20 years after the Six-Day War

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Israeli soldier guarding Egyptian prisoners in the Sinai, June 1967 The following is an abridged version of an editorial which appeared in the June 15, 1987, issue of International Viewpoint magazine.

In the dawn hours of June 5, 1967, the Israeli Army struck at its three neighboring states-Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. After just six days of fighting, the Zionist command achieved its goals. It was a formidable military show of force by a state dedicated to war.

Israel occupied the last parts of the territory of the former British mandate of Palestine still remaining under Arab sovereignty: the West Bank, which had been annexed by Jordan, and the Gaza strip, which had been administered by Egypt.

To increase its military advantage against its most dangerous enemies, Israel seized "strategic zones"—the Sinai desert from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria in the northeast. On June 10, the army of a state covering 8000 square miles controlled 39,950 square miles of territory.

Today, with only 4 million inhabitants, Israel has the world's seventh powerful air force.

United Nations partition

The 20th anniversary of this conquest inevitably brings to mind another date: the 40th anniversary of the Nov. 29, 1947, United Nations General Assembly vote that partitioned Palestine into two states-Arab and Jewish.

On that date, the Jewish state was given 55 percent of the territory, although the Jews—the overwhelming majority of them made up of immigrants fleeing the terror of European anti-Semitism-constituted only a third of the population and possessed just 6 percent of the land.

But even this flagrant injustice could not satisfy the chiefs of the Zionist armed gangs. In a few months of fighting and massacres, they added 2500 square miles to the 5500 square miles given to them by the United Nations. What is more, on the 8000 square miles they took over, they made sure that only a small minority of Palestinian Arabs remained.

The state of Israel was born. By a cruel irony of history, it bore within it some of the characteristic traits of Nazi Germany's Persian Gulf (continued from page advanced its national interest by serving as the monkey's paw of imperialism.

But the national interests of lackey capitalism in places like Iran are also in conflict with those of the region's masses of super-exploited workers and farmers. This was expressed in a series of revolutionary mass mobilizations that led to the overthrow of the Shah in 1979.

The Khomeini regime, which captured and contained the revolutionary explosion in Iran, seeks only to cut a new deal with the imperialist powers. It only wants a bigger share of the profits for Iranian capitalism—not the destruction of imperialist power over Iran.

Khomeini's basic strategy has been to ride the moral authority of a mass movement that overthrew the hated regime of the Shah. He aims to win influence over the anti-imperialist masses to gain hegemony over the oil-producing countries in the area.

Khomeini hopes to cut a new deal with imperialism over distribution of oil profits. The primary beneficiary of such a new division of the surpluses expropriated from Arab workers would, of course, be the capitalists of Iran.

The Iraqi rulers, however, also aspire to a dominant role in the redivision of the "Brown Plague"—racism, militarism, and expansionism.

These features were compounded by another that was in total contradiction to the dreams of self-sufficiency of the more utopian Zionists-dependence.

Dependency on U.S. imperialism Israel is the most extreme example of dependence in the world. No other state is as dependent-both militarily and economically—as the Zionist state is on U.S.

OKAY, BOY....

GETOUT THERE imperialism.

A state with such a small population (700,000 Jews in 1948), based on the expulsion of the Palestinian people, could survive only by maintaining a military force superior to that of its enemies and therefore out of all proportion to its own resources. Only U.S. imperialism had both the means and the motivation for supporting it.

In turn, Israel was to serve as mercenary state of imperialism, not only Africa to Central America.

These innate features of the Zionist state were to grow over the years. The 1967 war was to be a decisive point in this process. The peak would be reached 10 years later with the coming to power of Menachem Begin's Likud, an embodiment of the most narrow-minded chauvinist arrogance and racist disdain.

Likud's insane military expedition in 1982 was to reveal the naked reality of the Israeli state, stripped of the veneer of social Zionist hypocrisy. This was to result in a grave moral crisis, breaking the national consensus for the first time in war.

Tactical ruling-class divisions Today, 20 years after the Six-Day War, the ruling class of the state of Israel remains divided on the means of maintaining control over the Palestinian territories conquered at that time.

The Likud advocates pure and simple absorption of the Occupied Territories into the Israeli state, with the maintenance of the existing apartheid system and the eventual expulsion of the native inhabitants. The Laborites, led by Shimon Peres, propose the creation of a Palestinian bantustan [reservation in South Africa], which would be administered by Israel's old crony, King Hussein of Jordan.

The Six-Day War dealt a mortal blow to bourgeois and petty-bourgeois Arab nationalism, which were embodied by the Nasser regime in Egypt and the left Ba'athist regime in Syria. But the real fruits of the Arab defeat in 1967 only ripened 10 years later. This was when Sadat inaugurated the process of separate peace agreements with the Zionist state-the Camp David accords.

Before this point could be reached, the tempestuous rise of the armed movement of the Palestinian refugees in the countries bordering Israel had to be subjected to repeated blows from its "brothers"-the Arab regimes. This movement was crushed in Jordan in 1970-71. It was muzzled in Lebanon by Hafez al-Assad's Syria in 197677.

In a Middle East where reactionary winds are prevailing today, including those of Islamic fundamentalism, the resistance by the Palestinian masses to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is unquestionably the most important progressive mass struggle in the region.

But we are still a long way from the emergence of an independent movement of the working class that is able to transcend national borders and ethnic, national, and religious differences.

Unfortunately, the more distant a socialist perspective remains, the deeper the Middle East will sink into barbarism.

interests than when he aids Iraq against Iran.

Reagan, or his successor, will come to terms with whoever emerges the "victor" in a bloody war which saps the strength of the oppressed masses on both sides.

In the meantime, U.S. Navy ships are in the Persian Gulf-on "the thin edge of the wedge" of military involvement, as one U.S. Army official told the Washington

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AND KILL ENCHOTHER! USA