JERUSALEM:
Forty years ago, as a young lieutenant in the Israeli Air Force, I went with my squadron on a trip to the West Bank. The Six Day War has just ended, with a smashing victory for Israel. We drove through the Old City of Jerusalem and wept in front of the Wailing Wall. Then we took the road to the Dead Sea, passing by the charred Jordanian tanks which our comrades, the fighter pilots, hit from the air. In Jericho I remember a very old man sitting outside a café, sipping at his narghileh, who said in Arabic (one of us translated): "I've seen the Turks, then the British, then the Jordanians. Now it's your turn to rule us."
Yet we had no intention of ruling anybody. The war was forced on us by Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian president, who dragged the whole region into a reckless adventure. Even then, the West Bank could have been left in the hands of King Hussein of Jordan, had he just listened to the pleas of our prime minister, Levy Eshkol, to stay out of the Israeli-Egyptian feud.
With the territories surprisingly in our hands, then, we didn't intend to keep them for long. As a matter of fact, the same trip was done in a hurry, because we felt it was our last chance to see those places in the West Bank, the cradle of our nation, before we had to give them back, in return for peace.
Indeed, immediately after the war, the slogan of the day in Israel was "land for peace." Except that we didn't have a partner for the deal. When the heads of the Arab states met in Khartoum later in 1967, their response was a resounding, triple no: No negotiations with Israel; no recognition of Israel; no peace with Israel.
It took another round, the Yom Kippur War, to convince the Arab states that Israel will never be defeated. Then, in November 1977, already a major, I was on duty at Ben Gurion Airport when Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt, formerly our greatest enemy, made his historic visit. Soon enough, under the auspices of President Jimmy Carter, Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel, and in return received all of Sinai back.
The formula of Land for Peace, then, emerging out of the results of the Six Day War, did work in the case of Egypt. It is still valid today vis-à-vis Syria as well: It's the Golan Heights in return for peace, and, following the example of the Egyptians who got back Sinai till the last inch - it's all of the Golan Heights in return for full peace. It now will take the leadership on both sides to decide whether they accept it, or whether it will take more wars to finally hammer the message in.
When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however, the Six Day War only made things more complicated. Thirty years before, in 1937, the British Peel Commission of Inquiry concluded that the only viable solution was to partition the land between Arabs and Jews. Indeed, the 1948 War separated the two peoples, with only a small minority of the Palestinians remaining in Israel. Come the Six Day War and the Israelis and Palestinians were mingled, with the two peoples once again fighting for the same piece of land.
To apply the land-for-peace formula in the Israeli-Palestinian context, both sides have to resign themselves to the idea that the land they have in mind is only a fraction of their greater dreams. Israelis will have to realize that they will not be able to remain forever in the West Bank - their biblical Judea and Samaria; and the Palestinians will have to accept the bitter reality that they will never return to areas from which they had fled in 1948. In the words of the 1937 Peel Commission report, while partition "offers neither party all it wants, it offers each what it wants most, namely freedom and security."
On the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War, both peoples should pause and think. Either they go on with the present course, which might lead to a Kossovo-like situation, eventually calling for an international intervention; or they endorse the path of two states living in peace with each other, with concrete, final borders that are not only formally recognized but are accepted in the hearts and minds of their peoples.
This article was first published in the International Herald Tribune on May 27, 2007.
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The opinions expressed herein are the author's own personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect those of the Israel Democracy Institute.