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.

The Roots of Crisis: a Region in Conflict

The Six-Day War did not arrive without warning or history. It was the product of two decades of unresolved conflict, of ideological confrontation, of Cold War maneuvering, and of the specific military and political dynamics of the Middle East in the mid-1960s. To understand why six days in June of 1967 ended as they did, one must understand the world that produced them.

The State of Israel had been established in May 1948 in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the collapse of the British Mandate in Palestine. Its establishment was immediately followed by the first Arab-Israeli war, in which the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon attacked the new state in an attempt to destroy it in its first weeks of existence. Israel survived that war, expanding beyond the boundaries proposed by the United Nations partition plan of November 1947, but the conflict left a series of unresolved grievances and an explosive political landscape. The armistice agreements of 1949 ended the fighting but established no permanent peace. Egypt controlled the Gaza Strip. Jordan controlled the West Bank and the eastern part of Jerusalem, including the Old City with its Jewish, Muslim, and Christian holy sites. Israel controlled the western part of the city and the new city beyond. These arrangements were formalized in armistice agreements but never in formal peace treaties, leaving the legal status of the boundaries contested and the underlying political conflicts entirely unresolved.

Approximately 700,000 Palestinian Arabs had fled or been expelled from their homes during the 1948 war, a catastrophe known in Arabic as the Nakba, or the Catastrophe. These refugees and their descendants were scattered in camps in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and in the Gaza Strip, living in poverty and sustained by UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, and by the political hope, which the Arab states actively fostered for their own political purposes, that they would one day return to their homes. Their plight, and the question of whether and how they might return, became one of the central unresolvable issues of Middle Eastern politics. Three generations later, the number of registered Palestinian refugees had grown to over five million, and the question of their return remained as intractable as ever.

The Arab states refused to recognize Israel's existence and maintained a formal state of war with it, blocking Israeli shipping through the Suez Canal and other waterways under their control. A second round of Arab-Israeli fighting came in 1956, when Israel, in coordination with Britain and France, attacked Egypt following President Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal. Israel captured the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip in that campaign but was forced to withdraw by American and Soviet pressure. The Suez Crisis left a complicated legacy: Nasser emerged from it as a hero of Arab nationalism even in military defeat, demonstrating that resistance to Western imperialism could be politically triumphant even when militarily unsuccessful. Israel was confirmed as a formidable military power but was left with a sense that international pressure could be used to constrain its freedom of action. The United States and Soviet Union had both demonstrated that they regarded the Middle East as a critical arena of Cold War competition in which their interests took precedence over the concerns of regional actors.

By the mid-1960s, the Middle East was deeply embedded in Cold War dynamics. The Soviet Union had established close relationships with Egypt and Syria, providing both countries with large quantities of modern military equipment, including aircraft, tanks, artillery, and surface-to-air missiles, and with substantial numbers of military advisers who helped train and organize Arab armed forces. The United States was increasingly aligned with Israel and with more conservative Arab states such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan. The region was a theater of superpower competition in which local actors pursued their own agendas while being armed and occasionally restrained by their great-power sponsors.

Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian president, was the dominant figure in Arab politics in this period. A charismatic and genuinely gifted political communicator, Nasser had built his reputation on Arab nationalism, anti-imperialism, and the promise of pan-Arab unity. His radio broadcasts, particularly through Voice of the Arabs, reached audiences across the Arab world and made him a figure of mass popularity that no other Arab leader could match. He had led Egypt since 1954, had faced down the Suez Crisis and emerged as a hero, and had briefly united Egypt and Syria into the United Arab Republic from 1958 to 1961. But by 1967, his position was more complicated than his rhetoric acknowledged. Egypt was bogged down in a costly military intervention in Yemen, supporting the republican side in a civil war against Saudi-backed royalists. The Egyptian economy was struggling under the weight of the military, the bureaucracy, and the inefficiencies of state socialism. The promised unity and progress of Arab nationalism had not materialized. Nasser needed a political success, and the confrontation with Israel offered the possibility of one, particularly if he could force a diplomatic victory without having to fight.

Syria, under the control of a radical Baathist government since the coup of 1966, was in many respects the most volatile actor in the regional picture. The Syrian government actively supported Palestinian guerrilla organizations, most importantly the newly founded Fatah movement of Yasser Arafat, in launching raids and sabotage operations into Israel from Syrian and Jordanian territory. These raids provoked Israeli retaliatory strikes, which in turn escalated into artillery exchanges and air combat over the Syrian-Israeli border region in the Golan Heights area. In April 1967, Israeli aircraft shot down six Syrian MiG-21 fighters in a dogfight that culminated with Israeli planes flying over Damascus in a demonstration of air superiority. The episode both demonstrated the gap between Israeli and Syrian air power and intensified the pressure on Nasser to take more active measures in support of his Syrian allies and to demonstrate that Egyptian leadership of the Arab world meant something.

Palestinian organizations, operating from bases in Jordan and Syria, had been conducting guerrilla operations against Israeli territory for years. Israel's response to these attacks was typically to hold the host government responsible, launching punitive military raids against Jordanian and Syrian territory that created enormous political complications for moderate Arab governments and gave radical actors an incentive to escalate. The cycle of raid and retaliation had been building in intensity through the mid-1960s, and by 1967 the regional situation had a self-reinforcing quality that made de-escalation increasingly difficult for any of the parties.

Nasser's Gambit: the Crisis of May 1967

The specific sequence of events that led to the Six-Day War began in mid-May 1967 with a fateful intelligence failure and a series of political miscalculations that locked all parties into an escalating confrontation neither fully intended to produce but none knew how to stop.

On May 13, 1967, the Soviet Union provided Egypt with intelligence reports claiming that Israel was concentrating large military forces on its northern border for an imminent attack on Syria. This intelligence was fabricated or grossly exaggerated: Israel had no such concentration of forces and no plans for a major assault on Syria at that time. Whether the Soviets genuinely believed their own intelligence or were deliberately trying to provoke a regional crisis to distract from other concerns is a question historians continue to debate. The effect was immediate: Nasser mobilized his army and began moving large Egyptian forces into the Sinai Peninsula, the desert expanse between Egypt and Israel that had served as a buffer zone since the end of the 1956 war. The Egyptian columns crossing the Suez Canal were filmed and broadcast, generating enormous excitement across the Arab world.

On May 16, Nasser demanded the withdrawal of the United Nations Emergency Force, the international peacekeeping force that had been stationed in the Sinai and at Sharm el-Sheikh, guarding the southern approaches to the Straits of Tiran, since the end of the Suez Crisis in 1956. United Nations Secretary-General U Thant complied with the demand with a speed that surprised and dismayed many observers, ordering the UNEF's withdrawal without seeking General Assembly authorization or exhausting diplomatic alternatives. The withdrawal removed the buffer between Egyptian and Israeli forces and left Nasser in direct control of the Straits of Tiran.

On May 22, 1967, Nasser announced the closure of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, blockading the port of Eilat, Israel's only outlet to the Red Sea and through which a substantial portion of Israel's oil supplies arrived. This was the step that made war, if not inevitable, then enormously likely. Israel had been explicit since the end of the 1956 war that it would regard any closure of the Straits of Tiran as a casus belli, an act of war justifying military response. The United States had made similar assurances to Israel in 1957, guaranteeing freedom of navigation through the Straits in exchange for Israeli withdrawal from Sinai. Nasser knew what he was doing and chose to do it anyway, gambling that international pressure would restrain Israel, that Arab military strength was sufficient to deter or defeat an Israeli attack if one came, and that the political benefits of confronting Israel would shore up his position at home and across the Arab world.

The Arab political atmosphere in late May 1967 was charged with a dangerous excitement. Radio broadcasts from Cairo and Damascus spoke of the coming destruction of Israel, the liberation of Palestine, and the imminent revenge for the humiliations of 1948. Arab leaders who were privately skeptical of the military situation felt unable to say so in public without being branded cowards or traitors. On May 30, King Hussein of Jordan, a moderate leader who had maintained back-channel communications with Israel and who had serious private doubts about the wisdom of war, flew to Cairo and signed a mutual defense pact with Nasser, placing the Jordanian army under Egyptian military command for the duration of the crisis. Iraq signed a similar agreement and began moving troops toward Jordan. Arab armies from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq were positioned around Israel's borders.

Israel mobilized its reserves and waited, with the economy grinding to a partial halt as hundreds of thousands of men stood under arms. The waiting was psychologically devastating. The Holocaust was less than two decades in the past, the rhetoric from Cairo and Damascus spoke explicitly of the elimination of the Jewish state, and the military situation appeared genuinely threatening to a small country of roughly two and a half million people surrounded by adversaries with combined populations many times larger. Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, a cautious and thoughtful man, initially sought a diplomatic solution. Foreign Minister Abba Eban traveled to Washington, Paris, and London seeking support and guarantees. President Lyndon Johnson was sympathetic but constrained by the consuming demands of Vietnam, and the American proposal to organize an international naval force to break the blockade of the Straits of Tiran moved with such agonizing slowness that Israeli military planners concluded it would not materialize before war became unavoidable on terms unfavorable to Israel.

On June 1, Moshe Dayan, the famous general who had led the 1956 Sinai campaign and whose reputation for boldness and unconventional thinking made him a reassuring figure to an anxious Israeli public, was brought into the government as defense minister. The Israeli military, led by Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin, had concluded that every day of waiting further eroded Israel's military advantage and strengthened the Arab position by allowing more time for Arab armies to deploy, entrench, and coordinate. On June 4, the Israeli cabinet met in a session that lasted through the night and voted to authorize the military to strike. The decision was made to launch a preemptive attack on Egypt's air force at dawn the following morning. It was a decision that would reshape the Middle East.

Operation Focus: the Destruction of the Arab Air Forces

At 7:45 in the morning of Monday, June 5, 1967, approximately 200 Israeli aircraft took off from airfields across Israel in a carefully coordinated wave. They flew west over the Mediterranean at low altitude to avoid detection by radar, then turned south to approach Egyptian airfields from unexpected directions at precisely the moment the Egyptians were most vulnerable. Egyptian pilots were finishing breakfast. The morning shift change was underway at radar stations. Egyptian commanders had reportedly been told that an Israeli strike would not come in the early morning hours, and some senior commanders were not yet at their posts. The timing had been chosen with meticulous care after years of intelligence gathering and months of specific operational planning.

What happened in the next three hours was one of the most devastating applications of air power in the history of modern warfare. Israeli aircraft hit Egyptian airfields in a series of closely timed waves, destroying aircraft on the ground with bombs and with specialized runway-cratering munitions called dibber bombs that had been developed specifically to disable runways quickly. The runways were hit first with precision, preventing Egyptian aircraft from taking off, and then the parked planes themselves were destroyed where they stood. Within approximately three hours, an estimated 286 of Egypt's roughly 420 combat aircraft had been destroyed, the vast majority of them on the ground without ever becoming airborne to engage the attackers. The Egyptian air force, the largest in the Arab world and the equipment of which had been provided and maintained with Soviet assistance, had been effectively destroyed before it could fight.

The achievement was the product of years of intelligence gathering, months of mission planning, rigorous and exhaustively repeated training of pilots and ground crews, and a culture of professionalism and improvisation within the Israel Air Force that had been built up over years of preparation for precisely this kind of contingency. Israeli pilots had practiced these attacks exhaustively against mock targets built to replicate Egyptian airfield layouts. Ground crews had developed techniques for rapid aircraft turnaround that allowed Israeli planes to refuel, rearm, and return to the fight within minutes of landing. The entire operation required timing so precise that individual aircraft were sometimes separated by only minutes in their attack windows over the same airfield. The fact that it succeeded as completely as it did was a testament to years of preparation and to the professionalism of Israeli aircrews and support personnel.

The Israeli air force then turned its attention to Jordan and Syria, which had entered the war in response to Egyptian calls for action and Jordanian treaty obligations. King Hussein had ordered the Jordanian army to open fire along the West Bank front and to shell Israeli positions in Jerusalem, following false Egyptian reports that Egypt was winning the air battle. Jordanian and Syrian aircraft were caught similarly unprepared and were destroyed in subsequent waves of Israeli attacks. By the end of the first day of fighting, the Arab coalition had lost the substantial majority of its combined air power, including the modern Soviet-supplied jets that had been Egypt's most expensive and prized military assets. Israel had achieved air superiority over all fronts, and with that achievement the military outcome of the war was essentially determined within the first hours of fighting, even though the ground battles would continue for five more bloody days.

The Sinai Campaign and the Conquest of the West Bank

On the ground in the Sinai, the Israeli military operated with a speed, tactical aggression, and operational sophistication that overwhelmed Egyptian defensive positions built on a fundamentally different military doctrine. Egyptian defensive planning assumed that any Israeli attack would be preceded by days of observable mobilization, that Egyptian air cover would be available to support ground units, and that the Israeli advance could be channeled into prepared kill zones where Egyptian armor and artillery held the advantage. All of these assumptions proved catastrophically wrong within the first hours of fighting.

Israeli armor struck deep into the Sinai along multiple axes simultaneously, using aggressive mobile warfare to outflank Egyptian positions and create panic and disorganization among troops who found themselves without air cover and fighting an enemy that moved far faster than their training had prepared them for. The Israeli ground offensive in Sinai was led by three divisional commanders who would each go on to play major roles in Israeli military and political life. General Israel Tal drove north along the Mediterranean coastal route. General Abraham Yoffe's division penetrated through terrain the Egyptians had considered impassable. General Ariel Sharon, whose aggressive and innovative tactical thinking would define his military and later political career, attacked through the central Sinai toward the fortified Egyptian position at Abu Ageila.

Sharon's assault on Abu Ageila stands as one of the most studied tactical actions of the war. The Egyptian position there was a sophisticated defensive system built around interlocking fortifications, minefields, and well-sited artillery that was designed to channel and destroy attacking armor. Sharon's plan for taking it combined simultaneous infantry flanking movements, direct armor assault, artillery bombardment, and a helicopter-inserted paratroop attack on the Egyptian artillery positions in the rear of the defensive line, all coordinated to strike at the same time under the cover of darkness. The Egyptian defensive system, built to withstand a conventional frontal assault, was overwhelmed by the simultaneity and audacity of the attack. Within hours, a position that had been expected to require days to overcome had fallen.

As Egyptian defensive positions collapsed under Israeli assault across the Sinai front, the retreat turned into a rout. Egyptian forces attempting to withdraw toward the Suez Canal through the Mitla Pass were caught by Israeli aircraft and devastated. Tanks, artillery pieces, vehicles, and equipment were abandoned as soldiers fled on foot across the burning desert. The images of miles of destroyed Egyptian armor stretching through the Sinai sands, published in newspapers and broadcast in newsreels around the world, became among the most iconic visual records of the war and of the complete disparity in military capability between the two sides. By June 8, Israeli forces had reached the east bank of the Suez Canal along its entire length. The Sinai Peninsula, some twenty-three thousand square miles of desert, had been taken in three days of fighting.

On the West Bank and in Jerusalem, the fighting was no less dramatic and its consequences were no less historically transformative. Jordan had entered the war on June 5 based on Egyptian assurances that Arab arms were prevailing, assurances that were entirely false but that King Hussein had no way to verify in the opening hours of the conflict. Jordanian forces shelled Israeli positions in Jerusalem, including the Israeli parliament building, and advanced toward the UN headquarters building in the city. Israeli forces counterattacked, initially with the limited goal of reducing the threat to Israeli Jerusalem, but as the scale of the Jordanian miscalculation became apparent and as the military opportunity presented itself, Israeli commanders pressed for more ambitious objectives.

The battle for Jerusalem was fought with an intensity that reflected the profound emotional and religious significance of the city to Israelis and Palestinians alike. Israeli paratroopers under Colonel Mordechai Gur advanced through the narrow streets of the city, fighting through the American Colony area, around the walls of the Old City, and finally through the Lion's Gate into the Old City itself on June 7. The moment when Israeli paratroopers, some of them weeping openly, reached the Western Wall and touched its ancient stones was broadcast to the world and became one of the most emotionally charged images of the entire war. General Moshe Dayan and Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin entered the Old City to stand before the Western Wall, the holiest site accessible to Jewish prayer, which had been under Jordanian control and inaccessible to Israeli Jews since 1948. Defense Minister Dayan declared that Israel had returned to its holiest sites and would never leave them.

Beyond Jerusalem, the entire West Bank fell to Israeli forces within three days of fighting. Jordanian resistance was fierce in places but was ultimately overwhelmed by Israeli air superiority and the speed of Israeli advances. The cities of Ramallah, Nablus, Jericho, Bethlehem, and Hebron all came under Israeli military control. The fall of the West Bank brought approximately 600,000 Palestinians into Israeli military administration, Palestinians who had lived under Jordanian rule since 1948 and who now found themselves under a different military occupation with uncertain legal status and uncertain futures. Their situation would not be temporary.

The Golan Heights: the Final Front

Syria had fired on Israeli settlements in the Galilee region from the volcanic plateau of the Golan Heights for years before June 1967. Perched on high ground overlooking Israeli villages in the valley below, Syrian artillery had made life in the farming communities of the upper Galilee a matter of intermittent terror, with shells falling on houses, fields, and children's playgrounds. The Israeli government had long been under pressure from the northern settlements to do something about the Syrian guns, but had also long been reluctant to take on the fortified Syrian defensive positions on the heights, which represented a formidable military obstacle.

Syria had remained relatively cautious in the opening days of the war, firing artillery at Israeli positions but not launching major ground offensive action. The Syrian government, which had done much to provoke the crisis by supporting Palestinian raids and by its bellicose rhetoric, found itself watching the destruction of Egyptian and Jordanian forces from the relative safety of the heights without committing its own army to serious combat. Israeli military commanders and settlement leaders in the north argued that the opportunity to deal with the Syrian threat should not be missed, but government decision-making about the Golan was complicated by political disagreements in the Israeli cabinet about whether to extend the war to Syria and by concerns about Soviet reaction if Israel attacked a state so directly under Soviet patronage.

The debate in the Israeli cabinet about attacking Syria was intense and the outcome not foreordained. Defense Minister Dayan initially opposed the assault on the Golan, arguing that the military and political risks were too high. It was the pressure from the northern settlements, combined with intelligence suggesting that Syrian forces on the heights were beginning to show signs of disorganization, and ultimately Dayan's own change of mind, that led to the authorization to attack. The assault on the Golan Heights began on the morning of June 9, by which time fighting had effectively ended on both the Sinai and West Bank fronts.

The assault on the Syrian positions on the Golan Heights was among the most difficult ground fighting of the entire war. The Syrians had spent years fortifying the plateau, building an elaborate system of concrete bunkers, gun emplacements, tank positions, and interconnected tunnels. The approaches from the Israeli positions below were steep and exposed, and Israeli infantry and armor had to climb up roads under fire. The northern assault force crossed the border through minefields under artillery fire. Initial Israeli casualties were heavy, and progress was painfully slow compared to the rapid advances in Sinai and the West Bank.

But Syrian defensive resistance, while fierce in some places, collapsed in others, and the combination of Israeli air strikes on Syrian positions and the moral effect of the defeats suffered by Egypt and Jordan on Syrian military cohesion proved too much to overcome. Syrian soldiers in some positions, seeing Israeli forces approaching on multiple axes and hearing of the catastrophes on other fronts, abandoned their fortifications. By the morning of June 10, Israeli forces had broken through the main Syrian defensive line and were advancing across the Golan plateau toward the town of Quneitra, the main Syrian population center in the area. The Syrian military command ordered a withdrawal, and the Golan Heights fell with a speed that surprised even the Israeli commanders who were attacking it.

From the captured heights, Israeli soldiers could now look down into the Syrian heartland. Israeli forces advanced to within artillery range of Damascus before a ceasefire brought the fighting to an end. The fall of the Golan Heights removed the Syrian military threat to the northern Israeli settlements, ended Syrian control of the water sources that fed the Jordan River, and placed Israel in possession of approximately 450 square miles of Syrian territory from which its forces would not withdraw. The strategic and symbolic importance of the Golan to both Israel and Syria, the memory of years of Syrian shelling and of the Israeli lives lost in taking it, and the presence of water resources, ensured that the fate of the Golan would be as contested in the decades after 1967 as the fate of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The Uss Liberty Incident

Among the most controversial and still-debated episodes of the Six-Day War was the attack on June 8, 1967 on the USS Liberty, a United States Navy signals intelligence ship operating in international waters in the eastern Mediterranean. Israeli aircraft and motor torpedo boats attacked the Liberty in a sustained assault that lasted over an hour, killing 34 American crew members and wounding 171 others. The attack caused more American casualties in a single incident than any other peacetime naval event of the Cold War era.

The Israeli government apologized for the attack and paid compensation to the families of the dead and wounded, claiming that the Liberty had been misidentified as an Egyptian vessel by Israeli forces operating under the fog-of-war confusion of the conflict's most intense days. The United States government accepted this explanation, and the official position of both governments remained that the attack was a tragic case of mistaken identity. However, many survivors of the Liberty attack, and numerous researchers and naval officers who subsequently examined the evidence, have argued that the ship was clearly identifiable as American, that it was flying a large American flag, that it moved slowly enough to be observed from close range before being attacked, and that the sustained nature of the assault, including torpedo boat attacks after the initial air strikes, makes the mistaken identity explanation implausible.

The controversy over the USS Liberty has never been fully resolved to the satisfaction of its survivors or of historians who have examined the evidence. Theories about why Israel might have deliberately attacked the ship, including suggestions that it was monitoring Israeli military communications that Israel did not want intercepted, or that Israel did not want the United States to know about planned operations, have been proposed but not definitively substantiated. What is not in dispute is that American sailors died in an attack by an Israeli ally during wartime, that the investigation conducted by the United States Navy was cursory and incomplete, and that the political sensitivity of the Israeli-American relationship at the height of the Six-Day War shaped the official handling of the incident in ways that left many questions unanswered. The Liberty's survivors and their supporters have continued to press for a full and independent investigation for decades.

The Ceasefire and the Scope of Israeli Gains

A United Nations-brokered ceasefire brought the Six-Day War to an end on the evening of June 10, 1967. In six days of fighting, Israel had transformed the map of the Middle East in ways that no military campaign since the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 could match. The territorial acquisitions were staggering in scale relative to Israel's pre-war size. Israel now controlled the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank of the Jordan River including eastern Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. The total area of these territories was approximately 26,000 square miles, more than three times the area of pre-war Israel within the 1949 armistice lines.

The military campaign had destroyed the armed forces of three Arab states. Egypt had lost the bulk of its air force and suffered catastrophic losses of armor and artillery in the Sinai. Jordan had lost its army's West Bank forces and all of the Jordanian-controlled territory west of the Jordan River. Syria had lost the Golan Heights and suffered severe losses of military equipment. Arab casualties were in the tens of thousands killed, wounded, and captured. Israel lost approximately 700 soldiers killed and several thousand wounded across all fronts, numbers that represented a significant human cost but that were remarkably low given the scope and intensity of the fighting against three armies.

The speed and totality of the Israeli victory stunned the world. Military analysts struggled to fully explain how a small country of roughly two and a half million people had so completely defeated coalitions representing tens of millions more, with equipment supplied and maintained by a superpower. The answers pointed to multiple factors that had compounded each other: the devastating success of Operation Focus in eliminating Arab air power in the first hours of fighting, which left Arab ground forces without air cover and subject to constant Israeli air attack; the higher training, initiative, and tactical adaptability of Israeli officers and soldiers compared to their Arab counterparts, who operated within more rigid command structures that were poorly suited to the fast-moving nature of modern mobile warfare; the quality of Israeli military planning, which had been honed over years of analysis and rehearsal; and the problems of coordination among the Arab coalition partners, who shared neither a unified command structure nor a common operational doctrine.

The ceasefire left Israel in possession of territories and in a strategic position dramatically more secure than what it had held before June 5. But the very completeness of the victory created new problems and new dilemmas that Israel's political leadership was only beginning to understand. What to do with the captured territories? With the populations living in them? With the international community's expectations? These questions would define Israeli politics and Israeli-Arab relations for the next half century and beyond.

The Human Consequences: Palestinians Under Occupation

The most immediate and enduring human consequence of the Six-Day War was the imposition of Israeli military administration over roughly one million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. These Palestinians had already lived through one catastrophic upheaval in 1948, when the communities their parents and grandparents had lived in for generations had been destroyed or taken over by Israel. Now they found themselves under Israeli military rule, with all the restrictions, uncertainties, and humiliations that military occupation entails.

The West Bank Palestinians had been Jordanian citizens under Jordanian rule since 1948. Jordan had been a relatively stable and in some respects tolerant administrator, and Jordanian citizenship had given West Bank Palestinians access to education, economic opportunities, and legal status. Israeli military administration replaced this with a regime governed by emergency regulations that allowed for administrative detention, curfews, closure of institutions, demolition of houses, and deportation. The military government controlled movement, commerce, construction, and political activity. Palestinian civil society and political organizations were suppressed or severely restricted.

Gaza, already home to enormous numbers of Palestinian refugees from 1948 who had been living in UNRWA-run camps for nearly twenty years, was if anything in a more desperate situation than the West Bank. The Gaza Strip had been under Egyptian administration since 1949, and while Egypt had not integrated Gaza into Egyptian territory or made its inhabitants Egyptian citizens, it had administered the territory in ways that kept the refugee population politically contained. Under Israeli occupation, Gaza became a pressure cooker of poverty, overcrowding, and political frustration that would eventually produce some of the most violent and intractable episodes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The 1967 war also created a second wave of Palestinian refugees. Approximately 300,000 to 400,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from the West Bank and Gaza during and immediately after the fighting, adding to the existing refugee population in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Many of the new refugees came from Jordanian-controlled areas east of Jerusalem, where Israeli authorities demolished three Palestinian villages, Imwas, Yalu, and Beit Nuba, in the Latrun area shortly after the fighting ended. The creation of new refugees in 1967 compounded the unresolved injustices of 1948 and deepened the Palestinian national grievance against Israel.

The occupation transformed the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in profound and mostly negative ways. Economic integration with Israel brought some benefits in terms of employment and access to goods, but it came at the cost of dependence and vulnerability. Palestinians could work in Israel, but they were subject to arbitrary restrictions. Palestinian agriculture faced competition from Israeli agriculture and restrictions on water access. Palestinian political life was controlled and suppressed. The Israeli military court system that operated in the territories operated under different standards than Israeli civilian courts, with lower evidentiary requirements and much higher conviction rates. The Palestinian experience of life under occupation was one of constant negotiation with military authority, of permits required and sometimes denied, of checkpoints and closures, of house demolitions and administrative detentions, and of the fundamental vulnerability of living in a territory whose legal status was undefined and whose future was uncertain.

Un Resolution 242 and the International Response

The international community's response to the Six-Day War and to the territorial changes it produced was shaped by the central document of Resolution 242, adopted by the United Nations Security Council on November 22, 1967. Resolution 242 became the foundational framework for all subsequent international diplomacy on the Arab-Israeli conflict, and its ambiguous language has been the subject of constant dispute and competing interpretations for more than five decades.

The resolution called for the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict, and for termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every state in the area. It also called for a just settlement of the refugee problem and for guaranteeing freedom of navigation through international waterways in the area. The resolution explicitly emphasized the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war, a principle that clearly implied that Israeli retention of the captured territories would be legally problematic.

The critical ambiguity in Resolution 242, which was deliberate and the result of careful negotiation among the Security Council members to achieve the consensus necessary for adoption, was in the phrase territories occupied in the recent conflict. The English text omitted the definite article the before territories, while the French text, which is equally authoritative, used the phrase des territoires, which could also be read as not requiring full withdrawal from all captured territories. Arab states and most of the international community interpreted the resolution as requiring Israeli withdrawal from all territories captured in 1967. Israel and the United States interpreted it as requiring withdrawal from some but not necessarily all territories, and as making any withdrawal conditional on the achievement of peace agreements with neighboring states that recognized Israel and guaranteed its security.

This interpretive gap, which was never bridged in the years following 1967, became one of the permanent fixtures of the Arab-Israeli diplomatic landscape. Every subsequent peace process, every international conference, every American diplomatic initiative in the region had to navigate the question of what Resolution 242 required, and the question was never resolved because the underlying interests and political positions of the parties made resolution impossible without changes in the regional situation.

The Arab states responded to their defeat in the Six-Day War with the Khartoum Resolution of September 1967, issued after an Arab League summit in Sudan. The resolution articulated the famous three noes: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel. The Khartoum noes reflected the genuine political impossibility for Arab leaders of accepting the territorial and political consequences of the 1967 defeat, but they also ensured that the post-war situation would remain frozen rather than move toward any kind of negotiated resolution. The combination of Israeli reluctance to withdraw without peace agreements and Arab refusal to offer peace meant that the diplomatic and political consequences of the Six-Day War became locked in place in ways that allowed conditions on the ground to change in directions that made eventual resolution increasingly difficult.

The Soviet Union, embarrassed by the performance of its military equipment and its Arab clients, moved quickly to rearm Egypt and Syria with replacement military equipment and to restore its position in the region. American-Soviet tension over the Middle East intensified in the wake of the war, with the hotline between Moscow and Washington being used during the conflict to prevent dangerous misunderstandings. The United States, having deepened its relationship with Israel through the crisis, became more explicitly committed to Israeli security as a pillar of its Middle Eastern policy, a development with long-term consequences for American standing in the Arab world and for the ability of the United States to serve as an honest broker in the conflict.

The Aftermath: Settlements, Occupation, and Intractability

In the months and years following the Six-Day War, Israeli society debated with passion and without resolution what to do with the territories it had captured. Three broad positions emerged in Israeli politics that have, in various configurations, defined Israeli political life ever since. The first position, associated with the secular left and with the Labor establishment that had governed Israel since its founding, held that the occupied territories should be offered to Egypt and Jordan in exchange for peace agreements. This land-for-peace approach recognized that Israel could not permanently govern large populations of Palestinians without either becoming an apartheid state that denied civic rights to millions of people or ceasing to be a Jewish state by incorporating those people as citizens. The second position held that Israel should retain all or most of the territories for security reasons, arguing that the pre-1967 borders were dangerously narrow and indefensible and that no Arab leader trustworthy enough to maintain any peace agreement would be found. The third position, which gained growing force from a religious nationalist movement energized by the conquest of the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria, held that Israel had a divine right and obligation to settle and retain the West Bank as part of the Jewish people's ancestral homeland.

The settlement movement began almost immediately after the war. The first settlements were established by religious Zionist groups on the West Bank in the summer and fall of 1967, sometimes with government approval and sometimes in advance of it. The Israeli government under Prime Minister Eshkol and his successors authorized settlements in the Jordan Valley as a security measure, in the Golan Heights as a strategic asset, and in Hebron and other parts of the West Bank in response to pressure from religious nationalist groups who felt a deep attachment to the biblical landscape of Judea and Samaria.

The settlement enterprise grew steadily in the 1970s and accelerated dramatically in the 1980s under governments of the right-wing Likud party. By the early 2000s, there were more than 200,000 Israeli settlers living in West Bank settlements and roughly 200,000 more in Israeli neighborhoods built in East Jerusalem after Israel's annexation of the eastern part of the city in 1967. By the 2020s, the settler population in the West Bank had grown to over 700,000, in settlements spread across the landscape in ways that many analysts argued had made any viable Palestinian state geographically impossible. The settlement enterprise is regarded by the United Nations, by the International Court of Justice, by the vast majority of states in the international community, and by most international legal scholars as illegal under international law, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilian population into occupied territory. Israel disputes this legal interpretation, but the settlements have been the single greatest obstacle to any negotiated two-state solution.

The occupation also transformed Palestinian national politics. The Palestine Liberation Organization, founded in 1964 under the auspices of the Arab League, had been dominated by Arab state interests before 1967. After the war, with the humiliating failure of the Arab states to destroy Israel or liberate Palestine demonstrated for all to see, Palestinian national movements began to assert an independent political identity. Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement took control of the PLO in 1969 and oriented Palestinian national strategy toward armed struggle and toward the goal of an independent Palestinian state, rather than the pan-Arab approach of the previous era. The PLO became the recognized representative of the Palestinian people, recognized as such by Arab states and eventually by the United Nations, and it operated from bases in Jordan, then in Lebanon after being expelled from Jordan in 1970, conducting guerrilla operations and increasingly international terrorist attacks that brought the Palestinian cause to the attention of the world at enormous human cost.

The Six-Day War also fundamentally changed the nature of the Israeli-American relationship. Before 1967, the United States had maintained a degree of neutrality in the Arab-Israeli conflict and had actually been one of the principal pressures forcing Israel to withdraw from Sinai after the 1956 war. After 1967, the United States became increasingly and explicitly committed to Israeli security, providing growing quantities of military equipment including, eventually, the advanced aircraft and tanks that Israel needed to maintain its military edge over Soviet-supplied Arab armies. American military and economic aid to Israel grew dramatically in the years after 1967 and has been a cornerstone of both American foreign policy in the Middle East and of Israeli national security strategy ever since.

The 1973 War and Its Relationship to 1967

The Six-Day War did not end the era of Arab-Israeli military conflict; it set the stage for the next round. The Yom Kippur War of October 1973, launched by Egypt and Syria in a coordinated surprise attack on Israel on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, was in crucial respects a direct consequence of the Six-Day War and of the diplomatic stalemate it had produced. President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, who had succeeded Nasser after the latter's death from a heart attack in September 1970, concluded that Israel would never negotiate a return of the Sinai through diplomatic means alone and that only military action could force a diplomatic process.

The 1973 war shattered the myth of Israeli military invincibility that the Six-Day War had created. Egyptian forces crossed the Suez Canal and drove Israeli forces back from the Bar-Lev Line of fortifications with sophisticated use of anti-tank missiles and surface-to-air missiles that temporarily neutralized Israel's air superiority. Syrian forces broke through Israeli defenses on the Golan Heights and came close to descending into the Israeli valleys below. Only massive American resupply of Israel during the fighting and Israel's ultimate military recovery prevented a potential catastrophe. The war ended with another UN ceasefire and ultimately led to the negotiations that produced the Camp David Accords of 1978 and the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty of 1979, in which Israel returned the entire Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in exchange for full peace, normalization, and Egyptian recognition of Israel's right to exist.

The Egypt-Israel peace, the first between Israel and any Arab state, was made possible in part by the Six-Day War's territorial outcome. Israel had something to offer Egypt that Egypt desperately wanted: the return of its sovereign territory and national dignity. The peace was also made possible by American mediation under President Jimmy Carter, who invested enormous personal and political capital in brokering the Camp David framework. The treaty demonstrated that territorial compromise for peace was achievable, but it also demonstrated the limits of what was achievable: the Palestinian question was not resolved at Camp David, Sadat was assassinated by Egyptian Islamists in 1981 partly as a result of his peace with Israel, and the treaty produced a cold peace that normalized relations at the governmental level without producing genuine reconciliation between Egyptian and Israeli societies.

The Legacy of the Six-Day War

The Six-Day War of 1967 belongs to that small group of events in modern history whose consequences are so deep and so wide-ranging that they cannot be contained within the category of military history or diplomatic history or even political history. It is an event that changed how people understood the relationship between military power and political legitimacy, between territorial control and national identity, between religious meaning and political reality.

For Israel, the war produced a sense of power and possibility that was intoxicating but ultimately problematic. The conquest of the biblical heartland energized a religious nationalist movement whose political influence has grown steadily since 1967, producing the settlement enterprise and a political culture in which the retention of the West Bank and the divine significance of the land have become central elements of a significant strand of Israeli politics. The security that the conquest of the Sinai and the West Bank initially provided gave way to a new set of security challenges: the occupation itself became a generator of Palestinian resistance, of guerrilla warfare, of two intifadas, of rocket attacks from Gaza, and of international isolation that has complicated Israel's relationships with countries that might otherwise be natural allies.

For Palestinians, the Six-Day War was the second great catastrophe after 1948. It brought an additional one million people under Israeli military control, created hundreds of thousands of new refugees, and placed the Palestinian national movement in the position of having to build a strategy for liberation and statehood in the face of an occupation that became more entrenched with every passing decade. The Palestinian national movement's response to 1967, the assertion of a distinct Palestinian national identity and the building of political and eventually armed organizations to advance it, was in many respects the most politically significant long-term consequence of the war.

For the Arab world, the Six-Day War was a defining catastrophe, al-Naksa in Arabic, meaning the setback, whose psychological and political consequences were enormous. The failure of Arab nationalism, as embodied in Nasser's Egypt and the Baathist regimes of Syria and Iraq, to deliver on its promises of unity, development, and the liberation of Palestine discredited secular pan-Arab ideology and opened space for the growth of political Islam as an alternative framework for Arab political life. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and eventually al-Qaeda and the Islamic State are all, in different ways, products of the ideological vacuum left by the failure of secular Arab nationalism, a failure that was most dramatically illustrated by the Six-Day War.

For the United States, the war deepened American entanglement in Middle Eastern affairs in ways that have shaped American foreign policy ever since. The American commitment to Israeli security, which solidified after 1967, has been both a pillar of American strategic positioning in the region and a source of friction with Arab states and populations whose grievances about the Palestinian question have colored their views of the United States. The petrodiplomacy of the 1970s, including the Arab oil embargo of 1973, was partly a response to American military resupply of Israel during the Yom Kippur War and reflected the degree to which the Israeli-Arab conflict had become entangled with American strategic interests in ways that imposed real costs.

The occupied territories remain occupied. The West Bank is home to more than 700,000 Israeli settlers, to Palestinian cities and towns under various levels of Israeli control, to a Palestinian Authority with limited governing powers, and to the daily reality of military occupation that has now lasted for decades. Gaza, from which Israel withdrew its settlements and military forces in 2005, has been governed since 2007 by Hamas and has been subject to an Israeli and Egyptian blockade. Two million Palestinians live there in conditions of severe overcrowding and economic distress. Periodic cycles of military conflict between Israel and Gaza-based armed groups have killed thousands and destroyed infrastructure repeatedly without resolving the underlying political conflict.

The peace process that began with Oslo in 1993 and that seemed for a moment in the mid-1990s to offer a path toward a two-state solution has been stalled since the collapse of the Camp David summit of 2000 and the outbreak of the Second Intifada. The parameters of a potential peace agreement are well understood, involving a Palestinian state in approximately the West Bank and Gaza Strip with a capital in East Jerusalem and some arrangement for the Palestinian refugees. What has been lacking is not the framework for a solution but the political will on both sides to accept the compromises that any solution would require. The Six-Day War created the territorial and demographic facts on the ground that make any such solution increasingly difficult to achieve with each passing year.

The war's legacy is ultimately the story of a military victory whose political consequences have been largely negative for virtually all parties involved. Israel won the war but has not achieved the peace and security that any victory is supposed to deliver. The Arab states that lost the war have rebuilt their military capabilities and in some cases made peace with Israel, but the underlying Palestinian question that was at the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict remains unresolved. The Palestinians have paid the heaviest ongoing price, living for more than half a century under occupation or siege without the state or the rights that their national aspirations and their human dignity require. And the international community, represented most directly by the United Nations and its unimplemented resolutions, has watched the conflict persist and deepen without finding the means to resolve it.

The Six-Day War of 1967 was six days of fighting whose reverberations have never stopped. It is the war that defined a region, shaped a generation of leaders and movements, and created the territorial and political realities that the world continues to struggle with today. Understanding it is not optional for anyone who seeks to understand the modern Middle East. It is the key to everything that followed, and much of what came before as well.

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The Deep Background: the 1948 War, the 1956 War, and the Road to 1967

To understand why the Six-Day War happened, it is necessary to look back further than the immediate crisis of May 1967. The war did not emerge from a vacuum. It grew out of nearly two decades of unresolved conflict, repeated military confrontations, accumulated grievances, Palestinian displacement, superpower rivalry, and a region in which every armistice had planted the seeds of the next war. The Six-Day War was, in one of its most fundamental dimensions, the third Arab-Israeli war, and it cannot be understood without understanding the two that preceded it.

The 1948 Arab-Israeli War and Its Consequences

The roots of the June 1967 conflict reach back to November 29, 1947, when the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 181, the Partition Plan for Mandatory Palestine. The resolution proposed dividing the territory of British Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, with Jerusalem placed under an international trusteeship. The Jewish Agency, representing the Zionist movement, accepted the partition plan despite reservations about the borders it drew. The Arab states and the Palestinian Arab leadership rejected it entirely, arguing that the United Nations had no right to partition a land in which Arabs constituted the majority of the population and that any such division would be imposed at the expense of the indigenous Arab population.

When the British Mandate formally expired and the State of Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948, the armies of five Arab states, Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, invaded the following day. The ensuing war lasted approximately ten months, until the armistice agreements of 1949, and it produced results that would shape everything that followed for generations. Israel won the war, and in doing so expanded its territory beyond the boundaries allocated by the UN partition plan. At the time of the armistice agreements, Israel controlled approximately 78 percent of the territory of Mandatory Palestine. The armistice lines that emerged, known as the Green Line, established the de facto borders of Israel until 1967.

The West Bank, including East Jerusalem with its Old City and its sacred sites for all three Abrahamic religions, came under the control of Transjordan, which formally annexed it in 1950, renaming the country Jordan. The Gaza Strip came under Egyptian military administration. The Golan Heights remained under Syrian control. Jerusalem, which the UN Partition Plan had intended to place under international trusteeship, was divided: West Jerusalem came under Israeli sovereignty, while East Jerusalem, including the Old City with the Western Wall, the Temple Mount, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the Muslim holy sites of the Haram al-Sharif, came under Jordanian control. Between 1948 and 1967, Jews were barred from visiting the Jewish holy sites in East Jerusalem.

The most catastrophic human consequence of the 1948 war was what became known in Arabic as al-Nakba, the catastrophe: the flight and expulsion of approximately 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes during the fighting. This was roughly half the Arab population of Mandatory Palestine. Palestinian Arabs fled or were driven from cities including Haifa, Jaffa, and Acre; from hundreds of villages; from land that their families had worked for generations. The question of how to characterize what happened to the Palestinians in 1948 has been the subject of intense historiographical debate. Israeli historian Benny Morris, in his groundbreaking research into Israeli military archives that became available decades later, documented numerous cases of deliberate expulsion of Palestinian Arabs by Israeli military forces, though Morris argued that many Palestinians also fled in the chaos of war, sometimes encouraged to do so by Arab leaders who told them the armies of the Arab states would quickly return them to their homes. Israeli historian Ilan Pappe took a more forceful position, arguing that the displacement of Palestinians was the result of a deliberate and systematic policy of ethnic cleansing, and that the documentary evidence, when read carefully, demonstrates a coherent plan rather than a wartime improvisation. The debate between these historians reflects larger political and moral disputes about the nature and meaning of the 1948 events that remain unresolved and passionately contested.

What is not disputed is the result: approximately 700,000 Palestinians became refugees, settling in camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, where they and their descendants remained, waiting for the right of return that the United Nations had called for in General Assembly Resolution 194 of December 1948. That resolution stated that refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid to those choosing not to return. The right of return was never implemented. The Palestinian refugee camps became permanent institutions, home to hundreds of thousands of people living in poverty and statelessness, with their sense of national identity shaped by their experience of dispossession and their hope, or in many cases insistence, on return. By 1967, the Palestinian refugee population had grown through natural increase to well over one million people living in camps and in surrounding communities across the Arab world.

The armistice agreements of 1949 were not peace treaties. They were agreements to stop fighting, not to accept the results of the war as permanent. The Arab states explicitly refused to recognize Israel's existence and maintained a formal state of war. Israel was excluded from the Arab League. Arab states imposed an economic boycott on Israel and on foreign companies doing business with Israel. No Arab state would allow Israeli ships through the Suez Canal. Egypt blockaded the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping beginning in 1950. The failure to convert armistice into peace meant that all the underlying tensions remained alive and that the question of the Palestinian refugees, of the borders, and of the basic legitimacy of the Israeli state remained fundamentally open and contested.

The 1956 Suez War and Its Critical Aftermath

The second major Arab-Israeli war came in 1956 and its aftermath is essential to understanding why the Six-Day War occurred when it did and took the form it took. In July 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal Company, which had been jointly owned by Britain and France. Nasser's nationalization was immensely popular in Egypt and across the Arab world as an assertion of Arab sovereignty against the former colonial powers, but it threw Britain and France into a crisis. Both countries depended on the canal for the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf, and both had significant financial and strategic interests in the canal itself. They began planning military action to retake it.

Israel's motivations for joining what became the tripartite coalition against Egypt were different from those of Britain and France. Israel was concerned above all about two things: the fedayeen raids being launched from the Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip by Palestinian guerrillas who crossed into Israel and attacked civilians, and Nasser's blockade of Israeli shipping through the Straits of Tiran, which prevented Israel from using its southern port of Eilat. Nasser had imposed the blockade beginning in 1950, cutting off Israel's maritime access to Africa and Asia. Israel also feared that the sophisticated weapons Egypt was acquiring from Czechoslovakia, which were in fact Soviet weapons channeled through Czechoslovakia, would eventually shift the military balance decisively against Israel.

In late October 1956, representatives of Britain, France, and Israel met in secret at the town of Sevres, outside Paris, and signed a secret protocol. Under the plan, Israel would attack Egypt across the Sinai; Britain and France would then issue an ultimatum to both Egypt and Israel to withdraw from the canal zone; when Egypt refused, as was expected, Britain and France would intervene militarily on the pretext of separating the combatants, but with the actual goal of retaking the canal and, if possible, bringing down Nasser. On October 29, 1956, Israel launched Operation Kadesh, its assault on the Sinai Peninsula, and rapidly defeated Egyptian forces in the desert. Britain and France bombed Egyptian airfields and then landed troops along the canal.

The operation was a military success but a political catastrophe for the European powers. Both the United States, under President Dwight Eisenhower, who was furious at not being consulted and who faced a presidential election within days, and the Soviet Union condemned the attack and demanded a ceasefire and immediate withdrawal. Eisenhower threatened to sell American holdings of British pounds sterling if Britain did not comply immediately, which would have triggered a severe financial crisis for the already-strained British economy. The Soviet Union issued threatening notes to Britain, France, and Israel. The combination of American and Soviet pressure was overwhelming. Britain and France withdrew in humiliation within weeks. Israel was also required to withdraw from the territories it had captured in the Sinai.

However, Israel's withdrawal from the Sinai in early 1957 was not unconditional. Israel negotiated two critical guarantees in exchange for its withdrawal. First, a United Nations Emergency Force, known as UNEF, would be deployed on Egyptian soil in the Sinai and at Sharm el-Sheikh at the entrance to the Straits of Tiran, providing a buffer between Egyptian and Israeli forces. Second, Israel received international guarantees of free passage for Israeli shipping through the Straits of Tiran. President Eisenhower personally assured Prime Minister Ben-Gurion that the United States considered Israeli shipping rights through the Straits to be a matter of international law and that the United States would work to uphold them. These guarantees were considered vital to Israel's interests and strategic positioning.

The significance of these 1957 arrangements cannot be overstated in any account of the origins of the Six-Day War: the deployment of UNEF and the guarantee of passage through the Straits of Tiran were the precise arrangements that would be overturned in May 1967, triggering the crisis that led directly to the Six-Day War. When Nasser expelled UNEF from Egyptian soil and closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping in May 1967, he was reversing the specific guarantees Israel had received in exchange for withdrawing from the Sinai ten years earlier. From Israel's perspective, the 1967 crisis was thus not simply a new confrontation but the culmination of a process that had begun with the unresolved disputes of 1948 and the specific and now-violated arrangements made after 1956.

The political lesson that Israel drew from the 1956 experience was equally important for the future. Despite having won the military battle, Israel had been compelled by the great powers to give back everything it had gained. The United States and the Soviet Union had both sided against Israeli interests, for very different reasons. The lesson many Israeli leaders internalized was stark: Israel could not rely on the great powers to protect its vital interests in a moment of crisis. If Israel was to survive and secure its strategic interests, it would have to be capable of doing so through its own military capabilities. This conviction would shape Israeli military planning and strategic culture throughout the next decade and would be a crucial factor in the decision to strike preemptively in June 1967.

Escalating Tensions, 1960-1966

Between 1957 and 1967, the Arab-Israeli confrontation never reached the level of a full-scale war but never subsided into genuine peace. Palestinian fedayeen continued to launch raids into Israel from Jordan, Syria, and Gaza, attacking civilians, planting mines on roads, and sabotaging infrastructure. Israel responded with military reprisal operations, a policy of retaliation that was controversial both domestically and internationally but that Israeli leaders believed was necessary to deter further attacks by demonstrating that any attack would be met with a response that the attacking side would find painful. Often the reprisal operations targeted Jordanian villages and military positions even when the attacks had originated from Syrian territory, because Syria was considerably harder to strike effectively and Jordan's border was more accessible to Israeli military forces.

The Syrian border was particularly tense throughout the early 1960s. Israel and Syria quarreled bitterly over the demilitarized zones created by the 1949 armistice agreement along their shared border, and there were frequent clashes over agricultural activity within those zones, fishing rights on the Sea of Galilee, and control of commanding high ground. The dispute intensified in the mid-1960s over the critical question of water rights. Israel completed its National Water Carrier in 1964, a massive engineering project designed to pump water from the Sea of Galilee in the north to the arid Negev in the south. The Arab League's 1964 summit responded by launching a project to divert the tributaries of the Jordan River flowing through Syrian and Lebanese territory, which would reduce the flow of water reaching Israel's water carrier and limit Israel's ability to develop its water resources. Israel bombed the Syrian diversion works, destroying construction equipment in a series of military operations in 1965 and 1966. The water dispute added an additional and deeply practical dimension to the already explosive Israeli-Syrian relationship.

The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in May 1964 under the sponsorship of the Arab League, initially as a relatively controlled instrument of the Arab states rather than a genuinely independent Palestinian political organization. Ahmad al-Shuqeiri was its first chairman. However, a more militant Palestinian guerrilla organization, Fatah, led by Yasser Arafat, was already conducting cross-border raids into Israel from Jordanian and Lebanese territory. Beginning in January 1965, Fatah launched its first armed operations against Israeli infrastructure, including an attempted attack on the National Water Carrier, and subsequent attacks multiplied over the following year and a half. The raids accelerated significantly after a Syrian coup in February 1966 brought to power a more radical Baathist faction under Salah Jadid, who actively supported and encouraged Palestinian guerrilla operations against Israel as part of a strategy of revolutionary warfare aimed at destabilizing the Israeli state.

The year 1966 and the first months of 1967 saw a significant and dangerous escalation of violence. In November 1966, Israeli forces conducted a major reprisal operation against the Jordanian West Bank village of Samu, killing a number of Jordanian soldiers and demolishing houses, in retaliation for a mine attack on an Israeli patrol that had killed three soldiers. The Samu operation was politically controversial: Jordan's King Hussein condemned it and the United Nations Security Council censured Israel for the operation. The attack humiliated Hussein, who depended on the Palestinian population of the West Bank as a substantial part of his kingdom's population, and strengthened his domestic critics who argued that he was failing to protect the Palestinian population. It created pressure on Hussein to demonstrate Arab solidarity, pressure that would eventually lead him to sign the fateful defense pact with Nasser on May 30, 1967.

By the spring of 1967, the Syrian-Israeli border had become the most volatile frontier in the region. Israeli and Syrian aircraft fought dogfights over Syrian territory, with Israel shooting down six Syrian MiG fighter jets in an aerial battle in April 1967. The Israeli Chief of Staff, General Yitzhak Rabin, made public statements warning that Israel might need to take action to change the Syrian regime if Syrian-sponsored attacks against Israeli territory continued. Syrian officials and media responded with increasingly bellicose rhetoric. The region was moving toward crisis in ways that all the parties could feel but that none of the key actors seemed able or willing to step back from. The explosion, when it came, was both a surprise in its timing and entirely predictable in its general outlines.

The Diplomatic Crisis of May 1967

The crisis that led to the Six-Day War began not with a military incident but with an intelligence report. On May 13, 1967, Soviet intelligence delivered a report to Egyptian and Syrian officials claiming that Israel had massed eleven to thirteen brigades on the Syrian border in preparation for a large-scale attack on Syria. The report was false. United Nations observers on the ground, including General Odd Bull, the Norwegian commander of the UN Truce Supervision Organization, investigated and found no such concentration of forces. The Israeli government, in an unusual move, invited the Soviet ambassador to Israel, Dmitri Chuvakhin, to travel to the northern border himself and see that no such buildup existed. Chuvakhin declined to make the trip. Why the Soviet intelligence services produced and delivered this false report remains debated. Some historians believe it was a deliberate provocation intended to force a crisis that would demonstrate the value of Soviet military patronage to Egypt and Syria, both of which were Soviet client states. Others believe it was a genuine intelligence failure or miscalculation. What is certain is that Nasser received the report and acted on it, setting in motion a chain of events that would culminate in war.

On May 16, 1967, just three days after receiving the Soviet report, Nasser ordered the withdrawal of the United Nations Emergency Force from the Sinai and the Gaza Strip. UNEF had been stationed there since 1957, when Israel had withdrawn from the Sinai after the Suez War, and its presence had been one of the key guarantees maintaining relative stability along the Egyptian-Israeli border for a decade. The request to withdraw was addressed to UN Secretary-General U Thant. The Secretary-General's response was swift and has been criticized by many as excessively hasty: rather than referring the matter to the UN Security Council or the General Assembly, or at minimum stalling for time while diplomatic efforts were made, U Thant complied with Egypt's demand within days and ordered UNEF to withdraw. U Thant later wrote that he had no choice under the UN Charter since Egypt held sovereign rights over its own territory and could demand the withdrawal of foreign forces at any time. Critics responded that the proper course was at minimum to buy time through procedural delays and to force the Security Council to address the rapidly developing crisis. Whatever the merits of these arguments, the practical result was that UNEF's forces, the buffer that had prevented Egyptian and Israeli forces from confronting each other directly, departed the Sinai within days.

On May 22 and 23, 1967, Nasser took the step that made war virtually inevitable. He announced the closure of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. The Israeli government had declared in 1957, clearly and publicly, that it would consider the closure of the Straits of Tiran to be a casus belli, an act of war justifying a military response. The straits were not merely a matter of national pride; they were Israel's only access to the Red Sea and through it to the Indian Ocean, Africa, and Asia. Israeli oil supplies from Iran arrived through the port of Eilat at the northern tip of the Gulf of Aqaba, the waterway that the Straits of Tiran served as the entrance to. Closing the Straits thus cut off this oil supply and imposed a significant economic cost on Israel, in addition to the profound symbolic and strategic message it sent. The Arab world erupted in celebration. Nasser's popularity soared to heights it had not reached since the Suez crisis of 1956. For Arab publics who had suffered through years of Israeli military dominance and Arab political humiliation, Nasser's defiance seemed to promise a new chapter. Arab radio stations played martial music and called for the liberation of Palestine. The rhetoric of the Arab political moment was maximalist and threatening: Nasser spoke of restoring the situation to what it was before 1948, and PLO chairman Ahmad al-Shuqeiri spoke of driving the Jews into the sea. The political atmosphere in the Arab capitals was electric with a sense of imminent victory.

On May 30, 1967, in a move that shocked observers who were aware of the deep rivalry and mutual hostility between Jordan and Egypt, King Hussein of Jordan flew to Cairo and signed a mutual defense pact with Nasser. The Egyptian-Jordanian defense pact placed Jordanian forces under Egyptian command and brought Jordan formally into the anti-Israel coalition. Hussein was making a calculated but ultimately catastrophic bet. He knew that Jordan's military was far weaker than Israel's, and he maintained quiet back-channel contacts with Israeli officials. But he faced two intolerable alternatives: if he stayed out of the coming war and the Arab side won, he would be isolated and possibly overthrown; if he stayed out and the Arab side lost, his Palestinian subjects, who made up the majority of Jordan's population, would regard him as a traitor who had abandoned the cause. The defense pact with Nasser seemed to offer the least bad option, though it would prove to cost him the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Iraq and Saudi Arabia also committed troops to join the Arab coalition.

Israel's Three Weeks of Crisis and the Decision for War

Israel mobilized its reserve forces on May 19, 1967, just days after Nasser's order to UNEF. Mobilization was an economically ruinous step for Israel: the country's reserve military system meant that calling up the reserves essentially halted large sectors of the civilian economy. Approximately 250,000 reservists were called up, a huge proportion of the adult male working-age population of a country of fewer than three million people. The mobilization could not be sustained indefinitely without devastating economic consequences. Each day of mobilization cost Israel approximately ten million dollars, a staggering sum for an economy of its size.

The three weeks between Israel's mobilization and the outbreak of war on June 5 were a period of intense political and psychological strain within Israel. The Israeli public feared what was being called a second Holocaust; the rhetoric from Arab capitals was eliminationist, and ordinary Israelis prepared for the worst. Public parks in Tel Aviv were quietly designated as potential mass burial grounds. The psychological burden on Prime Minister Levi Eshkol was enormous. Eshkol was a capable politician and a skilled administrator but was not the commanding military figure that Israelis wanted in their leader in a moment of existential crisis. When he delivered a hesitant, stumbling radio address to the nation on May 28, 1967, his obvious stress was read by the public as weakness, and the political pressure on the government intensified.

The result was the formation of a national unity government. On June 1, 1967, Moshe Dayan was appointed as Defense Minister, replacing Eshkol in that role while Eshkol remained as Prime Minister. Dayan was a magnetic, one-eyed military hero, the symbol of Israeli military prowess from the 1948 and 1956 wars, and his appointment immediately changed the public mood. At the same time, Menachem Begin, leader of the right-wing opposition Gahal party, entered the government as a minister without portfolio, making it a genuine national unity cabinet. The cabinet voted on June 4, 1967, to launch military operations.

In the weeks before the decision to fight, Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban had conducted urgent diplomatic missions to the capitals of the Western powers in a last effort to find a diplomatic solution that would preserve Israeli interests without war. In Paris, French President Charles de Gaulle received Eban coolly and warned him explicitly against firing the first shot: France would side with whichever state was the victim of aggression, and if Israel attacked first, France would not support it. De Gaulle would later impose an arms embargo on Israel after the war, permanently damaging the close French-Israeli relationship that had existed through the 1950s and early 1960s. In London, Prime Minister Harold Wilson was sympathetic to Israel's position but could make no firm commitments. In Washington, President Lyndon Johnson told Eban that the United States was working on a multinational naval flotilla that would sail through the Straits of Tiran and break the Egyptian blockade, but he warned Israel not to act unilaterally. Johnson's famous formulation, conveyed through various channels, was that Israel would not be alone unless it decided to go alone, meaning that the United States would not abandon Israel but that if Israel struck first without waiting for the diplomatic process to run its course, it would be acting on its own. Johnson was deeply consumed by the Vietnam War, and his political ability to take strong action in the Middle East was constrained. The promised multinational flotilla to break the Tiran blockade never materialized. By June 4, the Israeli cabinet voted unanimously to go to war the next morning.

Operation Moked: the Destruction of the Arab Air Forces

The military plan that Israel had prepared for the contingency of war with Egypt, Jordan, and Syria centered on a single decisive concept: destroy the Arab air forces on the ground before they could take off. Air superiority would then allow the Israeli army to fight on the ground without fear of air attack, would enable Israeli aircraft to provide close air support to Israeli ground forces, and would allow the destruction of Arab armor, artillery, and supply lines from the air. The entire Israeli ground campaign depended on achieving this air superiority quickly and completely. If the Arab air forces were not destroyed in the first hours, the war might become an extended conflict in which Israel's numerical inferiority in men and weapons would be a decisive disadvantage.

The plan, called Operation Moked, meaning Focus in Hebrew, was the product of years of meticulous preparation under the supervision of Brigadier General Mordecai Hod, the commander of the Israeli Air Force. The plan called for virtually the entire Israeli Air Force, leaving only a minimal reserve for air defense, to attack Egyptian airfields simultaneously in a coordinated first strike. The timing of the attack was chosen with extraordinary care. The strike would begin at 7:45 in the morning Cairo time. This specific time was selected for several reinforcing reasons: the Egyptian radar operators changed shifts at 7:30 in the morning, and the new operators would not yet be fully alert; Egyptian Air Force generals and senior officers were typically in their cars driving to their offices at that hour and would not be at their command posts; the morning coastal mist over the Mediterranean, which Egyptian radar relied on to track low-flying aircraft approaching from the sea, would have burned off by then; and Egyptian combat air patrols, which had been intensive in earlier days but which could not be maintained indefinitely at high alert, had been standing down.

On the morning of June 5, 1967, at precisely 7:45 AM Cairo time, the Israeli Air Force launched 192 aircraft in the first strike wave. The Israeli aircraft flew at extremely low altitude over the Mediterranean Sea, below Egyptian radar coverage, before turning south and attacking their targets simultaneously. The coordination required was extraordinary: aircraft taking off from different airfields around Israel had to reach their targets, which were spread across Egypt, at exactly the same moment. Any aircraft that arrived early or late would alert the Egyptians and give them time to scramble their planes. The plan worked with almost perfect precision. The Israeli aircraft arrived over approximately ten Egyptian airfields simultaneously and caught the Egyptian Air Force almost entirely on the ground. Egyptian aircraft were lined up in neat rows on their runways, many without protective shelters. Israeli pilots used a specially developed runway-busting bomb, the Israeli-French designed Durandal, combined with strafing runs to destroy both aircraft and runways.

The results were devastating. In the first three hours of fighting, approximately 300 Egyptian aircraft were destroyed, the overwhelming majority of them while still on the ground. Among the aircraft destroyed were the most modern and capable fighters and bombers in the Egyptian inventory, including Soviet-supplied Tu-16 bombers that could have struck Israeli cities, MiG-21 fighters that were among the most capable aircraft of the era, and MiG-19 and MiG-17 fighters. The destruction was compounded by the extraordinary turnaround time that Israeli ground crews and pilots had perfected. Israeli aircraft returned to their base airfields, rearmed and refueled in approximately seven to eight minutes, and flew again. Standard NATO procedure for the same turnaround required thirty to forty-five minutes. This rapid cycling allowed each Israeli aircraft to fly multiple sorties in the same morning, multiplying the effective striking power of the Israeli Air Force several times over.

Having destroyed the Egyptian Air Force, the Israelis then turned their attention to Jordan and Syria, which had both begun military operations against Israel. King Hussein, who had been told by Nasser through a falsely optimistic telephone call early that morning that Egypt was winning the air battle and that Israeli aircraft attacking Egypt were Egyptian aircraft that had been shot down over Israel, ordered his forces to begin shelling West Jerusalem and Israeli positions in the center of the country. Jordanian Long Tom artillery shells landed in Tel Aviv and its suburbs, the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus came under fire, and the southern suburbs of Jerusalem were shelled. Israel sent messages to Hussein through the American ambassador and through the UN urging him not to attack, but the Jordanian bombardment had already begun. The Israeli Air Force attacked Jordanian air force bases at Mafraq and Amman later that morning, destroying the entire Jordanian Air Force. Syrian airfields were also struck. Later in the day, a strike force of Israeli aircraft flew the length of Jordan and struck the Iraqi air base at H-3 in the western Iraqi desert, destroying Iraqi aircraft that might otherwise have entered the conflict.

By the evening of June 5, the first day of the war, the Arab air forces had been shattered. Egypt lost approximately 300 aircraft, Jordan lost its entire air force of approximately 28 aircraft, Syria lost more than 60 aircraft, and Iraq lost approximately 17 aircraft. In total, the Arab coalition lost approximately 450 aircraft, the great majority of them on the ground. Israel lost approximately 19 aircraft to Arab anti-aircraft fire and the few Arab aircraft that managed to get airborne. The outcome of the air battle on the first day of the war determined the outcome of the entire conflict. Israeli air superiority was total and absolute from the morning of June 5 onward, and it made the Israeli ground victories that followed both possible and far less costly than they would otherwise have been.

The Ground War: the Sinai Campaign

The Israeli ground campaign in the Sinai Peninsula was executed by three armored divisional task forces attacking simultaneously along different axes, each designed to overwhelm a different segment of the Egyptian defensive system. The Egyptian forces in the Sinai were substantial: approximately 100,000 soldiers organized in seven divisions, including four infantry divisions holding prepared defensive positions and three armored divisions as a mobile reserve. The Egyptians had spent years constructing elaborate defensive fortifications in the northern Sinai, with minefields, tank obstacles, bunkers, and mutually supporting strongpoints. On paper, the Egyptian forces in the Sinai represented a formidable defensive force. The catastrophic failure of Egyptian command and communication in the opening hours of the war would render that paper strength meaningless.

General Israel Tal commanded the northern division, which struck along the coastal road through the Gaza Strip. Tal was Israel's foremost expert on armored warfare, the man who had transformed the Israeli armored corps into the professional force it had become. His division fought through the Gaza Strip, engaging Egyptian forces in the battle of Khan Yunis before breaking through the northern Sinai defensive belt and pushing west along the coastal road. The battles in the Gaza Strip were fierce and produced significant casualties, but the combination of Israeli air superiority and tank gunnery eventually overwhelmed the Egyptian positions.

General Ariel Sharon commanded the central division and fought what was arguably the most complex and technically demanding single Israeli military operation of the entire war: the Battle of Abu-Ageila, also known as the battle of Um Katef. The Abu-Ageila position was a deeply prepared Egyptian defensive complex in the central Sinai, consisting of three parallel defensive trench lines extending for miles, supported by artillery and protected by minefields. It had stopped Israeli forces during the 1956 war when attacked frontally. Sharon devised a multi-pronged night assault of extraordinary coordination. Infantry attacked the trench lines directly while engineers breached the minefields under fire. Paratroopers were flown by helicopter behind the Egyptian positions under darkness and attacked the Egyptian artillery positions from the rear simultaneously with the frontal infantry assault. Israeli tanks attacked along a separate axis. The coordinated assault from multiple directions, executed at night with strict radio silence and synchronized timing, succeeded completely, destroying the Abu-Ageila complex and opening the central route into the Sinai. Military historians have analyzed the Abu-Ageila battle as one of the most skillfully executed combined-arms operations in the history of armored warfare.

General Avraham Yoffe commanded the third Israeli division and was tasked with driving through a route the Egyptians believed to be impassable, a stretch of sand dunes and rocky terrain that Egyptian military planners had not fortified because they considered it beyond the capability of any armored force. Yoffe's tanks drove through it nonetheless, reaching the key road junction at Bir Lahfan before the Egyptian reinforcements from the armored reserve divisions could use that junction to respond to the attacks in the north and center. The blocking of the Egyptian reserve routes by Yoffe's division prevented the Egyptian armored reserve from being used effectively, contributing to the collapse of the Egyptian defensive system.

After the first day's breakthroughs, the Egyptian forces in the Sinai began to disintegrate. The cause was in large part a catastrophic command failure. Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer, the commander of the Egyptian armed forces and Nasser's closest personal friend, panicked on the first day of the war when the scale of the air losses became clear. Rather than stabilizing the situation, Amer issued a general order for Egyptian forces to withdraw from the Sinai. The order was issued without coordination or planning for an organized fighting withdrawal. Egyptian units that had not yet been engaged received orders to retreat but no instructions for how to do so, which routes to take, where the supply depots were, or how to maintain contact with adjacent units. The result was not a military withdrawal but a rout. Egyptian soldiers abandoned their vehicles, equipment, and weapons and began retreating on foot across the desert toward the Suez Canal, hundreds of miles away, in temperatures exceeding forty degrees Celsius. Israeli aircraft attacked the retreating columns relentlessly. Thousands of Egyptian soldiers died of heat, thirst, and wounds in the desert. The Mitla Pass, the mountain pass connecting the central Sinai to the canal zone, became choked with abandoned Egyptian armor, artillery, and vehicles as retreating Egyptian soldiers tried to funnel through the narrow passage under Israeli air attack. The Sinai became a vast graveyard of Egyptian military equipment.

Israeli forces reached the Suez Canal on June 8, the fourth day of the war. The entire Sinai Peninsula, a territory the size of the Iberian Peninsula, had been conquered in approximately one hundred hours of fighting. The human cost was significant but far less than might have been expected given the scale of the operation: Israel lost several hundred soldiers killed in the Sinai campaign, while Egyptian losses were in the thousands killed and tens of thousands captured or scattered.

The Jordanian Front and the Battle for Jerusalem

Despite the Israeli government's messages to King Hussein urging him not to enter the war, and despite the fact that Hussein had private intelligence from his own sources suggesting that Israel's military was far more capable than Arab public opinion believed, the Jordanian military began its operations against Israel on the morning of June 5. Jordanian artillery shelled the Israeli side of Jerusalem, including the Knesset, the Israeli government's new campus on Givat Ram, and the Hebrew University campus on Mount Scopus, which had been an Israeli enclave in Jordanian-held Jerusalem since 1948. Jordanian shells also fell on the Tel Aviv area. Jordanian forces moved into the United Nations headquarters building in Government House in Jerusalem, which had been the headquarters of the UN Truce Supervision Organization, evicting the UN personnel.

The Israeli forces on the Jordanian front were commanded by General Uzi Narkiss, a paratrooper who had been one of the Israeli officers who had fought to reach the Western Wall during the 1948 war and been turned back by Jordanian forces. Narkiss now had the opportunity and the mission to achieve what had been denied him nineteen years earlier. The initial Israeli operations focused on securing Israeli Jerusalem from Jordanian fire and pushing Jordanian forces off the high ground around the city that gave them their commanding positions. Israeli troops fought through the areas north of Jerusalem, including the town of Ramallah, and moved to encircle East Jerusalem.

The Battle for Jerusalem was assigned to the 55th Paratroop Brigade under Colonel Mordecai Gur. Gur's paratroopers were the elite of the Israeli army, highly trained fighters who had been assembled for a potential parachute drop into Sinai before the Jordanian attack redirected them to Jerusalem. They fought their way through the northern neighborhoods of Jerusalem on the nights of June 5 and 6. The fighting was brutal and costly. The battle of Ammunition Hill, a fortified Jordanian police training school position, was particularly fierce: Israeli paratroopers assaulted the position in close combat in the darkness, fighting from trench to trench, and suffered significant casualties. The position fell after hours of intense fighting that became one of the iconic battles of the Israeli military tradition.

On June 7, 1967, the third day of the war, Israeli forces completed the encirclement of the Old City of Jerusalem. At approximately 10:00 in the morning, Colonel Mordecai Gur led his paratroopers through the Lion's Gate, the eastern gate of the Old City walls, and moved toward the Temple Mount and the Western Wall. His radio transmission, broadcast live on Israeli radio, was heard by the entire country: the Temple Mount is in our hands. Defense Minister Dayan, Chief of Staff Rabin, and General Narkiss entered the Old City through the Lion's Gate later that morning. Dayan delivered a brief address at the Western Wall, the holiest accessible site in Judaism, promising that Israel had come not to conquer the holy sites of others but to ensure free access for all faiths. The Chief Rabbi of the Israeli Defense Forces, Shlomo Goren, blew a shofar at the Wall and recited prayers. The scenes of Israeli soldiers touching the ancient stones of the Wall for the first time produced an outpouring of emotion in Israel and among Jewish communities worldwide. For many Israelis, the capture of Jerusalem was the transcendent moment of the entire war, with religious and historical significance that transcended the military victory itself.

The broader campaign on the Jordanian front moved rapidly. Israeli forces took Nablus, Jenin, Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Hebron. The Jordanian army, which fought more effectively than the Egyptian army but was heavily outmatched by Israeli firepower and air superiority, suffered substantial casualties and was unable to hold any of its positions. By June 7, all of the West Bank was under Israeli military control. Jordanian casualties were in the hundreds killed and thousands wounded. Approximately 200,000 to 300,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from the West Bank during the fighting, adding to the Palestinian refugee population and creating what became known as the displacement of 1967, a new generation of Palestinian refugees who had lost their homes for the second time in twenty years.

The Syrian Front and the Golan Heights

The Syrian front presented the most politically and strategically complex decision of the war. The Golan Heights, a basalt plateau rising steeply from the Jordan Valley and the shores of the Sea of Galilee, dominated northern Israel from an elevation of several hundred feet. For years, Syrian artillery on the Golan had shelled the Israeli kibbutzim and farming communities in the valley below, turning daily life there into a dangerous and psychologically exhausting experience. The kibbutz residents had begged successive Israeli governments to do something about the Syrian shelling, and the capture of the Golan had been a military objective of many Israeli planners. But the Golan fortifications were formidable: years of Syrian engineering had turned the plateau into a dense network of bunkers, artillery positions, anti-tank ditches, minefields, and interconnected fortifications. An assault up the steep escarpment would be extremely difficult and costly.

The Israeli cabinet was initially reluctant to authorize an attack on the Golan. By June 8, Egypt and Jordan had been effectively defeated, and a ceasefire was expected soon. Attacking Syria would expand the war, risk Soviet intervention to protect a Soviet client state, and would involve assaulting the most heavily fortified position facing Israel. The cabinet was divided. On June 9, Defense Minister Dayan, in a decision that he later acknowledged was taken against the recommendations of some of his military advisers and that he made on his own authority without full cabinet approval, authorized the attack on the Golan. General David Elazar, the commander of the northern front, had been pressing for permission to attack and moved immediately when authorization came.

The Israeli assault up the Golan escarpment began on June 9 and was brutal in its execution. Israeli tanks climbed steep slopes under intense Syrian anti-tank and artillery fire. The infantry fighting through the Syrian bunker complexes was fierce and bloody. Israeli casualties in the assault were among the heaviest of the entire war in proportion to the number of troops engaged. But the Syrian command system, as had happened in Egypt, failed under the pressure of the Israeli assault. Syrian commanders abandoned their posts, and the Syrian army's defense collapsed. Israeli forces poured through the breach and swept across the Golan plateau. Syrian forces retreated in disorder toward Damascus. By the time the UN ceasefire came into effect on June 10, Israeli forces held the entire Golan Heights, including the town of Quneitra and positions from which Damascus itself was visible in the distance.

Dayan was later criticized on two counts with respect to the Golan operation: first, for delaying the attack by a day and a half after the other fronts had been won, which critics argued cost lives unnecessarily; and second, for halting the advance when the UN ceasefire came into effect rather than pressing on to Damascus, which some Israeli military figures believed was within reach and whose capture might have fundamentally changed the political outcome. Dayan rejected both criticisms, arguing that the timing of the attack was the result of military and political calculation, not hesitation, and that advancing to Damascus would have been a catastrophically risky overextension.

The Uss Liberty Incident

On June 8, 1967, the fourth day of the Six-Day War, an event occurred that has generated controversy and bitter dispute ever since. The USS Liberty, a United States Navy signals intelligence ship assigned to the National Security Agency, was sailing in international waters in the eastern Mediterranean, approximately twenty-five nautical miles north of the Sinai Peninsula coast. The Liberty was a lightly armed technical vessel, not a combatant, flying the American flag and marked with American naval identification. Its mission was to intercept communications in the region and report to American intelligence authorities.

In the early afternoon of June 8, Israeli aircraft attacked the Liberty with rockets, cannon fire, and napalm in multiple attack runs lasting approximately twenty-five minutes. Israeli torpedo boats then attacked the ship with torpedoes, one of which struck the NSA signals room in the side of the vessel. The combined attack killed 34 American servicemen and wounded 171 others, more than two-thirds of the crew. The Liberty was severely damaged and nearly sunk. American aircraft from nearby carriers scrambled to assist the Liberty but were ordered back by their commanders, a decision that has itself been the subject of controversy. The Israeli attack stopped when the Israeli forces apparently confirmed the ship's American identity.

The Israeli government apologized quickly and claimed the attack was a tragic case of mistaken identity. Israeli military and government officials stated that the Liberty had been confused with an Egyptian vessel, specifically an aged Egyptian horse transport called the El Quseir, and that the identification had been made under difficult circumstances during the heat of combat. The United States government, under President Johnson, accepted this explanation. A United States Navy Court of Inquiry was convened and reached a finding of mistaken identity, though the inquiry was conducted very rapidly and survivors of the attack have argued that it was neither thorough nor genuinely independent. Israel paid compensation to the families of those killed and wounded, and the matter was officially treated as closed.

The official explanation has been challenged persistently and with considerable force by the survivors of the attack and by some American officials and investigators. The most detailed account challenging the mistaken identity finding is James Ennes's book Assault on the Liberty, published in 1980, in which Ennes, a survivor of the attack, argued that Israeli forces knew the ship was American and attacked it deliberately, possibly to prevent it from intercepting Israeli military communications during the attack on the Golan Heights or other sensitive operations. Subsequent research has uncovered Israeli pilot testimony suggesting that the pilots recognized the ship as American before the attack was called off, and NSA documents that were declassified in later decades have fueled further debate. Various investigations, congressional testimonies, and declassified documents have sustained the controversy without resolving it definitively. The Israeli government has maintained its mistaken identity account consistently. The survivors of the USS Liberty have maintained their challenge to that account with equal consistency. The full truth of what happened on June 8, 1967, and why, remains one of the most disputed episodes in the history of American-Israeli relations.

The Immediate Aftermath and Un Resolution 242

The Six-Day War ended on June 10, 1967, when the last ceasefire, with Syria, came into effect. In six days of fighting, Israel had transformed the map of the Middle East. The territorial gains were staggering in their scale. Israel now controlled the entire Sinai Peninsula, extending from the Suez Canal in the west to the Red Sea in the south and the international boundary with Israel in the north and east. It controlled the entire West Bank of the Jordan River, including East Jerusalem and its Old City with its sacred sites for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It controlled the Gaza Strip, home to more than 400,000 Palestinians including a large population of refugees from the 1948 war. And it controlled the Golan Heights, the strategic plateau from which Syria had shelled northern Israel for two decades. The total area of the new territories was approximately 45,000 square miles, roughly three times the area of Israel within its pre-1967 boundaries.

The international community's immediate response was a mixture of shock at the scale and speed of the Israeli victory and urgent concern about the political consequences. The United Nations Security Council met almost continuously during the fighting and in the weeks that followed. The result of months of diplomatic negotiation was United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, adopted unanimously on November 22, 1967. The resolution called for the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict and for the termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence of every state in the area. The resolution also affirmed the necessity of guaranteeing freedom of navigation through international waterways and achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem.

Resolution 242 was carefully worded to allow different interpretations, and those different interpretations immediately became points of contention. The English text of the resolution called for withdrawal from territories occupied in the recent conflict, not withdrawal from the territories, which would have implied total withdrawal from all captured land. The omission of the definite article the before territories was deliberate: the British and American delegates who drafted the resolution intended to allow for the possibility of modifications to the 1967 lines as part of a negotiated peace settlement. Arab states and their supporters insisted that the resolution required total withdrawal from all occupied territories. Israel and its supporters insisted that the resolution envisioned land for peace negotiations in which Israel would withdraw from some but not necessarily all of the territories in exchange for peace treaties and recognized borders. This argument about the meaning of Resolution 242 has persisted for more than half a century and remains unresolved, reflecting the fundamental disagreement about the nature of the peace that must follow the war.

The Arab response to the defeat came at the Arab League summit convened in Khartoum, Sudan, in August and September of 1967. The Khartoum summit produced what became known as the Three Nos: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel. The Three Nos reflected the Arab leaders' assessment that they had no political choice but to maintain a maximalist posture of non-recognition given the scale of the disaster they had just suffered and the fury of their domestic populations. To accept peace with Israel so quickly after such a humiliating defeat would have been politically suicidal for any Arab leader. But the Khartoum declaration also foreclosed the possibility of immediate negotiations that might have produced a settlement before the facts on the ground hardened into something permanent. The window of opportunity, if it existed at all in 1967, was firmly closed by the Khartoum Three Nos.

The Occupation and the Settlement Enterprise

Israel found itself, almost by accident of military victory rather than prior political decision, in control of approximately 1.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, in addition to the Syrian population of the Golan Heights and the largely uninhabited Sinai Peninsula. The question of what to do with these territories and their populations immediately divided Israeli society and has remained the central and most contentious question of Israeli politics ever since.

The most pragmatic peace plan proposed within the Israeli government in the weeks after the war was the Allon Plan, devised by Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon. Allon proposed that Israel should annex the Jordan Valley, which he argued was necessary as a defensive buffer between Israel and Jordan, and a significantly enlarged Jerusalem. The heavily populated Arab areas of the West Bank, including Nablus, Hebron, Ramallah, and Jericho, would be returned to Jordanian sovereignty or given autonomy. The plan was never formally adopted by the Israeli government, partly because Jordan refused to negotiate with Israel under any circumstances in the post-Khartoum atmosphere, and partly because there were Israeli political forces that wanted to retain far more of the territory than the Allon Plan envisioned. The plan remained on the table as an informal guide to Israeli settlement and infrastructure construction in the Jordan Valley but was never brought to a definitive resolution.

The settlement of the occupied territories by Israeli civilians began almost immediately after the war. In September 1967, Kfar Etzion was reestablished in the West Bank. Kfar Etzion had been a Jewish kibbutz before 1948, destroyed by Jordanian forces during the 1948 war with its defenders killed. The survivors and children of the original settlers reclaimed the site as the first Israeli settlement in the newly occupied West Bank. It was soon followed by others. The settlement enterprise began as a combination of security considerations, ideological and religious motivations, and the pragmatic use of government land allocations and economic incentives. Over the following decades, the settler movement grew from a small ideologically motivated vanguard to a major political and demographic force.

The religious nationalist settler movement, Gush Emunim or Bloc of the Faithful, was formally founded in 1974 after the Yom Kippur War. Gush Emunim argued from a religious nationalist perspective that the Land of Israel, including the entire West Bank, which the movement called by the biblical names Judea and Samaria, was divinely promised to the Jewish people and that Jewish settlement of that land was a religious obligation. The movement established settlements throughout the West Bank, sometimes in defiance of government orders, and built a political constituency that grew steadily over the following decades. By the early 21st century, more than 700,000 Israelis were living in settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the settlement enterprise had become one of the central facts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, complicating and in many analyses foreclosing the possibility of a viable two-state solution.

The military administration of the occupied territories created a system that became increasingly difficult to justify or maintain over time. Palestinian civilians living under Israeli military administration were subject to military law: they could be detained without charge under administrative detention orders, their property could be requisitioned for military purposes, their movement could be restricted by curfews and checkpoints, and their political activity was constrained in ways that had no parallel in Israeli civil law. At the same time, Israeli settlers living in the same territory were subject to Israeli civil law, enjoyed the full rights of Israeli citizenship, and had access to Israeli courts. The two systems of law applied to two populations in the same territory based on their ethnic and national identity produced a system that critics characterized as inherently discriminatory and that became increasingly difficult to defend internationally.

The Yom Kippur War of 1973 and Its Consequences

The Six-Day War created the conditions for the next major conflict. Egypt under Anwar Sadat, who succeeded Nasser after Nasser died of a heart attack in September 1970, concluded that the humiliation of the 1967 defeat had to be reversed and that Israel would never return the Sinai through diplomacy alone. Sadat made multiple attempts to reach a diplomatic solution, including a 1971 peace proposal that offered Israel full peace in exchange for Sinai withdrawal, which Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir declined to engage with seriously. Having concluded that diplomacy had been exhausted, Sadat began planning a military operation designed not necessarily to defeat Israel militarily but to break the diplomatic stalemate by demonstrating that the Arab side could fight, that the situation was not frozen in Israel's favor, and that the United States needed to engage actively in resolving the conflict.

On October 6, 1973, the most sacred day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur, Egypt and Syria launched a coordinated surprise attack. Egyptian forces crossed the Suez Canal in massive force, overwhelming the Israeli Bar-Lev Line of fortifications on the eastern bank of the canal using innovative tactics, particularly the use of high-pressure water cannon to breach the sand ramparts that formed the main Israeli defensive barrier. Egyptian forces advanced into the Sinai and held their ground effectively in the initial days using Soviet anti-tank missiles to destroy Israeli armor and surface-to-air missile systems to neutralize Israel's previously dominant air power. Syrian forces simultaneously attacked the Golan Heights with hundreds of tanks and penetrated deeply into the Israeli defensive lines, at one point coming within artillery range of the Israeli population centers in the Jordan Valley below.

The 1973 war shattered the myth of Israeli military invincibility that had been created by the Six-Day War. The Israeli military and political leadership had fallen into a collective intelligence and strategic failure, discounting repeated warning signs of the impending attack because the dominant strategic assumption, based on the experience of 1967, was that Israel was so militarily superior that Egypt and Syria would not dare attack. This failure of imagination and of willingness to challenge the prevailing strategic paradigm, which became known in Israel as the Conceptzia or the Concept, led to a near-catastrophe in the war's opening days. Israel was saved by a massive American military airlift of arms and equipment, by the extraordinary performance of the Israeli soldiers and officers who fought the initial battles with limited resources, and eventually by Israeli military counterattacks that crossed the Suez Canal and encircled the Egyptian Third Army.

The political consequences of the 1973 war were transformative. The war created the conditions for peace between Egypt and Israel. President Carter's successful mediation at Camp David in September 1978 produced the Camp David Accords, which established the framework for an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, and the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty was signed in March 1979. Under its terms, Israel agreed to return the entire Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in exchange for full peace, diplomatic recognition, and normalization of relations. The withdrawal was completed in stages over the following years, with the final Israeli withdrawal from Sinai completed in April 1982. The Camp David process demonstrated conclusively that the land-for-peace formula of Resolution 242 could work in practice, not just in theory, when the political will existed on both sides and when American diplomatic engagement was sustained and committed. The Egypt-Israel peace endured and it prevented the outbreak of another major Egyptian-Israeli war, but it produced what both sides described as a cold peace, a peace of governments rather than of peoples, which normalized relations at the official level without generating genuine reconciliation between the two societies.

The Camp David Accords, the Oslo Process, and the Unresolved Conflict

The Camp David Accords of 1978 were historic in establishing peace between Egypt and Israel but they failed to resolve the Palestinian question. The framework for peace in the Middle East section of the accords provided for a transitional period of Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza and envisioned negotiations toward a final status determination, but it did not create a Palestinian state and did not deliver Palestinian self-determination. Egypt's isolation from the Arab world after signing the peace, and Sadat's assassination by Egyptian Islamists in October 1981, reflected the depth of Arab anger at what was seen as Egypt's abandonment of the Palestinian cause in exchange for the return of Egyptian sovereign territory.

The Palestinian national movement continued to evolve in the decades after 1967. The PLO under Arafat remained the dominant Palestinian political organization but faced a crisis of legitimacy and effectiveness. The First Intifada, which began in December 1987 in the Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza and quickly spread to the West Bank, was a spontaneous popular uprising against Israeli military occupation. The images of Palestinian youth confronting Israeli soldiers with stones, and the disproportionate Israeli military response, generated widespread international sympathy for the Palestinian cause and eventually led to the Oslo peace process. The Oslo Accords of 1993, signed on the White House lawn by Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in the presence of President Clinton, established mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO, created the Palestinian Authority as a governing body in parts of the West Bank and Gaza, and promised negotiations toward a final status agreement within five years. The final status was never agreed.

The assassination of Rabin in November 1995 by a right-wing Israeli extremist opposed to the Oslo process removed the Israeli leader who had shown the greatest willingness to make territorial concessions for peace. The subsequent years brought a series of failed negotiations and escalating violence, culminating in the collapse of the Camp David summit of July 2000 between Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak mediated by President Clinton, and the outbreak of the Second Intifada in September 2000. The Second Intifada was far more violent than the first: suicide bombings in Israeli cities, restaurants, buses, and shopping centers killed more than a thousand Israeli civilians and wounded thousands more. Israel's military response included the reoccupation of Palestinian cities, the construction of a security barrier along and sometimes beyond the 1967 Green Line, and targeted killings of Palestinian militant leaders. The Second Intifada ended not with a political agreement but with a military suppression that left the underlying conflict unresolved.

Israel's unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in August 2005, under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, removed all Israeli settlements and military forces from Gaza. Sharon intended the withdrawal as a step that would relieve international pressure on Israel, reduce the burden of occupation, and potentially strengthen Israel's position in the West Bank by demonstrating willingness to make concessions. The political consequences were the opposite of what Sharon had envisioned. Hamas, the Islamist Palestinian movement that had emerged in Gaza in the 1980s as an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood, won Palestinian legislative elections in January 2006 and after a brief civil conflict seized full control of the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian Authority in June 2007. Hamas established an Islamist government in Gaza and continued rocket and mortar fire into Israeli communities. Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade on Gaza. Three major military conflicts between Israel and Gaza-based armed groups in 2008-2009, 2012, and 2014 killed thousands of Palestinians and hundreds of Israelis, destroyed large amounts of Gaza's infrastructure, and failed to resolve the underlying political conflict.

The Long-Term Transformation of Israeli and Arab Politics

The Six-Day War transformed Israeli society and politics in ways that became fully apparent only over the subsequent decades. The secular Labor Zionism that had dominated Israeli political life since before the state's founding began a long decline after 1967. The conquest of the biblical heartland energized a religious nationalist current within Israeli society that had previously been politically marginal. For religious nationalist Israelis who believed that the territories captured in 1967 were part of the land divinely promised to the Jewish people, the Six-Day War was a miraculous event, a fulfillment of biblical prophecy. This interpretation gave the settlement enterprise a theological legitimacy that was deeply compelling to its adherents and deeply alarming to those, both in Israel and internationally, who saw the settlement project as the primary obstacle to a two-state solution.

The political realignment that the Six-Day War helped set in motion became visible in the 1977 Israeli elections, when the Likud party under Menachem Begin won power for the first time, ending nearly three decades of Labor political dominance. Begin's victory reflected multiple forces: the anger of Mizrahi Jews, Jews who had come to Israel from Arab countries and who had been treated as second-class citizens by the Ashkenazi Labor establishment, and who strongly opposed territorial concessions; the growth of religious nationalist politics; and a broader disillusionment with Labor governance following the failures of the Yom Kippur War. The 1977 election was in many respects a direct consequence of the political and social forces that the 1967 war had set in motion.

For the Arab world, the 1967 war was al-Naksa, the setback, a humiliation that exposed the bankruptcy of secular pan-Arab nationalism as a political project. The defeat of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, despite their numerical superiority in men and weapons, demonstrated that the Arab world's problems could not be solved by the mobilization of nationalist sentiment and military force alone. The failure of Nasser's Egypt to deliver on the promise of Arab liberation, combined with the general failure of the Arab socialist states to deliver economic development and political freedom, created the ideological vacuum that political Islam would fill over the following decades. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, suppressed under Nasser, began to grow again. Hamas in Palestine drew explicitly on the argument that secular Palestinian nationalism as embodied in the PLO had failed and that only a return to Islamic principles could deliver liberation. Hezbollah in Lebanon combined Shia Islamism with armed resistance to Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. The chain of causation from the 1967 defeat to the growth of political Islam in the Arab world is not simple or deterministic, but the connection is real.

The conflict's human costs over the decades since 1967 have been enormous and ongoing. Thousands of soldiers and civilians on all sides have been killed. Millions of Palestinians have lived under military occupation or in refugee camps or in the blockaded Gaza Strip. Israeli society has been shaped by decades of security threats, military service, and the moral and political burden of managing an occupation that cannot be reconciled with the democratic values that Israel proclaims. The international community has passed hundreds of resolutions, organized dozens of conferences, and invested enormous diplomatic resources in the search for a solution that has not been found.

The Golan Heights issue took a separate trajectory. Israel applied Israeli law to the Golan Heights in 1981, a step that fell short of formal annexation under international law but that incorporated the Golan into the Israeli administrative and legal system. In March 2019, United States President Donald Trump signed a proclamation recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, reversing decades of American policy and making the United States the first country to recognize Israeli sovereignty there. No other country followed suit. Syria continued to insist on the return of the Golan, though the devastation of the Syrian civil war that began in 2011 made any near-term resolution of the Golan question even more remote.

The two-state solution, a Palestinian state alongside Israel in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital, has remained the stated goal of most international actors for decades. The obstacles to achieving it have multiplied with each passing year. The number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank has grown to more than 700,000, making their removal a vastly more difficult political undertaking than it would have been in 1967 or 1977 or 1987 or 1997. The fragmentation of Palestinian politics between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza means that there is no single Palestinian authority capable of making and implementing a peace agreement. The status of Jerusalem, sacred to all three Abrahamic faiths and claimed as a capital by both Israel and the Palestinians, remains a seemingly intractable problem.

The Six-Day War of 1967 thus stands as one of the great turning points of modern history, an event whose consequences have proven far more enduring and far more difficult to resolve than its participants could have imagined in the moment of military triumph or defeat. The war's six days of fighting transformed the territorial map of the Middle East, but it was the political choices made in the years and decades that followed, the decisions about settlements, about diplomacy, about recognition, about violence and its alternatives, that determined whether the victory and the defeat of 1967 would lead eventually to peace or to a conflict without foreseeable end. More than half a century later, those choices are still being made, and their outcome remains uncertain.