Secret Documents Show Israel’s Occupation Dilemmas Started Hours After Six-Day War
Israeli troops celebrating their victory in the Six Day War. Image by Getty Images
Within days of capturing East Jerusalem and the West Bank in the 1967 Middle East war, Israel was examining options about their future ranging from Jewish settlement-building to the creation of a Palestinian state.
As the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the war nears on June 5, recently unearthed documents detailing the post-war legal and diplomatic debate have a familiar ring, and underline how little progress has been made towards resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Akevot, an Israeli NGO researching the conflict, has spent thousands of hours over two years gaining access to declassified, often dog-eared, documents and building a digital record of them.
The group’s aim in obtaining the files is to ensure that primary sources of conflict decision-making remain accessible to researchers, diplomats, journalists and the wider public.
“One of the things we realized early on was that so many of the policies related to current day Israeli government activities in the occupied territories have roots going back to the very first year of occupation,” said Lior Yavne, founder and director of Akevot.
“Policies that were envisaged very early on, 1967 or 1968, serve government policies to this day.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
