Learning the lessons of the Six-Day War

“These are debating points”, said the professor, who himself fought in the 1967 war as a 19-year-old conscript. They were not grounded in reality, he maintained, adding that Israel should change its policy “because it is not good for Israel, not because the rest of the world doesn’t like it”.

To this end, he said, “Israel cannot remain the state of the Jewish people if it remains in occupation of the Palestinians”. But he did not advocate unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank in the same way in which it had withdrawn from Gaza.

Instead, Professor Susser, withdrawal should be “slow and over the next five to 10 years, to create a new reality”.

He was not confident that a two-state solution would emerge from direct negotiations with the Palestinians, but urged that Israel should, nevertheless, pursue this path because it was in Israel’s own interests.

Professor Susser was realistic about Israel’s options. “If we had 15 million citizens in Israel, we could do something different. As it is, we have eight million and there are limits to what we can do. There are not enough of us — and one million Israelis have left the country. All the wars we have had have not caused Israel the damage that the one million who have left have caused.”

But in a typically humorous touch, Professor Susser concluded: “Whining is not a strategy”. Israel had to deal with what was, and not what it wished, he said.