In "Morris, Excerpted," I quoted the Israeli historian Benny Morris, who, in Righteous Victims, his survey of the Zionist-Arab conflict in Palestine, describes how victory in the six-day war of 1967 loosed within Israeli society ever stronger currents of "fundamentalist messianism" and "primal nationalistic greed." Herewith a few comments.
1. You sometimes hear someone say that Israel "has no partner for peace." The difficulty of achieving a settlement is perhaps illustrated by nothing so much as the fact that, while this does not give the Palestinians too little credit, it gives Israel rather too much. A settlement means a Palestinian state in Gaza and on the West Bank, and this latter means, in turn, the uprooting of tens of thousands of "messianic," "nationalistic" Jewish settlers. It isn't at all clear that the government of Israel could deliver. It has shown no inclination even to try. Though the settlements are the single greatest impediment to peace over which the Israeli government in theory could exercise control, it has done nothing. As Morris points out, the fundamentalist messianism and greedy nationalism are not confined to the settler movement.
2. Americans are in the competition, but probably Israelis are the people on earth most habituated to the idea that their national enterprises, including the military ones, are favored by God. Regarding the outcome of the six-day war, however, the obvious explanations have nothing to do with theology, everything to do with military science. Compared to the ragtag foe, Israel had a clear advantage in every military department that mattered, including preeminently air power. It's sort of amusing to imagine Talmudic enthusiasts discerning the hand of God, His will that the land of Israel belong to the Jews, in the activities of such men as Ariel Sharon and Moshe Dayan. Probably the religious scholars with heads full of messianic dreams have considered from every theological angle why God should have acted with so much more efficiency against the Arabs than He did against the Nazis. Sharon and Dayan might point out that the Nazis had a better army, and a better air force.
3. Whom the gods would defeat they first permit to "win" a war.
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