Forty Years after the War
of June 1967

“Peace comes with pain and strength.”
Yitzhak Rabin

On 5 June 2007, the fortieth anniversary of the Six Day War and the Israeli
occupation of Palestine, the Kay Spiritual Life Center hosted  “Forty Years
after the War of June 1967: Is Israeli-Palestinian Peace Possible?” on the
campus of American University in Washington, DC. This panel featured
Yuval Rabin (son of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin; governing board,
the Rabin Center), Amjad Atallah (president, Strategic Assessments Initia-
tive), Aaron David Miller (public policy scholar, the Woodrow Wilson
Center), and Ziad Asali (president, American Task Force on Palestine; panel
chair). 

Rabin opened by describing the Six Day War as “a war of our existence.”
He discussed the importance of the Camp David, Oslo, and other negotia-
tions and then talked about Israel’s 1967 victory. After stating that both sides
in this continued conflict have faced hardship, he also mentioned the lack of
knowledge involving certain issues. 

Atallah explained how Americans are bogged down with this conflict’s
technicalities, such as the number of checkpoints, which causes them to neg-
lect the bigger picture. He pointed out that on 29 November 1947, the United
Nations General Assembly passed a resolution (33 to 13) recommending that
Palestine be partitioned into two states, with over half of the land going to the
Jews and the rest going to the Palestinians. By May 1948, according to the
United Nations and the State Department, 350,000 Palestinians had been
expelled from their homes. The Arab states declared war on Israel and, out-
numbered and under-equipped, 400,000 more Palestinians were expelled. At
the time, the Israelis accepted partition and the Arabs rejected the plan. He
explained that the Israelis rushed to the Sinai Peninsula and the Jordan river
and fully understood the rules of diplomacy. This resulted in Jordan taking
over what is now the West Bank. In the course of the Six Day War, another
600,000 Palestinians were displaced, some for the second time. 

He mentioned that Israeli roadmaps do not include Palestinian towns,
many of which are no more than “impoverished Palestinian ghettos,” so that
“you will never know when Israel ends and the West Bank begins.” Even as
the Palestinians and the Arabs opposed Israel’s right to exist, by the end of

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1974 the PLO’s goal was partition. However, its leaders did not make this
public until 1988. In 1993, the PLO agreed to transform itself into a nation-
al liberation struggle. He added that every Arab nation today recognizes
Israel’s right to exist and that a 2006 poll in Arab states, and another one con-
ducted among Arab Americans and American Jews, showed that an over-
whelming majority of Arabs would support agreements with Israel that
allowed a two-state solution. 

Emphasizing that partition and integration could resolve this conflict, he
stated that: “The United States is the sole capital that can tip the balance in
either direction,” and thus every future American administration will have to
deal with how this continuing situation affects our national security interests.
He explained the necessity and crucial elements of resources and of a popu-
lation willing to make sacrifices, as well as the importance of leadership:
“No people nowhere, not Jews, not Arabs, not Palestinians, not black, not
white, [there is] nowhere in history where people have been oppressed and
they did not resist.”

Atallah did not talk about the consequences of the occupation. He felt
that what is needed on this anniversary is the core issue of whether we are
going to partition or integrate Palestine and Israel. Either way, it has to be a
“conscious choice.”

Miller, the final speaker, discussed the after-effects of war: “Wars create
pain in the prospects of gain, they create incentives and disincentives. … In
a conflict like the Arab-Israeli conflict, which evolved in stages over time
and is most likely to be resolved in stages over time, a certain measure of
conflict and violence is virtually inevitable.” He talked about how the war
has created opportunities and incentives for mass settlements and a new Pal-
estinian image and identity; accelerated Israeli’s centrality in the United
States’ cold war plan; demolished the Arabs’ secularist, Marxist, and social-
ist ideologies; and exposed pan-Arabism’s weakness. 

But most importantly, Miller added, the war failed to create a serious
opportunity for peace-making. It took another and more devastating war in
1973 to create enough pain and prospects for gain for serious peace-making
at Camp David in 1979. Miller stated: “People take risks only when there are
prospects for gain or they are motivated by disincentives for pain.” He closed
by stressing the importance of American leadership and remarked that a sus-
tainable peace plan would be impossible without it, for American leadership
and its relationship with both sides are the keys to ending this conflict. 

Panel chair Asali asked: “Is it possible to have a viable Palestinian state,
and can it be done?” and then opened the floor for questions. The first ques-

Conference, Symposium, and Panel Reports 149



tion concerned the right of return; the response was that it was unlikely.
Another person asked Atallah about Iran and the region’s political tensions.
Atallah responded by stating that the United States is already bogged down
in two wars and that the State Department cannot engage in a third conflict
simultaneously. Adding that the United States is a superpower, the most pow-
erful nation today, he stated: “It’s unforgivable that we don’t yet have an insti-
tutionalized diplomatic machine that can deal with multiple conflicts at the
same time and recognize the connections between them.” 

Other questions focused on 1967 borders, settlements, and Hamas, which
Miller described as “a permanent reality in Palestinian politics and gover-
nance.” Another attendee made a lengthy comment about Israel being the
region’s only democracy and continued to express his grief in a very unex-
pected and passionate manner as he held up a photo of his relative, who is
imprisoned in Jordan. It was a clear indication that the entire region, includ-
ing Israel, is still undergoing major dilemmas in politics and peace, not to
mention socioeconomic conditions, and that this is most likely to remain
unresolved and unanswered for another forty years. 

Soha Srour
AJISS Assistant Editor

Herndon, Virginia

150 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 24:4