1967.06.05-1967.06.10 - The Six-Day War

Sources

1. “Six-Day War” Wikipedia. Accessed April 26th, 2024.
2. Lozowick, Yaacov. “The Secret Transcripts of the Six-Day War, Part I”. Tabletmag. May 17th, 2017.
3. Lozowick, Yaacov. “Israeli Security Cabinet Secret Transcripts Part II, The Accidental Occupation”. Tabletmag. June 7th, 2017.
4. Ben-Ami, Shlomo. Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. Cary: Oxford University Press USA - OSO, 2007.

Belligerents

1. Israel
   1. Notable Leaders
      1. Prime Minster - Levi Eshkol
      2. Defense Minster - Moshe Dayan
      3. Chie of Staff - Yitzhak Rabin
   2. 264,000 soldiers
   3. 250-300 combat aircraft
   4. 800 tanks

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1. Egypt (still known then as the United Arab Republic)
   1. Notable Leaders
      1. President - Gamal Abdel Nasser
   2. 160,000 total troops
   3. 100,000 deployed
   4. 420 aircraft
   5. 900-950 tanks
2. Syria
   1. Notable Leaders
      1. President - Nureddin al-Atassi
      2. General - Hafez al-Assad
   2. 75,000 troops
3. Jordan
   1. Notable Leaders
      1. King - Hussein
   2. 55,000 total troops
   3. 45,000 deployed
   4. 270 tanks
4. Iraq
   1. Notable Leaders
      1. President - Abdul Rahman Arif
   2. 100 tanks
5. Lebanon
   1. 2 combat aircraft
6. Pakistan
   1. Helped to reinforce with volunteer pilots from the Pakistan Air Force
7. Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia
   1. Sent aircraft to reinforce losses for the first days of the war.

Casualties and losses

1. Israel
   1. 776-983 killed
   2. 4,517 wounded
   3. 15 captured
   4. 400 tanks destroyed
   5. 46 aircraft destroyed
   6. 1,000+ civilians injured in Jerusalem

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1. Egypt
   1. 9,800 - 15,000 killed or missing
   2. 4,338 captured
2. Syria
   1. 1,000 - 2,500 killed
   2. 367 - 591 captured
3. Jordan
   1. 696 - 700 killed
   2. 2,500 wounded
   3. 533 captured
4. Lebanon
   1. 1 aircraft lost In general, hundreds of tanks and 450+ aircraft were destroyed.

Also, 15 UN peacekeepers were killed, and 34 US troops killed in the 1967.06.08 - USS Liberty Incident. 17 Soviet Marines were allegedly killed, and 413,000 additional Palestinians were displaced.

Location

• Israel, and all of the formally Mandatory Palestinian area, plus the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt and the Golan Heights in Syria.

Causes

• Summary
  • May 1967, Nasser mobilizes Egyptian military into defensive lines along the Israeli border and closes the shipping lanes through the Straits of Tiran to Israeli vessels, despite Israel warning this would be a casus belli. Nasser also orders the removal of all UNEF personnel.
• Background
  • Following the 1956 Suez Crisis, Syria and Egypt signed a mutual defense agreement.
  • PLO activity and attacks against Israel from Arab countries continued.
  • In May, 1967, Nasser received bogus intel from the USSR that Israel was massing on the Syrian border, so he gathered troops in the Sinai Peninsula, ejected UNEF personnel, and once again denied passage of Israeli vessels through the Straits of Tiran.
  • On the 30th of May, Jordan an Egypt signed a defense pact. Iraq and Egypt began deploying troops and armored units in Jordan.
  • The United States did not believe at the timej that Egypt was preparing for an offensive war against Israel, as per the Watch Committee.
  • Nasser’s speech towards the Arab Trade Unionists in May 26th, 1967, claimed “The battle will be a general one and our basic objective will be to destroy Israel.”
    • Statements made by Nasser leading up to the war
      • “The armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon are poised on the borders of Israel to face the challenge, while standing behind us are the armies of Iraq, Algeria, Kuwait, Sudan and the whole Arab nation. This act will astound the world. Today they will know that the Arabs are arranged for battle, the critical hour has arrived. We have reached the stage of serious action and not of more declarations.” Gamal Abdel Nasser May 30th 1967
      • Nasser May 26 “The Arab people wants to fight. We have been waiting for the right time when we will be completely ready. Recently we have felt that our strength has been sufficient and that if we make battle with Israel we shall be able, with the help of God, to conquer Sharm el-Sheikh implies a confrontation with Israel. Taking this step makes it imperative that we be ready to undertake a total war with Israel.”

Ben-Ami, Shlomo. Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. (p. 93)

Lack of superpower guarantees, an almost apocalyptic fear of physical annihilation, the threat of a Nasserite Middle East bent on the destruction of Israel, a fatalistic pessimism as to the chances that the Arab world would ever reconcile itself to the existence of a Jewish state in its midst and the ever-present Holocaust complex, was the context for Ben-Gurion’s quest for a credible nuclear option. The nuclear option could also be seen as a protest against, or an alternative to, America’s reluctance to accord solid and unequivocal conventional guarantees to Israel’s existence and incorporate it into an organic regional alliance. Indeed, there were those in the Israeli political system who wanted to use the Dimona nuclear reactor as a way of pressuring America into securing Israel’s conventional capabilities.

Ben-Ami, Shlomo. Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. (p. 94)

Ben-Gurion oscillated frantically from a strategy of deterrence to the politics of hysteria. He bombarded world leaders with dramatic appeals for an international commitment to the independence and territorial integrity of all the states in the Middle East. Whatever territorial dreams he might have harboured in the past, he was now a keen champion of the status quo. To him, the territorial phase of Zionism was over and the safety of Israel within the borders of 1949 was his exclusive concern. Only the full demilitarisation of the West Bank and a formal defence treaty with America could set his mind at rest.

Ben-Ami, Shlomo. Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. (p. 98)

King Hussein’s predicament proved to be even more serious than that of Nasser. In his case it was the very existence of his kingdom that was at stake. He did not want to be dragged into war, but was too weak to resist the tide. As much as the supposed threat posed by Israel, it was actually the pressure of Fatah and the PLO that put in jeopardy the stability of the Hashemite kingdom. For the PLO, liberating Palestine also meant overthrowing the Hashemites’ ‘colonialist rule’. The King harboured no illusions as to the ultimate rationale of the PLO’s presence in Jordan, namely, as he explicitly wrote to Nasser, ‘the destruction of Jordan’.

Ben-Ami, Shlomo. Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. (p. 100)

And when retaliations and verbal threats failed to deter the Syrians, Rabin made it clear that his intention was to provoke the Syrians into an all-out war. In December 1966 he wrote to General Zvi Zamir, Israel’s military attaché in London: ‘an escalation with Syria is not against Israel’s interest, and in my view there is no better time than now for a confrontation with Syria. I prefer to go to war rather than allow this continuous harassment, especially if the Syrians persist in their efforts to facilitate the activity of Fatah on our border.’

Ben-Ami, Shlomo. Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. (p. 104)

Nor was the restless General spared Ben-Gurion’s ire. From his seclusion in the Negev desert, the Old Man had been following the evolving crisis with awe. Precisely because he shared the military’s assessment that the closure of the Straits threatened to vitiate all the achievements of the Sinai Campaign and could soon turn into a question of ‘national survival’–this was Rabin’s expression–Ben-Gurion saw all his old fears coming true: Israel was now surrounded by an all-Arab coalition aggressively supported by the Soviet Union, without being able to rely on an alliance with, or security guarantees from, a Western superpower.

Events

• Noteworthy Battle Things
  • Surprise attack on Egyptian airfield guaranteed all but certain victory in the Sinai for Israel.
  • IDF originally was to avoid Gaza strip/city, but attacks from that area forced the IDF to take over that territory.
  • Jordanian Army was instructed to lay a two-hour barrage against military and civilian settlements in central Israel itself.
  • Eshkol promised Israel would not initiate any action against Jordan if it stayed out of the way, but King Hussein refused.
  • Jordanian shelling of Jerusalem resulted in 20 dead and 1,000 wounded civilians.
  • Dayan ordered troops not to capture the Old City due to potential international backlash plus potential outrage of being forced to give back holy sites after capturing them. After hearing about the impending UN ceasefire, he changed his mind and captured it.
  • “Fearful that Israeli soldiers would exact retribution for the 1929 massacre of the city’s Jewish community, Hebron’s residents flew white sheets from their windows and rooftops.""
  • Syria entered the war on the assumption that Israel was losing dramatically to Egyptian forces. Nasser exaggerated/lied about Egyptian victory.
  • Dayan, after hearing of the Syrian acceptance of a cease-fire, clears an invasion/occupation on his own into the Golan Heights.

Outcome

• Conclusion
  • Israel seizes the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula (from Egypt), the West Bank of the Jordan River, including East Jerusalem (from Jordan), and the Golan Heights (from Syria).
  • 1967 Palestinian exodus.
    • 280k-325k Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, mostly resettled in Jordan, the other 700k remained.
    • 100k fled in the Golan Heights.
    • Israel granted full citizenship only to those in East Jerusalem (1967) and the Golan Heights (1981). Most Palestinians in territories declined to take citizenship.
  • Jews immigrating en masse out of the Soviet Union, and Jews leaving en masse from Arab countries (continued from 1948), and Jews leaving en masse from other Communist countries.

Important Notes