The Six-Day War

In six days in June 1967, the map of the Middle East was redrawn in ways that have proved impossible to reverse in the nearly six decades since. Israel’s preemptive air strikes destroyed three Arab air forces before most of their pilots had finished breakfast, and Israeli ground forces swept through the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights in the fastest territorial conquest since the Second World War. When the guns fell silent on June 10, Israel controlled territory three times its pre-war size, Jerusalem was unified under Israeli authority for the first time since antiquity, and the Palestinian question had been transformed from an issue of refugees into one of military occupation. The Yom Kippur War, the peace process, the settlement enterprise, the intifadas, and every subsequent chapter of the Arab-Israeli conflict have been defined by the outcomes of those six days. Understanding the war requires understanding not only how it was won but what it produced — and why those consequences have proven so extraordinarily durable.

The Pressure Cooker: 1948 to 1967¶

The Six-Day War grew from the unresolved tensions of Israel’s creation. The 1948 Arab-Israeli War — Israel’s War of Independence, the Palestinian Nakba — had produced an armistice but no peace. Egypt controlled Gaza; Jordan had annexed the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Palestinian refugees — roughly 700,000 people who had fled or been expelled during the 1948 fighting — were concentrated in camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, where they remained stateless and politically volatile.

Egypt under President Gamal Abdel Nasser had become the Arab world’s dominant voice, and Nasser’s pan-Arab nationalism — the ideology that Arab unity, modernization, and confrontation with Israel and Western imperialism were intertwined causes — commanded mass loyalty across the region. The nationalisation of the Suez Canal in 1956, followed by the Suez Crisis in which Israel, Britain, and France attacked Egypt but were forced to withdraw under US and Soviet pressure, had paradoxically enhanced Nasser’s prestige: he had faced down three aggressors and emerged a hero. Israel had withdrawn from the Sinai Peninsula under American pressure, in exchange for UN peacekeepers (UNEF) stationed in Sinai and a US guarantee of freedom of navigation through the Strait of Tiran.

The decade between Suez and 1967 was one of escalating border tensions, guerrilla raids, and aerial incidents that both sides managed but never resolved. Syria had been particularly active in supporting Palestinian guerrilla operations from its territory, and Israeli reprisals — including an April 1967 air battle over Damascus in which Israeli aircraft shot down six Syrian MiGs — had humiliated Syrian leadership and put pressure on Nasser to demonstrate pan-Arab solidarity.

The proximate trigger came from Soviet Union intelligence, deliberately fabricated or genuinely mistaken. In May 1967, Moscow informed Cairo that Israel was massing forces on the Syrian border for an imminent attack. The intelligence was false — UN observers on the ground confirmed no unusual Israeli concentrations — but Nasser chose to act on it, or chose to use it as the pretext for moves he had long contemplated.

The Crisis Escalates¶

On May 14, Egyptian forces began moving into Sinai in large numbers. On May 18, Nasser demanded the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers from Sinai and Gaza — a request that UN Secretary-General U Thant controversially complied with immediately, removing the buffer force that had kept the border quiet since 1957. On May 22, Nasser announced the closure of the Strait of Tiran to Israeli shipping — the casus belli that Israel had explicitly warned, in 1957, would be treated as an act of war.

The strategic logic of Nasser’s moves has been debated ever since. Was he genuinely seeking war, or was he playing to Arab audiences while expecting that US pressure would prevent hostilities? The Israeli assessment, which proved correct, was that the distinction was irrelevant: whether or not Nasser wanted war, his actions had created a strategic situation that Israel could not tolerate indefinitely. With Egyptian forces in Sinai and the Strait of Tiran closed, Israel’s southern port of Eilat — its only access to Asian trade and to the Iranian oil supply it depended on — was strangled. Waiting was not a neutral option.

Jordan’s King Hussein, despite his private doubts about the wisdom of confrontation and his secret backchannel to Israeli leaders, felt compelled by pan-Arab pressure to sign a mutual defence pact with Egypt on May 30. Iraq sent forces to Jordan. Syria was already on a war footing. Israel found itself surrounded by coalitions on three fronts, with a total Arab force of perhaps 465,000 soldiers, 2,800 tanks, and 800 aircraft poised against an Israeli force of 275,000 (heavily dependent on reserves who needed to be rapidly mobilized), 1,100 tanks, and 200 combat aircraft.

The three weeks between Nasser’s Tiran announcement and Israel’s attack on June 5 were among the most intense in Israeli history. The economy was partially mobilized, with reservists called up and a significant fraction of the Israeli male population under arms. The government held anxious debates about whether to strike first or wait for US diplomacy to reopen the Strait. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, appointed to provide military confidence to the nervous coalition government, pressed for action. Prime Minister Levi Eshkol agonized and stalled.

The United States under President Lyndon Johnson was engaged in simultaneous crises — Vietnam was consuming enormous political and military resources — and while Washington privately signalled understanding of Israel’s position, it asked for more time to assemble an international naval force to reopen the Strait through non-military means. The “Red Sea Regatta,” as it was mockingly called, never materialized. On June 1, Israel’s military and intelligence leadership presented Eshkol with their unanimous recommendation: strike now, while the element of surprise remains available. On June 4, the cabinet voted to go to war.

June 5, 1967: The Air Strike¶

At 7:45 a.m. on June 5, 1967 — timed for when Egyptian pilots were eating breakfast and Egyptian radar operators were at shift change — Israeli aircraft crossed the Egyptian border at low altitude, below radar coverage. The first wave struck ten Egyptian airfields. Within the first three hours, the Israeli Air Force destroyed 286 Egyptian aircraft, the great majority of them on the ground. By the end of the day, 416 Arab aircraft had been destroyed — Egypt, Jordan, and Syria combined — against Israeli losses of 46 aircraft. The Arab air forces, which had represented the primary threat to Israeli cities and which would have been decisive in any sustained ground campaign, ceased to exist as military forces within hours.

The technical achievement was matched by the operational deception. Egyptian pilots had been warned of possible Israeli attack but had been assured by their commanders that the Israeli Air Force was too small to attack all Egyptian fields simultaneously. The assumption was correct in one sense and catastrophically wrong in another: the Israelis had spent years modifying their aircraft for rapid turnaround, reducing the time between sorties to 7-8 minutes versus the standard 90 minutes, effectively tripling the operational size of their air force for a single intense effort.

Nasser was informed of the scale of the disaster within hours but concealed it, broadcasting to the Arab world a false narrative of Egyptian advances and Israeli defeats. Jordan’s Hussein, receiving the false Egyptian reports, ordered Jordanian artillery to open fire on Israeli Jerusalem and Israeli territory — a decision that, had he known the truth, he would almost certainly not have taken. His entry into the war cost him the West Bank.

The Ground War¶

With air superiority absolute, Israeli ground forces moved simultaneously on three fronts. In Sinai, three Israeli armoured divisions drove into the Egyptian defences in a coordinated attack that echoed the German operational art of 1940. The Egyptian positions, though numerous, were outmanoeuvred by Israeli forces that repeatedly found gaps, bypassed strong points, and struck at command nodes. Egyptian forces fought hard in places — Abu Ageila, the Mitla Pass, Bir Gifgafa — but the loss of air cover made organized defence impossible. By June 8, the Israeli Army was at the Suez Canal, having advanced 200 kilometres in three days. Tens of thousands of Egyptian soldiers retreated through the Sinai desert on foot, dying of thirst by the hundreds; an estimated 10,000-15,000 Egyptian soldiers died in the Sinai fighting.

On the Jordanian front, intense fighting for Jerusalem was the centrepiece. Israel had initially hoped to keep Jordan out of the expanded war, but once Jordanian artillery opened fire, the operational logic demanded action. Israeli paratroopers under Mordechai Gur assaulted the Old City on June 7, fighting through the narrow lanes of the Muslim Quarter toward the Temple Mount — the holiest site in Judaism, controlled by Jordan since 1948. At the Western Wall — the last standing remnant of the Second Temple — Israeli soldiers wept and blew the shofar. Defense Minister Dayan announced: “We have returned to our holiest places, never to be separated from them again.” The West Bank’s cities — Nablus, Ramallah, Hebron, Bethlehem, Jericho — fell within two days. Roughly 300,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled, many of them second-time refugees who had already fled in 1948.

The Golan Heights — Syrian territory from which artillery had periodically bombarded Israeli kibbutzim in the Jordan Valley below — was the war’s final front. The Heights were massively fortified, rising sharply from the Jordan Valley in a series of steep basalt escarpments. Israeli forces assaulted them on June 9-10, suffering their heaviest casualties of the war in direct assaults on Syrian fortifications. When the ceasefire took effect on June 10, Israel held the Golan.

UN Resolution 242 and the “Land for Peace” Formula¶

The international response crystallized in UN Security Council Resolution 242 of November 22, 1967, which established the framework that would govern Middle East diplomacy for the following half-century. The resolution called for Israeli withdrawal “from territories occupied in the recent conflict” (deliberately ambiguous in the English text as to whether it meant all the territories or some), recognition of every state’s right to “live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries,” and a just settlement of the refugee problem.

The deliberate ambiguity of “from territories” — inserted by the British draft at American insistence to avoid requiring total Israeli withdrawal — became one of the most contested phrases in diplomatic history. Israel and its supporters read it as permitting retention of some territories; Arab states and most international lawyers read it as requiring withdrawal from all. The phrase has never been definitively interpreted, and its unresolved ambiguity runs through every subsequent peace negotiation.

The resolution’s implicit bargain — “land for peace” — was theoretically simple: Arab recognition and peace in exchange for Israeli withdrawal. In practice, the trading of tangible territorial control for intangible diplomatic recognition proved enormously difficult. The Khartoum Arab Summit of September 1967 produced the famous “Three Nos” — no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations — foreclosing diplomatic progress for years.

Palestinian Displacement and PLO Radicalization¶

The 1967 war added roughly 300,000 Palestinians to the refugee population and brought another 1.1 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza under Israeli military occupation. The combined effect was to transform the Palestinian national cause from a question of refugees absorbed into surrounding Arab states — the dominant pre-1967 framework — into a question of occupation, resistance, and self-determination.

The Palestine Liberation Organization, founded in 1964 under Egyptian sponsorship as a vehicle for the existing Arab states to manage Palestinian nationalism, was transformed after 1967 by the political rise of guerrilla factions, particularly Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. The Arab states’ failure to liberate Palestine through conventional war — the failure spectacularly demonstrated in six days of fighting — discredited the strategy of Arab interstate action and empowered the guerrilla organizations that argued for Palestinian self-reliance. The PLO’s increasingly spectacular operations — aircraft hijackings, the Munich Olympics massacre of 1972 — brought the Palestinian cause to global attention while simultaneously discrediting it in Western opinion and allowing Israel to frame all Palestinian resistance as terrorism.

Cold War Dimensions¶

The Six-Day War was fought in the shadow of superpower competition. The Soviet Union had been the primary arms supplier to Egypt and Syria, and the scale of Arab military losses required massive Soviet resupply operations in the war’s immediate aftermath. Moscow broke diplomatic relations with Israel and pushed for Israeli withdrawal in the UN Security Council, but stopped well short of any direct military involvement — a restraint partly enforced by the same nuclear deterrence logic that constrained American intervention in Soviet-adjacent conflicts.

The United States had supplied some weapons to Israel but maintained formal neutrality at the war’s outset; the unofficial “green light” American planners had given Israeli pre-emption was never publicly acknowledged. The war’s outcome enormously strengthened the US-Israel relationship: Israel had demonstrated that it was a strategically capable partner that could defend itself and American interests without requiring the deployment of American soldiers — a valuable commodity during Vietnam. American arms transfers to Israel accelerated significantly after 1967, establishing the qualitative military superiority that has characterized the relationship ever since.

The Liberty incident — the Israeli attack on the US intelligence ship USS Liberty on June 8, killing 34 American sailors — introduced a jarring note of ambiguity. The official Israeli explanation of mistaken identity has never been fully accepted by Liberty survivors or by some American intelligence officials who believe Israel was preventing the ship from monitoring Israeli military communications. The incident was suppressed by both governments under Cold War imperatives and remains officially unresolved.

The Lasting Territorial Legacy¶

The territories seized in the Six-Day War remain the central unresolved question of the Arab-Israeli conflict nearly six decades later. The Sinai was returned to Egypt through the 1973 war and the subsequent peace process, completed in 1982. Israel returned the Golan — partially, then withdrew completely — in the Syrian disengagement of 1974, though it later annexed the Golan Heights in 1981 in a move recognized by the United States in 2019 but rejected by the international community. Gaza was transferred to Palestinian Authority control in 2005 before Hamas seized it in 2007. The West Bank remains under Israeli military occupation, with over 700,000 Israeli settlers now living in settlements across the territory — a fact that has progressively foreclosed the two-state solution envisioned by Resolution 242.

The settlement enterprise — the construction of Israeli civilian communities in the occupied West Bank — began almost immediately after 1967 and has continued under every Israeli government of left and right, Labour and Likud. What began as a security doctrine evolved into an ideological and demographic project. The religious Zionist movement, galvanized by the return to the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria, drove settlement construction with a messianic intensity that secular Israelis found difficult to resist politically. By 2026, with settlements threaded throughout the West Bank and the settler population exceeding 700,000, the geographic feasibility of a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel has been radically diminished.

The unresolved question of Palestinian self-determination — deferred, managed, and periodically erupting in violence — is the direct legacy of June 1967. The Oslo process of the 1990s attempted to negotiate a final settlement and failed. The Camp David summit of 2000 came close and collapsed. The subsequent intifadas killed thousands on both sides. The current impasse reflects the deep truth that the Six-Day War’s territorial outcomes have proven durable in ways that the war’s architects, on both sides, could not have anticipated. What was seized in six days has proved impossible to resolve in sixty years.

Sources & Further Reading¶

• Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Michael Oren (2002) — The definitive military and diplomatic history of the war, based on extensive archival research across multiple countries including newly available Israeli and Soviet archives.

• The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East by Guy Laron (2017) — A revisionist account that emphasizes domestic political factors, Soviet provocations, and economic pressures in explaining why the crisis escalated to war rather than being resolved diplomatically.

• Lions of Judah: The Six-Day War and the Making of Israel’s Legend by Randolph Churchill and Winston S. Churchill (1967) — An early contemporary account written in the war’s immediate aftermath by Winston Churchill’s son and grandson, capturing the atmosphere of the moment.

• My Life by Golda Meir (1975) — Israel’s future Prime Minister was a central figure in the lead-up to 1967; her memoir provides the Israeli political leadership’s perspective on the pressures and decisions of the crisis period.

• The Arab-Israeli Wars: War and Peace in the Middle East by Chaim Herzog (1982) — An Israeli general and later president provides the most comprehensive single-volume military history of all the Arab-Israeli wars from 1948 through the 1970s.