My personal memories of the “Six Day War” begin with the reality I knew in South Africa, where anyone who had ever been called “Jewboy” walked a lot taller after Israel’s lightning victory. (It also impressed the hell out of the apartheid regime in South Africa, with which Israel quickly made common cause.) But that victory introduced into Israeli political life a giddy messianism and hubris that saw Israel expand its territorial boundaries, laying permanent claim to East Jerusalem and the best land and key water sources on the West Bank. The result has been to render moot the idea of partitioning the land west of the Jordan into two separate states, one Israeli and one Palestinian, living side by side. The occupation has created a single state for all the people living west of the Jordan river, but it is an apartheid state in which some 4 million people are denied the democratic rights of citizenship. Today, there is still talk of partitioning the territory in a new two-state solution. But the unitary state created by Israel since the war on 1967 renders a two-state solution increasingly unlikely.…
Israel’s 1967 legacy
