On May 25, 1967, twelve days before the Six-Day War, I published in Haolam Hazeh, the news magazine of which I was the editor, an article entitled “(Egyptian President) Nasser Has Fallen Into a Trap”. That sounded crazy, because, at the time, all Israel was in the grip of mortal fear.

Nasser had sent his troops into Sinai. If he had really intended to start a war, he would have done this as secretly as possible. But his troops passed Cairo in broad daylight, proof that the aim was to show off. On May 23, Nasser announced (falsely) that he had mined the sea approaches to Eilat.

That was for Israel a casus belli. Eilat was Israel’s gateway to the eastern world, free passage there had an emotional importance far beyond its actual value. To dramatize these steps, the Egyptian leader asked the UN Secretary-General, U Thant, to withdraw UN forces — but only from a certain sector. (These forces had been stationed on the border since the 1956 Sinai war).

Misreading the situation completely, U Thant withdrew all his troops.

Adding to the general despair was the personality of Levy Eshkol, prime minister and minister of defense (until he gave the portfolio to Moshe Dayan). He was seen — quite wrongly — as a bumbling, indecisive and incompetent leader. Prominent generals went to Eshkol and delivered what amounted to an ultimatum, demanding an immediate attack. With almost the whole male population mobilized and waiting on the borders, normal life had come to a virtual standstill. The whole country was holding its breath.

When our (Israeli) army attacked, it was like the release of a powerful spring.

On the first day of the war, after an emergency parliamentary session, I was in the Knesset bomb shelter sitting out shelling by Jordanian artillery in East Jerusalem, when a friend whispered in my ear: “We have already won the war. The Air Force has destroyed the Egyptian airplanes on the ground”.

This information was withheld from the public, because the government was afraid that if they became public, the UN would impose a cease-fire — which now just seemed obstructive.

Many of the Arab territories were conquered almost by accident. There was a military plan for the destruction of the Egyptian forces in the south, but there were no plans for a comprehensive war. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan was against the occupation of the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. The West Bank was occupied in an improvised operation, after King Hussein of Jordan had unexpectedly opened fire in order to demonstrate his solidarity with Egypt. In the beginning, Dayan also objected to the operation against Syria, for fear of Soviet intervention. Because of this, there was no plan for the future of the large population in the occupied territories.

On the fifth day of the war, just after our army had conquered the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, I wrote an open letter to Levy Eshkol, proposing that he seize the historic opportunity and offer the Palestinian people the chance to establish a state of their own. Right after the war, Eshkol invited me to a private talk. He listened patiently while I explained this idea. He said with a benign smile, “In negotiations, one starts by offering the minimum and demanding the maximum. Then, gradually, one raises the offer until a compromise is achieved somewhere in the middle. What you propose is to offer everything even before negotiations have started.”

“That is true when one sells a horse,” I answered, “not when one wants to achieve a historic peace.”

To my pleasant surprise, I found I had quite a number of supporters in the army high command. Generals, it has been said, always fight the last war. They also have in their minds the last peace. Many generals preferred the idea of a demilitarized Palestinian state next to Israel to the prospect of returning the territories to Jordan, a much bigger state that could serve as a staging area for the armies of Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. In public opinion polls, support for the idea of a Palestinian state next to Israel reached an astonishing 37 percent.

That phase passed quickly. The US, which, on the eve of the war, had secretly informed our government that it would not object to an Israeli attack, now did nothing to compel Israel to withdraw. Gradually, the Israeli leadership became aware of a total absence of international pressure to return anything. Moreover, the “three No’s” adopted in September 1967 by the summit meeting of humiliated Arab leaders in Khartoum (“No peace, No recognition, No negotiations”) played into the hands of Israeli annexationists.

Teams of people from the Kibbutz movement were already swarming over the West Bank looking for favorable locations. They found them in the Jordan Valley — flat, suitable for tractors and watered by the river. Immediately after the war, huge numbers of refugees from the 1948 war had been driven out of the Jericho refugee camps near the river. The settlement drive, which was to change the map completely, was on its way.

Almost automatically, actions of ethnic cleansing were carried out. The writer Amos Kenan told that me he had just witnessed the expulsion of thousands of inhabitants from three villages in the Latrun area. I asked him to sit down and write a report of what he had seen. It was a revolting document. I distributed copies of the report to several ministers. It did not help. The work was finished before anybody could intervene. Today, the “Canada Park” covers the site.

Almost at the same time, it was reported to me that the army had started to destroy the town of Qalqilia. From the vicinity of that town, Jordanian artillery had tried to shell Tel Aviv, some 25 km away. I hastened there and saw that one neighborhood was already almost completely demolished. Again I went to the Knesset, in order to induce the prime minister and the other ministers to interfere. And indeed, the demolition was stopped and the houses already demolished were rebuilt. I don’t know what role exactly my intervention played in this, but since then, every time I pass the place, I have a feeling of satisfaction. (Though Qalqilia is now cut off by the monstrous wall.)

On the first day of the fighting, it was a defensive war. Dayan declared that we had no intention of conquest. Almost all Israelis thought so, too. A day after the fighting was over, it had become a war of expansion and annexation. Completely intoxicated by the Biblical landscapes, the flood of “victory albums”, the new patriotic songs and the messianic slogans, the public took the lead. The Eshkol government, which had first officially decided to negotiate the return of the territories, forgot about this when it realized that there was no need to.

In an article soon after, I told a story about how to capture monkeys. One attaches a bottle to the branch of a tree and puts a fruit into it. The monkey puts his hand into the bottle, takes hold of the fruit and tries to pull it out, but his fist enclosing the fruit is much too big. Thus he is captured. He could, of course, get free any moment by letting go of the fruit, but, craving for the fruit, is unable to do so. In the same way, holding on to the occupied territories, we were hostages of our own greed.

After the war, Professor Yeshayahu (Isaiah) Leibowitz, an orthodox Jew, foresaw that the occupation would corrupt us and turn us into a people of “secret service agents and managers of foreign labor”.

In retrospect, it looked as if the whole scenario was the work of a talented director — the anxiety, the crescendo of fear, the miraculous victory. This helps to explain what happened later on.

In the Faust legend, Mephistopheles pays for the soul of the learned doctor with every imaginable kind of pleasure. Something like that happened to us in June 1967. What looked like a gift from God was actually a temptation from Satan, an attempt to buy our soul. Did he succeed? Did Israel lose its soul? I hope not. I hope that the intoxication is now finally wearing off. Many things said and written this week seem to indicate this.

Forty years after the event, the question is still open.