I was somewhere between Airfix and puberty when, 40 years ago today, the Six Day War began with preemptive Israeli strikes on Egyptian airbases. Then, it was exciting, the culmination of a period of heightening threats from President Nasser, with newspapers carrying diagrams of how many tanks, men and aircraft each combatant had. As a juvenile collector of information on planes I tended to take the Arab side as they flew interesting MiGs and Ilyushins as compared with the boring French Mirages of the Israelis. As for the implications of the extraordinary Israeli triumph, I had even less understanding of the consequences of catastrophic victory than did the Israeli leaders themselves, and that, it turns out, is saying something.

Four decades later I was watching a documentary about the West Bank – conquered in that brief war – with my 14-year-old daughter. Narrated by someone not hostile to the Jewish state, it was nonetheless a catalogue of arrests, imprisonment, harassment, land and water grabs, Berlin walls and checkpoints. A girl with moral sense, she was amazed by the fundamentalism and foul behaviour of some of the settlers, and bemused by their American accents. Why were they there? Who had let them take the land? How could there be peace with them around?

The Six Day War was, as Israelis have always claimed, a defensive conflict, as was the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Had Israel lost either badly or quickly, the chances are that it would have ceased to exist long before Great Power intervention could have saved the country or its people. As with the response to the attacks by Hezbollah last summer, it seems to me that Israel was entitled to take the action it did. We in the UK would have done the same.

But what the Jewish state then did was neither right nor necessary. As related in The Accidental Empire by Gershom Gorenberg – an indispensable history of the settlement movement – five weeks after the end of the war, and while officially pursuing a diplomatic solution with the absurdly recalcitrant Arab states, the first settlers, on a nudge and a wink from the local military authorities, moved on to the occupied Golan Heights. Today, four decades on, 250,000 Jewish settlers live in the West Bank, with another 200,000 in formerly Arab east Jerusalem.

‘No, no, no’: why Israel is still at war

On the eve of the 40th anniversary of the six-day war, stances taken back then still loom over the Middle East peace process

BACKGROUND

• How the six-day war was reported

• Stolen Iraqi jet helped Israel win six-day war

• Conflict still on peak of anguish

• West Bank proves explosive legacy of Israeli victory

• Islam seeks unity against Israel

Related Internet Links

• 40th anniversary Six Day War section

Related Links

• Second radical group joins attacks in Lebanon

The victory of 1967 was so fast, so complete, that to many Israelis it seemed like some kind of miracle: and if it were some kind of divine act of will, then what could it mean but that the biblical Israel – the Whole Land – should be reunited? Mysticism fused with insecurity, expedience with exaltation, to create an argument for somehow keeping the newly conquered lands. In east Jerusalem the Arab mayor was summoned to be told that his council was being abolished. When the mayor asked for the abolition on paper, the translator had to find a napkin to write it on. Meanwhile, bulldozers moved into the Mughrabi quarter next to the Western wall and knocked down an entire neighbourhood. Israeli diplomats were told not to talk about annexation but “municipal fusion”.

In charge at the time were some of the flawed giants of Israeli history. They must have known that David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, had cautioned back in 1949 that any annexation of the West Bank would face the country with “an unbearable choice”, that of “accepting hundreds of thousands of Arabs amongst us, or mass expulsion with the methods of Deir Yassin”. His successors forgot this. The Defence Minister Moshe Dayan argued for a colony, in which the Jews would be attached to Israel and the Arabs would have local autonomy. He even compared the Jewish presence to that of a forceful Beduin suitor, who gradually convinces his abducted bride that he is the one for her. But why, asked one of his more enlightened colleagues, would any people settle for such status in the era of decolonisation? The big politicians, Allon, Eshkol, Dayan and Meir – all supposedly of the Centre Left – acted as though the question had not been asked, and permitted or tolerated the de facto annexation of Palestinian territory.

A young novelist writing in the newspapers could see the consequences even if they couldn’t. Amos Oz, then 27, predicted “the total moral destruction that long occupation causes the occupier”, adding, “even unavoidable occupation corrupts”.

Israel’s leaders were advised that West Bank settlement violated the Fourth Geneva Convention. But they didn’t see the inhabitants as constituting any kind of nationality. “What Palestinian people? What are you talking about?” Golda Meir asked one critical friend. Arab governments too recognised no Palestinian entity, concentrating on stratagems to win back their own lost lands, or else plotting the final victory over Zionism.

Today the West Bank is unrecognisable even as the place it was in 1978 when I first went there. It is almost unimaginably worse.

Conditions there have helped the rise of a truly formidable fundamentalism among sections of the once secular society, one which brooks no compromise with Israel and encourages the most terrible forms of violence. And though the fairly precise outline of any conceivable solution to the competing desires for national existence has been known since 2001, the business of getting there has been terribly weakened by bad strategies.

The second Palestinian intifada has almost destroyed the peace camp in Israel itself, even though support for annexation of the West Bank is far lower now than 40 years ago. The Israeli Government’s decision to opt for unilateral action in the absence of “a partner for peace” has led to it doing a military hokey cokey in Gaza, having handed over the people there to a condition of anarchy. The Western decision to penalise the Palestinians for having elected Hamas has been completely counter-productive, allowing Hamas to claim a kind of collective martyrdom.

And – truly pathetically – supposed friends of the Palestinians here in Britain effectively sidetrack any movement for peace by endorsing ludicrous, unworkable but damaging proposals to boycott Israeli intellectuals and academics.

Oz wrote that any deal would eventually have to be done by “an inconsistent Zionist and an inconsistent Palestinian”. The first may even now be standing for the leadership of the Israeli Labour Party. The second probably languishes in an Israeli prison. Let’s hope they meet soon.

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