Most Arabs of a certain age can recall what they were doing on June 6, 1967, when the June War broke out exactly 35 years ago today. It was a war that took a mere six days from start to finish, but those six days shattered many of our illusions, reshaped the political landscape of our region, and left those of us who were coming of age at the time grappling with profoundly troubling questions about our place in the modern world. At a seminal level, we are still grappling with those questions today.
In the late 1950s and mid-1960s, young Arabs were growing up with the moral optimism of a generation that wanted to reinvent its world and rebuild its society, after decades of colonial rule.
It was a generation whose entire belief system derived from the notion that nothing was more related to its quest for meaning than the call for the unity of the Arab states within a single territorial homeland — a homeland that included a Palestine liberated from foreign occupiers by the mighty Arab armies.
No single event in our modern history was to so vividly showcase the smashed remains of that consensus — the sense that we are one nation that in due course will triumph over a settler state superimposed on the heartland of our world — than did the defeat of the Arab armies in the June War.
In the words of the French philosopher George Bataille describing his countrymen’s mood following the Nazi occupation of France, one felt "broken, crushed, killed ten times over, suffocated and nailed down."
Had everything we believed in, we asked then, been hollow and worthless?
Before gloom descended, some Arabs literally headed for the hills, where they stood and fought — by all accounts, bravely — against units of the Israeli Army that in September 1968 invaded the refugee camp known as Karameh on the Jordan border with the West Bank. (Yes, those folk were invading refugee camps even then.)
From then on, the guerrillas who fought at Krarameh — predominantly but not exclusively Palestinian — were later to take over the PLO from its traditionalist leadership and to command uncommon, if at times undeserved, respect throughout the Arab world. Though their movement retained a potent influence on the national imagination, it did not, however, grow with the job, nor did it inspire leaders who were informed in the ways of the world and understood whom they were fighting against.
The sad truth is that Palestinians, along with other Arabs, never bothered to learn, truly learn, who their enemy was. They knew little about his history, his culture, his sensibility, his inward preoccupations, his social values and the essential repertoire of his consciousness. In short, what made him tick. Big mistake.
It is a given in military theory, as we read in the writings of the German war strategist, Carl von Clausewitz, that when two forces are engaged in an "anti-goal relationship," as in the case of colonizer against colonized, nation against nation, army against army, and even individual against individual, these two forces ideally seek to "give as much ambiguity" about themselves and to "gain as much clarity" about the enemy. The more you know about the ways of that enemy, and the less he knows about yours, the more you are likely to end up being the winner.
Consider this example: Israelis have universities with Arab Studies departments and think tanks devoted exclusively to researching the military, social, political, economic and cultural profile of the Arab world. Arabs, however, have never committed the same resources to examine in like manner the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses. This glaring disparity has had its toll.
In recent weeks Arabs winced at the spectacle of an Arab leader being put under house arrest, and humiliated no end, by the army of a two-bit settler state in Palestine. For Palestinians on the scene, it was beyond wincing. They have come to accept doom, almost acquiesce in it, as if it were part of their historical truth and the forward motion in which their national existence is anchored.
Those who trusted the enemy — say at Oslo — because they had not taken the trouble to study him, were astonished to discover, to their manifest surprise and horror, that if a national liberation movement sets itself up to be taken for a ride, someone, somewhere along the line, will oblige it.
True, thirty five years are still recent history, but to those of us who were coming of age at the time, those were years that codified our national reflexes, our twists of feeling and our communal sense of reference.
After the battle of Karameh — the name translates into Arabic as "valor" — the Palestinian leadership, bristling with elan, came forward with the promise to heal a wounded people, and deliver a captive nation. Perhaps they had other plans. Perhaps they just failed. But, make no mistake about it, we are all complicit in the breakdown.
