The Emergence of 'Extremism' by Rob Faure Walker

Author:Rob Faure Walker [Walker, Rob Faure]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2021-10-20T18:30:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

The emergence of ‘radicalization’

Fallout from the Six Day War

On 5 June 1975, the American guided-missile cruiser USS Little Rock was the first ship in nearly a decade to travel through the Suez Canal. A military ship led the way as the waters were feared to be littered with mines left eight years earlier by the optimistically named ‘Six Day War’. The Six Day War resulted from Israeli retaliation against Egypt closing the Straits of Tiran to their shipping. In response, Israel attacked its neighbouring countries, killing over 20,000 Palestinian, Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian troops. While the newsreels reported on jubilant celebrations in Israel following the war, returning Israeli soldiers recorded their horror at what they had done in creating millions of Palestinian refugees and being part of a campaign that included the murder of civilians. Israeli filmmaker Mor Loushy (2016) documents the horror that the returning soldiers felt at what they had done and reports their accurate predictions and fears for the subsequent violence and apartheid that their actions during the brief war had consigned Israel to. The soldiers, many of whom had survived the Holocaust in their youth make painful comparisons with their actions at displacing Palestinians, ‘I could see myself in those kids who were carried in their parents’ arms, when my father carried me, perhaps that’s the tragedy, that I identified with the other side. With our enemies.’

While Israel’s military action would unsettle the entire region for decades, it was also felt abroad when the Yom Kippur War of 1973 saw coordinated military action by Egypt and Syria to retake the territories they had lost. Having challenged the previously unopposed military superiority of Israel, Egypt and Syria placed themselves in a position to negotiate the Israeli withdrawal from much of the territory they had occupied. Acting in defence of the Arab coalition, members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) proclaimed an oil embargo on counties perceived to be supporting Israel. While those directly targeted were Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States, global oil prices soured and economies around the world would be blighted by highest rates of inflation seen in half a century.

Neoliberalism, the Left and New Labour

While extraordinarily high rates of inflation in the United Kingdom during the 1970s corresponded with those around the world that were also rising in response to the oil crisis, Conservative politicians were quick to blame them on the domestic policies of Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s Labour government. This gave cause for Mr Julian Critchley, Conservative MP for Aldershot, to be the first politician recorded as referring to ‘radicalization’ in Parliament, in a House of Commons debate on the Army on 17 June 1975:

There was a time when the objective of British foreign policy, like the objective of any country's foreign policy, was the maintenance of security. In the 1960s that objective changed and became the maintenance of prosperity. In the 1970s we are experiencing the radicalisation of politics, and defence has now to compete for attention with the problems of inflation, unemployment and energy.

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