In November 1969, Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban gave an interview to the German magazine Der Spiegel, and there made a statement that has gone down in history. Reduced to a sexy sound bite, however, his actual words have long been forgotten.
According to friend and foe alike, Eban ostensibly referred to the 1967 borders (from which Israel was forced to fight for its survival in the Six-Day War) as the “Auschwitz borders.”
The Right regularly refers to this phrase to illustrate that even someone as dovish as Eban understood the importance of maintaining control over the territory acquired by Israel in its victory in the war to annihilate the Jewish state.
The Left accuses the Right of enlisting Eban for a cynical purpose: to bolster its political opposition to territorial withdrawals.
And the Arabs claim that the intention of Israelis who invoke Eban is to call the Palestinians Nazis.
In honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day, which begins Sunday evening, let us review what Eban actually told his German interviewer nearly 45 years ago:
“We have openly said that the map will never again be the same as on June 4, 1967,” he said. “For us, this is a matter of security and of principles. The June map is for us equivalent to insecurity and danger. I do not exaggerate when I say that it has for us something of a memory of Auschwitz. We shudder when we think of what would have awaited us in the circumstances of June 1967 if we had been defeated; with Syrians on the mountain and we in the valley, with the Jordanian army in sight of the sea, with the Egyptians who hold our throat in their hands in Gaza. This is a situation which will never be repeated in history.”
Eban was not equating Israel’s Arab enemies with the Nazis (though the historic bond between them would have warranted it). Rather, he was stressing the genuine peril that would have befallen Israel in the event of victory on the part of those whose express goal was to “push the Jews into the sea.”
Decades later, this objective is still the same. The only difference now is that terrorism against civilians — coupled with a concerted campaign to enlist fellow travelers and useful idiots in the West to delegitimize the entire Zionist enterprise — has replaced the conventional battlefield. And a key sponsor of this activity is a nuclearizing Islamic Republic of Iran.