into his messianic prophecy. This formulated into NeoZionism, a right-wing, nationalistic and religious ideology which promotes the concept of “Greater Israel” and the settlement of Palestinian territories. Greater Israel is a highly controversial irredentist concept which has several biblical and political meanings, but generally refers to an imprecise portion of land in the Levant called the “Land of Israel,” which was promised to the Jews by God in the Torah. Greater Israel has been evoked by Zionists over the years in different contexts, but generally it has been embraced as an actual political goal by right-wing factions, such as the religious Zionists.25 In one his most famous speeches given a few weeks before the war, Zvi Yehuda protested against the 1947 UN Partition Plan – a UN plan which divided the territory of Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state, and a Special International Regime for the city of Jerusalem26 – on the basis that it granted portions of the land to the Arabs, that according to Jewish texts, was promised entirely to the Jews: “And where is our Hebron?...And where is our Shechem?….Where is Lord’s land? Can we sacrifice a single millimeter of it? God forbid!”27 The UN Partition Plan was never implemented, because soon after it was adopted into a Resolution in the UN General Assembly, a war between Jews and Arabs of Palestine broke out. The overall shift towards the right in Israeli politics could be felt as early as the first meeting of the Knesset after the war, demonstrated by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol’s speech: “Jerusalem is united. For the first time since the establishment of the state Jews can pray at the Western Wall, the relic of our Temple and our historic past.”28 Even for many secular Israelis and Jews in the diaspora who were anxious about the fate of the Jewish State in a hostile region, the victory was interpreted as divine redemption, and led to increased national solidarity through a return to traditional Jewish values and symbols.29 Renewed interest in the teachings of the Cook in the aftermath of the Six-Day War resulted in the formation of the Gush Emunim by their followers, a religious Right-wing group which advocated for the Jewish settlement of the Occupied Territories as a way of hastening the Messianic Age.30 The Gush constructed several illegal settlements, starting with Kedumim in the West Bank, near the Palestinian city of Nablus (Shechem in Hebrew) in 1975.31 Although the Gush no longer exists as an institution, its ideology has left a permanent legacy on Israeli society and Israeli-Palestinian conflict.32 The presence and ongoing expansion of existing settlements, and the construction of new outposts is a severe obstacle in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process which has been criticized by Palestinians, third parties
such as the UN and the European Union, and even many Israelis.33 However, the general right-ward shift which Israeli politics has experienced ever since the election of Menachem Begin and his Likud Party in 1977, has made the Israeli political establishment more complacent about the illegal settlements, hence why little is done to stop them.34 One of the main international consequences of the Six-Day War was that it triggered the decline of the Arab nationalism, amplified by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Arab nationalism is an ideology that asserts the unity of the indigenous inhabitants of the Arab world, based on a common language, history, and culture grounded in an Islamic past.35 Nasserism and Syria’s Ba’athism were the two main sects of Arab nationalism, and both espoused a syncretism between nationalism and socialism as the path forward for the Arab world. This came with the goal of establishing a United Arab Republic (UAR) between Egypt and Syria, as the first step towards a much larger pan-Arab state.36 However, the unity between Egypt and Syria was ultimately shattered when national loyalties began to supersede the pan-Arab goals of the UAR, and both countries began accusing one another of trying to dominate the political union with their individual nation’s interest.37 Nevertheless, all Arab nationalists believed that the major obstacle preventing transnational unity amongst them was Western imperial intervention in their affairs following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and they saw Israel as an outpost of Western influence in the region. This sentiment is evident in a speech given by Nasser in May 1967: “The circumstances through which we are now passing are in fact difficult ones because we are not only confronting Israel but also those who are behind Israel...the West, which created Israel and which despised us Arabs and which ignored us before and since 1948.”38 Before the war, Nasser had made exaggerated claims about the military capacities of Egypt and its allies, and he was confident about an Arab victory due to his triumph in the Suez Crisis: “Today, some eleven years after 1956, I say such things because I am confident. I know what we have here in Egypt and what Syria has...This is Arab power. This is the true resurrection of the Arab nation.”39 However, the defeat in the Six-Day War completely caught Arab nations off-guard and destroyed the credibility of Arab nationalism as a whole. The defeat also gave a pretext to the domestic opposition to Nasser — namely the ultraconservative Islamist Muslim Brotherhood — an excuse to attack him.40 In a way, the war gave Islamists across the Arab world a 74
