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Re-Examining the Six-Day War

By Henry Norr, June 2007

To mark the Occupation’s fortieth anniversary, we proudly present this well-researched summary of how it began. Examining the Zionist narrative and reframing history with a human-rights perspective is an essential step toward a just peace. We encourage you to share this article with friends and coworkers who only know the one version.
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To most Israelis and Americans, the history of the June 1967 Middle East war is a classic David-and-Goliath tale.

Plucky little Israel, the story goes, was peacefully minding its own business until the neighborhood bully, Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser (heavily armed by the Soviet Union), suddenly massed his troops and, in cahoots with Jordan, Syria and the rest of the Arab world, prepared to launch an attack intended to wipe out the Jewish state. Backs to the wall and abandoned to their fate by the rest of the world, the Israelis had no
choice but to strike out at their enemies. By dint of courage, cleverness, and determination - and with the Judeo-Christian God clearly on their side - they pulled off a military miracle: in just six days they not only shattered the enemy’s forces but also quadrupled their territory, capturing the Sinai Desert and Gaza Strip from Egypt, East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria.

Palestinian displacement, 1967 (photo: UNRWA)

Crafted originally by Israel’s then Foreign Minister and chief mouthpiece to the West, Abba Eban, and in recent years retold in a best-selling book and countless interviews and op-eds by the American-born Israeli historian Michael Oren, this story is repeated endlessly in the mainstream media. But from the outset Nasser’s decision to send his troops into the Sinai on May 15, 1967, precipitated the crisis that led to war, but his move was preceded by a series of aggressive Israeli attacks on its neighbors - and numerous indications that Israel was preparing a major offensive against Nasser’s ally, Syria.

The previous November, for example, 4,000 Israeli soldiers had assaulted the town of Samu’ in the West Bank (then under Jordanian control), killed 15 Jordanian soldiers and three civilians, and methodically destroyed at least one hundred houses, a school, and a clinic. The attack was in response to the planting of a land mine that killed three soldiers and other cross-border raids by guerrillas from a then-new organization called Fatah, but, as U.S. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg told the United Nations, the Samu’ raid’s toll “in human lives and in destruction far surpasses the cumulative total of the various acts of terrorism conducted against the frontiers of Israel.”

Another demonstration of Israeli belligerence came a few months later along the Syrian border, the site of frequent skirmishes - 80 percent of them deliberately provoked by Israel, according to Moshe Dayan. On April 7, 1967, one of these battles escalated, and by the end of the day Israel had shot down six Syrian planes, including one near Damascus.

By May the Israeli media were filled with calls by editorialists and politicians for a fullscale attack on Syria. Yitzhak Rabin, then chief of staff of the Israeli “Defense” Forces, declared, “The moment is coming when we will march on Damascus to overthrow the Syrian government.” The Associated Press, the New York Times, and the Jerusalem Post all reported that Israel was preparing to attack. Then the Soviets shared with Egypt an intelligence report - apparently erroneous, but in context easily believable - that the Israelis were massing troops for an attack on Syria.

In this situation Nasser, who cast himself as the leader of the Arab world but had been criticized, even mocked, for not responding to the November and April incidents, began moving troops into the previously demilitarized Sinai; shortly afterwards, he demanded the removal of a UN peacekeeping force along Egypt’s border with Israel and declared the Straits of Tiran, a waterway leading to the Israeli port of Eilat, closed to Israeli shipping.

Exactly what Nasser’s intentions were, and even whether the Egyptian leadership shared any coherent plan, is not known. Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol told his cabinet that the Egyptians’ goal was to deter Israel from carrying out its threats against Syria. US intelligence agencies insisted that the Egyptian troops were in defensive positions and were not about to attack Israel.

But Israel’s generals, confident of their military superiority (an assessment shared by the CIA), saw a chance to knock out Nasser and demanded an immediate preemptive attack. Most of the Israeli public and media joined their call - largely, according to Tom Segev’s new book 1967, out of fear that Nasser planned a new holocaust. Eshkol refused for a while to give go-ahead, mainly because the Johnson administration was initially, and vehemently, opposed. As Segev shows, however, Israel mounted a multi-front campaign - enlisting Jewish donors to the Democrats, Jewish members of the administration, and Jewish friends of LBJ, as well as ultra-rightists within the CIA such as the legendary James Jesus Angleton - to win Washington’s approval for war
By early June, that campaign had succeeded, and with a green light from the Americans, Israel launched a surprise attack on the morning of June 5. Flying French Mirage jets low over the Sinai, under Egyptian radar, the Israelis managed to destroy most of the Egyptian air force on the ground - the outcome was actually determined in the war’s first minutes. When Jordan and Syria joined the fight, Israel decimated their air forces, too. By all accounts Arab ground forces put up a tough fight on many fronts, but without air support, they stood little chance of success.

Records of the deliberations of Israeli leaders show that their primary goal going into the war was not to expand their territory, but to shatter the military power of Egypt and Syria and to humiliate Nasser, thus undermining the Arab nationalism he represented. With those goals accomplished, however, and with Arab defenses crumbling on all fronts, the leaders couldn’t resist the temptation. Giddy with success and patriotic and (in some cases) religious exaltation, they proceeded to grab the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Old City of Jerusalem, and finally, in the final hours of the war, the Golan Heights. Dayan called it “fulfilling Zionism.”

Almost overnight, then, the Israelis, the Palestinians, and their neighbors were confronted with a new political landscape, one that in most respects hasn’t changed since. (Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt under the 1979 Camp David agreement.) Another 200,000 to 250,000 Palestinians became refugees, mostly fleeing to Jordan. Palestinians who remained in Gaza and the West Bank began strikes, demonstrations, and other forms of resistance within weeks. The Israelis moved quickly to suppress it, using such tactics as military raids, arrests, torture, land seizures, curfews, and home demolitions - and constant recruitment of collaborators.

Among Israeli and American Jews, the war brought a dramatic upsurge in religious and Zionist fervor, while the “special relationship” between their governments grew tighter than ever - regardless of the Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty, which occurred on the fourth day of the war.

Within days of the war’s end, Israeli leaders began debating what to do with the Palestinian territories. Among Israeli Jews there was what Segev calls “a wide and virtually unchallenged consensus” that “Jerusalem is ours,” and on June 27 the Knesset annexed the eastern part of the city.

As to the rest of the territories, there was more debate. Dayan advocated setting up military outposts and Jewish settlements on the mountaintops of the West Bank. Gen. Yigal Allon wanted to annex Gaza, Bethlehem, Hebron, and the Jordan Valley, but to keep down Israel’s Arab population by setting up a Jordanian-controlled or “quasi-autonomous” zone on the remnants of the West Bank. Menachem Begin rejected every proposal: as Segev summarizes his position, “Martial law was working, and it was sufficient to let the United States know that Israel was working on solutions.” What the leaders never discussed were the only two solutions that could have brought lasting peace and justice to the region: creation of a single state with full equality for Palestinians, or withdrawal of Israeli troops to pre-1967 orders, a truly independent Palestinian state, and a settlement acceptable to the Palestinians on the status of the refugees and Jerusalem.

In short, the occupation had begun. Forty years later, not much has changed.

Henry Norr has spent six months in Palestine in UNRWA Archives - 1967 recent years, starting with a visit to the Gaza Strip under ISM auspices in May, 2002.

Palestinian displacement, 1967 (photo: UNRWA)