“It was Israel’s last war, and that means that you guys won’t have to fight in another war with the Arabs.” Mr. Arbel, our geography teacher sounded euphoric. He had just returned from the Sinai after doing his duty as a medic in what came to be known as the Six-Day War. He told the students who were about to enter their senior year at the Herzliya Hebrew High School (Gymnasium) in Tel Aviv that the military victory over the neighboring states of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in June 1967 ensured that Israelis would soon be arriving at the promised land of eternal peace. Israel would return the Sinai to Egypt and the Golan Heights to Syria in exchange for peace agreements with these countries, would help resolve the “refugee problem,” and would co-exist in harmony with the “inhabitants” of the “territories.” (The term “Palestinians” had yet to be integrated into the public discourse.)

When the boys and girls in our class joined the Israel Defense Forces in 1969, we would probably spend our scheduled two-and-half years of compulsory military service playing soccer, beach bumming, partying, and preparing ourselves for college. Perhaps military service could be cut down to two years, and we could escape from our provincial setting and do some traveling abroad. London’s Abbey Road and the hippie hangouts of Amsterdam were popular destinations for Israeli kids hoping to discover what the Summer of Love was all about. Indeed, Beatlemania was challenging Jerusalemania. “Jerusalem of Gold,” a song that celebrated the return to the Old City and the reunification of Western (Israeli) and Eastern (Palestinian) parts of Jerusalem was playing on the radio in the days after the occupation of the West Bank—or “the liberation of Judea and Samaria,” as many Israelis were starting to describe it. The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released on June 1, four days before the war started, and my friends and I were hoping to listen to “Lucy in the Sky of Diamonds” on Radio Luxembourg, which was broadcasting throughout the Middle East.

As students at the Herzliya Gymnasium, which was established in 1905 in Jaffa and moved in 1909 to the first Hebrew city of Tel Aviv—it was named in honor of Theodor Herzl, the Zionist movement’s founder—we took pride in the fact that our alumni included prime ministers and generals and paid tribute each year to graduates of the school, including many officers in elite combat units who had been killed during Israel’s wars and whose names were listed on a memorial wall in the school. In 1964, the year in which I entered Herzliya, the school had highlighted its contribution to Israel’s security by merging with the most prestigious boarding school for future military officers.

In a way, Mr. Arbel was promising us that our names wouldn’t be added to the school’s memorial wall. But that was only the subtext of his message, which suggested that we would be the first generation of Israelis to live in a postwar age of “normalcy.” We would no longer be segregated in a small and militarized Jewish ghetto and suffocated by pressures from a collectivist Zionist ideology that treated with disdain the pursuit of individual paths to happiness represented by westernized Tel Aviv and the Mediterranean coast of Israel, where a new form of secular Israeli-Hebrew identity had started to evolve.

Young Israelis frequenting cafés and boutiques in the city’s fashionable Dizengoff Street were denounced by Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, as the “Espresso Generation.” His government, like those of Pakistan and South Africa, barred the Beatles from performing in Israel. And the new generation was slammed by old-guard Zionist ideologues for their materialism and careerism, not to mention their hedonism and decadence, symbolized by the first discotheque and the first Chinese restaurant, which were opened in Tel Aviv in the mid 1960s. (Their owner was Mandy Rice-Davies, who had played a role in the British sex and political scandal known as the Profumo Affair before converting to Judaism and marrying an Israeli playboy.)

With peace supposedly around the corner of Dizengoff, the hope among my classmates was that ushering a post-ideological spirit into Israel would unleash a new era of political, economic, and cultural freedom. As the saying went, Israelis would be able to “catch America,” that is, to live like Americans.

But Mr. Arbel was wrong. When the graduates of Herzliya’s Class of 1969 joined the IDF, in the midst of the “war of attrition” with Egypt, compulsory military services was extended to three years. Then came the bloody 1973 Yom Kippur War, and we ended up contributing more names than any other class in the school’s history to the list on its memorial wall. It grew even longer as the two Palestinian Intifadahs and other regional conflicts crushed post-1967 hopes of Israeli normalization in the Middle East. They revived during the swinging days of globalization, when Israelis and Palestinians were expected to surf the Internet happily ever after, then shattered once again in the aftermath of the collapse of the Oslo Peace Process. By then, I had decided to “catch America” in New York City and then Washington, D.C., joining the long list of members of Herzliya’s Alumni Association of North America.

Tel Aviv, persuaded of a political philosophy that stressed the need to make Israel a “normal” state and rightful member the community of nations, continued to assert itself as Israelis and Palestinians took the first steps toward reconciliation in the 1990s. But those who had hoped to “catch America” in Israel by introducing a constitution, changing the relations between synagogue and state, integrating Arab citizens into Israeli life, and most importantly, creating the foundations for an independent Palestinian state that would live in peace with Israel—the necessary condition for Israeli integration into the Middle East—found themselves on the defensive, confronted by the powerful political force that emerged in the aftermath of the Six-Day War.

For most of the 1960s and ’70s, one of Tel Aviv’s most colorful figures, pilot and restaurant owner Abie Nathan, operated a seagoing “pirate” radio station, the Voice of Peace, which broadcast, in English, Hebrew, and Arabic, a mix of the latest rock music intersperced with calls for peace. (Nathan even flew in his private plane to Egypt twice, hoping to get a private audience with President Gamal Abdel Nasser.) The station, whose broadcasts opened each day with John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance,” was popular among young Israeli professionals and students who constituted the backbone of the Israeli peace camp. Its members supported giving up the occupied territories in exchange for peace. But in the hit-parade of Israel’s political ideologies, “Jerusalem of Gold”—with its lyrics, “We have returned to the water wells, the markets and the square / a shofar calls at the Temple Mount in the Old City”—overpowered “Give Peace a Chance.”

Indeed, the coalition of Greater Israel, symbolized by Jerusalem and the Jewish settlements that started to crop up in the West Bank after the Six-Day War, represented the new spirit of radical Zionism, led by right-wing nationalist parties that had been marginalized politically until 1967, Jewish settlers, and ultra-Orthodox militants. Their vision was that of an isolationist, unilateralist, and angry Jewish state in a neverending confrontation with the Palestinians, the Arab World, the Muslims, and the Gentiles. They expected Jews in America and elsewhere to immigrate—to make Aliya, that is, to ascend—to Israel, or at the minimum, provide it with political and financial support. This messianic and apocalyptic outlook was echoed in the popular Israeli slogan, “The whole world is against us,” which clashed with the dreams of Tel Aviv.

One of the central and certainly the most tragic figure in the post-1967 saga was the late Israeli military and political leader Yitzak Rabin. A proud member of Israel’s secular and Westernized Zionist elite, Rabin was born in Palestine (a “Sabra”) to a family of Eastern European Zionist pioneers, fought in Israel’s War of Independence and the 1956 Sinai Campaign, and was groomed by the country’s founding fathers to lead the new nation-state.

As the IDF’s chief of staff in the weeks leading up to the Six-Day War, it was Rabin’s retaliatory military strikes against Jordan and his threats to punish Syria for its alleged support of anti-Israeli terrorists that helped ignite the military tensions with Damascus that in turn set in motion the Middle East crisis that resulted in the third Arab-Israeli war. Syria’s ally, the Soviet Union, pressed Egypt’s Nasser to deploy troops in the Sinai as a way of deterring Israel. Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping and formed a military alliance with Jordan and Syria. Diplomatic efforts to resolve the crisis failed, and Israel launched a preemptive strike against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria.

Rabin’s conduct before, during, and after the war personified Israel’s mental state. His somewhat hysterical response to Syrian policies was followed by a nervous breakdown, which he suffered after Nasser moved his forces into Sinai and the young Israeli general became convinced that the Jewish state was facing another Holocaust. In reality, Israel’s powerful military machine, which the French helped to build, destroyed the air forces of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria and in six days occupied the Sinai, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights. On one day, Rabin’s psyche was consumed by the hellish specter of Auschwitz; on the next, he was daydreaming about re-establishing the ancient glory of the Kingdom of Israel.

A few weeks after the war ended, and as Israel was taking steps to consolidate its control over Jerusalem—“the city that joined as one”—Rabin accepted an honorary degree, bestowed on him by the Hebrew University. As the chief of staff stood on Mount Scopus, “in this ancient and splendid site that looks over our eternal capital,” he celebrated Israel’s military victory. The conquest of the Old City of Jerusalem, Rabin said, had stirred Israelis to “wells of emotions and spiritual elevation.” He also reiterated Israel’s commitment to “values of moral goodness, values of human goodness,” and to seeking peace with the Arabs.

Like most Israelis, Rabin, who later served as ambassador to Washington and as prime minister, would be torn between the nationalist and religious fervor, stirred up by prewar fear and postwar arrogance, and the continuing search for acceptance by the world, for a sense of normalcy. But the struggle between the two value systems, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and the political forces that attended each, was never really resolved, as power shifted back and forth between those favoring accommodation with the Palestinians and those fantasizing about Greater Israel.

Rabin’s election as Israel’s prime minister in 1992 represented a clear victory for the peace camp. He led the process of Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation that brought about the Oslo Accords and the peace agreement with Jordan. When he shook hands with Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat and Jordan’s King Hussein on the lawn of the White House, Rabin enjoyed the support of young Israelis hoping to transform their country into a modern center of high-tech and business success—the Singapore of the Middle East.

Thus on Nov. 28, 1993, following the signing of the Oslo Accords, Abie Nathan decided to sink his peace ship in international waters. The agreement validated the Voice of Peace’s mission, and on the final day of broadcasting, Abie instructed the presenters to play nonstop Beatles records.

Sitting on the White House lawn and watching Rabin shake hands with Arafat, it seemed to me as though the Six-Day War was finally ending. I imagined that at this moment a teacher was promising the members of Herzliya’s Class of 1993 that his students wouldn’t have to fight another war with the Arabs.

While the first Intifadah demonstrated to Rabin and other members of Israel’s elite the costs involved in continuing to maintain control over the territories he helped “liberate” in 1967, the demographic reality, in which the Arab Palestinians with their higher birth rate could outnumber Jews in Greater Israel by the first decade of the 21st century, suggested to them that Israel would have to make a choice between remaining a democratic state with a Jewish majority and becoming a binational state. At the same time, Republican and Democratic administrations in Washington provided Rabin and his political allies with incentives to withdraw to the pre-1967 borders as a way of securing Israel’s future.

“We tended to believe that the whole world is against us, that we have to live alone in a new ghetto of ours,” Rabin said after accepting an honorary degree from Bar-Ilan University five months before the Oslo Accords were signed. But now it was “an entirely different world, and I believe that our generation, the generation that experienced the two most important events, has to change,” he stressed. “No more fear, feelings that the whole world is against us, that we are besieged.” He called on Israelis to adopt a different attitude of openness and strength.

But two years later, as he was leaving a mass rally at the center of Tel Aviv in support of the Oslo process, Rabin was assassinated by Yigal Amir, a right-wing Orthodox Jewish extremist living in a settlement in the West Bank. Amir and the Greater Israel camp had won. The Oslo process came gradually to an end; the Palestinian-Israeli talks collapsed in 2000; the second Intifadah began; and in the post-9/11 mindset, the Israeli and American narratives that combined victimology with arrogance seemed to merge.

“The whole world is against us” mentality resonated among the neoconservative ideologues who hijacked U.S. foreign policy in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. It has since been transformed into the favored jingle of that alliance of messianic Zionists and American imperialists hoping that U.S. hegemony in the Middle East will help secure Greater Israel. As a result, the United States may end up reliving Israel’s post-1967 experience of a military victory turning into a political disaster.

But at least America will leave Iraq one day. Israelis will probably be stuck in the territories “liberated” in 1967 for many years to come, where the dream of a normal state could be buried forever. 
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Leon Hadar is a Cato Institute research fellow in foreign-policy studies and author, most recently, of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East.