June 5, 1967, was supposed to be our last defeat. It was meant to awaken the dormant veins of renaissance within us and compel us to entrust our destinies to people of wisdom and knowledge. It was supposed to mark our departure from the age of empty rhetoric, hollow slogans, and meaningless verbal excesses. Yet, in the name of the Naksa (the Setback), successive generations of authoritarianism descended upon the Arab world.
The wars with Israel gradually transformed into wars among Arabs themselves. Muammar Gaddafi ruled Libya for forty-two years. Saddam Hussein concluded that Arab unity required a war against Iran that would claim a million lives. Hafez al-Assad believed that restoring Arab order meant deploying the Syrian army throughout Lebanon. The Palestine Liberation Organization decided that the road to Jerusalem passed through the mountains of Sannine.
Sudan moved from the era of the poet-statesman Muhammad Ahmad Mahjoub to that of Colonel Jaafar Nimeiry. Anwar Sadat was assassinated on the platform commemorating the October 6 victory.
The true setback was not what happened in June 1967. It was what Arabs subsequently did to one another.
The battles of Palestine were fought in the heart of Beirut. Ariel Sharon reached the Presidential Palace in Baabda while Muammar Gaddafi was busy confronting the world in defense of his colorful tent in New York. Gallows were erected in Libyan universities and in the squares of Baghdad. Abdul Salam Arif and Abdul Karim Qasim were killed while their comrades looked on.
The trials conducted by Mahdawi came to symbolize law and justice in the Arab world. The civil wars in Lebanon and Algeria each left approximately 150,000 dead. No one truly knows the number of victims in Amman, during Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait, or in Yemen’s fratricidal wars. Brothers, comrades, unity—and massacres.
In the 1967 defeat, Israel achieved success through surprise. In the Arab wars that followed, there was planning, ambush, and deception. There were agreements and treaties cast aside as worthless. There was persecution, imprisonment, and torment for intellectuals and politicians alike. There were exiles, refugees, and displaced people.
Lebanon’s schools have become overcrowded shelters for the displaced. Fifty-nine years after June 5, the region remains marked by peoples wronged by their rulers and lands wounded by those entrusted with their protection.
“The Arabs are merely a phenomenon of sound,” wrote Abdullah al-Qasemi, lamenting in despair.
Originally published in Asharq Al-Awsat.
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