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
