The Six Days War shaped the next 50 years of world history
National Post, 6 June 2017
Before 1967, Jews and Israel were not only history’s underdog, but its persecuted victim. After 1967, Israel was strong. It began then to lose the international support of the global left, champion of the weak and afflicted. Progressive politics now agitates to delegitimize Israel as a 21st-century apartheid state.
Our world was significantly shaped 50 years ago this week by war in the promised land. Six days changed the Middle East; a week changed the world.
World Jewry looks back a hundred years to the Balfour Declaration of 1917, indicating that a Jewish homeland in Zion might well emerge from the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. It would be another 30 years — and the intervening horror of the Shoah — before the United Nations would vote in 1947 to replace the British Mandate in Palestine with two states, one Jewish and another Arab. The Jews accepted it, the Arabs did not.
War followed in 1948 and while the new State of Israel survived, the ceasefire left it strategically precarious, with Syrians on the Sea of Galilee in the north, Jordan controlling the West Bank just miles from Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem divided, with the Old City in the hands of Jordan.
The Six Day War of 1967 changed all that. The Middle East today is shaped more by 1967 than 1947 or 1917.
Read more at the National Post:
http://nationalpost.com/opinion/father-raymond-j-de-souza-the-six-days-war-shaped-the-next-50-years-of-world-history