One land and two peoples

The Six Day War of 1967 represents a before and after in the history of the State of Israel.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
26 October 2023 Thursday 04:25
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One land and two peoples

The Six Day War of 1967 represents a before and after in the history of the State of Israel. The troops led by Moshe Dayan defeated the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan and the borders drawn and approved by the UN in 1948 were altered. Golda Meir tells in her memoirs that on the third day of the war she was able to go to the Wailing Wall of Jerusalem, mixed with the soldiers with rifles on their backs, and praying in front of the wall of the Solomonic temple, after inserting a piece of paper into a crack in the stones in which he wrote the word shalom (peace).

Meir was a Ukrainian Jew who arrived in Palestine in 1921 with Zionist, secular and social democratic ideas to build a State, in which Jews would find security after the horrors of the Holocaust and secular persecutions in all the countries of Europe. That June 1967 the Jews returned to the wall to which they could not go because the old city of Jerusalem belonged to the Arabs.

That dazzling military victory was more bitter than sweet and has been the origin of the problems that have led to the horrors of the war now being waged in Gaza between Israeli troops and the Hamas terrorists, who entered Israel on October 7 and They carried out a massacre of more than 1,400 Jews. The Netanyahu Government has responded with disproportionate bombings that affect hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who are not all from Hamas. The foreseeable land invasion of Gaza will be a military error and the loss of moral authority and the international narrative that will turn against the Netanyahu Government.

There are two problems that stem from that victorious war of 1967. The first is that there are two peoples who dispute the same territory with different historical-emotional reasons and the second is the economic, social and political inequality between Israel and the Palestinians – almost the half of the population. They do not have a State to shelter them and are monitored by Israel, which is building new settlements in the West Bank.

The conflict will not be resolved with indiscriminate violence that affects the most vulnerable of the two peoples. The two states, provided for in the Oslo agreements, is the most rational political way to avoid living in a state of permanent hatred.