The Six-Day War, The 6-Day War, 1967 - The Peace FAQ

The Six-Day War, The 6-Day War, 1967

Frequently Asked Questions:

● Was Israel the agressor in 1967? Did Israel attack peacefull Egypt,
Syria, Jordan and Iraq on June 5, 1967 and wrestle the Gaza Strip
from Egypt, the "West Bank" from Jordan, and the Golan Heights
from Syria?

Was Israel the agressor in 1967? Did Israel attack peacefull Egypt,
Syria, Jordan and Iraq on June 5, 1967 and wrestle the Gaza Strip
from Egypt, the "West Bank" from Jordan, and the Golan Heights
from Syria?

● THE 1967 WAR

In May 1967, Egypt and Syria took a number of steps which led
Israel to believe that an Arab attack was imminent. On May 16,
Nasser ordered a withdrawal of the United Nations Emergency Forces
(UNEF) stationed on the Egyptian-Israeli border, thus removing the
international buffer between Egypt and Israel which had existed since
1957. On May 22, Egypt announced a blockade of all goods bound to
and from Israel through the Straits of Tiran. Israel had held since
1957 that another Egyptian blockade of the Tiran Straits would
justify Israeli military action to maintain free access to the port of
Eilat. Syria increased border clashes with Israel along the Golan
Heights and mobilized its troops.

The U.S. feared a major Arab-Israeli and superpower confrontation

and asked Israel to delay military action pending a diplomatic
resolution of the crisis. On May 23, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson
publicly reaffirmed that the Gulf of Aqaba was an international
waterway and declared that a blockade of Israeli shipping was illegal.
In accordance with U.S. wishes, the Israeli cabinet voted five days
later to withhold military action.

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The U.S., however, gained little support in the international

community for its idea of a maritime force that would compel Egypt
to open the waterway and it abandoned its diplomatic efforts in this
regard. On May 30, President Nasser and King Hussein signed a
mutual defense pact, followed on June 4 by a defense pact between
Cairo and Baghdad. Also that week, Arab states began mobilizing
their troops. Against this backdrop, Nasser and other Egyptian
leaders intensified their anti-Israel rhetoric and repeatedly called for
a war of total destruction against Israel.

Arab mobilization compelled Israel to mobilize its troops, 80 percent

of which were reserve civilians. Israel feared slow economic
strangulation because long-term mobilization of such a majority of
the society meant that the Israeli economy and polity would be
brought to a virtual standstill. Militarily, Israeli leaders feared the
consequences of absorbing an Arab first strike against its civilian
population, many of whom lived only miles from Arab-controlled
territory. Incendiary Arab rhetoric threatening Israel's annihilation
terrified Israeli society and contributed to the pressures to go to war.

Against this background, Israel launched a pre-emptive strike against

Egypt on June 5, 1967 and captured the Sinai Peninsula and the
Gaza Strip. Despite an Israeli appeal to Jordan to stay out of the
conflict, Jordan attacked Israel and lost control of the West Bank and
the eastern sector of Jerusalem. Israel went on to capture the Golan
Heights from Syria. The war ended on June 10.

- Anti-Defamation League

● Israel did indeed simultaneously attack Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq
on June 5, 1967. It had little choice. For weeks leading up to that
day, Israel's Arab enemies upped the temperature by amassing
troops on the borders of the tiny Jewish state, while threatening
murder and mayhem. Consider the following:

May 14, 1967: Egypt's President Gamal Nasser demands the

withdrawal of United Nations force--established in 1957 as an
international "guarantee" of safety for Israel--from the Sinai
peninsula. The UN meekly obeys; the United States and Britain fail to
rouse the Security Council to take action.

May 15: Three Egyptian army divisions and 600 tanks roll into the
Sinai. World community does nothing.

May 17: Cairo Radio's Voice of the Arabs: "All Egypt is now prepared
to plunge into total war which will put an end to Israel."

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May 18: Voice of the Arabs announces: "As of today, there no longer
exists an international emergency force to protect Israel. We shall
exercise patience no more. We shall not complain any more to the
UN about Israel. The sole method we shall apply against Israel is a
total war which will result in the extermination of Zionist existence."

May 18: Nasser announces blockade of Straits of Tiran in the Red

Sea, severing Israel's southern maritime link to the outside world.
Israel considers the closure an act of war. (US President Lyndon
Johnson later says: "If a single act of folly was more responsible for
this explosion than any other it was the arbitrary and dangerous
announced decision that the Straits of Tiran would be closed.")

May 20: Syria's defence minister (now president) Hafez el-Assad

says: "Our forces are now ready not only to repulse the aggression
but to initiate the act of liberation itself, and to explode the Zionist
presence in the Arab homeland. The Syrian army, with its finger on
the trigger, is united ..."

May 27: Nasser: "Our basic objection will be the destruction of

Israel. The Arab people want to fight."

May 30: Nasser : "The armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon
are poised on the borders of Israel."

May 30: Jordan's King Hussein signs a five-year mutual defence pact
with Egypt and the two set up a joint command, making clear its
stance in any future conflict.

My 31: Egyptian newspaper Al Akhbar reports: "Under terms of the

military agreement signed with Jordan, Jordanian artillery, co-
ordinated with the forces of Egypt and Syria, is in a position to cut
Israel in two ..."

May 31: Iraqi President Rahman Aref announces: "This is our

opportunity to wipe out the ignominy which has been with us since
1948. Our goal is clear--to wipe Israel off the map."

June 4: Iraq joins Nasser's military alliance against Israel.

June 5: Six Day War begins: Israeli Airforce attacks airfields in

Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq.

June 10: Israel and its enemies accepted UN Security Council cease-
fire demands. The war ended, leaving Israel in control of the Sinai

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peninsula, eastern Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, Judea-Samaria and

the Gaza Strip. (The Sinai was returned to Egypt between 1978 and
1982, as part of an Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty.)

"Never in human history can an aggressor have made

his purpose known in advance so clearly and so widely.
Certain of victory, both the Arab leaders and their
peoples threw off all restraint. Between the middle of
May and fifth of June, world-wide newspapers, radio
and, most incisively, television brought home to
millions of people the threat of politicide bandied about
with relish by the leaders of these modern states. Even
more blatant was the exhilaration which the Arabic
peoples displayed as the prospect of executing
genocide on the people of Israel ... In those three
weeks of mounting tension people throughout the
world watched and waited in growing anxiety--or in
some cases, in hopeful expectation--for the
overwhelming forces of at least Egypt, Syria, Jordan
and Iraq to bear down from three sides to crush tiny
Israel and slaughter her people."

- Samuel Katz, Battleground: Fact and fantasy in Palestine

● Israel's critics maintain that the 1967 War was one of Israeli
aggression rather than a war of Israeli self-defense. Yet, on May 15,
Israel's Independence Day, Egyptian troops began moving into the
Sinai, massing near the Israeli border. By May 18, Syrian troops, too,
were preparing for battle along the Golan Heights, 3000 feet above
the Galilee, from which they had shelled Israel's farms and villages
for years. Egypt's Nasser ordered the UN Emergency Force (UNEF),
stationed in the Sinai since 1956, to withdraw, whereupon the Voice
of the Arabs proclaimed, on May 18, 1967:

"As of today there no longer exists an international emergency force

to protect Israel. We shall exercise patience no more. We shall not
complain any more to the UN about Israel. The sole method we shall
apply against Israel is total war, which will result in the
extermination of Zionist existence."

Two days later an enthusiastic echo came from Hafez Assad, then
Syria's Defense Minister, who proclaimed openly: "Our forces are
now entirely ready...to initiate the act of liberation itself, and to
explodethe Zionist presence in the Arab homeland....The time has
come to enter into a battle of annihilation." President Abdur

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Rahman Aref of Iraq joined the chorus of genocidal threats: "The

existence of Israel is an error which must be rectified. This is our
opportunity to wipe out the ignominy which has been with us since
1948. Our goal is clear - to wipe Israel off the map." On June 4, Iraq
formally joined the military alliance with Egypt, Jordan and Syria.
The Damascus regime's commitment to military final solutions for
Israel has been described by Ahmed S. Khalidi and Hussein Agha
as stemming from "...an apparently strong conviction that the
struggle with Israel is no mere political or territorial dispute, but
rather a clash of destinies affecting the fate and future of the Middle
East." Moreover, Syria's approach to Israel, say Khalidi and Agha,
remains "bound up with the view that force, whether active or
passive, is the final arbiter of the conflict with Israel and the ultimate
guarantor of any settlement in the area."

Was Israel the aggressor in 1967, as the Arabs [and anti-Zionists]

continue to maintain? It hardly seems possible. The jurisprudential
correctness of Israel's resort to anticipatory self-defense is well-
established in longstanding customary international law. The Law of
Nations is not a suicide pact. Israel could not have been expected to
wait patiently for its own annihilation. Indeed, when the Government
of Golda Meir decided not to exercise the lawful option of
anticipatory self-defense in October 1973, when Egypt and Syria
were preparing to launch yet another war of aggression against the
Jewish State, her country almost paid for it with collective
disappearance. And although Israel eventually prevailed against the
Arab aggressors, it did so at a staggering cost in human life. The
Yom Kippur War produced 2326 deaths of Israeli soldiers, nearly ten
thousand injuries and hundreds of prisoners. These costs to Israel
were the direct results of A'man's (Military Intelligence Branch)
failure to predict the Arab attack, a failure known in Israel's
intelligence community as the Mechdal, a Hebrew term meaning
"omission", "nonperformance" or "neglect".

- Louis Rene Beres

Professor of International Law
Department of Political Science
Purdue University

● "The war is inevitable... The war is coming, though not immediately...

The efforts and the agreements which are now taking place are not
building peace; they are agreements leading to war."

- Amin al-Huweidi, the former Egyptian Minister of War and head

of the General Intelligence

● "In recent weeks, the Middle East has passed through a crisis whose

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shadows darkened the entire world. The crisis has many

consequences, but only one cause. Israel's right to peace, security,
sovereignty...indeed its very right to exist, has been forcibly denied
and aggressively attacked."

- Abba Eban, in his statement to the UN following the Six Day War

● In the months leading up to the 1967 Six Day War the airwaves in
the Middle East and throughout the western world were crowded with
threats that Israel was going to be driven into the sea, that Israel
and all its citizens were going to be wiped off the face of the earth.
The threats were accompanied by actions -- Egyptian President
Nasser ordered the UN peacekeeping forces to leave the Sinai
Peninsula and replaced them with his own troops, the Gulf of Aqaba
was blockaded to stop the majority of Israel's shipping, Syrian troops
gathered on the western edge of the Golan Heights while border
incidents and terrorist attacks against Israel increased. While many
individuals and groups did speak up to draw attention to the real
threat Israel faced, one group was conspicuously silent -- the
Christian church.

- Dave Blewett, The National Christian Leadership Conference for

Israel (NCLCI)

● The only prerequisite to a solution of the Middle Eastern question in

its entirety (including the situation of the refugees) remains the
acknowledgement of Israel's right to exist. We have recently
witnessed the spectacle of many nations of the world in effect
denying only to Israel the prerogative of self-protection against
terrorist harassment and openly avowed politicide. The war in the
Middle East was the direct result of the illegal Egyptian blockade of
the Gulf of Aqaba and the announced intention of Arab leaders, with
accompanying military measures, to wipe Israel from the face of the
earth. Yet Israel is now taking steps towards permanent peace and
reconciliation, while all that most Arab leaders offer is a promise of
revenge. Considerably after the cease-fire was effected the Iraqui
chief of state spoke for Arabs everywhere in proclaiming that "the
existence of Israel is in itself an aggression." No real hope is in sight
for a negotiated settlement, either with the Arabs or through the
almost completely futile United Nations organization. If the Israelis
do not insist upon taking necessary steps on their own to ensure
their rights as an independent people, they run the risk of death. We
must avoid the wholly unsupported assumption that if Israel will only
behave as others ask or demand, her detractors will become rational
and want to be friends. The only thing that would appear capable of
propitiating Arabs, communists and Christians who find the Israelis
guilty of "aggression" would be for the latter to lie down and be

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slaughtered.

- by A. Roy and Alice Eckardt in "AGAIN, SILENCE IN THE

CHURCHES", The Christian Century, August 2, 1967

● "The American Council in Jerusalem came just before the [Six Day]
war to evacuate all the Americans in the area..."

- Walid, a Palestinian Arab defector, indicating that the brewing war

was common knowledge.
quoted from "Answering Islam"

● "As my right honourable friend said yesterday, and I am

paraphrasing his words, it is hard to imagine getting closer to
catastrophe than in the way we seem to have been drifting in the last
day or two. I, as have other Members of the House, have had some
connection with this situation for a good many years - in fact, since I
first went down to the United Nations at the end of the war when the
state of Palestine was established by United Nations actions."

"So long as Israel's neighbours, or some of them, refuse to recognize

the right of Israel to exist as a state, then we move from one crisis to
another."

"Israel, of course, also has the basic obligation which I am sure she
accepts, to live without provocation and threat to her neighbours and
in accord with the UN decisions which gave her birth."

"I am perhaps repeating the obvious, but the danger point, is the
situation in Sharm el Sheikh. The troops of the United Arab Republic
now control this port in the Gulf of Aqaba. In 1957 we spent days
and nights arguing about this particular aspect of the settlement
which it was hoped would have been reached at least in accord with
the withdrawal of the Israeli troops from the ground they had
conquered. They made it quite clear at the time that they visualized
a package deal by which, in return for withdrawing from vital
strategic points, and especially from Sharm el Sheikh, they would be
protected against action from those areas, and particularly this point,
which would prejudice and destroy their own national interest. They
undoubtedly feel they have a commitment to that effect."

"We need not go into the legal situation. Perhaps it should be sent to
the international Court of Justice for Judgement, but before the
International Court of Justice could render a judgement many things
would have to be done to avoid trouble, because the Gulf of Aqaba
now is of vital importance to the existence of the State of Israel .
From 90-92 percent of its oil goes past the Strait of Tiran and into
the gulf to the port of Elath. That certainly is one very dangerous
point."

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"The second dangerous point is the Gaza Strip which has now been
taken over by the Palestine Liberation Army, a part of the force of
the United Arab Republic. This army is composed of men devoted-
and fanatically and sincerely devoted -to what they believe to be the
liberation of their homeland. They are there now in the Gaza strip
with 300,000 Palestinian refugees. If there could a more explosive
situation than that, I do not know what it could be."

"The third point is the Syrian border, which has been the scene of
terrorist incidents and activities in recent weeks and which perhaps
has been the occasion for the development of the recent crisis, which
can explode at any minute."

"The fourth danger point is the possibility of excessive reaction or

retaliation by land, water, or air against provocation or terrorist
incidents."

- Canadian Prime Minister L.B. Pearson in the House of Commons,

May 24/67

● "...something should be done about the right of Israeli ships, which

was exercised by all other ships until a day or so ago, to navigate the
Suez Canal. There have been decisions by the Security Council of the
UN affirming that right, but in practice, the affirmation has not meant
very much to Israel."

- Canadian Prime Minister L.B. Pearson in the House of Commons,

June 8/67

● In 1967, Palestinian raiders from Syria increasingly put the lives of

Jewish immigrants in danger. Encouraged by the U.S.S.R., Egypt,
and its charismatic leader Gamal Nasser, was thought to have
"expansionist" tendencies, and a desire to invade Israel. As 100,000
Egyptian troops massed on the Sinai, Israel took the only action
available to prevent certain defeat...on June 5, 1967, they attacked.
A brilliantly planned air attack destroyed almost the entire Egyptian
air force as it sat on the ground. By gaining air superiority, the
Israelis were then able to maneuver their tank corps with impunity,
not fearing Egyptian air attacks. A series of armored cavalry and tank
task forces then advanced rapidly and surrounded or cut-off Egyptian
defenders. Six days later, it turned into a rout, and the Israelis
gained both territory and the respect of other military forces in the
region.

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