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… It might be worth reminding ourselves briefly of how the so-called disputed territories — the West Bank and Gaza — came into existence. They were certainly not “stolen.” Before being acquired by Israel in a defensive war in 1967, they had been occuped since 1948 by, respectively, Jordan and Egypt. Jordan’s title to the West Bank (originally designated by the British as part of the Jewish National Home) had never been recognized in international law, and in any case neither Jordan nor Egypt nor any other party had ever claimed these territories as a Palestinian homeland. Neither had the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), founded in 1964, which was no surprise since back then, too, the only homeland the PLO was intending to “liberate” was the land of the state of Israel. As for the 1967 war itself, it had nothing to do with the situation of the Palestinian Arabs; as Gamal Abdel Nasser, the president of Egypt, put it with complete frankness, the “aggression” the Arabs sought to undo in provoking that war was the existence of Israel itself.
To be sure, the Arab states had made much of the hapless condition of the Palestinian Arab refugees who had fled their homes in the 1948 war that accompanied the birth of Israel. But these states had also ensured that the refugee’s condition would remain hapless by refusing to absorb and resettle them as the Israelis had done with an equivalent number of Jewish refugees who had fled or been expelled from their homes in the Arab world during the same war. Almost twenty years later, in the immediate aftermath of the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel was eager to negotiate a return of the land it had conquered in exchange for peace and diplomatic recognition by the Arabs, and there was nothing to prevent those territories from become an absorption point for refugees or indeed the locus of a Palestinian state. The answer, delivered at a meeting of all the Arab states in Khartoum in August 1967, was swift and plain. It was the famous “Three No’s”: no peace, no recognition, no negotiations.
Thus, in the face of Arab adamancy, began the Israeli occupation and administration of the West Bank and Gaza, and thus, too, began the myth of Israeli “intransigence.” Translated into English, the only thing this could mean was the continued determination of the Israelis to resist Arab plans for their elimination. The real intransigents were the Arabs.
William J. Bennett
Chapter 4, “The Case of Israel”
Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism
