The wide, and ugly, repercussions of June 5

June 5 represents to the Arabs a humiliating military defeat when great swathes of territory from Egypt, Syria and Jordan were occupied by the Israeli army.

But there is another dimension to the fifth of June: It was the genesis for a radical Arab awakening that exposed the futility of political regimes, shattered their camouflage of legitimacy, and cornered presidents and chiefs-of-staff to be questioned by militant army officers.

It was no surprise that following the 1967 war, three coups d’état toppled regimes in many Arab capitals, including Libya. Syria, Yemen and Algeria underwent the tumultuous rebirth of a different political compass.

The military shock of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war reverberated as well among major political parties. The Baath Party lost its conservative leadership to a new angry generation of younger revolutionaries in both Iraq and Syria.

The Communist Parties in the region had to undergo the same upheaval when the Trotskyite anarchists held the helm in Aden and Lebanon.

The same metamorphosis controlled the Qawmi Arab National movement of George Habash, Nayef Hawatmeh and Constantine Zureiq.

But the greatest impact of that war was on the Islamic movement whose pacifist ideology was revolutionised to adhere to a radical interpretation of the Koran and the concept of jihad.

University lecturers at Jordan Sharia colleges abandoned their academic career and founded military bases along the Jordan River.

Thousands of frustrated displaced Palestinians joined some of those university professors, believing that regular armies cannot achieve what guerrillas can in an irregular warfare.

Revolutionary Islam is a phrase coined by Abdullah Azzam, a university lecturer who founded his own military camp along the Jordan River, then moved to Kabul to be the ideological mentor of Osama Bin Laden.

Al Qaeda, Daesh and all Jihadi Salafist subterranean cells venerate Azzam as their main ideologue.

It was June 5 that electrified Azzam into issuing an Islamic edict allowing his followers to commit what was termed positive counteraction of sabotage, slaying and target assassination.

The horrendous crimes committed now in Iraq’s Mosul and Syria’s Raqaa are just some minor manifestations of a distorted ideology that the fateful events of June 5 helped impregnate the Islamic line of thought.

It is that fifth of June that allows, in the current civil war in Syrian, atrocious massacres under the guise of Islam.

Forty-eight years passed since 1967, and the evil tree planted by Israeli occupation of Arab land is still spreading its poison.