--Egypt, Jordan and Syria--after months of threats directed at the Jewish state. At a Palestinian refugee camp named Jalazon, chiseled out of a stony hillside not far from Jerusalem in the West Bank, then under Jordanian rule, Nazmeia was expecting a child. Her brother Abu Fady, then 9, remembers his family listening to an Egyptian radio announcer describe how Arab troops were advancing on Tel Aviv. Within hours, the radio said, the Jews would be keeping company with fishes in the sea. "We were flying with happiness," recalls Abu Fady. "We were making plans to go back to our village, which the Jews had stolen from us."

The radio was wrong. In the camp, the Palestinians could see an army approaching from the eastern hills. "We thought they were King Hussein's soldiers," says Abu Fady. A man from Jalazon ran down to greet the troops, firing his rifle in celebration--and had a surprise. "The first soldier slapped him and took away his gun, and the man cried out, 'Aiiee! They're Jews, not Arabs,'" Abu Fady recounts. Israeli fighters appeared in the skies, strafing Jordanian posts along the Samarian hills, and the family decided to flee. They were not alone; the roads were clogged with thousands of panicked families as more than 350,000 refugees left for Jordan. Within a few hours, Nazmeia fell to the ground, groaning, giving birth. The family pulled out of the stream of people, and as the bombs fell, she crept into the thornbushes and delivered a baby boy, Omar al-Nakhla.

That little boy, now a man, still lives with his family in Jalazon. His life, with hopes raised and dashed, consumed with bloody and often pointless struggle, parallels the Palestinian experience and explains what lies at the heart of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. And it reveals why, 40 years on, the Six-Day War continues to shape the Middle East.

The war was a triumph for Israel. Within hours of its start, the Egyptian air force had been destroyed in pre-emptive air strikes. Israeli troops sliced through Egyptian defenses in the Sinai Peninsula, moved against the Syrians in the Golan Heights and outflanked King Hussein's Bedouin army in the West Bank. In 132 hours, it was all over. Israel had more than tripled its territory, its forces moving into ancient Jerusalem, fulfilling the age-old quest of the Jews to return to their holy city. The war changed mental maps in the Middle East as much as it did the political landscape, altering hopes and fears. In 1967, Israel as a nation was not quite 20 years old, born in the shadow of the Holocaust and a war in which Arab armies attempted to throttle the new state at birth. So for Israelis, 1967 was a time of euphoria, only to be followed by years of letdown as victory's hoped-for fruits--peace and coexistence with their neighbors--seemed ever less likely. Hardened by terrorism, many Israelis now want to wall off the Palestinians behind a mass of concrete and razor wire.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1627015,00.html

[question everything]

1. The story misses a small detail

Israel attacked Egypt after the latter kicked out the UN peace keepers and blockaded the Straits of Tiran - a recognizable act of war. Israel had no intention in attacking Jordan - that by then ruled the West Bank of the Jordan River.

However, Egypt's Nasser called on Jordan's King Hussein to "join the festivities" and to open a second front, resulting in a defeat.

One has to wonder whether the Palestinians would have dreamed, and killed, for a national homeland were they still under the rules of Jordan and of Egypt.