Israelis protest to mark Six-Day War

This week's remembrances of the Six-Day War 40 years ago expose political divisions in Israeli society.

from the June 7, 2007 edition

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Perhaps the most contentious policy to follow the 1967 war was the Jewish settlement of what were once Arab lands. Israel has settled over 260,000 citizens in the West Bank since 1967 – another 18,000 live on the Golan Heights while the 8,000 Jewish settlers who had been housed in Gaza were evacuated by force nearly two years ago.

"We realized that that homeland comes with a huge mortgage, and no one's willing to pay it," says Michael Oren, a historian and author of "Six Days of War." He says that most Israelis were dazzled by their territorial gains in 1967, in particular by regaining access to holy sites in the Old City as well as places on the biblical landscape of the West Bank.

"I think Israeli society is a lot less polarized than it was five years ago," says Mr. Oren, a senior fellow at the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. In the middle, Oren explains, is the average Israeli, who won't show up to express outrage in a protest in Tel Aviv, but is keen to make compromises if it's a route to making peace.

"What you have is a much wider center," he says. "The feeling is that Israel should help create a Palestinian state and that would be the ideal solution. But in the absence of a tenable Palestinian partner, Israel has no choice but to draw its borders unilaterally, and that's really how Israel can defend itself. We've moved from a paradigm of coexistence to a paradigm of separation."

The war's anniversary week will be full of protests, marches, and rallies, many of them held jointly by Israeli and Palestinian activists. While the Tel Aviv demonstration continued, a big-screen live feed came in from Anata, a Palestinian village outside Jerusalem.

But several Palestinians who were able to get to Tel Aviv also made their way to the stage here, to tell their stories in person. Bassam Arramin of Combatants for Peace, an organization of Israeli and Palestinian men with military backgrounds, addressed the crowd and implored them not to go home and feel satisfied.

"We are victims of the occupation, both of us," he says. "It has made us all into fighters. But I don't want to be occupied by you, and you don't want to be a state of occupiers."

For her part, Ms. Lerman acknowledges that most of the people who went out of their way Tuesday to put themselves through the simulated checkpoint experience are other peace activists and left-wingers opposed to Israel's presence in the territories it conquered 40 years ago this week. The exercise was, in a sense, preaching to the converted.

"If this affects the mind-set of even one person, great, we did something," she says. "That's better than sitting at home and accepting this situation."

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