Middle East: Coping with Victory

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Now that the war is over, the trouble begins.

— General Moshe Dayan

As the lights went on again from Dan to Elath, Israel began to cope with the enormous problems of victory. One was what to do with all the newly conquered territory — what to keep for reasons of security or sentiment, what to trade off for reasons of economics or politics. Though the Israelis have no intention of budging now, and certainly would be hard to dislodge by any means, no sober Israeli believed that it would be good for his nation to hold all the new lands over the long run.

Fattening the Waistline. Sinai is a worthless desert, Gaza an economic sinkhole. To try to integrate the 1,330,000 Arabs in all the occupied lands would be costly and perhaps dangerous.* What then did Israel want? For simple security, it wanted at least a buffer strip on the rocky heights of Syria and a slice of West Jordan to fatten out its own narrow waistline. It also wanted free passage through Aqaba, perhaps guaranteed by an Israeli garrison at Sharm el Shiekh.

Then there was Jerusalem. For reasons deeper than strategy or security, Jerusalem is the one Israeli prize that is not negotiable. Any government that returned Old Jerusalem to Jordan would surely collapse. Already the Israelis have razed the bunkers and blockhouses dividing the city's two sectors, and bulldozers have leveled Arab huts to open a broad square before the Wailing Wall —all that remains of the Second Temple, destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70. Last week, for the festival of Shavouth, which commemorates the handing down of the Law to Moses, the Old City was opened for the first time in 19 years to ordinary Israelis. By day's end, 200,000 thronged to see the Wall and pray at it.

Feeding the Poor. Israel's most crucial immediate problem was to feed, find jobs for and govern the Arabs in the occupied territories. The problem was least difficult where people were fewest—in the wastes of Sinai and the heights of Syria. Two-thirds of the inhabitants had trekked from Syria's captured sectors to the safety of Damascus. The city of El Quneitra (pop. 10,000) was a ghost town, its shops shuttered, its deserted streets patrolled by Israelis on house-to-house searches for caches of arms and ammunition. The hills echoed/with explosions as Israeli sappers systematically destroyed the miniature Maginot line from which the Syrians had shelled kibbutzim across the Sea of Galilee. On the other side, kibbutz children slept in their own beds instead of underground shelters for the first time in a week.