From 1967 to 2024: Massed Arab Armies vs. Gaza’s Flipflop-Wearing Warriors

If Israel couldn’t win in six days, Israel should never have entered Gaza in the first place. A lesson I’m sure the Israeli command structure has learned but a little too late to do anything about it. Israel’s citizen army is stuck amid desert and rubble, going street by street, house by house, trying to find Gaza’s elusive resistance fighters, who remarkably always seem to find Israeli soldiers and tanks minutes before they decimate their ranks. Gaza has cost Israel dear, and the the multi-front conflict has stretched its military capabilities and resources to breaking point, a far cry from the victory of the Six Days War, which many Israelis are commemorating today.

 

Victorious Israeli soldiers after capturing the old city of Jerusalem from Jordanian forces, carrying a portrait of the kind upside down

 

 

The Six Day War, was arguably a classic and text book conflict in which superior tactics, careful planning and meticulous training won the day for the Israelis against greater numbers and a lot of table pounding bravado. Let’s give that generation of Israel’s soldiery their fair due, they planned and executed a perfect surprise attack, decimating the largest Arab air force at the time on the first day, taking out over 300 aircraft on the ground at multiple undefended airfields in Egypt. 

 

During that conflict, each Israeli aircraft and pilot made four sorties a day to their Arab counterparts’ one or two, impressive. Air superiority has always been Israel’s primary goal to secure in any conflict in gets involved in, it’s how it ensured ultimate success in 1967 in just six days, how it captured East Jerusalem and the West Bank and the Golan Heights and Gaza, in fact every success Israel has had up until October 7, 2023, was thanks to its success in 1967 and the mythology that grew around it.

 

The Camp David Peace Accords and following accords and normalization of relations with other Arab countries, Israel’s larger than life image in military and technical matters, all the myths, the legends about its security services, the stuff Arab children’s nightmares are made of, all of this began with a brilliantly successful war over 55 years ago. More than half a century has passed since then, and then on a fateful day in October last year everything changed.

 

Far be it for me to tempt fate, but if Israel’s loud mouthed politicians, who have squandered the hard won success of 67, continue with their threats and finger waging warnings to Lebanon, I would be forgiven if I don’t believe a word they say. I would also be forgiven if I were to compare them with our own Arab leaders of 1967, pounding the table with their fists, threatening vengeance, their poetry and bluster resounding till my parent’s generation thought they would reach Tel Aviv before too long. As it turned out, only their booming voices reached the enemy’s ears, and Israel was by that war’s end closer to Damascus than Arab armies were to Tel Aviv!

 

It is true that today Israel faces a two-front dilemma: where should it focus its attentions, Gaza or South Lebanon? And dare it goad Hezbollah into responding with even greater military vigor. Already Hezbollah’s unmanned aerial vehicles are finding great success skirting and avoiding Israeli air defenses, instead, anti-missile and anti-drone missiles are finding domestic targets to fall on top of, including Northern Palestine’s dense forests and rich agricultural lands, setting them ablaze, helped by unseasonably hot temperatures.

 

Any and all structures in Northern Galilee are possible targets, any structure an IDF soldier enters, civilian home or military outpost, becomes a legitimate military target, and it’s not as if Hezbollah weaponry is achieving little success, quite the contrary to the surprise of many I’m sure. The Hezb’s tactical superiority in responding to Israeli bombings of villages in south Lebanon and the Bekaa, is evident for all to see. Israel’s bombs may have a wider blast radius, but the real impact of Hezbollah missiles and drones lies in their psychological effect on Israeli soldiers and civilians alike. In a recent news report, it was said that Hezbollah’s Ridwan Brigade could take control of northern Palestine in just eight minutes. Imagine that.

 

In Gaza, a further 50,000 reservists are preparing to join their fellows on the front lines in Rafah. A small town with barely a handful of main roads and little infrastructure needs an extra 50,000 men to subdue it?! Those Gazans must be superhuman, or else their adversary is ill-prepared to meet them in a close quarters fight. The Gazan fighter fights for the lives of his family and for his land, his faith and its history and for his children, those martyred and those still alive, he fights with every part of his weakened body, half starving without a roof to call his own he still fights. What is the Israeli reservist fighting for? He’s fighting to get stay alive and survive long enough to go back home. Who do you think will win?

 

Let the politicians talk and debate the finer points of Israel’s surrender, because that is what this prisoner exchange deal is: to halt all military action and withdraw from the Gaza Strip, that’s no deal Israel would make willingly. Only a hair’s width from defeat would an Israeli government consider such a deal, and they certainly are there. Let the doubters doubt, let them laugh and ridicule at what I say, I can see for myself how things are playing out. As Israel failed to win in 2006, so it shall fail in 2024, but the consequences will be far graver for it.

 

I don’t dare think of the possibility of final victory, lest this time too it turns out to be another mirage, but the possibility is certainly there. Israel’s final collapse could happen unless her allies step in to help prop it up. Long term, as long as Israel continues to lose citizens to reverse migration (ex: those who migrated from the US to Israel are going back to the US today), as long as Israeli reservists continue to be called up risking their lives on the front lines of a war that means very little to them, Israel will find it difficult to recruit new citizens from among the Jews of the world. If Israel loses that, it loses its reason for being.

 

If mankind continues to use books of religions as serious guides to policy, then ultimate failure and tragic loss will ensue every time. Today, we mark a sad commemoration of a war that should never have happened and if it was to happen, then the Arab countries should have started it and surprised Israel in 1967 not the other way round. As it happened, Israel was quicker to take decisive action and the Arabs lost, but worst of all we were lumbered with 50 years of false assumptions and ill-conceived myths about an Israel that is in true fact weaker than a spider’s cobweb.