The Six Day War of 1967 means a before and an after in the history of the State of Israel. The troops led by Moshe Dayan defeated the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan and altered the borders drawn and approved by the UN in 1948. Golda Meir explains in her memoirs that on the third day of the war she was able to go at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, mixed with the soldiers with rifles on their backs, and praying in front of the wall of the Solomonic temple after inserting a piece of paper into a crack in the stones on which he wrote the word shalom (peace) .
Meir was a Ukrainian Jew who arrived in Palestine in 1921 with Zionist, secular and social democratic ideas to build a State in which Jews would find safety after the horrors of the Holocaust and the secular persecutions in all the countries of Europe. That June of 1967 the Jews returned to the wall to which they could not go because the old city of Jerusalem belonged to the Arabs.
That glorious military victory was more bitter than sweet and has been the source of the problems that have led to the horrors of the war now raging in Gaza between Israeli troops and Hamas terrorists, who on October 7 entered in Israel and perpetrated a massacre of more than 1,400 Jews. The Netanyahu government has responded with disproportionate bombings affecting hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who are not all from Hamas. The foreseeable land invasion of Gaza will be a military mistake and the loss of moral authority and the international narrative that will turn against the Netanyahu Government.
There are two problems that start from that victorious war of 1967. The first is that there are two peoples who dispute the same territory with different historical-emotional reasons and the second is the economic, social and political inequality between Israel and the Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank – almost half the population -. These do not have a State that shelters them and are second-class citizens watched over by Israel, which is building new settlements in the West Bank.
The conflict will not be resolved with the indiscriminate violence that affects the most vulnerable of the two peoples. The two states, provided for in the Oslo agreements, is the most rational political way to avoid living in a permanent state of hatred.
