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DORE GOLD:
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Operation Justice Recovered
 Thirty-five years ago when Israeli forces entered the West Bank in a war of self-defense, Israeli society had an overwhelming sense that justice was on its side.
Israel had warned Jordan, even after its artillery in the West Bank opened fire on Israeli cities, not to join the military adventurism of Egypt, which was massing its forces in Sinai and blockading Israeli shipping in the Gulf of Eilat, in a blatant act of war.
When Israel neutralized the Jordanian attack and liberated the Old City of Jerusalem, it re-established the right of Jews and members of all faiths to return to their ancient holy sites, which previously had been desecrated during the years of Jordanian rule.
While Israelis remembered conducting a just war in 1967, they lost their sense of moral certitude in subsequent years. In the inevitable political polarization that afflicts every democracy facing a protracted conflict, many Israelis forgot their own just claims: that they had repeatedly been the target of unprovoked attacks and were entitled to new defensible borders, in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 242, which were different from the fragile armistice lines that had invited past aggression.
Under the 1993 Oslo Agreement, Israel withdrew its military government over 98 percent of the Palestinian population in the disputed territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip establishing instead a Palestinian regime and thereby undercut the moral claim by the Palestinians and their advocates that Israel forcibly occupied another people.
Once the Barak government offered Yasser Arafat statehood and was flatly turned down with a widespread attack on Israelšs civilian population, the moral clarity of the 1967 Six Day War was re-established for the vast majority of Israelis.
Arafat miscalculated, believing that Israelšs unilateral retreat from Lebanon could be replicated in the West Bank and Gaza, without binding him to renounce further Palestinian claims inside of Israel proper. His error was the same as other authoritarian leaders who see democratic debate as weakness and who fail to understand that democratic societies energized with a strong inner-conviction in the justice of their cause, cannot be broken.
Dore Gold is a former ambassador to the United Nations,
an adviser to the Sharon government and heads the Jerusalem
Center for Public Affairs.
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