Today's Krauthammer Highly Recommended

Any excerpt doesn't do it justice.

For Israel, There Was No Peace Before The Land

... that three-week period between May 16 and June 5 [1967] helps explain Israel's 40-year reluctance to give up the fruits of the Six Day War -- the Sinai, the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza -- in return for paper guarantees of peace. Israel had similar guarantees from the 1956 Suez War, after which it evacuated the Sinai in return for that U.N. buffer force and for assurances from the Western powers of free passage through the Straits of Tiran.

All this disappeared with a wave of Nasser's hand. During those three interminable weeks, President Lyndon Johnson tried to rustle up an armada of countries to run the blockade and open Israel's south. The effort failed dismally.

It is hard to exaggerate what it was like for Israel in those three weeks. Egypt, already in an alliance with Syria, formed an emergency military pact with Jordan. Iraq, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, Libya and Morocco began sending forces to join the coming fight. With troops and armor massing on Israel's every frontier, jubilant broadcasts in every Arab capital hailed the imminent final war for the extermination of Israel. "We shall destroy Israel and its inhabitants,'' declared PLO head Ahmed Shuqayri, "and as for the survivors -- if there are any -- the boats are ready to deport them.''

For Israel, the waiting was excruciating and debilitating. Israel's citizen army had to be mobilized. As its soldiers waited on the various fronts for the world to rescue the nation from peril, Israeli society ground to a halt and its economy began bleeding to death. Army Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin, later to be hailed as a war hero and even later as a martyred man of peace, had a nervous breakdown. He was incapacitated to the point of incoherence by the unbearable tension of waiting with the life of his country in the balance....

Comments

[scp]

This is a *good* post. Posts like this one, about critical junctures in Israeli history are important, and are useful for describing the context/circumstances of what goes on over there. Perhaps you should make a permanent link to this post (and others like it, as they occur) somewhere off to the left side of this blog page. You should probably also capture a copy of Krauthammer's original article, so you can always refer to it in the future (just in case it should disappear from the Internet at some future date).