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Modern History

Home > Modern History > International Studies in Peace and Conflict > The Arab-Israeli Conflict 1948-1996 > 1967 and the growth of Israeli extremism

This tutorial:

• Describes the role of key features, issues, individuals, groups and events of selected twentieth-century studies (H1.1)
• Analyses and evaluates the role of key features, issues, individuals, groups and events of selected twentieth-century studies (H1.2)

Key features and issues:

• nature and impact of nationalism
• nature and consequences of Israeli occupation of the Occupied Territories
• terrorism/violence and their impact on Israeli and Palestinian communities

In particular, you will learn about:

Origins of tension

• consequences of the war for Israel and the Palestinians in 1967
• political and social issues in Arab-Israeli relation in 1967

War and peace - causes, course and consequences of the 1967 (six day) War

The Occupied Territories and Lebanon

• attitudes and policies of the Israeli Labour and Likud Parties toward the Occupied Territories
• rise and significance of the Israeli settler movement in the Occupied Territories

The Peace process

• the Intifada 1987 - 1994: Palestinian resistance and Israeli response
• support and opposition for the peace process amoung Israelis

Contents

Introduction
The Radical Right pre-1967
The Radical Right after the Six-Day War
Who are the Radical Right?
The violence of the Radical Right
Herut/Likud and the Radical Right
The Radical Right and the Intifada
References

Introduction

The year 1967 proved to be a turning point in Israeli–Arab relations for several reasons, most obviously as the date of a one-sided war between Israel and her Arab neighbours, which saw the conquest of what were to become known as the "Occupied Territories". Meron Benvenisti, in his book Sacred Landscape, has this to say about that conflict: "The 1967 war is regarded as the final battle of the 1948 war." To understand his meaning, we must go back to the foundations of the state of Israel.

The Zionist enterprise was not united in 1948. The infant government, under Ben Gurion, was committed to the establishment of the state of Israel with boundaries exceeding those proposed in the United Nations (UN) partition plan of November 1947. However, Ben Gurion did not push for the occupation of the West Bank and, indeed, in November 1947 had, through Golda Meir, come to an understanding with King Abdullah of Transjordan that he, Abdullah, could take control of the West Bank in return for his promise to keep Jordan out of the anticipated war against Israel. As events turned out, Abdullah could not resist the pressures against him to join the war in May 1948, but what held Ben Gurion back from claiming the West Bank? What did the Zionists want in 1948?

Thomas Friedman explains that the Zionist Jews who founded Israel had three basic objectives in mind:

• to create a Jewish state;
• to create a democratic state;
• to create a state in the historic homeland of the Jewish people; which included all the land from the Mediterranean to the Jordan river.

Ben Gurion argued that in the real world one often had to settle for less than complete victory. Israel was being offered, in effect, the chance of a Jewish state, and a democratic state, but in only part of Israel. To hold out for all of the land of Israel might risk everything.

Ben Gurion was concerned with the demographic nature of the newly created Israel. The Zionists were setting up a Jewish state, for Jews. It would be self-defeating to incorporate the West Bank, with its approximately one million Arabs, into a Jewish state.

But Ben Gurion's was not the only view. Extremists, such as Menachem Begin of the Irgun, argued that the River Jordan was the natural frontier for the new Israel, which should occupy its original biblical territories. This view, that Israel's destiny lay in reoccupying its former biblical lands, particularly the regions of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) may be called the view of the radical right in Israeli politics.

The Radical Right pre-1967

For the first twenty years of Israel's existence the radical right had little influence. Why?

• The founders of Israel were opposed to the more religious elements of Zionism and wanted a modern, secular (that is, non-religious) and democratic state. Why was that?
• Ehud Sprinzak states that this was largely because many of the original Israelis were survivors of the Holocaust and, as such, could not tolerate the extreme nationalism and autocratic style of the radical right. The vast majority of the Israelis took on board these views even though they had not gone through the Holocaust. The radical right, therefore, says Sprinzak, "were never part of the national consensus and had no political power or influence."

The Radical Right after the Six-Day War

The 1967 war changed all that. Now Israel's eastern border rested on the River Jordan, and Jerusalem was theirs. It was the signal for the radical right to come out of obscurity.

Within Israel the greatest consequence of the 1967 war was upon the Israeli national psyche (mentality). To appreciate the full significance of this, one must understand the gloom that descended upon Israel in May 1967 as war loomed. Press headlines of the time within Israel spoke of special prayers in the Knesset, of 3000 people leaving the country, of warehouses remaining open all night because of panic buying in the shops. This was a country on the verge of doom. On 23 May, the day Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran, Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin suffered a nervous collapse and offered his job to his deputy. The Prime Minister, Levi Eshkol, projected confusion and indecision.

Then came the war and, within six days, a victory complete and absolute, which returned the nation to much of its biblical territory. This caused a mental revolution. Most Israelis were shocked and confused by the immensity of the victory. Some of them, however, were very certain about one critical element: never again would they let their homeland be weak and vulnerable. For nearly half of Israel's citizens the outcome of the Six-Day War created a new psychology and new identity, which Sprinzak calls Israel's "territorial maximalism".

Once again Israeli policy-makers had to examine the choices which had confronted Ben Gurion in 1948.

• They could keep all the land of Israel and remain a Jewish state, but this could only be done by curtailing democracy. The only way Israel could permanently control the Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip would be by physically suppressing them and ensuring that they would never be given political rights.
• They could annex the West Bank and Gaza and remain a democracy, but this would sacrifice the Jewish character of the state because the one million Palestinians in the occupied territories, added to the 500,000 Arabs already within Israel, would, according to demographic projections, outnumber the Jews by the early twenty-first century.
• The third option was for Israel to remain a Jewish and democratic state, but this could only be done by getting rid of large areas of the West Bank and Gaza or by getting rid of the Palestinian inhabitants of those regions by transfer, for example, to Jordan. Since world opinion would never tolerate a forced transfer of populations, this option really came down to the option of relinquishing territory.

Friedman says that instead of choosing between these options, as Ben Gurion had done in 1948, both major parties, Likud and Labour, spent the years 1967 to 1987 avoiding a choice until the Intifada forced matters to a head.

While governments remained indecisive, the radical right grew in strength. It was after the 1967 war that the view of Zionism as a secular, democratic movement was first seriously challenged in Israel by aroused nationalists and religious fundamentalists. The nationalists, and they were by no means confined to one political party, spoke of Israel's "manifest destiny" and believed that might was right. Even though more than one million Palestinians lived in the newly occupied territories, Israel, they said, was justified in suppressing their national rights. Israel was said to have a valid legal and historic claim to the entire territory west of the River Jordan. Settling this territory was, in the words of General (now, in 2001, Prime Minister) Ariel Sharon, the "Zionist answer" to Arab hostility. The religious fundamentalists gladly shared this view. They knew exactly what borders God had ordained for Israel and claimed that the occupation of 1967 heralded the coming of the Messiah. Settling these territories was a divinely ordained task.

Who are the Radical Right?

The radical right crosses lines of party, social origin, economic strata and education. Their views combine extreme attitudes regarding the indivisibility of the Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, bitter hostility towards the Arabs, and special expressions of never-ending hostility towards the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO). They exhibit a siege mentality. Their world is divided simply between the sons of light (themselves) and the sons of darkness (anyone who disagrees). Such a world has no room for legitimate opposition. The hundreds of thousands of Israelis who share the beliefs of the radical right do so because they feel unsafe in a small Israel, are suspiciously hostile of the Arabs, and mistrust the nation's moderate leaders.

Their leaders are vocal and are good lobbyists and communicators. They manipulate national symbols such as pioneering, settlement, and defence. The most important asset of the radical right is the strategic location of its hard core of support, the settlements of the West Bank. In the West Bank grew up, after 1967, the 'Land of Israel' movement and, after 1974, Gush Emunim (The Bloc of the Faithful, a messianic movement of the settlers in the West Bank and Gaza). The settlers are not very numerous, but for many Israelis they represent the only true heirs of the Zionist pioneers who expanded the small Jewish community in Palestine and built Israel from scratch. Even cabinets hostile to the radical right cannot afford to ignore the settlers' attitudes and demands.

The violence of the Radical Right

Into this movement of the radical right, which developed as a result of the 1967 war, was injected a core of violence, especially in the occupied territories. Conflict between the settlers and the local Arabs did not emerge immediately after 1967. As long as Jewish settlers remained relatively few and settled outside the densely populated Arab areas, a myth of coexistence could be maintained. This was especially true during the administration of Yitzhak Rabin (1974–77), when the government strictly forbade Jewish settlement in Samaria and would not allow land to be confiscated.

The Likud victory of 1977 brought an end to the cautious settlement policy of the Labour administration. The new policy called for massive settlement of the entire West Bank. The practical purpose of this policy was to create an irreversible situation in the West Bank, so much settlement that future political compromise over the area would be impossible. This was to have an enormous effect, polarizing relations between Jews and Arabs and leading to an increase in violence.

From the beginning of the occupation in 1967 the Jewish settlers were allowed to carry arms. There was nothing particularly sinister about this, simply a realistic recognition that the occupied territories were a high-risk area. Nevertheless, as the years went by, there were many dubious uses of officially issued arms and soon vigilantism became the norm. By 1983 an Israeli researcher found that 28% of male settlers and 5% of female settlers admitted to having participated in some type of vigilante activity that involved attacks on Arab property and people. Only 13% of settlers disapproved of vigilante activity, which became a way of life.

In September 1971 those who advocated violence received reinforcement with the arrival, from America, of Rabbi Meir Kahane, who had gained notoriety as head of the Jewish Defence League in America. Kahane stated bluntly that, "Jewish violence to protect Jewish interests is never bad". In 1975 his movement became known as Kach ('Thus'). He believed that Arabs had no part to play in Israel and should all be expelled. Jewish acts of terrorism followed, such as a bomb attack on Arab mayors in 1980, in which two were crippled, and an attempt to blow up the Muslim places on the Haram al-Sharif, or Temple Mount, in Jerusalem in 1982, which was foiled by Israeli security.

After the murder of Kahane in New York by an Arab assassin in 1990, his ideas lived on, as seen in the massacre of twenty-nine Arabs by Baruch Goldstein in Hebron in 1994 at the tomb of Abraham.

Goldstein's grave became a shrine, and he became a hero of the radical right. His followers published a book about him, the subtitle of which referred to "Dr Baruch Goldstein, the saint, may God avenge his blood". One avid reader of this book was Yigal Amir. Amir was not a psychopath, nor was he deranged. He was the extreme product of the radical right and, therefore, when he saw the land of Israel being "betrayed" by the "Land for Peace" policies of Yitzhak Rabin, he took it upon himself to assassinate the Israeli Prime Minister in November 1995.

Herut/Likud and the Radical Right

The Labour Party had dominated Israeli politics for the first twenty years of the state's existence. In 1973 the Likud Party was formed as a party of the right wing. Its name means "unity" in Hebrew, and it was a coalition of several smaller parties, of which Herut was the most notable. The main driving force behind the merger of the parties, and the radical right's most prominent supporter in Likud, was, and arguably still is, Ariel Sharon, who had left the IDF to go into politics in 1973.

Sharon has always stood for maximising the territory of Israel and the belief that political goals can be achieved by military means. The other significant figure in these early years of Likud was the leader of the Herut wing of the party, Menachem Begin.

Those on the right greeted Begin's election in 1977 with enthusiasm. This was the man who had opposed Ben Gurion's limited territorial vision for Israel, and, as might be expected, the restrictions on settlement building in the West Bank were lifted. Begin, it seemed, was a true sympathiser with the radical right. However, he was an intense and complex man. While nationalistic to the bones and often extreme in rhetoric, during the 1960s Begin changed. His radicalism diminished, and he became more open to other views. When he negotiated the Camp David agreements of 1978–79, which handed back the Sinai to Egypt, and ensured that the last Israeli settlements were removed from the Sinai in time for the 1982 deadline, the radical right felt that he had betrayed them.

Nonetheless, the radical right peaked during the great settlement years of 1979–84, which were also the years of the Lebanon War and the growth of Arab–Jewish friction throughout the entire West Bank region. In 1980 Jerusalem was officially annexed to Israel. A similar annexation of the Golan Heights took place less than a year later. The West Bank was opened for massive Jewish settlement, and the possibility of its future annexation looked bright. The radical right perceived the assassination of President Sadat of Egypt in November 1981 and the significant "cooling" of the peace with Egypt as blessed signs.

The Lebanon War was a great failure, and not the least of its victims was Menachem Begin; but the radical right and the settler community benefitted from every month of its prolongation. From 1982 to 1985 noone paid any attention to the creeping annexation of Judea and Samaria, the West Bank. World attention was focused on Lebanon, and little pressure was placed on Israel regarding the settlements in the territories. Bitter about its leftist critics at home and abroad, the besieged Likud government moved closer to its natural allies from the right, radicalising its anti-Arab and anti-left rhetoric. By 1984 there was hardly any difference between the radical right and Likud.

The Radical Right and the Intifada

The Intifada and its consequences dealt the radical right a series of blows. First, it showed that the price of keeping control in the occupied territories might be more than the nation of Israel was willing to pay. Second, when, in 1988, Arafat accepted resolution 242, thereby implying the PLO's willingness to live peacefully with Israel and give up terrorism, the radical right were robbed of their strongest argument against compromise with the Palestinians. A third blow was the surprising decision of Yitzhak Shamir to opt for a national unity government instead of creating a narrow, right-wing coalition after the national election of 1988. Had Shamir allied himself with the religious parties and the radical right, thereby fulfilling the hopes of the extremists, he would have been forced to deal harshly with the Intifada and allow a renewed settlement drive. The Prime Minister apparently became convinced that the uprising could not be put down easily. He also did not want to depend on the radical right and have Ariel Sharon as Minister for Defence. He consequently opted for a moderate coalition and made Yitzhak Rabin the key minister in the new cabinet.

The radical right was in decline. "Land for peace" was the cry, and the politics of compromise was the coming mood. In 1992 Rabin's Labour Party thrust Likud, and their radical right supporters, out of office; but they were not finished. Criticism of Rabin mounted after the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, and Yigal Amir completed the work which others, including some rightist rabbis had urged, when he murdered Rabin in November 1995. Our syllabus ends with the return of Likud in 1996, the abandonment of the "Land for peace" policy and a flourishing of new settlements in the West Bank.

The radical right had returned to power, and today their political favourite, Ariel Sharon, holds the reins of power in Israel.

References

Benvenisti, Meron. Sacred Landscape, University of California Press, 2000.
Friedman, Thomas. From Beirut to Jerusalem, HarperCollins, 1998.
Shlaim, Avi. The Iron Wall, W.W. Norton and Company, 2000.
Sprinzak, Ehud. The Ascendance of Israel's Radical Right, Oxford University Press, 1991.
Sprinzak, Ehud. Brother against Brother, Free Press, 1999.