May 28, 2007
The Six-Day War, 40 Years Later Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:20 PM EST Next month will mark the fortieth anniversary of the Six-Day War between Israel and several of its Arab neighbors. That brief but decisive conflict, which saw the Jewish state capture east Jerusalem from Jordan, the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria, redrew the borders of the Middle East and established the framework for much of the region’s chronic instability over the four ensuing decades. Though subsequent arrangements resulted in the return of the Sinai Peninsula and a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from (and Palestinian autonomy in) Gaza, the war’s legacy continues to form the backdrop against which Arab and Israeli politics operate. It’s long been established lore that the Six-Day War encouraged American Jews to reconsider their liberalism on domestic and foreign policy. According to the standard narrative, American Jews were stunned to see many erstwhile allies in the black civil rights movement support the Arab cause in 1967; feeling resurgent ethnic pride in Israel, they not only repudiated the agenda favored by their onetime friends in the civil rights struggle—namely, an expanded welfare state and increased opportunities for African-Americans—but also rejected the liberal universalism that had been ingrained in modern Jewish culture in favor of a more “particularist” strain of Jewish pride and power. It didn’t help that many prominent Jews claimed that the war changed their fundamental outlook. “Has the Six-Day War changed my Weltanschauung,” Elie Wiesel asked rhetorically in 1968. “I would go even further and say that the change was total, for it involved my very being both as a person and as a Jew.” But the standard narrative on American Jews and the Six-Day War is wrong. Far from repudiating the politics of Great Society liberalism, the main Jewish “defense” agencies—the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council—as well as local Jewish federations and synagogues continued throughout the 1970s to apply standard liberal logic to the problems facing their communities. Despite breaking with their civil rights allies over the issue of affirmative action in high education, something that did not drive a wedge between some Jewish and black organizations until the late 1970s, most Jewish organizations remained steadfast in their support of more compensatory spending on antipoverty, educational, and infrastructural spending. Prominent Jewish neoconservatives may have been in the process of questioning the efficacy of state intervention in social and economic affairs, but most Jewish community leaders were not. Moreover, on a grassroots level Jews continued to identify as liberal Democrats. Exit polls in 1968 indicated that 87 percent of New York City’s Jews voted for the Democrat Hubert Humphrey, down only slightly from 1964 totals, when 92 percent supported Lyndon Johnson. Four years later, when Richard Nixon ran for a second term, The New York Times reported that the President “overwhelmed [George] McGovern in areas of predominantly Roman Catholic voters,” while Jews continued to vote Democratic but in somewhat diminished numbers. Exit polls suggested that McGovern won 66 percent of the Jewish vote nationally but a whopping 85 percent among New York City Jews. By the early 1970s half of all Jews still considered themselves “liberals” and another 27 percent “moderates,” compared with just 13 percent of Catholics who identified as “liberals.” The flawed 1967 narrative has present-day implications. Those on the extreme left and extreme right continue to blame neoconservative Jews for America’s problems in the Middle East, with the former tending to claim that America’s support for Israel has cost it its moral capital in the region, and the latter insisting that the Iraq War was initiated for, by, and at the behest of Jewish necons. What both sides share is a dangerous tendency to see a powerful neoconservative Jewish lobby pulling the strings and calling the tune. But this has never been the case. Neoconservative Jews are few in number and do not enjoy the backing of the larger American Jewish community, which continues to support liberal and even dovish Democrats in greater proportion than does any other ethno-religion or racial group except African-Americans. If Karl Rove can do anything right, it is surely counting votes. In this sense, the Six-Day War did more than redraw geopolitical boundaries in the Middle East. It laid the foundation of an inaccurate but still resonant charge that blames American Jews for so many of the world’s woes, even as it fundamentally misreads American Jewish political culture.
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