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When Israel Was Admired (Almost) All Around

“God Almighty,” she whispered. “What have I done?” All the months of fighting him, all the carefully built-up resistance, collapsed in that mad second that had sent her rushing to his side.

Thus did Kitty Fremont—tall, blonde, blue-eyed, beautiful, and the quintessential WASP—fall in love with Ari Ben Canaan despite herself. Having lost her husband in war and her daughter to polio, she was not ready to love again. And Ari was not easy to love. Kitty was still grieving and Ari was inured to human suffering, seemingly to all softer feelings. He was single-minded—obsessed with rescuing the remnant of European Jewry that survived the Holocaust and creating a state for the Jewish people. She had come to Palestine as a nurse, tending to refugees. Despite her personal tragedy, the direct experience of Israel’s birth pangs filled Kitty’s heart, and she gave it to Ari and taught him to love in return.

The two lovers are, of course, the main protagonists of Leon Uris’s 1958 blockbuster, Exodus, the best-selling novel in America since Gone with the Wind. It became a major motion picture, was translated into scores of languages, and reached best-seller lists in numerous other countries.

Kitty was the invention of a Jewish writer, nurturing a wish that the gentile world should see the founding of the Jewish state as a story of heroism, sacrifice, and redemption. In this purpose, Uris succeeded beyond all measure. A romantic epic of deadly serious intent, Exodus framed the story of Israel for millions of Americans and other Westerners, helping to create a climate of opinion in the 1960s that was warmer to Israel than ever before and more convinced that the country’s birth had been both just and necessary.

During the decades before the events portrayed in Exodus, Western publics had neither known nor cared much about the Zionist project, although wellsprings of sympathy could be found among devout Christians. The Jewish bible constitutes a part of Christian scripture, and the Jews hold an important place in Christian eschatology. Thus, for some, as Conor Cruise O’Brien put it, Zionism resonated with “a power” that activated “moral, spiritual and aesthetic forces, rather than calculations of material interest.”¹

Nonetheless, most of the time, such ephemeral “forces” were outweighed by raisons d’etat. With near unanimity, Arab leaders had denounced vociferously the idea of a Jewish state in their midst. Arabs outnumbered Jews many times over and, as the twentieth century unfolded, the world grew ever more dependent on oil from Arab lands. These considerations bulked large with the diplomats, generals, and others conducting the foreign affairs of Europe and America. When governments acted, as they usually do, primarily from motives of “realism,” that is, of simple self-interest, then the Arabs held trumps. The Zionists or Israelis managed to prevail only in those rare instances when “idealism” prevailed.

Without two such moments—born of the convictions of an English foreign minister and an American president—Israel would not have come into existence. The first of these was the issuance of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 pledging the British government to foster “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” This took on the force of international law when it was incorporated in treaties that formally settled World War I, establishing new countries and borders and a fragile new international order.

Arthur James Balfour was foreign secretary in the government of David Lloyd George, whom historian Paul Johnson describes as “a philosemite and a Zionist . . . also a Bible-thumper.”² Following an audience he had granted to Zionist spokesman Chaim Weizman, Lloyd George was quoted as commenting that “when Weizman was talking of Palestine he kept bringing up place-names which were more familiar to me than those on the Western Front.”³ The prime minister’s mind-set was mirrored in Balfour whose successor, Robert Vansittart, once said, perhaps in pique, that Balfour had cared for nothing but Zionism.⁴

To say that the two ministers acted out of unalloyed altruism would be an exaggeration. Historian Walter Laqueur notes that they “were aware that the goodwill of world Jewry was an important if intangible factor. The year 1917 was not a happy one for the Allies and they needed all the assistance they could get.”⁵ Yet, “by the time the Balfour Declaration was published, America had joined the Allies and there was no longer any urgent need to appease American Jewry.” Thus, Laqueur concludes, “self-interest by itself cannot provide a satisfactory explanation for British policy on Palestine in 1917.”⁶

Lloyd George’s pro-Zionism was opposed from many sides within his own administration. Less than two years after its promulgation, “General Money, head of the British military administration in Palestine, advised London to drop the Balfour Declaration,” writes Laqueur. “The people of Palestine were opposed to the Zionist program, and if Britain wanted the mandate [from the League of Nations to rule the territory] it was necessary ‘to make an authoritative announcement that the Zionist program will not be enforced in opposition to the wishes of the majority.’”⁷

When, in 1924, Labour was entrusted for the first time to lead a government, Zionists might have taken heart. In general, around the world, their vision enjoyed more sympathy from the Left than the Right. But the Labour government proved to be steely realists with respect to Palestine. The colonial portfolio was placed with Sidney Webb, the avatar of Fabian socialism. He was stone cold to the Zionist idea and indeed to the plight of the Jews.

Following Arab riots in 1929 that left 133 Jews dead, Webb appointed Robert Shaw to head an investigation. Shaw found that the Arabs were to blame, but recommended nonetheless that the solution was to choke off Jewish emigration into Palestine in order to assuage Arab anger.

This scenario was enacted again the following decade in more ominous circumstances. The “Arab revolt” of 1936 to 1939 was led by the mufti of Jerusalem and apparently financed by Adolf Hitler’s government. By the time it petered out, a few hundred Jews had died at Arab hands. Arab casualties were much higher, numbering thousands. Some of these were victims of Jewish retaliation but the large majority fell as the British suppressed the uprising or in Arab-on-Arab violence.

In response, London adjusted its policies. As the Los Angeles Times described it:

Just as Hitler’s cruelties were becoming apparent to the world, the British issued a white paper that partially reneged on the Balfour declaration’s promises. In deference to Arab feelings, the British established a limitation on Jewish immigration into Palestine. The Zionists were furious, but they were helpless to do anything about it.⁸

Even while the Arab revolt raged, some three dozen governments had convened at Evian in 1938 at the invitation of President Franklin Roosevelt. The first signs of Hitler’s “final solution to the Jewish problem” were already visible, and the subject of the conference was the rescue of the imperiled Jews. The outcome was nil. The British government insisted that the possibility of haven in Palestine for European Jewry not even be discussed.

Germany’s final defeat laid bare the full horror of the Holocaust, but even this did not soften London’s attitude toward Zionism or the Jews. Labour’s Clement Atlee had replaced Winston Churchill as prime minister, with Ernest Bevin as his foreign minister. Both men were anti-Semites, especially Bevin. (Or, as the British Labour historian, Kenneth O. Morgan, put it: “Bevin was not . . . anti-Semitic. But, without doubt, he was emotionally prejudiced against the Jews.”⁹)

Nonetheless, British policy was shaped less by prejudice than by recrudescent realism. London did not want to “fly in the face of the Arabs,”¹⁰ explained Lord Halifax, Britain’s ambassador in Washington.

The issue at hand was the fate of the Jewish survivors in European displaced persons camps. Their situation was desperate; and this steeled the determination of the Zionists, exemplified by the fictional Ari Ben Canaan, to bring them to Palestine. London’s adamant refusal was exemplified by the fate of the Exodus, a real ship from which Uris took the title of his novel. Bound from France for Palestine with 4,500 refugees, it was intercepted by the Royal Navy, and its passengers were shipped back to Europe where they were incarcerated in the British occupation zone of Germany, under the watch, eerily, of “local” guards.

It was at this moment that a second figure stepped forward, as Arthur Balfour had, and placed idealism above realism in endorsing a Jewish state. This was U.S. President Harry S. Truman, who fumed that Attlee’s policies lacked “all human and moral considerations.”¹¹ Truman’s decision to support the 1947 resolution of the UN General Assembly that partitioned Palestine between Jews and Arabs, and to recognize the Jewish state almost as soon as it had declared its existence, tipped the scales on this historic issue.

While a senator in 1941, Truman had joined the American Palestine Committee, a pro-Zionist group. He claimed his interest in Palestine “went back to his childhood,” write historians Allis and Ronald Radosh. “Raised as a Baptist, he had read the Bible ‘at least a dozen times’ before he was fifteen.”¹² After the war, Truman received a report on the shockingly bad conditions in displaced persons camps housing European Jews who had managed to avert the genocide. Absorbing the grim details, he called their plight a matter of the “highest humanitarian importance” and fought with the British to allow them to go to Palestine.¹³

Roosevelt, too, had harbored Zionist sympathies. But Roosevelt had been warned sharply by the State Department that support for a Jewish homeland would compromise vital American interests with the Arabs. Roosevelt hoped he could square this circle through a personal meeting with King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. But, as with Stalin at the wartime summit meetings, the president overestimated the effects of his own charm and powers of persuasion. Not only did Ibn Saud refuse to countenance a Jewish state in the Middle East, he opposed adamantly the entry of even a single additional Jew into Palestine. Following his meeting with the Saudi monarch, Roosevelt privately voiced his newfound conviction that “the project of a Jewish state in Palestine was, under present conditions, impossible of accomplishment.”¹⁴

During the Roosevelt and Truman years, public opinion sympathized with the Jews and thus supported Zionist aims, insofar as it was aware of them. This, however, flew in the face of America’s diplomats and generals. Government cables, revealed to a postwar commission examining the Palestine problem, showed that each time the White House had made promises to the Jews, the State Department hastened to tell Arab leaders to disregard them. And, after one Truman statement supporting further Jewish emigration to Palestine, senior American diplomat Loy Henderson went so far as to apologize to the British ambassador for the department’s inability to control the president.¹⁵

Needless to say, Truman was a politician, and there were more Jews in America than in Britain or any other country, especially after the annihilation of European Jewry by Hitler. But to ascribe Truman’s actions to political considerations is unconvincing. He had a stronger reputation than any other president in modern times for doing what he thought was right rather than what was expedient. And his support for Zionism began when he represented Missouri, a state where Jewish influence was negligible.

Throughout his presidency “the State Department and Truman were at loggerheads” on Palestine, write the Radoshes.¹⁶ The third of Truman’s secretaries of state, General George C. Marshall, began as a visceral Zionist sympathizer with scant knowledge of the issue, but by the time the department’s Middle East experts finished briefing him, he reversed his position completely. He became so adamant that once Truman decided to cast the American vote in favor of partition and to recognize Israel, he had to go to lengths to persuade Marshall not to resign in protest and oppose him publicly. This showed the toughness for which Truman was renowned, and which his predecessor did not share. David Niles, a White House aide who served both presidents, later wrote that he doubted Israel would have come into existence had Roosevelt lived out his fourth term.

Passage of the 1947 resolution in the UN General Assembly partitioning Palestine between Arabs and Jews required a two-thirds majority. The American decision influenced others but was not sufficient to ensure the outcome. Surprisingly, the Kremlin, never a friend to Zionism, decided also to support partition, calculating that the departure of the British from Palestine would enhance Soviet influence there. This constituted one of the rare instances when a state’s calculus of realpolitik worked to the Jews’ advantage.

In general, however, the UN vote was a moment when humanitarian considerations carried unusual weight in international deliberations. Apart from Truman’s predispositions, several other factors contributed to the outcome that made the birth of Israel possible. The first was the Holocaust itself. Although authoritative reports had reached the outside world during the war, almost no one grasped the immensity of the crime until the war was over. Jewish communities had been pillaged many times in many places, and people on the outside who had heard reports of atrocities from Nazi-occupied Europe pictured pogroms, a sad but familiar spectacle. The unprecedented reality of murder as a mass-production industry was something no one other than the Nazis themselves had imagined.

When Allied forces liberated those camps whose traces the retreating Nazis had not managed to erase, they found half-dead prisoners, corpses stacked for burning, and the maniacal machinery of death. The shock reverberated around the globe over the next few years as the astounding details were gathered and publicized. Although knowledge of the Holocaust did not cleanse the world of anti-Semitism, it created a reservoir of sympathy for the Jews wider and deeper than they had known over the millennia.

In contrast, the role of Arab leaders during the war earned no goodwill among Western governments or publics. As the Los Angeles Times put it: “The Arabs, on the whole, sided with the Nazis with whom they shared common hatreds.”¹⁷ According to German historians Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cuppers, “Egypt’s King Farouk sent [Hitler] a message in the spring of 1941 saying that ‘he was filled with great admiration for the Führer and respect for the German people, whose victory over England he fervently wished for.’”¹⁸ Saudi Arabia’s King Ibn Saud declared that: “All Arabs and Mohammedans throughout the world have great respect for Germany, and this respect is increased by the battle that Germany is waging against the Jews, the archenemy of the Arabs.”¹⁹ Pro-Nazi military officers led by Rashid Ali Al-Gaylani seized Iraq in 1941, slaughtering two hundred Baghdadi Jews before their coup was put down by British forces. Gaylani and his co-conspirators enjoyed “widespread Arab Sympathy,” notes Cruise O’Brien, while there was little such support for the Allied cause.²⁰

Gaylani and the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who had come to Baghdad to aid the coup, escaped the Allied forces with the assistance of the Germans and Italians and made their way to Berlin.²¹ There, after a personal audience with Hitler, the Mufti began broadcasts to the Middle East on German radio about the “common battle against the Jewish danger” that united the Muslims to Germany.²²

The Mufti was the leader of the Palestinian Arabs and, by some estimates, the most popular figure in the Arab world, so his countless incendiary broadcasts against the Allies and the Jews amounted to a significant psychological warfare asset for the Axis. In addition, in 1943, he traveled to Yugoslavia where he recruited Muslim volunteers to create a division of the Wafen SS. In 1946, he escaped Allied captivity and possible trial as a war criminal, making his way to Cairo where he was welcomed as a hero.

In short, the Arabs had mostly supported the losing side in the world war, whereas the United Nations had been founded as a kind of victors’ club. The very rubric, United Nations, had been the formal name that the alliance against the Axis had given itself, and it was now carried over to the new global body. And, indeed, the price of admission to the United Nation’s founding conference was to declare war on the Axis. Thus, the history of Jewish persecution and of Arab collaboration helped tilt the General Assembly.

So, too, did the contrast between the two sides in their attitude toward compromise. Both camps were divided within themselves, but among the Jews the advocates of accepting half a loaf prevailed, whereas among the Arabs the absolutists reigned supreme. Golda Meyerson (later, Golda Meir), the Zionist representative at the United Nations, expressed disappointment that the proposed partition would deny Jerusalem to the Jews, but she embraced the plan nonetheless, hoping the United Nations would “improve” it.²³ In contrast, the Arab Higher Committee, which, with al-Husseini back at the helm, had regained its status as the voice of the Arabs of Palestine, was unyielding. The Arabs “would never allow a Jewish state to be established in one inch of Palestine,” vowed the group’s spokesman, warning that the effort to do so would lead “probably to a third world war.”²⁴

Sixty-four years later, Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, conceded in an interview on Israeli television that this refusal of compromise “was our mistake. It was an Arab mistake as a whole.”²⁵ There were many reasons for this mistake and for the contrast in the stands of the two parties. The key one was that the Jews were desperate for a state in Palestine even “the size of a table cloth,” as David Ben Gurion famously put it, whereas the Arabs, including those of Palestine, had reached no consensus on what they wanted except that there be no Jewish state on even “one inch.” Some envisioned an independent Arab Palestine, whereas others preferred to see the land absorbed into a “greater Syria” or an enlarged Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Still others yearned for a pan-Arab state or a pan-Muslim caliphate. When the war of 1948 ended, all of the West Bank, including Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip were in Arab hands, but not a finger was raised to create a Palestinian Arab state. That was the Palestinian tragedy, or Naqba, as it is called today.

Over the ensuing years, the Arab world seethed with recriminations, sparking the overthrow of incumbent regimes in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. International efforts to mediate the Arab–Israeli conflict proved futile, as Arab political discourse reverberated with the paramountcy of redeeming Arab honor, even while the strengthening Israeli state and army made this goal each day more unrealistic.

Then, with little warning, in the spring of 1967, the constant background noise of low-gauge confrontations and mutual threats swelled to a crescendo. For reasons that remain murky to this day, the Kremlin informed the Egyptian and Syrian governments falsely that Israeli forces were massing on Syria’s border for an attack. Israel denied this, and UN and Egyptian officials saw for themselves that there was no truth in it. But the tension did not dissipate.

On May 15, following meetings between Egyptian and Syrian military leaders, Cairo declared an emergency, and tanks were seen rumbling through the streets of the capital. A day later Radio Cairo broadcast: “the existence of Israel has continued too long. We welcome the Israeli aggression. We welcome the battle we have long awaited. The peak hour has come. The battle has come in which we shall destroy Israel.”²⁶

Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser demanded that the UN Emergency Force (UNEF) be withdrawn from the Sinai where it had been stationed as a buffer under the terms that ended the 1956 Sinai War. Much of the world was dismayed at the alacrity with which UN Secretary-General U Thant complied with this request, and some analysts speculated that Nasser may have counted on more resistance. But Nasser communicated directly with Yugoslavia’s dictator, Josip Broz Tito, and India’s president, Indira Gandhi. Their countries furnished the largest contingents of UNEF troops, and Nasser was close to both leaders, having collaborated with Tito and Gandhi’s father, Jawaharlal Nehru, in founding the Non-Aligned Movement. They made clear to UN headquarters that their intention was to pull out their forces in compliance with Nasser’s wishes, leaving U Thant few options.

On May 23, while Egyptian forces continued to pour into the Sinai, Nasser declared the Straits of Tiran closed to Israeli shipping. The Straits of Tiran are at the neck of the Gulf of Aqaba—a three-mile-wide waterway between Egypt and Saudi Arabia that leads to the port of Eilat, Israel’s sole outlet to its south and east. Free passage through this channel had been internationally guaranteed, albeit without Egyptian concurrence, under the terms of Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai after the 1956 war. There was little question that the renewed blockade constituted an act of war. Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, editor of the leading Egyptian government newspaper, Al-Ahram, and a confidant of Nasser’s, told his readers at the time, “an armed clash between [Egypt] and the Israeli enemy is inevitable.”²⁷

For his part, Nasser breathed fire. Addressing a trade union meeting on May 26, he declared:

[I]f Israel embarks on aggression against Syria or Egypt the battle against Israel will be a general one . . . And our basic objective will be to destroy Israel. . . . I say such things because I am confident. I know what we have here in Egypt and what Syria has. I also know that other [Arab] states . . . will send . . . armored and infantry units. This is Arab power. This is the true resurrection of the Arab nation.²⁸

Israeli leaders mostly tried to calm the situation. Levi Eshkol, Israel’s prime minister, was known as an organization man, not an orator. When he addressed the Knesset on May 28, his words were so mild and delivered so fumblingly, that they “were conciliatory to the point of timidity,” says historian Howard M. Sachar.²⁹ “We do not contemplate any military action,” Eshkol insisted in words explicitly addressed to Egypt and Syria, appealing for “reciprocity” from them.³⁰ Cruise O’Brien speculates that these earnest assurances of peaceful intentions may have backfired in that they “seem to have suggested to Nasser that Israel was so anxious to avoid war that further risks could be taken.”31**

Not all Israeli utterances were pacific. Two weeks earlier, military chief of staff Yitzhak Rabin had reacted to some guerrilla actions emanating from Syria by threatening, “We may well have to act against centers of aggression and those who encourage it.” For this bellicose outburst he was dressed down so severely by David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s iconic first prime minister who was still active although he had been succeeded in office by Eshkol, that Rabin apparently had a brief nervous breakdown.

While urging Israeli patience, Washington and London decried Egypt’s action against freedom of navigation. Hoping to forestall a military response by Israel, they floated plans to organize an international flotilla to break the blockade. Although other governments agreed that freedom of the seas should be affirmed, few if any were willing to send ships into a potentially violent showdown. U.S. President Lyndon Johnson was strongly sympathetic to Israel, but he felt constrained by the mounting domestic and international protests against his escalation of the war in Vietnam.

On May 30, King Hussein of Jordan flew to Cairo. Israel’s border with Jordan was by far its most vulnerable, directly abutting Israel’s narrow midsection where most of its people lived. Before, Hussein had always distinguished himself as the most moderate of Arab rulers, the polar opposite of the inflammatory Nasser. In the heat of the moment, however, Hussein calculated that he could not resist the fervor of the “Arab street,” so he opted to go all in. In Cairo he offered obeisance to Nasser and pledged unity against the Zionist enemy, going so far as to place his army under Egyptian command.

The tightening military encirclement of Israel was accompanied by a crescendo of blood-curdling threats. One Arab leader after another promised to “explode Zionist existence,” or to “get rid of the Zionist cancer.”³² Ahmed Shuqairy, head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, vowed: “We will wipe Israel off the face of the map,” adding the memorable fillip, “no Jew will remain alive.”³³

With Arab armies mobilized around them, Israeli leaders wanted to strike the first blow, believing that the advantage of surprise could compensate for their disadvantages of size and space. They waited as long as they felt they could for the American/British flotilla to materialize. But, with no sign of progress on that front, they launched their attack the morning of June 5, while claiming disingenuously that the Arabs had fired first. Within hours the Egyptian air force was destroyed, mostly on the ground, and the war’s outcome had been determined.

During the three weeks of the prelude to war, the six days of fighting, and then the period of diplomatic jockeying that followed, Israel enjoyed broad if not unanimous support from the West. Washington and other Western governments were cautious, hoping to forestall the conflict, to bring it to a fast halt if and when the fighting started, and above all to avoid getting drawn directly into it. Still there was little doubt that most of them sympathized with Israel, a position fostered not only by sentiment but by the shrill anti-Western rhetoric of the Arabs and their close identity with the Soviet camp. That link seemed to tighten as the crisis intensified.

Public and elite opinion in the West showed little of the ambivalence or restraint evident in governmental reactions. Memories of the Holocaust, admiration for Israel’s achievements, and its image as a diminutive David menaced by the Arab Goliath combined to create widespread support for the Jewish state.

In America, the Jewish community roused itself as never before. Donations poured in for Israel. Sampling the spirit of the giving, The New York Times offered this snapshot:

“You have got it all now,” said a brief letter containing a check for $25,000. The message was from a professor at the Jewish theological seminary who said he had gladly stripped himself of his worldly goods and sent the proceeds to the . . . Israel emergency fund. The owner of two gas stations . . . turned over the deeds . . . Other Jews walked in with the cash-surrender values of their life insurance policies. Still others, deeply moved by the Arab-Israeli war, sold real estate and securities and sent the money.³⁴

Some donated themselves. During the run up to the war, many American Jewish students departed for Israel, hoping to replace Israeli workers in farms and factories who were mobilized to the front.³⁵ Others joined demonstrations. A rally in New York drew a crowd estimated variously at 45,000 to 125,000; one in Washington, from 7,000 to 35,000.³⁶

A Louis Harris poll showed unsurprisingly that 99 percent of Jews sympathized with Israel. Among Christians, support was strong, too. About half of them said they had no strong feelings or were not sure. But those that did hold clear views were all but unanimously in favor of Israel. Among Protestants the ratio was 41 percent for Israel to 1 percent for the Arabs. Among Catholics it was 39 percent to zero. For Americans altogether, 41 percent sympathized with Israel but only 1 percent with the Arabs.³⁷ A Gallup poll yielded similar results: 55 percent said their sympathies lay with Israel against 4 percent supporting the Arab states. (The rest either answered “neither” or had no opinion.)³⁸

As the crisis deepened a luminous group of intellectuals including Hannah Arendt, Ralph Ellison, Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson, Lionel Trilling, and Robert Penn Warren signed a display ad in The Washington Post. “The issue can be stated with stark simplicity,” it said. “Whether to let Israel perish, or to act to ensure its survival and to secure legality, morality, and peace in the area.”³⁹ A similar declaration, calling on the US government to break the blockade of Aqaba, was placed in The New York Times in the name of more than 3,700 academics.⁴⁰

Another statement in this vein was issued by a group of prominent Christian religious leaders, including the famous theologian Reinhold Neibuhr and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.⁴¹ King was not the only civil rights leader to make himself heard. A Washington pro-Israel rally was addressed by Whitney M. Young, Jr., president of the National Urban League, and Bayard Rustin, the man who had conceived of and organized the landmark 1963 March on Washington.⁴²

News organizations, too, embraced Israel. The New York Times editorially denounced Nasser as “crudely aggressive,” a sentiment echoed by its star columnist, James Reston, who wrote: “the key issue has to be clearly defined . . . Nasser has committed an aggressive illegality.” Humorist Russell Baker poured ridicule on the Arabs, going so far, in those days before the advent of “political correctness,” as to make fun of “the Arab mind.”⁴³ TIME carried stories with a pro-Israel slant several weeks running. “The real issue,” it said, “is . . . Israel’s . . . basic right to exist. Most of the world has accepted and acknowledged that right, but not the Arabs.”⁴⁴ Reporting that “there was little doubt as to where the majority of Americans stood,” the magazine offered a potpourri of illustrations such as: “in Chicago’s Loop, Mayors Row restaurant changes the name of one of its dining rooms from ‘Little Egypt’ to the ‘Tel Aviv room.’”⁴⁵

Although the executive branch was cautious, worried about what actions might have to follow words, members of congress and senators were less so. When the State Department spokesman declared at the outset of fighting that the position of the United States was “neutral in thought, word, and deed,” Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen, the minority leader, waxed indignant: “what’s neutral? I call it ‘snootral’—when you stick up your snoot at both sides.” His colleague, Republican Senator Hugh Scott, condemned the administration’s position as “very much confused.” Democrats joined in the criticism, and The New York Times branded the neutrality declaration “grotesque.”⁴⁶ Secretary of State Dean Rusk quickly issued a clarification, saying neutrality did not mean “indifference.”⁴⁷

Although support for Israel was bipartisan, Israel was above all a cause championed by liberals. In addition to civil rights leaders, AFL-CIO President George Meany warned that failure to defend Israel would imperil “the security of our country, of the entire free world.”⁴⁸ So militant was labor’s attitude that on the day the war broke out, “a labor rally for Israel almost turned into a riot . . . when some persons got the impression that one spectator was opposing a resolution pledging financial support for Israel,” according to a report in The New York Times.⁴⁹

John Kenneth Galbraith, the president of the leading liberal advocacy organization, Americans for Democratic Action, appeared on Meet the Press and declared that he would “absolutely” favor direct military intervention in defense of Israel. Like Galbraith, many of the strongest advocates of support for Israel were opponents of the Vietnam War. Senator Wayne Morse, who had cast one of only two votes against the Tonkin Gulf resolution that had originally authorized the war, called on the administration to unilaterally break Nasser’s maritime blockade.⁵⁰ Senator Eugene McCarthy, who would become the champion of the Vietnam peace movement in the 1968 election, declared that the United States had “the legal and moral obligation” to take military action if Israel were attacked.⁵¹ And Senator George McGovern, who would capture the Democratic presidential nomination as a peace candidate in 1972, said on the conclusion of the fighting that he hoped Israel “did not give up a foot of ground” until the Arabs made peace.⁵²

The response in Europe to the Middle East crisis was very much like that in the United States. The British government under Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson worked closely with the Johnson administration to end the Egyptian blockade but got nowhere. London’s caution matched Washington’s but so did the warm support of Israel displayed by the British public and opinion leaders.

Indeed, polls suggested that support for Israel among Britons was even marginally stronger than among Americans. A Gallup survey during the war found that 55 percent favored Israel, 2 percent favored the Arabs, with 43 percent favoring neither or having no opinion.⁵³ Editorials backing Israel appeared in The Times, The Observer, The Guardian, and The Economist.⁵⁴

After Nasser closed the Straits, a rally in “solidarity with Israel” drew a crowd of ten thousand. They listened to Lord Janner pray to God to “protect the people of Israel [and] give them the strength to go to victory,” then marched to the Israeli embassy.⁵⁵ Reuters reported a melee at Heathrow Airport as volunteers jockeyed for seats aboard a flight to Israel. The Washington Post reported that “some 5000 Britons have formally applied to go to Israel. . . . Roughly 15% are non-Jewish.”⁵⁶

In France, which had been Israel’s closest ally, President Charles de Gaulle turned sharply against the Jewish state, but few followed him. According to Flora Lewis in the Los Angeles Times:

By a count which cabinet ministers have leaked personally, there are no more than four of the 28 members of President Charles de Gaulle’s government not opposed to his stand on Israel and the Middle East. At least half a dozen ministers have talked privately of resigning on the issue. Defense Minister Pierre Messmer did, taking it back only at the last minute.⁵⁷

De Gaulle was defying public and elite opinion. Polls recorded that 56 percent of the French favored an Israeli victory whereas 2 percent backed the Arabs.⁵⁸ A support rally outside Israel’s embassy in Paris outdid that in London, drawing twenty thousand.⁵⁹ According to the Los Angeles Times, “several thousand Frenchmen, only about half of them Jews, volunteered to serve as replacements for Israeli workers and farmers who were mobilized as reservists.”⁶⁰

France’s most luminous literary couple, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, led an intellectual outpouring of support for Israel that included artists like Pablo Picasso. “The press, virtually unanimous except for L’Humanité, the Communist newspaper, recited Israeli military victories with obvious relish under huge headlines,” reported The New York Times.⁶¹

In West Germany, reported The Guardian,

The . . . Government has been at pains to maintain a position of strict neutrality in the Middle East war, but the press has almost without exception championed the Israeli cause, more emphatically and more emotionally perhaps than have the newspapers of any other Western country. The Israeli embassy has been bombarded with offers of help, financial, humanitarian, and military, the last by young Germans volunteering to fight for Israel. Needless to say, they have been politely turned down.⁶²

This nearly unanimous Western support made itself felt in the United Nations where, once the reality of Arab battlefield reverses became clear, Arab and Soviet bloc delegates began clamoring for an immediate cease-fire and a return to the status quo ante. This demand, which aimed to force Israel to relinquish its conquests while leaving in place the Aqaba blockade, was a tactical blunder. With each passing hour and day, Israel was consolidating victories on all three fronts, with territorial gains at the expense of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. Because time worked in Israel’s favor, its backers were in a position to insist that a Security Council cease-fire resolution be coupled not with a requirement for undoing the war’s results but rather for an end to the Arab–Israeli conflict, itself.

Having staved off the explicit threat of annihilation by its neighbors, Israel now had two further war goals. The first was to trade its new material leverage over the Arabs for acceptance of its existence. The second was to adjust its borders—which were nothing but the 1948 armistice lines given legal standing—so as to be less vulnerable. At its center it was less than ten miles across. “Auschwitz borders,” they were termed by Israel’s usually restrained UN ambassador, Abba Eban.

The result was Security Council Resolution 242, introduced by the United Kingdom and backed by the United States, which called for “freedom of navigation through international waterways in the area,” meaning Aqaba, “and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace.” In its most crucial section, it specified “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” The Soviet delegate attempted to insert the word “the” before “territories,” but was rebuffed. It was more than splitting hairs. The absence of “the” meant that Israel must withdraw but perhaps not from all of its conquests. Moreover, Resolution 242 also spoke of each state’s right to “secure and recognized boundaries,” opening the door to Israel’s claim that its existing narrow borders were not secure.

The Arabs and the Soviets were compelled to accede to this resolution because, with Israeli forces triumphant on all fronts, the alliance of Western states and Israel held all the cards. A couple of weeks later, the Arab–Soviet forces attempted to recoup their diplomatic losses by taking the matter to the General Assembly. The Non-Aligned bloc sponsored a resolution that contradicted Security Council Resolution 242, but even with the Soviet and Arab blocs and the Non-Aligned (and de Gaulle’s France), they could not gather the necessary two-thirds vote, so the stratagem failed.

Triumphant on the battlefield and in the diplomacy, Israel basked in the world’s admiration and enjoyed a golden moment of peace and security. But the fruits of victory, however sweet, contained the seeds of bitter trials ahead.

Soviet enmity, which Israel had endured since a few years after the 1948 UN partition vote and the subsequent withdrawal of Britain from the area, grew fierce. Although hostile, the Kremlin had previously attached little importance to Israel. But the crushing defeat Israel had inflicted on a pair of Soviet clients armed with Soviet weapons was a huge blow to Moscow’s prestige. In the Cold War contest for the allegiance of third world countries, the USSR had overnight suffered a steep slide in its appeal. And, to boot, the Soviet state no longer appeared all-powerful to its own downtrodden subjects, above all its Jews.

Natan Sharansky recalls:

The Six-Day War had made an indelible impression on me as it did on most Soviet Jews, for, in addition to fighting for her life, Israel was defending our dignity. On the eve of the war, when Israel’s destruction seemed almost inevitable, Soviet anti-Semites were jubilant. But a few days later even anti-Jewish jokes started to change, and throughout the country, in spite of pro-Arab propaganda, you could now see a grudging respect for Israel and for Jews. A basic eternal truth was returning to the Jews of Russia – that personal freedom wasn’t something you could achieve through assimilation. It was available only by reclaiming your historical roots.⁶³

The movement that stemmed from this, of which Sharansky was to become the living symbol, challenged the totalitarian grip of the Communists as never before. Lashing back, the Soviet propaganda machine went into overdrive in blackening the names of Israel and Zionism.

The Soviet backlash against Israel’s triumph was mirrored in the West by de Gaulle. Perhaps because his stance on the war had evoked more dissent and criticism than he was accustomed to, or perhaps because Israel had ignored his stricture not to strike the first blow (and thus committed the “crime of lèse-Gaullism,” Raymond Aron quipped), the French president lashed out furiously at the Jews. He is probably the only Western head of state to have done this since Hitler. He called them “an elite people, self-assured and domineering.” His foreign minister, Maurice Couve de Murville, later explained implausibly that this was intended as a “tribute to their exceptional qualities,”⁶⁴ but Aron, probably the leading French political thinker of his age and a largely deracinated Jew, was moved to pen a short book protesting what he took as de Gaulle’s deliberate reintroduction of anti-Semitism into French public discourse.⁶⁵

Whatever bigotry de Gaulle exhibited, the motive for his reversal of France’s alliance with Israel was not emotional but the coldest of realpolitik. The Arabs had numbers and oil. De Gaulle explained:

In this region, where France has always been present and active, I naturally intend to re-establish our position. The political and strategic importance of the Nile, Euphrates, and Tigris basins, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf is all the greater now that, thanks to oil, it is coupled with an economic weight of the first order. Everything bids us to return to Cairo, Damascus, Amman, Bagdad, and Khartoum, as we stayed in Beirut, as friends and as partners.⁶⁶

For the moment, de Gaulle was out of step with the rest of the West, but the other Europeans would soon begin to feel the same pulls he did. As Raymond Aron put it: “Once again, General DeGaulle realized before others which way the immediate future would go.”⁶⁷

Finally, Israel found itself in the awkward role of occupier. This was a label that the Arabs had placed on it since 1948, and on the Zionists even before that, in the belief that any Jewish sovereignty or even substantial settlement in Palestine was illegitimate. Thus, the six hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand Arabs who had fled or been chased from Palestine to surrounding countries in 1948 had been kept in camps rather than absorbed as Israel had absorbed the Jewish refugees from Arab lands. The purpose of this heartless policy was to dramatize the insistence that these people be returned to their homes in what had now become Israel. The “right of return” was an expression of the defeated Arab nations’ determination to undo the outcome of the 1948 war.

Now, having vanquished Egypt, Syria, and Jordan yet again, Israel became overlord of millions of Arabs. As Israeli leaders imagined it, this situation would not last long, only until the neighboring countries agreed to grant them acceptance in return for most of the land captured in the Six Day War. But, in their humiliation, the Arabs were more determined than ever to defy Israel. So the temporary became increasingly permanent. And, as time passed, the once nebulous sense of national identity among Palestinians, the bulk of whom were now under Israeli rule, began to crystallize. Thus, not only did the Israelis occupy territory that the Arabs claimed as theirs, but they had become “occupiers” in a second, more fraught sense—standing between another people and its national aspirations.

*Not all Israeli utterances were pacific. Two weeks earlier, military chief of staff Yitzhak Rabin had reacted to some guerrilla actions emanating from Syria by threatening, “We may well have to act against centers of aggression and those who encourage it.” For this bellicose outburst he was dressed down so severely by David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s iconic first prime minister who was still active although he had been succeeded in office by Eshkol, that Rabin apparently had a brief nervous breakdown.