Next year, Israel will mark the 50th anniversary of the Six-Day War, which broke out in June 1967. It was the war that transformed Israel from a tiny, precarious and besieged state into a regional empire. The left and the right will each try to define the event in a way that aligns with their conflicting ideologies. For the left, including Israel’s dwindling peace camp, the event marks 50 years of occupation, and the right will celebrate 50 years since the reunification of Jerusalem. The two sides will be locked in a struggle over the memory, the narrative and the national agenda.
The left is coming at this from the position of the irrelevant underdog that lost the public's support and is trying to reinvent itself. The right, which has dominated Israel for the past few decades, will try to brand this historic anniversary from the most popular perspective, highlighting the consensus on Jerusalem in order to obscure the reality on the ground.