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Prelude to the Six Days

[Washington Post] Charles Krauthammer - There has hardly been a Middle East peace plan in the past 40 years - including the current Saudi version - that does not demand a return to the status quo of June 4, 1967. Why is that date so sacred? Because it was the day before the outbreak of the Six-Day War in which Israel scored one of the most stunning victories of the 20th century. The Arabs have spent four decades trying to undo its consequences. In fact, the real anniversary should be now, three weeks earlier. On May 16, 1967, Egyptian President Gamal Nasser ordered the evacuation from the Sinai Peninsula of the UN buffer force that had kept Israel and Egypt at peace for 10 years. That three-week period between May 16 and June 5 helps explain Israel's 40-year reluctance to give up the fruits of that war - the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza - in return for paper guarantees of peace. 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. The world will soon be awash with 40th-anniversary retrospectives of the war - and exegeses on the peace of the ages that awaits if Israel would only to return to lines of June 4, 1967. But Israelis remember the terror of that June 4 and of that unbearable May when, with Israel in possession of no occupied territories whatsoever, the entire Arab world was furiously preparing Israel's imminent extinction. And the world did nothing.
2007-05-18 01:00:00
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