Eleven years separate the Israeli landing in Sinai in 1956 from the air raid that opens, in June 1967, the war that would multiply several times over the territory under Israeli control. Another ten separate that second war from the third, the one of October 1973, the only one Israel did not clearly win on the ground and the only one, too, that ended up costing power to the coalition that had governed since the founding of the State. Between these three wars there is no straight line. There is forced learning in 1956, a territorial expansion nobody negotiated in 1967, and a political erosion no later military victory managed to fully offset. The result, four years after the last war, was the first electoral defeat of the Zionist left since 1948, and the arrival in power of a party that openly claimed the doctrine this same space analysed in the previous episode, Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall. Nobody in 1956 could foresee that chain of events. Nor did they need to, for it to happen anyway.

Suez 1956, the failure that teaches the limits of force without a guarantor

On 26 July 1956, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, until then controlled by French and British shareholders through the Suez Canal Company. The response was not diplomatic. It was secret, and it was signed in a villa outside Paris.

Between 22 and 24 October 1956, Israeli prime minister David Ben Gurion, French foreign minister Christian Pineau and British deputy under-secretary of state Patrick Dean drafted at Sèvres a protocol none of the three governments would publicly acknowledge for years. The plan was simple in design and sordid in execution. Israel would attack the Sinai on 29 October and reach the canal the next day. France and the United Kingdom would then issue an ultimatum to both sides demanding a ceasefire and a ten-mile withdrawal on each side of the canal, anticipating an Egyptian refusal that would give them the pretext to occupy the zone themselves.

The plan was executed almost to the letter. Israel invaded the Sinai on 29 October. France and the United Kingdom bombed Egyptian airfields on the 31st and landed troops at Port Said on 5 November.

What the Sèvres protocol did not foresee was the reaction of the two powers that, in 1956, already decided the fate of any regional war. Washington, not informed of the plan, applied financial pressure to force a British withdrawal. Moscow, in parallel, threatened direct military intervention against London and Paris, a threat historiography considers more rhetorical than operational, but one that served its political purpose regardless. France and the United Kingdom withdrew in December. Israel, slower and more reluctant, did not complete its withdrawal from Sinai until March 1957, under the guarantee of a United Nations Emergency Force deployed on the border with Egypt.

The lesson Israel drew from 1956 was not that force was useless, but that force, without the unconditional backing of a power willing to protect its results on the ground, reversed as quickly as it was won. Eleven years later, that lesson would find another application.

1967, six days that multiply the territory and bury at birth the trade of land for peace

The spring of 1967 brought an escalation none of the parties fully controlled. Egypt mobilised troops in the Sinai, demanded and obtained the withdrawal of the UN emergency force, and on 22 May closed the Strait of Tiran to Israeli shipping, an act Israel called a casus belli. Jordan signed a mutual defence pact with Egypt days later. Syria, already exchanging artillery fire with Israel since April, completed an encirclement Israel read as the prelude to war.

Israel decided not to wait. On 5 June, the Israeli air force launched Operation Moked against Egyptian airfields, destroying within hours close to ninety percent of Egypt’s combat aviation.

What followed was less a war than a redistribution of the map. In six days, from 5 to 10 June, Israel occupied the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip, seized from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, seized from Jordan, and the Golan Heights, seized from Syria in the offensive’s final two days. Casualty figures run to around twenty thousand Arab dead against eight hundred Israeli in a hundred and thirty-two hours of combat. None of these territories, except Sinai a decade later, would be returned through the route the UN would propose barely five months on.

Affirms that the fulfilment of Charter principles requires the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East which should include the application of both the following principles, i) Withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict, ii) Termination of all claims or states of belligerency. (United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, 22 November 1967)

Resolution 242, adopted unanimously on 22 November 1967, contained from its drafting a deliberate ambiguity that was never resolved. The English text demands withdrawal of Israeli forces “from territories occupied in the recent conflict”, with no definite article. The French text, equally binding at the UN, speaks of withdrawal “des territoires occupés”, a construction that grammatically fuses the preposition with the definite article “les”, implying the whole. Israel held consistently to the English reading. Everyone else, almost always to the French one. Land for peace was thus born politically dead as a formula, a text everyone could cite and no one was bound to honour the same way.

Territories occupied in June 1967 would not be discussed in those terms again for nearly a decade. The next war would not recover them; it would, instead, make them harder still to resolve.

1973, the trauma of Yom Kippur and the fiction of Labour infallibility

On 6 October 1973, coinciding with Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, and with the tenth day of Ramadan, Egypt and Syria launched a coordinated attack Israeli intelligence failed, or refused, to anticipate. Egypt crossed the Suez Canal in twelve waves under a fifty-three-minute artillery barrage against the Bar Lev Line. Mossad chief Zvi Zamir had received eleven separate warnings during September, including one direct from Jordan’s King Hussein on the 25th of that month. His conclusion, documented afterwards, was that the Arab armies were simply not capable of a war of that scale.

Israel withstood the first blows, contained the Syrian advance on the Golan between 8 and 14 October, and under Ariel Sharon’s command established a bridgehead on the far side of the canal that ended up encircling Egypt’s Third Army. On 22 October, Security Council Resolution 338 demanded an immediate ceasefire, which Israel ignored for three more days. When the war truly ended, on 25 October, Egypt held twelve hundred square kilometres on the canal’s eastern bank, Israel sixteen hundred on the western one, and five hundred more inside Syrian territory on the Golan. Arab casualties range between eight thousand and eighteen thousand five hundred, Israeli ones between two thousand five hundred and two thousand eight hundred.

Israel won the war on the map. It lost it on another terrain, one no military victory alone could restore.

The Agranat Commission, tasked with investigating the intelligence failure that allowed the surprise attack, delivered its preliminary report in April 1974. It recommended the dismissal of the chief of staff, David Elazar, and the head of military intelligence, Eli Zeira, along with other mid-ranking officers. It exonerated, however, the political leadership, that is, prime minister Golda Meir herself and her defence minister, Moshe Dayan. The Israeli press of the time spoke of a plain double standard between military and civilian command, a uniformed scapegoat shielding those who had made the underlying political decisions. Golda Meir accepted Elazar’s resignation “with a heavy heart”, in her own words. She herself would resign weeks later, without any formal report ever holding her responsible for anything.

Among those who publicly demanded the resignation of the entire cabinet after the Agranat report was Menachem Begin, then leader of the opposition and declared heir to Jabotinsky’s revisionism. Begin was not in government. He could afford to demand accountability. Three years later, he would be the one to collect it at the ballot box.

1977, when scandal, Mizrahi resentment and Jabotinsky’s legacy converge

On 15 March 1977, journalist Dan Margalit, of the newspaper Haaretz, revealed that Yitzhak Rabin, prime minister since 1974 and Golda Meir’s successor, held together with his wife Leah a dollar bank account in Washington, illegal for an Israeli citizen barring exceptions. The account, opened during Rabin’s years as ambassador to the United States, had never been closed. On 8 April, after a second account came to light, Rabin withdrew from the Labour Party candidacy. Shimon Peres took his place mere weeks before an election the party approached weakened. Leah Rabin was fined two hundred and fifty thousand Israeli lirot. Her husband was assigned by the authorities a passive role and a minor administrative penalty.

The scandal accelerated a decline another process, slower and deeper-rooted, had already been preparing since the 1950s. Mizrahi Jews, from the Arab and Muslim world, by then made up the numerical majority of Israel’s Jewish population, yet remained relegated in housing, education and political representation by an Ashkenazi-majority Labour establishment that had received them, after 1948, into transit camps and peripheral development towns. A founder of the Israeli Black Panthers, a Mizrahi protest movement, would describe those conditions in a phrase the press quoted often, ten people living in one room, sewage running down the middle of the streets. Begin’s Likud, unlike the Labour apparatus, courted that electorate. The results of 17 May 1977 confirmed the bet had worked.

Likud won 33.41 percent of the vote and forty-three seats, four more than in the previous election. The Labour Alignment fell to 24.60 percent and thirty-two seats, nineteen fewer. Turnout stood at 79.23 percent. (Official results of the Israeli legislative election of 17 May 1977)

Television anchor Haim Yavin announced the results with a single Hebrew word that stayed lodged in Israeli memory, mahapakh, the upheaval. It was the first time, since the founding of the State in 1948, that the Labour bloc and its predecessors lost the government.

Begin formed a government on 20 June 1977, fifty-four years after Jabotinsky broke with the mainstream Zionist leadership over his insistence that only organised force would secure a Jewish state against an Arab population no material benefit would ever persuade to accept it. None of the three wars running from Basel to 1977 was designed to produce that electoral result. Suez taught the limits of force without a guarantor. The Six Days delivered a territory Resolution 242 never managed to negotiate back. Yom Kippur destroyed, with no tribunal ever ruling as much, the reputation for infallibility that had sustained Labour for three decades. What was missing, a banking scandal and a Mizrahi electorate tired of waiting, a journalist and thirty years of badly resolved housing policy supplied. The result was the same man Golda Meir had once had to endure as an accuser from the opposition benches, now in his own office, governing by a doctrine written in 1923 by someone who died without seeing this victory the current defeated at Basel still refused to claim as its own…

G.S.

Sources

• United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, 22 November 1967 (official text)
• United Nations Security Council Resolution 338, 22 October 1973 (official text)
• Sèvres Protocol, Encyclopedia.com
• Suez Crisis, Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Six-Day War, History.com
• Yom Kippur War, Wikipedia
• Nation Stunned by Agranat Committee Report, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 4 April 1974
• Golda Meir’s Government and the Agranat Report, April 1974, Israel State Archives
• Dollar Account affair, Wikipedia
• 1977 Israeli legislative election, Wikipedia
• The Mizrahi-Ashkenazi Divide, Israel’s Divides Explained