This Shabbat we will read the portion "Shlach" in the book of Numbers, and this week is the anniversary of the Six-Day War. As happened then, some people are spreading evil reports that the land to which we have come is a land that "eats up its inhabitants." More than 3,000 years after the story of Joshua and the spies, portions of the people influenced by a media that has for years fostered feelings of guilt, let out that old lamentation: "And all the congregation lifted up their voice and cried...why did the Lord bring us into this land, to fall by the sword?...Were it not better for us to return to Egypt?"

Euphoria reigned after the Six-Day War, say the "forgive-us-for-winning" people. That is not true. There was a feeling of relief; the human joy of victory, pure and simple. And yes, a feeling of elation because, in addition to having been saved from annihilation, we had also arrived - Moshe Dayan put those feelings best - at the places the people had longed for thousands of years. And there was also a rational conclusion: There would not be another opportunity to slice across our narrow hips, and that our security was assured for a long time to come.

Those were the justifiable, natural and rational reactions of millions of people in the three weeks before the war. People lived in existential anxiety and feared the worst, 22 years after the Holocaust.

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The government did not assert, as it should have, the national rights of the Jewish people over its liberated homeland. It did not even treat them in this way, as it should have from a historical perspective. "Bargaining chips," it called them. By relying on this status, relating to areas of the homeland as bargaining chips, for 40 years most of our troubles and evils have come to us: the Yom Kippur War, the intifada, the terror war of September 2000, the deep rift among the people and the distancing of most of the world from identifying with Israel.

There is no precedent in the history of Israel of an army handing its rulers such a great military victory with the goal of deriving maximum political achievements. Neither is there a precedent of a government that so missed a historic opportunity, as the Levi Eshkol government did in 1967, to advance national, security and political interests. At historic junctures, when there is no understanding of the greatness of the achievement and the greatness of the opportunity, the greatest of victories is also missed.

America at that time, haunted by guilt feelings of a government and public opinion that did not - as they should have - come to Israel's aid when everyone thought the Jewish state might be destroyed, expected Israel to take significant steps in the matter of territory. In Europe, especially in treacherous France, no one dared to preach to Israel what to do. The Arab world, battered and defeated, could not prevent anything. But the strong man in the cabinet, Moshe Dayan, waited for a phone call from King Hussein of Jordan instead of pushing for a realization of the vision he touted.

The decision-makers did not have a super-ideology; and lacking this, they could not formulate a strategy. For example, the annexation of the liberated territories, which would have upgraded out position in the world and determined irreversible political, psychological and physical facts on the ground.

It is not the price of the occupation - a people is not an occupier in its homeland - that we are paying, and not the price of determining the facts on the ground. If we had determined them to a great and irreversible extent, the world would have come to terms with them. Lacking a leader who can call out that "we should go up at once...for we are well able to overcome," we are being carried on a wave of lack of self-confidence, "and we will be in our own sight as grasshoppers," just as in the days of the Joshua's spies.