The anniversary of the Six Day War

On the Palestinian side, there was this reckoning, the New York Times reports:

The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, said Tuesday that the Palestinians were on the brink of civil war and that their internal battles were as dangerous to their welfare as Israeli occupation has been, if not more so.

Mr. Abbas was speaking in a televised address to mark the 40th anniversary of the start of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, which ended in a stunning military victory for Israel and a sobering defeat for the Arab armies, and began Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

And on the Israeli side:

Israeli peace activists protested against the four decades of occupation in Hebron, a tense and conservative Palestinian city with a biblical past, and tried to drown out a small counterdemonstration of local Jewish settlers with their chants. . .

Fatah and the Israeli center and left are in favor of ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by means of a negotiated two-state solution. The Israeli nationalist right wing opposes giving up territory won in 1967, while Hamas seeks Israel’s destruction.

Hebron is of particular significance to religious Jews as the burial place of the biblical patriarchs. It is also the only Palestinian city with a Jewish settlement at its heart, with about 500 Jews and an additional 250 transient yeshiva students living amid 160,000 Palestinian residents. About 7,000 Jews live in the settlement of Kiryat Arba, adjacent to Hebron.

Close to 300 Israeli anti-occupation protesters from the Peace Now movement arrived here on Tuesday morning in bulletproof buses and an army escort. They shouted “Hebron settlers, a bone in the throat,” while about 30 settlers demonstrated behind police barricades at the other end of the lot. Scores of police officers and security forces separated the two groups.

David Wilder, a spokesman for the Jewish community of Hebron, called the return of Jews to Hebron a “miracle” and termed the Peace Now demonstration a “desecration.”

“They are coming and saying it would have been preferable if we had lost the war,” he said, adding that “it was a war of survival.”