The Six-Day War: Six Days That Changed the Middle East Forever

Introduction

In the long, complicated, and often heartbreaking chronicle of modern Middle Eastern history, few events have compressed as much transformation into as little time as the Six-Day War of June 1967. In less than a week of fighting, from June 5 to June 10, the Israel Defense Forces shattered the combined military power of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, seized territories three times the size of Israel itself, brought more than one million Palestinians under Israeli military administration, and reconfigured the political geography of the region in ways that have defined and in many respects plagued the world ever since.

The war lasted six days. Its consequences have lasted more than half a century and show no sign of resolution. The question of what to do with the territories Israel captured in 1967, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, and above all the eastern half of Jerusalem including its Old City with its Jewish Quarter, the Western Wall, the Temple Mount, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the Haram al-Sharif, has remained at the absolute center of the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab conflicts, of international diplomacy, of United Nations debate, and of millions of individual lives, from that moment to the present day.

This article examines the Six-Day War in its full context: the long-building tensions and Cold War dynamics that produced it, the dramatic military events of the six days themselves, the territorial and human consequences of Israeli victory, and the profound and enduring legacy that has shaped the politics of the Middle East and the relationship between Israel and the Arab world across the decades since 1967. It is impossible to understand the modern Middle East, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Palestinian national movement, the dynamics of Arab politics, or the foreign policy of major powers toward the region without understanding the Six-Day War. It is, in the most direct sense, the conflict that made the world we live in.

The speed of the Israeli military triumph astonished observers around the world, including many of Israel's closest allies who had doubted the young state could withstand the combined pressure of multiple Arab armies supported by Soviet equipment and Soviet military advisers. The gap between the apocalyptic rhetoric that filled Arab airwaves in late May 1967 and the catastrophic military reality that unfolded over six days of June was staggering, and its political consequences reverberated far beyond the battlefield. Arab leaders who had promised their populations the destruction of Israel now faced the humiliation of total defeat. The Soviet Union saw its most advanced military hardware burned and abandoned in the Sinai desert. The United States found itself more deeply entangled in Israeli security than ever before. The Palestinian national movement, which had operated in the shadow of Arab state politics, was forced by the failure of those states to develop new strategies and new organizational forms of its own.

The Six-Day War also transformed Israel in ways that continue to shape Israeli politics and society to this day. The swift and total military victory produced in many Israelis a sense of confidence bordering on hubris, a messianic current within Israeli religious nationalism that attached profound significance to the conquest of the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria, and a political dynamic in which the question of what to do with the occupied territories increasingly divided Israeli society along deep ideological and religious fault lines. The settlement enterprise that began tentatively in the months after the war and grew into a vast and permanent presence across the West Bank has been the most consequential and contentious legacy of the Six-Day War for Israeli domestic politics and for the prospects of a negotiated resolution to the conflict.

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