Yossi Klein Halevi

A Jubilee For Our Political Certainties

The debate over the future of the liberated/occupied/administered territories began in the summer of 1967, immediately after the Six-Day War. It was, initially, an argument among writers, in part a linguistic debate over how to refer to the lands Israel had just won. Natan Alterman, the beloved poet long identified with Labor Zionism, advocated annexing the “liberated territories,” as he called them, insisting that the Jewish people couldn’t be an occupier in its own land, and that returning to nine-mile-wide borders would be an act of national suicide. A young novelist named Amos Oz implicitly challenged Alterman: Writing in Davar, the Labor Party’s newspaper, Oz insisted that only people, not land, could be liberated, and that occupation invariably ended badly for the occupier.