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.
The Arab Cause Becomes Palestinian (and “Progressive”)
Israel would never again enjoy the degree of sympathy it experienced in 1967. The simplest reason was that Israel would never again seem so endangered. The devastating prowess demonstrated by Israel’s fighting forces gave it an aura of invulnerability.
The implications of this new image were compounded by another transformation resulting from the war. Until 1967, Israel was pitted against the Arabs, who held an advantage in terms of population of roughly fifty to one, and in terms of territory of more than five hundred to one, as well as larger armies and more wealth and natural resources. The Six Day War, however, set in motion a redefinition of the conflict. No longer was it Israel versus the Arabs. Now it was Israel versus the homeless Palestinians. David had become Goliath.
The altered perspective that made Israel look big instead of small was accompanied by a shift in ideological appearances that was no less important. The Arab states were seen as autocratic and reactionary. But, the groups that came to speak for the Palestinians presented them as members of the world’s “progressive” camp.
These twin transformations stemmed from the crystallization of the idea of a Palestinian nation in the second half of the twentieth century. The absence of a widespread sense of Palestinian nationhood before then may surprise those who came to the “Mideast conflict” in the 1970s or later, when Palestinian national aspirations came to be seen as the quintessence of the principle of self-determination. But, in historical context, it is easy to understand. Most of the countries of the Middle East, with Egypt the most notable exception, were modern creations—their borders drawn by colonial rulers—and the development of their national identities works in progress. And so it was with Palestine, except that there the process was strengthened by the presence of a hated enemy against whom the Palestinians could define themselves and make their cause sacred to their brother Arabs.
Traditionally, most of the people in the region identified themselves simply or primarily as Muslims. Indeed, strong traces of this legacy are still evident among Palestinians. As recently as 2011, according to the Palestinian press agency, WAFA, a survey revealed that when asked their first identity, 57 percent of Palestinians answered “Muslim,” rather than “Palestinian,” “Arab,” or “human being.”1 Of course, by the same token, some people in the West might feel that Christianity is their first attachment, but it is likely that the proportion is much smaller. More to the point, “Christian” is a spiritual identity, not a political or ethnic one. For Islam, these two selves are not separable. When Palestinians were asked in the same poll to choose the political system best for themselves, a plurality of 40 percent favored an Islamic caliphate, whereas only 24 percent wanted “a system like one of the Arab countries” and 12 percent “a system like one of the European countries.”
Beyond religion, another strong affinity that came before nationalism was pan-Arabism—the idea that all Arabs should form a single polity. This vision had germinated in the years after World War I in reaction to the high-handedness with which the Western powers carved up the Arab lands they had taken from Turkey. Pan-Arabism was central to the philosophy of the Baath movement that took power in Syria and Iraq in the 1960s. But its foremost proponent was Gamal Abdel Nasser, the most popular figure that the Arab world has known since the crusades.
Pan-Arabism was not so natural to Egypt, with its distinct and ancient national identity, as to the newly minted Arab countries. Nonetheless, it answered the burning need to restore dignity by creating a union strong enough to stand up to the West and to Israel. “Lift your head, brother, the days of humiliation are over,” was one of the slogans of Nasser’s revolution. As the Cambridge History of Egypt summarizes it:
Arab unity, under Egyptian leadership, would guarantee victory over the Zionist enemy and the liberation of Arab land; [and] battling Israel was only the local facet of a struggle that set the Arabs in general, and particularly Egypt, against imperialism . . . and through which the connection with the third world was established.2
Although today there is not much left of this ideology, for the two decades bracketed by the 1948 and 1967 Arab–Israel wars, pan-Arabism was the dominant political idea of the Arab world. Given the salience of Muslim and Arab identities, Palestinian identity lagged far behind.
Palestine, after all, had never been a country. The name designated a portion of the Arab territory taken from the defeated Ottomans in World War I and given to the British to govern as a League of Nations “mandate,” meaning they were not to treat it as a colony. The Balfour Declaration reflected an awareness of the Arab inhabitants without seeing them as a distinct nationality. Rather, it spoke of the Jewish people and “existing non-Jewish communities
