Pyrrhic Victory?

The Six Day War began 40 years ago today. It was Israel’s complete and total humiliation of Palestine and the Jewish State’s Arab neighbors— Egypt, Jordan, and Syria.

PBS had a good look at the war last night. Israel knew almost from the beginning that its victory was too good to last. And so it has proven to be. The Middle East presents a complex picture. But the heart of its problem is the humiliation Arabs received at Israel’s hands in 1967. It lead directly to Arab terrorism we can see in Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan’s assassination of Robert Kennedy exactly a year later, and that year’s first aircraft hijacking, when Palestinian militants forced an El Al flight to Algiers and held it for 40 days.

The violence has never stopped since. There has been progress, but perhaps less than if Israel’s 1967 victory had not been so lopsided. The secular states of Egypt and Jordan survived, but do not enjoy bright futures today. As for Israel. . .