Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

What Bibi wants to do in the West Bank is not annexation

Fifty-three years ago today, Israel was fighting for its survival. In a larger sense, that doesn’t make it all that different from any day in the preceding 19 years or the 53 that have followed. The Six-Day War was different, however, because it not only saw the tiny nation’s improbable victory over three Arab powers bent on its destruction, it returned vast swathes of the Land of Israel to Jewish custodianship. Two thousand years of history had been overturned in less than a week.

The legacy of this war is still debated today, because, in the words of Yossi Klein Halevi, victory ‘turned Israel into… history’s most improbable occupier’. Now we are told Israel is becoming an apartheid state — we’ve been told this for decades — because Benjamin Netanyahu is preparing to ‘annex the West Bank’. The UK’s Middle East Minister James Cleverly has denounced ‘annexation which we have consistently said we oppose — and which could be detrimental to a two-state solution’.

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