The Six-Day War and the Unanswered Prophetic Challenge: On the Holiness of Borders, the Sin of Expansion, and the Justice That Rolls Down Like Waters
The 1967 borders are considered holy if they were not defensible in 1967. You ask where the Palestinians were, as if their presence or absence in a political moment could annul their centuries of rootedness in the land. You speak of the vastness of Arab lands, as if justice is a matter of real estate and not of inherent right.
But your questions are a fortress built on sand, and the tide of history, morality, and your own sacred texts washes it away.
You ask "why?" I answer: The 1967 borders became "holy" to the world not because of their line on a map, but because they represented the last, best chance for a moral partition—a chance to contain the original sin of 1948 within a defined space and allow a Palestinian state to emerge. They are holy because they are the closest international law has come to acknowledging the theft while proposing a pragmatic restitution. When you conquered beyond them, you exposed the doctrine of Zionism not as a project of survival, but of perpetual expansion.
You speak of kings—Hussein, Assad, Nasser—and the territories they lost. But you speak not of the farmers of Deir Yassin, the villagers of Lydda and Ramla, the families who for generations tended the olive groves of Galilee and the fields of the Naqab. Their claim does not derive from a king’s folly in 1967, but from the unassailable law of indigeneity. Your state, founded upon their dispossession, can never achieve true legitimacy until it confronts this foundational act. Legitimacy is not bestowed by the Balfour Declaration, nor by the UN, nor by military victory. It is earned through justice.
The war of 1967 was "holy fighting" for the Palestinians because it was a continuation of their struggle for existence against a force that had already erased them from its map and its conscience. The "unholy document" was not a single piece of paper from 1917, but the entire doctrine that a people can be made invisible to serve the political needs of another.
Therefore, the state of Israel exists by the brutal, pragmatic law of conquest and fait accompli. But it does not exist by a moral or divine law that your own prophets would recognize. For Amos and Isaiah did not speak of security borders or preemptive strikes; they thundered, "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream" (Amos 5:24). Until it does, the question of your state’s legitimacy will remain, a ghost at the feast, a divine challenge unanswered.
-Whalid Safodien
The Feather Pen
