The 1967 War is not the defining event of modern Middle Eastern history, writes Ghada Karmi*. A landmark, yes, but it cannot be the end "We have united Jerusalem!" shouted a triumphant Moshe Dayan, Israel's chief of staff, on 7 June. It was the third day of the 1967 War, when Jerusalem's Old City was taken from the Arabs. In the euphoria an Israeli paratrooper climbed to the top of the Dome of the Rock mosque and hoisted an Israeli flag above it, an act of indescribable sacrilege to Muslims. Israeli soldiers, and black-coated rabbis, swarmed all over Al-Haram Al-Sharif, the sacred compound, something hitherto unimaginable even in Arab nightmares. As I stared with disbelief at the TV images of wild Israeli jubilation that day long-buried memories of my early childhood stirred, when I had played with children in that same place, unaware of the blighted future that awaited us 30 years on. The 1967 War was a major turning point in the recent history of the Middle East, as the current effusion of reminiscences and analyses flooding newspapers and media programmes demonstrates. It was also a seminal moment in my own life. Growing up in a middle class England with a safe medical career ahead of me, I seldom thought of a past that had impelled my family to leave our home in Jerusalem in 1948 and still prevented us from returning. But the devastating effects of the war on my fellow Arabs, mercilessly displayed on screen before the world's scornful gaze, and the derision of my own colleagues against Arabs was a cruel shock and a harsh reminder that I, too, was an Arab. I still remember the humiliation of that time, my inability to explain or justify the failure of the Arab armies and how it spurred me to commit myself to the cause of Palestine from then on. The 1967 War re-shaped the map of the Middle East and UN Resolution 242 that flowed from it -- limiting the parameters of the conflict to an exchange of conquered Arab land for peace with Israel -- became the context of every peace proposal thereafter. "To understand what is happening in the Middle East today", asserted a senior BBC journalist this week, "one has to understand what happened in 1967", a view in accordance with the prevailing notion that the conflict dates from then and hence, it is only by resolving the issues arising from the war that a final peace can be secured. That has been the central motif of the peace process, a reading of history that Israel and its Western sponsors have propagated. By dealing with the symptoms they hope to avoid having to confront the cause of the conflict. But to really understand what brought us here, to the apparently endless conflict between Israel and the Arabs, the mutual bloodshed, the impasse in the peace process, even the kidnapping of the BBC's Gaza correspondent, Alan Johnstone, we cannot stop at 1967. That was but a station, albeit a dramatic one, on a route that started elsewhere. The creation of Israel in 1948, a state whose raison d'être was to establish a Jewish-only enclave in the heart of the Arab region, was the beginning. The subsequent wars, including that of 1967, the crises, turbulence and, latterly, terrorism, all stem from this original event. It could not have been otherwise: a state based on notions of racial exclusivity, that discriminated against non- Jews while insisting on living in their midst, could only be imposed by force and the resistance this aroused was inevitable. Thus, even if the 1967 Israeli occupation of Arab land were to be reversed -- on past evidence a most unlikely event -- it would solve only part of the problem. It would still leave the consequences of the original event in 1948 unresolved: the refugees, the division of land and resources to Israel's advantage and, most seriously, a state with an ideology that had originally led to the conflict would remain intact. Under such conditions there will be no end to the cycle of violence and revenge. There is only one way to resolve the tragedy of Israel/Palestine and bring peace to the region and that is to return to the roots of the problem, to return the country to the single unit it had been before 1948. While the place of my childhood can never return, its approximation so far as possible is better than the situation that exists today. In the single entity Israel/Palestine two peoples must live together without borders or partitions. It is the only solution capable of addressing the issues that have perpetuated this conflict: land, resources, settlements, Jerusalem and the refugees. It answers to the needs of common sense and justice without which there can be no durable peace. When that happens the 1967 War will take its rightful place as a landmark in Middle Eastern history and not its defining event. * The writer is author of Married to Another Man: Israel's Dilemma in Palestine , to be published by Pluto Press later this month.
