“The Six-Day War,” Israeli military historian Uri Milstein told Al Jazeera, “is considered to be a historic military achievement” despite the fact that it “wasn’t even a real war” but rather “a chase with live fire against an escaping enemy that didn’t fight.” The asymmetry of this (non-)war, Between just June 5 and 10 of 1967, Israel would capture and occupy the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) from Jordan, and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, thus quadrupling its size. As the beginning of Israel’s decades-long occupation of Gaza, understanding the Six-Day War is crucial to understanding in turn the current crisis.
Tensions between Israel and its Arab neighbors had been rising since the Suez Crisis of 1956, during which Israel, followed by the United Kingdom and France, invaded both Egypt and the Gaza Strip to depose popular Egyptian socialist president Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had infuriated Western leaders by nationalizing the European-owned Suez Canal Company. As a result of the crisis, the UN created the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF), which it tasked with keeping peace along the Egyptian–Israeli border. Seeing it as an illegitimate state, Egypt had restricted Israeli access to the both the Canal and the Straits of Tiran, thus cutting off its route to the Red Sea via the Gulf of Aqaba.
In April 1967, Syrian forced shot upon an Israeli tractor ploughing in the demilitarized zone. Shortly thereafter, Nasser received (false) Soviet reports that Israel was massing troops along the Syrian border. In response, Nasser expelled the UNEF peacekeepers and announced that his country would again block Israeli ships from the Straits of Tiran, which Israel considered a casus belli. Both sides began to mobilize and at 7:45 a.m. June 5, before UNEF had even finished evacuating, Israel executed Operation Focus, a surprise attack that destroyed the majority of the Egyptian Air Force on the ground. When Syrian and Jordanian forces retaliated, the Israeli Air Force also bombed the air bases of those countries. By noon, the Israel Defense Forces had destroyed 450 aircraft, thus ensuring air superiority for the remainder of the “war.”
As the scare quotes—and Milstein’s actual quote—suggest, this war was not much of a war. Israel had simultaneously launched ground invasions of the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip, which Egypt had occupied since the conclusion of the First Arab–Israeli War in 1949. Quickly realizing his disadvantage, Nasser ordered a retreat. Jordan, which had only become an Egyptian ally the week before, was never intended to assume an offensive role, but rather to “tie down a proportion of Israel's forces and so prevent it from using its full weight against Egypt and Syria.”1 Syria was largely uninvolved for the first four days of the war, despite having a defense pact with Egypt (to boot, “Jordan had entered the war in the belief that it would be supported by Syria and Egypt”).2 For their part, the Syrians “did not understand what was going on, nor did they have the military experience and capability, especially in the officer corps, to react to the new situation.”3
The results were, as expected, devastating. Between June 5 and 10, over 20,000 Arabs were killed. As would become common between Israel and its Arab neighbors, the scale of death and destruction was highly unequal: Israel suffered fewer than 1,000 causalities. In addition, 15 peacekeepers died during Israeli strikes in Sinai at the outset of the war, as well as 34 crew members aboard the USS Liberty, which was in international waters north of the Sinai Peninsula when it was attacked by both Israeli fighter jets and torpedo boats after being mistaken for an Egyptian vessel. While both the Israeli and US governments conducted inquiries and issued reports concluding that the attack was a case of mistaken identity, some maintain the ship was deliberately targeted.
Israeli territorial gains were similarly stunning. Come June 10, Israel found itself having captured the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) from Jordan, and the entire Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. The displacement of populations within the occupied territories was extensive. Between 280,000 and 325,000 of the estimated one million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza were displaced from their homes, with the majority fleeing to nearby Jordan (UNRWA puts the number even higher at 413,000). In his diary, Moshe Dayan, who was serving as Defense Minister at the time of Six-Day War, wrote that homes in the West Bank were destroyed “not in the battle, but as punishment… and in order to chase away the inhabitants.”
In his monograph of the “Zionist–Arab conflict” entitled Righteous Victims, Israeli historian Benny Morris reports how IDF soldiers went around “with loudspeakers ordering West Bankers to leave their homes and cross the Jordan [River].”4 Beginning the day after the culmination of the Six-Day War and continuing for about a month, Israel organized free buses for thousands of Arabs from East Jerusalem to the Allenby Bridge, the only official border crossing between the West Bank and Jordan. “At the bridge,” Morris writes, “they had to sign a document stating that they were leaving of their own free will.” In this way, we can see that Israel has long had a talent for turning crisis into opportunity, with the goal of having “as much of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians in it as possible.”
Mutawi, Jordan in the 1967 War, 183.
Ibid., 182.
Lesch, “Syria” in The 1967 Arab–Israeli War ed. Louis and Shlaim, 92.
Morris, Righteous Victims, 329.