Was the War Necessary?

Israel has always insisted that it went to war in 1967 over the fundamental issue of survival. To bolster that argument, Premier Golda Meir last week declassified for the first time the brief five-paragraph resolution of that year that approved pre-emptive strikes against neighboring Arab states. Outside the Knesset, Israel's parliament, an angry crowd of young Jews and Arabs retaliated with signs declaiming DOWN WITH THE OCCUPATION and A NATION CANNOT BE FREE THAT OPPRESSES OTHERS. Their argument, and that of some other critics lately, is that Israel was merely being expansionist.

The 1967 resolution found the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan "deployed for immediate multifront aggression, threatening the very existence of the state." The only solution was military action "to liberate Israel from the stranglehold of aggression which is progressively being tightened." The Cabinet thereafter gave the General Staff permission to fix its own time and place for a response. Less than 24 hours later, Israeli jets were on their way to destroy Arab planes on the ground in a first strike that determined the course of the entire brief war.

Arab Threat. Now, however, some Israelis are questioning the government's interpretation of events. Ezer Weizman who was a deputy chief of staff in 1967 and is still Israel's most outspoken hawk, maintains that it was not so much survival as the credibility of the armed forces that was at stake. Faced with the Arab threat, they proved they would go to war; since they won so conclusively, Weizman argues, Israel will never be threatened again.

Haim Bar-Lev, the present Minister of Commerce and Industry but until recently chief of staff of the armed forces (and deputy chief during the war), has stated that "the entrance of the Egyptians into Sinai was not a casus belli." If Gamal Abdel Nasser had not insisted on barring the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, Bar-Lev insists, the war would not have occurred, at least not at that time.

Matityahu Peled, a political commentator and Arab studies specialist at Tel Aviv University and the army's quartermaster general in the war, calls the survival argument "a bluff which was born and developed only after the war." Says Peled of the crisis five years ago: "When we spoke of the war in the General Staff, we talked of the political ramifications if we didn't go to war --what would happen to Israel in the next 25 years. Never of survival today."

If not survival, then what was the motive in fighting? Peled considers that it was actually to stem the growing Soviet influence in the Middle East. It was the Russians, in Peled's view, who convinced the Egyptians that Israel would not fight over the Straits of Tiran, through which only 2% of Israeli shipping moved. They were proved wrong.

No one at that time was thinking in terms of Israeli expansion, says Peled. Indeed the Israeli government feared that no matter how victorious it was in the war, it would be isolated in peace. Today, in contrast, says' Peled, the government has adopted an expansionist policy. "It is working under the illusion that territory will provide security."

The debate is one sign that Israelis now feel secure enough to risk raising such a sensitive issue in public. But it also begs the question of whether that security depends as much on Israel's expanded borders as the government maintains. With a national election coming up next year, Mrs. Meir is interested in proving the critics wrong and stressing the more patriotic casus belli of survival. Unless she does, since Israel five years after the war has still not won the peace, dissenters such as those outside the Knesset last week may grow increasingly vocal.

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