1967 Six Days Victory, Alternative to Destruction

"So Sorry We Won" was the brilliantly prophetic name Ephraim Kishon and Dosh gave to their post 1967 Six Days War political satire. Here we are a half a century later, and even Israelis think there was a viable alternative to the miraculous victory of Biblical proportions which gave the State of Israel our Historic Homeland.

I was about to graduate high school when Egypt's Nasser began his tirades threatening to destroy the State of Israel, wipe it into the sea.

The absence of any significant international reaction to the reimposition of the blockade on the Gulf of Aqaba only emboldened Nasser. In a speech to Arab Trade Unionists on 26 May, he declared his real objective: "The battle will be a general one and our basic objective will be to destroy Israel." (Jewish Virtual Library)

There was nothing ambiguous about his statement, and there was nothing ambiguous about the fact that the United Nations and every single solitary country in the world just acquiesced or ignored Nasser's threats.

Here we were thirty years after the rise of Hitler and Naziism in Germany, just over twenty years after their defeat, and it looked like Hitler had risen from his grave.  The world, including the United States, had sat idly by when Jews were murdered by the Nazis, and now their successors were standing placidly on the sidelines while Nasser was orchestrating the destruction of the nineteen year old struggling State of Israel.

That was the situation in June, 1967, when without any foreign ally the State of Israel achieved the most miraculous and unprecedented victory in the history of warfare. In six days, not only did we defend the indefensible Auschwitz borders, but we liberated all of the land from the Golan Heights in the north to the Suez Canal on the south and to the Jordan River on the East. This not only gave the State of Israel all of historic, holy and Biblical Jerusalem, it returned the locations of our Biblical National History and finally gave the modern state logical and defendable borders.

You'd think that such a victory would be embraced, celebrated and accepted by all sectors in Israeli society for eternity.

The Jewish People may be academically brilliant with a disproportionately high percentage of discoveries and prizes in science, but when it comes to politics and "self-defense," we tend to get things wrong. In the Bible you can read about how our very first king, King Saul, was more concerned with trying to kill David than obeying Gd's decree that he destroy all of the enemy Amalek. And unfortunately, things haven't changed all that much.

Not only are the European Union and most foreign governments boycotting the big celebrations of the 50 years our 1967 victory and subsequent settlements in the liberated Land, but many Israeli politicians and political parties are boycotting the Judea and Samaria jubilee.

Honestly, I'm not surprised by the fact that non-Jews and other countries don't care about the survival and security of the State of Israel, but I find it truly incomprehensible that there are Israelis who don't understand, or more accurately, refuse to understand that the alternative to that 1967 victory was the destruction of the State of Israel, Gd forbid. Here we are a half century, fifty 50 years later, and they still haven't a clue as to the perilous security situation we'd be in without having full control and sovereignty over Judea, Samaria, the Jordan Valley and the Golan Heights.

It's bad enough that Menachem Begin gave Egypt the Sinai. But there is no way the State of Israel could survive with an enemy Arab terror state inside our borders.

Allowing Jews to live in all parts of the Land of Israel we now control is the only way to secure the Land and make even Tel Aviv a safe place for Jews.