Memories from Israel, 1967
Friendly coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians was briefly a wondrous reality.
The beach of Tel Aviv
Unless you are a senior citizen, you have no living memories from the 1960s. I was born in 1944 in Haifa, Israel, and grew up there. My memories from that watershed year—1967—are still vivid.
During Israel’s preemptive June 1967 Six-Day War, the Israeli Army captured the Gaza Strip from Egypt and the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan. Suddenly, Israel controlled the entire area between the (Jordan) River and the (Mediterranean) Sea.
As a student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem before the war, I remember well the wall separating Jordan’s East Jerusalem from Israel’s West Jerusalem, with Jordanian soldiers sometimes visible on it. Jordan barred all Israelis from visiting the Jewish holy sites in East Jerusalem. We were all used to that reality and regarded it as permanent.
Initially, the new, postwar reality seemed to us Israelis like a dream come true. We were now able to visit the Jewish holy places in East Jerusalem. We went to Hebron, Ramallah, and Nablus in the West Bank and Gaza City in the Gaza Strip, hitherto terra incognita. Jerusalem was reunited, and the wall in its midst was torn down.
We looked in astonishment at sights that seemed to be from an alternate universe. We observed West Bank Palestinian men who were so excited about seeing the Mediterranean Sea for the first time that they arrived at Israel’s beautiful beaches wearing business suits. We saw innumerable cars and trucks bearing West Bank and Gaza license plates in the streets of Haifa and Tel Aviv. We beheld in amusement drivers of Gazan trucks announcing their used merchandise on loudspeakers in Yiddish — the language of East European Jews. We were all hoping this idyllic new reality would last. Alas, it did not.
While all of us were aware that Palestinian terrorism had preceded 1967 by more than a decade — well before Israel controlled any territory in the West Bank or Gaza, so before the establishment of any settlements in those areas — we hoped that the new reality would end Palestinian terrorism. In retrospect, we were hopelessly naïve.
The first fatal Palestinian terrorist attack in Israel since the 1967 Six-Day War occurred on Sept. 4, 1968 — the day of my departure for graduate studies in the United States. One civilian was killed and three were wounded by bombs that exploded in the heart of Tel Aviv. At that time, there were only two tiny settlements in the West Bank — Kfar Etzion and Kalya — both built on the ruins of pre-state Jewish communities destroyed by the Jordanian Army.
That was a bad omen. The idyll of friendly coexistence between Palestinians and Israelis was beginning to unravel. From my vantage point at two U.S. universities, I followed the news from Israel with growing concern. As more terrorist attacks ensued with increasing frequency, I knew it was only a matter of time before the easy interaction between Israelis and Palestinians would end. Sadly, it did.
Perhaps the most horrifying among the many Palestinian terrorist attacks during the 1970s and 1980s was the 1974 strike on a school near the Lebanese border, in which 27 Israelis were killed, including 21 children, and 78 were wounded. It was clear that Israel had to take strict security measures to protect its population. Those measures included checkpoints on major West Bank and Gaza roads and between the territories and Israel, as well as restrictions on Palestinian travel to Israel. Those restrictions were further tightened during the First Intifada (1987–1993), when Palestinian terrorists killed around 200 Israelis.
All those measures fell far short of preventing Palestinians — whether terrorists, petty criminals, or job seekers — from entering Israel almost at will. A particularly horrific wave of Palestinian terrorism took place during the second half of the 1990s, when Palestinian suicide bombers blew themselves up on civilian buses, restaurants, and places of entertainment, causing mass casualties.
On a very minor scale, I personally experienced the effects of West Bank Palestinians’ easy access to Israel. During a visit to Israel, I stayed with my mother at her senior community near the West Bank. I parked my borrowed sister’s car in her parking lot late at night. My sister woke me up the following day with a phone call at 7 a.m. She reported that police had informed her that her car had been stolen by thieves from the West Bank. On their way home, they were surprised by a roving police checkpoint. They abandoned the vehicle and escaped on foot. The police told my sister they had retrieved her car.
The situation was turning from bad to worse. During the Second Intifada (2000–2005), Palestinian terrorists murdered as many as 1,000 Israelis. A more drastic measure for ensuring Israeli security was needed. In 2002, Israel began building a security barrier to shield Israelis from West Bank Palestinian terrorists. Within a few years, West Bank terrorist attacks in Israel decreased dramatically, as did the rampant car thefts.
Meanwhile, the situation in the Gaza Strip darkened as well. In 2005, Israel removed unilaterally from Gaza all 8,000 Jewish residents and all Israeli troops, expecting the Palestinians to use their new freedom to develop Gaza’s economy and live in peace with Israel. But in 2007, Hamas violently took over Gaza and has fired rockets at Israeli civilians in nearby towns and villages ever since. It remained in control until the current war when the Israeli Army entered Gaza following the atrocities Hamas had committed in Israel last Oct. 7.
I wish I could be optimistic that the U.S. vision of realizing a two-state solution — a Palestinian state living in peace with Israel — will come to fruition. But I’m afraid it won’t happen in the foreseeable future. Under far more favorable circumstances than those expected to prevail after the Gaza war, the Palestinian leaders rejected, in 2000 and 2008, Israeli offers of recognizing a Palestinian state controlling virtually the entire West Bank, the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, and all of Gaza.
The primary Israeli condition was — and would no doubt remain — that the Palestinians permanently accept the legitimacy of the Jewish state of Israel next to their own state and renounce any further claims against it. They refused to do so then, and all indications are that they would refuse to do so after the war, even if that generous offer were repeated.
To my deep regret, I expect even less to experience in my lifetime a return to the easy coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians that I witnessed almost six decades ago. I can only hope that the next generation — or at least the generation after that — will enjoy a revival of that idyll.
