MIDDLE EAST
Palestinian fighters leaving
Beirut in
1982 (DR)
minority of
Palestinian Arabs remained.
The state of Israel was born. By
Twenty years after the Six-Day War cruel irony of history, it bore within it some of the characteristic traits of the "Brown Plague," many of whose victims had been shanghaied into the Zionist enterprise — racism, militarism and expansionism. These features were compounded by another that was in total contradiction to the dreams of self-
IN THE DAWN hours of June 5, 1967, the Israeli army struck at its three neighboring states - Egypt, Jordan and
Syria. After just six days of fighting, the Zionist command achieved its goals. It was a formidable military show of force by a state dedicated to war. Today, with only 4 million inhabitants, Israel has the world's seventh most powerful airforce.
Israel occupied the last parts of the territory of the former
British mandate of Palestine still remaining under Arab sovereignty - the West Bank that had been annexed by
Jordan, and the Gaza Strip, which had been administered by Egypt. To increase its military advantage against its most dangerous enemies It seized "strategic zones" - the Sinai desert against Egypt; and the Golan Heights against Syria in the northeast. On June 10, the army of a state covering
20,800 square kilometers controlled 102,400 square kilometers of territory!
HE TWENTIETH anniversary of
T this conquest inevitably brings to mind another date: the fortieth anniversary of the November 29, 1947, UN General Assembly vote to partition Palestine into two states, Arab and Jewish. The latter was given 55 per cent of the territory, although the Jews - the overwhelming majority of them made up of immigrants fleeing the terrors of European anti-Semitism - constituted only a third of the population and possessed just 6 per cent of the land.
Even this flagrant injustice could not satisfy the chiefs of the Zionist armed gangs. In a few months of fighting and massacres, they added 6,500 square kilometers to the 14,300 given to them by the UN. What is more, the Arab and Jewish populations had been roughly equal on these territories, but on the 20,800 square kilometers they took over they made sure that only a small sufficiency of the more utopian Zionists - dependence.
Israel is the most extreme example of dependence in the world. No other state is so dependent both militarily and economically as the Zionist state is on US imperialism. A state with such a small population (700,000 Jews in 1948), based on the expulsion of a greater number of natives belonging to an incomparably larger national community, could survive only by maintaining a military force superior to that of its enemies, and therefore out of all proportion to its own resources. Only United States' imperialism had both the means and the motivation for supporting it.
In turn, Israel was to serve as a mercenary state of imperialism, not only in the Arab region but also from Sri Lanka to Africa to Central America.
These innate features of the Zionist state were to grow over the years. The 1967 war was to be a decisive stage in this process, which would reach its peak ten years later with the coming to power of Menachem Begin's Likud, an embodiment of the most narrow-minded chauvinist arrogance and racist disdain.
Likud's insane military expedition into Lebanon in 1982 was to reveal the naked reality of the Israeli state, stripped of the veneer of social Zionist hypocrisy. This was to result in a 3 grave moral crisis, breaking the national consensus for the first time in war. June 15, 1987• International Viewpoint