Israel and the Palestinians
Forty years on



May 24th 2007 | JERUSALEM
From The Economist print editionThe
aftermath of the war of 1967 has been a story of squandered
opportunities and deepening divisions among Israelis and Palestinians
alike

Getty Images



WITH the damp of a rainstorm still hanging in the evening air, a
human wave bore down on Jerusalem's old city from the west, engulfing
the cool stone walls in a blue-and-white sea. Chanting, dancing and
waving flags, thousands of young Israelis celebrated the capture of the
ancient capital with a symbolic re-enactment—flowing through its narrow
alleys towards the Western Wall, as Israeli troops did on June 7th 1967.

May 16th, the day that the “reunification” of Jerusalem fell this
year by the Jewish calendar, was the day Israel marked the 40th
anniversary of its greatest ever military victory, when it crushed
three Arab armies and took control of nearly three times its own
landmass in just six days. Like those conquering troops, this year's
rejoicers wore a uniform, albeit of a different kind: casual clothes
and skullcaps for the men, long skirts for the women. Other than
religious Zionists, that subset (about a fifth) of Israeli Jews who
believe that settling as much as possible of “Greater Israel” is a
religious duty, few Israelis today think that Israel's finest hour left
it with a lot worth celebrating. Many of the rest are as likely to see
its capture of land and subsequent occupation as a tragedy for Israel.


The
Palestinians who watched the march quietly from the sidelines, kept at
a safe distance by police, have had still more cause to mourn. Just as
the war made Jews the world over feel vindicated after 19 years of
precarious statehood, the reunification of historic Palestine—Israel,
Gaza and the West Bank—under Israeli rule seemed to give the
Palestinians a chance to get their own struggle for a state back on
track. Yet since then both societies have fractured to the point that
their internal conflicts sometimes eclipse the one they have with the
other side. And in the meantime a dispute over land has acquired the
harsh absolutes of a religious conflict.

Many of the participants, historians now argue, were reluctant to go
to war. Israel's leaders did not then believe in the doctrine of
“strategic depth”, protection through holding more territory; that came
later. Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian president, had been cranking up
the rhetoric about destroying Israel in an effort to maintain his
position as a “pan-Arab” leader, but in reality kept warning his allies
that Israel was still too strong to be attacked. Jordan's King Hussein
had held secret talks with Israeli officials, who felt it in their
interest to prop up his regime.

The main tensions were with Syria, which competed with Israel for
the scarce waters of the Jordan river and supported raids on it by
Palestinian guerrilla movements. Among these was the Fatah
organisation, headed by a young engineer called Yasser Arafat, who
argued that what would liberate Palestine was not Arab government
talking-shops—such as the puppet Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO)
that the Arab League had created in 1964—but an armed struggle waged by
the Palestinians themselves. The Israeli army under its hot-headed
chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin, also deliberately provoked the Syrians
in an escalating series of clashes, and at one point Israel threatened
to invade.

Syria appealed to Nasser, who had signed a defence pact with it. He
ordered troop deployments in the Sinai and closed the Red Sea to
Israeli shipping, hoping that this would get his allies off his back.
Instead, it pushed Israel into launching a pre-emptive strike. Even so,
Levi Eshkol, the prime minister, opposed it for two weeks. He caved in
to pressure from the army only after a threat by some parties to quit
the governing coalition forced him to bring the hawkish Moshe Dayan
(pictured above) on board as defence minister.

Reading the historical accounts today, one wonders what the
government commission that recently slammed Israeli politicians and
generals for their rashness in launching last summer's war in Lebanon
would have made of 1967. It was a war prompted by a gung-ho military
(see article),
a misreading of the enemy's intentions and political expediency; a huge
gamble that stretched Israel's forces to the very limit, and could have
destroyed the country had it failed.

No wonder Israelis were relieved and proud. But their feelings went
deeper. The Holocaust had left many Jews with a crisis of faith: how
could a caring God allow such a tragedy? The triumph in 1967 gave them
reason to believe again. “For Jewry to be envied: that is a change
indeed,” concluded The Economist's dispatch from Jerusalem that week (see article).

The fact that the West Bank was home to the major biblical sites—the
old city of Jerusalem, the tomb of the patriarchs in Hebron, Rachel's
tomb in Bethlehem—added to the sensation of a divine guiding hand. “Der
Judenstaat”, the seminal tract by Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism,
is usually mistranslated as “The Jewish State” rather than “The Jews'
State”, but now the mistranslation became apt. In the words of Michael
Oren, an Israeli historian, the war “confronted the state of Israel
with its Jewishness”.

That gave religious Zionism new credibility. Young idealists went
out to the West Bank to put up impromptu settlements, which the army at
first dismantled. But the rest of the country's interests quickly fell
into line with theirs. The West Bank offered aquifers and made a good
security buffer; it and the Gaza Strip provided cheap Palestinian
labour and housing land; and building new Jewish neighbourhoods around
East Jerusalem was a way for Israel to consolidate its hold on the holy
city. It was two decades before the first Palestinian uprising, or intifada, made mainstream Israelis question the wisdom of holding on to the occupied territories.

For some Palestinians, meanwhile, 1967 seemed like a gift.
Palestinians in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank could suddenly meet
again after 19 years apart, although the million or so refugees outside
were now cut off from them. It was easier to campaign against
occupation by the Zionist enemy than by their Arab brethren. Moreover,
Nasser had used the Palestinians' plight as a convenient rallying-cry
to unite the Arab world around his leadership. The war's abject failure
discredited pan-Arabism, allowing Arafat to bring the Palestinian cause
itself to centre stage. Soon he was able to take over the PLO and step up the use of direct, violent attacks on Israel, taking Nasser's place as the leader that Arabs everywhere admired.

However, the war had longer-lived repercussions that ultimately made
things more complex. One was a wider geopolitical shift. The key to
Israel's victory, a massive aerial assault that destroyed the Egyptian
air force on the ground, was accomplished with French Mystère and
Mirage fighter-bombers. Today the backbone of its combat force is
American F-15s and F-16s.
Only after the war did the United States sign its first big arms deal
with Israel; today it supplies some $2.5 billion a year in military
aid. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, cut off ties with Israel and
strengthened them with the Arab world. Israel's success also galvanised
diaspora Jewry, giving rise to the strong “Jewish lobby” in America and
to the “refusenik” movement in the Soviet Union. By turning the refusal
of exit visas for Soviet Jews into a political issue, it helped keep
Jews there from assimilating. But the cold war, hitherto a fight for
influence in Europe and Latin America, had now acquired a Middle
Eastern axis, and Jews and Arabs were at its centre.

A second change was that, even as the war proved Israel's military
deterrence, it made deterrence obsolete. Instead of tackling Israel
head-on, its neighbours concentrated ever more on sponsoring proxies
that entangled the army in the terrible complexities of guerrilla
warfare, where victory is impossible to define and the combatants are
hard to separate from civilians. Israel's last conventional war, and
last clear victory (albeit at a heavy cost), was in 1973. Today it
fights Iran and Syria through Hizbullah in Lebanon and various militant
groups in Gaza. Last summer it launched campaigns on both fronts that
killed many hundreds of innocents but could not wipe out the enemy. The
idea that “strategic depth” of territory can protect the country has
also taken a beating from Saddam Hussein's Scud missiles in the first
Gulf war, from Gaza's and Hizbullah's rockets, and now from the
impending menace of an Iranian nuclear missile. The army is getting an
overhaul after the Lebanon debacle, but even the best-trained army
cannot destroy the kinds of threats Israel faces today.

Third, the collapse of pan-Arabism left an ideological vacuum. It
was partly filled by political Islamism, with its dream not merely of a
single Arab state but of a united Islamic society or umma,
run along the guidelines of Islamic law. As the new ideology took hold
it spun off radical interpretations that came to threaten the region's
existing regimes. Iran's Islamic revolution in 1979 was its first
notable success. And in 1987 the Muslim Brotherhood's Palestinian
franchise was reborn as the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and
began its long path to taking control of the Palestinian cause. Hamas
is to the Palestinians what the settlers are to Israel: it believes
that the land was consecrated to Muslims by God, and is not negotiable.

Divide and misrule



Forty years of conflict have convinced most Palestinians and
Israelis that they are best off separating into two states. Yet they
seem incapable of getting there.

Though most Israelis have come to accept that the Palestinians
should have independence, most still think they are not automatically
entitled to it, but first need to earn it by providing Israeli
security. For their part, though most Palestinians are willing to let
Israel exist if it leaves them alone, most think armed struggle of some
sort is justified as long as it continues to occupy their land and kill
suspected militants and innocent bystanders alike. Neither side has
ever had a leadership willing to override those views.

In the meantime the Israeli settlements that dot the West Bank like
holes in a Swiss cheese keep growing. The measures that protect them
from Palestinian extremists, such as special settler-only roads and
hundreds of checkpoints and roadblocks, stifle the West Bank's economy
and drive even more Palestinians to extremism.

On top of this, the attrition of the conflict has left the two
societies deeply divided. On the Israeli side, the chronic instability
of the governments elected in its system of proportional representation
makes them hostage to minority interests, and the settlers are one of
the most determined and organised minorities in the country. Their
politicians can forge alliances with other groups, such as the growing
ultra-Orthodox factions, who used to be wary of Zionism but are ever
more pro-settler, and secular nationalists, many of whom immigrated
from the debris of the Soviet Union and share with the settlers a
dislike of Arabs.

Young settlers are just as militant as their parents were a
generation ago, setting up small West Bank outposts and resisting their
dismantlement in fierce, well-publicised mass protests. Israel's
pull-out of the settlements in Gaza in 2005, which seemed at the time
to have broken the settlers' spirit, now appears to have left them more
united and emboldened. And the interface between ultra-Orthodoxy and
religious Zionism has spawned a new breed of young settlers known as hardal (a Hebrew acronym that also means “mustard”), who are more fanatical than ever.

On the Palestinian side, the 1967 war laid one slow-burning fuse by
cutting off Gaza and the West Bank from the rest of the Arab world.
That turned Arafat and his cronies into a leadership in exile. They
grew so detached from the Palestinians under Israeli rule that the
first intifada in 1987 took them completely by surprise.
Hamas took advantage to claim some of the credit for that popular
uprising. Arafat and company were allowed back after signing the Oslo
peace accords with Israel in 1993. But in trying to impose a system of
authority based on loyalty to himself, he created a lasting rift in
Fatah between his “outside” people and younger local leaders. Corrupt
and unpopular, Fatah could not even produce a united list for last
year's Palestinian election. That played a large role in Hamas's
landslide victory.

To complicate matters further the Oslo accords, which gave the
Palestinians in the occupied territories partial autonomy, and the
second, much bloodier intifada in 2000, which prompted Israel
to pull out of Gaza and put up its barrier in the West Bank, have
fragmented the Palestinians even more than they were before Israel
occupied them. Today Gaza is nearly cut off to visitors, and residents
can get in and out only sporadically, via Egypt. Visas for Palestinians
outside to visit the West Bank are getting harder to come by. None but
a select few from the occupied territories can visit Israel, and
Palestinians who live in Israel are finding it increasingly difficult
to visit the territories. Those who live in refugee camps in
neighbouring countries have always been isolated—they cannot return to
Palestine, they are often stateless and their host countries impose a
variety of restrictions ranging from the annoying to the oppressive.

That has heightened the differences in Palestinian society. The
urban, urbane elite in the West Bank look down on the more Islamist
denizens of Gaza and scratch their heads in disbelief at the deadly
factional violence there; some still recall with a shudder how a wave
of Gazans (“sharks”, as one Ramallah resident calls them) arrived in
the West Bank seeking work in the 1990s. The Palestinians in Jerusalem,
who have held Israeli residence permits since 1967 but considered
themselves a cut above the rest long before that, look down on the
occupied ones. The cosmopolitan, progressive Palestinians from northern
Israel who hold Israeli citizenship look down on the conservative,
clannish Jerusalemites. And everyone else treats the
Palestinian-Israelis as suspicious collaborators because their
grandparents did not flee in 1948.ReutersMore divided than ever

Political agendas have diverged too. Hamas is much more powerful in
Gaza, and even within Hamas the West Bankers are more willing to hint
at a compromise with Israel than the Gazans. Refugees, especially those
“outside”, cleave to their “right of return” more fiercely than
Palestinians in Palestine. “If they all come here we have a big problem
too, not just the Israelis,” confides the (Hamas) mayor of one West
Bank town.

Since Arafat's death in 2004, the leadership has fragmented, and not
just between Hamas and Fatah. Hamas's exiled chief, Khaled Meshal, is
frequently at odds with leaders in Gaza. Meanwhile, as the peace
process has faded, Palestinians living in Israel have adopted a more
local agenda, campaigning against discrimination that they suffer in
the Jewish state, and for an internal right of return to their
ancestors' villages that has nothing to do with the return of refugees
from abroad.

The general erosion of political authority, especially in Gaza, has
created a power vacuum that clan chieftains and criminal bosses have
been quick to fill. The lawlessness is fertile soil for jihadi extremists.
These are anathema to the other Palestinian factions, which do not want
to be dragged into the West's war with al-Qaeda. In Gaza such extremist
groups are a tiny fringe, often probably no more than façades for
criminals. But they have taken a stronger hold in some of the more
desperate refugee camps abroad (see article).
War and peace



Today, the most positive spin on the 1967 war is that it paved the
way for peace between Israel and its neighbours. Defeat made the Arabs
begin to accept that the Jewish state could not be destroyed. The end
of the dream of a pan-Arab state forced them to deal with Israel
one-on-one. The lands that it had captured gave them something to
negotiate over. The return of the Sinai to Egypt in 1982 set the
example. Peace with Jordan followed in 1994. Talks with Syria came
close to success in 2000. Finally, 35 years after those historic six
days, the Arab world did the equivalent of admitting defeat. In 2002
the 22 members of the Arab League offered Israel full normalisation of
relations in return for a full withdrawal from the territories captured
in 1967, and repeated their offer earlier this year.

But as tends to happen in the Middle East, events had already been
overtaken by other events. The Arab League's first offer came at the
blood-soaked height of the second intifada; its reiteration
found both Israeli and Palestinian politics at new lows of divisiveness
and desperation. Israel now sees itself as fighting not just 200m Arabs
but 1.2 billion Muslims, armed with weapons it cannot resist and an
ideology it cannot counter. Palestinians feel that a viable state is
practically impossible, so deeply has Israel encroached on their land
and dismembered their society. Like many wars, 1967 created
opportunities. A shame that everyone has squandered them.

http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?story_id=9222979&fsrc=RSS

la «guerre des Six Jours»

Il
y a 40 ans, le 5 juin 1967, les Israéliens attaquaient une coalition
arabe groupée à leurs frontières et la défaisaient dans une «guerre des Six Jours»...






Le
drame se noue lorsque la Syrie dénonce des pompages israéliens dans le
Jourdain et elle-même commence à détourner les eaux du fleuve.

Le 7 avril 1967, l'aviation israélienne abat six Mig-21 syriens.

Nasser,
le populaire président égyptien, qui traverse une mauvaise passe suite
à l'embourbement de ses troupes au Yémen, tente de se refaire une
virginité en s'en prenant à son tour à Israël.

Il exige le retrait des soldats de l'ONU stationnés dans le Sinaï depuis 1956, réoccupe Gaza et Charm el-Cheik et surtout bloque le golfe d'Akaba, seul débouché maritime d'Israël sur l'océan Indien.

Le
1er juin, le Premier ministre israélien Lévi Eshkol forme un
gouvernement d'union nationale avec le général Moshé Dayan, héros de la
guerre de 1956, et le chef de la droite dure, Menahem Begin.

La guerre devient inévitable.

Le
5 juin à l'aube, l'aviation israélienne, bien renseignée, détruit au
sol la totalité de l'aviation égyptienne. L'armée israélienne (Tsahal) peut dès lors se lancer dans le désert du Sinaï.

Les
troupes égyptiennes se débandent dans un sauve qui peut général et
meurtrier. Beaucoup de soldats périssent de faim et de soif dans le
désert.

Pendant ce temps, le roi Hussein de Jordanie,
manipulé par les Égyptiens, laisse son armée bombarder la partie juive
de Jérusalem. Israël contre-attaque sans attendre.

Il faudra au total trois jours à Tsahal pour atteindre le canal de Suez et quatre pour atteindre les rives du Jourdain.

Plus
rude est la conquête de la partie arabe de Jérusalem, confiée à des
parachutistes pour épargner les vestiges archéologiques et les édifices
religieux. La Légion arabe du roi Hussein résiste vaillamment et les
combats se déroulent souvent au corps à corps.

Israël ne veut pas s'arrêter en si bon chemin, avec le risque, comme en 1956, de perdre la paix après avoir remporté la guerre.

Le 9 juin, Tsahal
monte à l'assaut du Golan, le plateau syrien d'où l'artillerie ennemie
est en mesure de bombarder impunément les plaines de Galilée.

Deux jours après, enfin maître du terrain, Tel Aviv
accepte un cessez-le-feu. La guerre aura duré moins de six jours, se
soldant par un triomphe sans égal du petit État hébreu et une nouvelle
humiliation des Arabes.

article complet:Le 5 juin 1967, moins de vingt ans après sa création officielle,
l'État d'Israël lance une attaque foudroyante contre la coalition
menaçante de ses voisins.Le 11 juin suivant, après une guerre
éclair de six jours, il peut se flatter d'une glorieuse victoire, avec
le soutien de l'immense majorité de l'opinion occidentale. Qui se
douterait alors que cette euphorie débouchera sur une dramatique
impasse ? André Larané
Desserrer l'étau
Depuis sa fondation en 1948, l'État d'Israël a dû mener deux guerres, la première contre ses voisins arabes pour éviter l'anéantissement à sa naissance, la deuxième en 1956 contre l'Égypte de Nasser,
jugée menaçante. Cette deuxième guerre a débouché sur une défaite
diplomatique, les Israéliens ayant été contraints d'évacuer sans
contrepartie le Sinaï qu'ils avaient conquis.En 1964, la Syrie
dénonce des pompages effectués par les Israéliens dans le Jourdain.
Elle-même commence à détourner les eaux du fleuve nourricier d'Israël.
La tension monte entre les deux pays. Le 7 avril 1967, l'aviation
israélienne abat six Mig-21 syriens (des avions de chasse de fabrication soviétique) au-dessus du lac de Tibériade.Le
président Nasser, qui traverse une mauvaise passe suite à
l'embourbement de ses troupes au Yémen, tente de se refaire une
virginité auprès des masses arabes en dénonçant à son tour Israël. Ses
alliés soviétiques l'assurent qu'Israël masse des troupes à la
frontière avec la Syrie en vue d'attaquer cette dernière. Le 16
mai, il exige le retrait des soldats de l'ONU stationnés dans le Sinaï,
sur la frontière égypto-israélienne, depuis 1956. Le 23 mai, il
réoccupe Gaza et Charm el-Cheik, dans le Sinaï, et surtout bloque le
golfe d'Akaba, seul débouché maritime d'Israël sur l'océan Indien. Il
se réconcilie avec le roi Hussein de Jordanie et obtient que leurs deux
armées soient placées sous un commandement unique (égyptien). Ahmed
Choukeiri, chef de l'Organisation de Libération de la Palestine,
renchérit verbalement en appelant à «jeter les juifs à la mer». Les
Israéliens se sentent menacés dans leur existence et en appellent à
l'opinion publique occidentale qui prend unanimement fait et cause pour
eux. Le Premier ministre Lévi Eshkol, un civil partisan de la
négociation, se résout à former un gouvernement d'union nationale le
1er juin avec le général Moshé Dayan, héros de la guerre de 1956 et
chef d'état-major, au poste clé de ministre de la Défense. Ce dernier
plaide pour une guerre préventive. Le chef de la droite, Menahem Begin,
entre aussi au gouvernement. La guerre devient inévitable.Guerre éclair
Israël
déclenche les hostilités le 5 juin à l'aube. En une heure et demie,
l'aviation israélienne, bien renseignée, détruit au sol la totalité des
forces aériennes égyptiennes et syriennes. Notons que le triomphe des
avions de chasse israéliens, des Mirage, va assurer la
notoriété mondiale de leur constructeur, l'industriel français Marcel
Dassault, et le hisser d'un coup parmi les principaux fabricants
d'armes !Débarrassée de toute menace aérienne, l'armée israélienne, désignée par l'acronyme Tsahal, peut dès lors se lancer dans le désert du Sinaï où stationnent les troupes égyptiennes.
Après
une violente bataille qui voit s'affronter un millier de chars de part
et d'autre, l'armée ennemie se débande dans un sauve-qui-peut général
et meurtrier. Beaucoup de soldats périssent de faim et de soif dans le
désert. Dans le même temps, Tsahal occupe la bande de
Gaza, portion de la Palestine, et en chasse les Égyptiens. Le
gouvernement israélien prie le roi Hussein de Jordanie de rester
en-dehors du conflit. Mais le souverain a confié le
commandement de son armée à un général égyptien. Il est d'autre part
abreuvé par les Égyptiens d'informations mensongères sur la bataille du
Sinaï. Il laisse donc son armée attaquer la partie juive de Jérusalem.
Israël contre-attaque sans attendre.Il faudra au total trois jours à Tsahal pour atteindre le canal de Suez et quatre pour atteindre les rives du Jourdain. Plus
rude est la conquête de la partie arabe de Jérusalem, confiée à des
parachutistes pour épargner les vestiges archéologiques et les édifices
religieux. La Légion arabe du roi Hussein résiste vaillamment et les
combats se déroulent souvent au corps à corps, voire à l'arme blanche.Dès
le 8 juin, la Syrie, jusque-là épargnée, et l'Égypte, acceptent le
principe d'un cessez-le-feu. Mais Israël ne veut pas s'arrêter en si
bon chemin, avec le risque, comme en 1956, de perdre la paix après
avoir remporté la guerre. Le 9 juin, Tsahal monte à
l'assaut du Golan, le plateau syrien d'où l'artillerie ennemie est en
mesure de bombarder impunément les plaines de Galilée. Deux jours
après, enfin maître du terrain, Tel Aviv accepte à son tour le
cessez-le-feu. La guerre aura duré moins de six jours, se soldant par
un triomphe sans égal du petit État hébreu et une nouvelle humiliation
des Arabes.Échec de la démocratie
Le 1er septembre, à Khartoum, au Soudan, les chefs arabes, humiliés, disent : «Non à la paix avec Israël, non à la reconnaissance d'Israël, non à la négociation avec Israël». À
l'ONU, à New York, les dissensions entre Soviétiques et Américains ne
permettent pas d'aboutir à un accord international sur une solution au
conflit. Simplement est votée le 22 novembre 1967 une résolution
inspirée par les Britanniques, qui ménagent habilement les deux camps.Cette résolution 242 demande que l'armée israélienne se retire «de territoires» («from territories»en anglais) et que soient établies des frontières «sûres et reconnues» sans plus de précisions.Un trop grand triomphe
Fuyant
les combats, 200.000 Palestiniens de Cisjordanie sont allés grossir les
camps de réfugiés du Liban et de Jordanie, déstabilisant un peu plus
ces pays fragiles. Il reste en Cisjordanie, à Gaza et Jérusalem-Est un
million de Palestiniens. Ils passent sous administration israélienne,
comme les 300.000 Palestiniens restés en Israël après 1948. Leur poids
démographique va peser de plus en plus lourd face aux 2,7 millions de
juifs israéliens. Trente ans plus tard, la parité est atteinte avec 4,8
millions de Palestiniens face à 5,2 millions de juifs sur 27.000 km2
(moins que la Bretagne !).Après la brutale répression des mouvements palestiniens par le roi Hussein de Jordanie en septembre 1970 («Septembre Noir»),
les Palestiniens se radicalisent. Le nouveau président de l'OLP, Yasser
Arafat, est débordé par des mouvements terroristes comme celui de
Georges Habache. La prise d'otages des Jeux Olympiques de Munich, en 1972, amorce le basculement de l'opinion publique européenne en faveur des Palestiniens.Les
chefs arabes nationalistes, socialistes et laïcs, déconsidérés par
leurs échecs à répétition, cèdent peu à peu la place aux islamistes. En
1975, le Liban, où les chrétiens ont perdu la majorité démographique,
bascule dans la guerre civile. Il devient contre son gré le terrain
d'entraînement de multiples factions et une menace permanente au flanc
d'Israël. En 1979, le triomphe de l'imam Khomeiny à Téhéran, en
Iran, donne des ailes à l'islamisme arabe. Il va se révéler pour Israël
un ennemi autrement plus coriace que le nassérisme. -

1967 Middle East War







Introduction

• 5 June
  
• 6 June
  
• 7 June
  
• 8 June
  
• 9 June
  
• 10 June
  

Tensions rise in May as UN troops withdraw and Egypt deploys troops in the Sinai and Gaza



























RELATED MEDIA



David Rubinger, Time and Life photographer


Zeid al-Rifai, adviser to Jordan's King Hussein


Forty years on










RELATED BBC LINKS:


Radio 4's Six Days That Changed The Middle East


Special Report: Middle East Crisis
















The 1967 Middle East War, also known as the Six Day War, was
the third conflict between Israel and neighbouring Egypt, Jordan and
Syria.

The first, in 1948, left East Jerusalem and the River Jordan's
West Bank under Jordanian control and the coastal Gaza Strip under
Egyptian control.
In 1956, Israel invaded the Gaza Strip and Egypt's Sinai
peninsula. Israel was forced to leave the Sinai the following year and
a United Nations Emergency Force (Unef) was deployed.

Tensions continued to rise and newly-formed Palestinian militant
groups began cross-border raids with Arab support. Egyptian President
Gamal Abdel Nasser was keen to unite the Arab world and spoke of "the
destruction of Israel", while Israel feared it could be wiped out.
In May 1967, President Nasser demanded the removal of Unef
troops from the Sinai, closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping
and signed a defence pact with Jordan. Some historians question whether
Nasser planned to go to war, but all three factors, and Egyptian troop
deployment in the Sinai, led to a pre-emptive strike by Israel.




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