Although the ultimate origins of the 1967 War lie in Israel’s creation in 1948 and the attendant expulsion of the majority of the non-Jewish, Palestinian-Arab population of the approximately 78% of historic Palestine that became Israel, its immediate causes involved growing tensions between Israel and Egypt in the months prior to June 1967.
Seeking to put pressure on Israel, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser took a series of steps including asking the UN to withdraw its peacekeeping force from the Sinai Peninsula and moving Egyptian soldiers into their places along the border with Israel, and most importantly, closing the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, which was considered a casus belli by Israel.
Despite his saber rattling, behind the scenes Nasser was sending diplomatic signals to the US and Israel indicating that he wanted to resolve the crisis through negotiations. Much of the Egyptian army was bogged down in Yemen, where Egypt had intervened in the civil war, and Nasser was in no position to launch a war against Israel. On June 2, US Secretary of State Dean Rusk relayed to Israeli Ambassador Avraham Harman that the US had “been told categorically that Egypt will not attack.”
Knowing that Nasser was likely bluffing, and sensing an opportunity to eliminate much of his Soviet-supplied armed forces and expand territorially, on the morning of June 5 Israel launched a devastating air assault on the Egyptian air force, most of which was destroyed on the ground in a few hours. Syria and Jordan came to Egypt's defense, and were swiftly defeated as well.
Over the course of the next six days, Israel conquered and militarily occupied the Palestinian West Bank, East Jerusalem (both controlled by Jordan post-1948), and Gaza Strip (controlled by Egypt post-1948), the Syrian Golan Heights, and the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula (the latter was returned as part of the 1979 peace agreement between Israel and Egypt). In doing so, Israel came to control the remaining 22% of historic Palestine.
Israel's rapid victory stunned the international public, despite the fact that Israeli and US intelligence had both predicted an easy Israeli victory, even in a battle waged on multiple fronts. Israel’s UN envoy, Abba Eban, initially claimed to the UN Security Council that Egyptian troops had attacked first and that Israel's air strikes were retaliatory. Within a month, however, Israel admitted that it had launched the first strike. It asserted that it had faced an impending attack by Egypt, evidenced by Egypt's bellicose rhetoric, removal of UN peacekeeping troops from the Sinai Peninsula, closure of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, and concentration of troops along Israel's borders.
Later, Israeli political and military leaders acknowledged that they knew Israel wasn’t in imminent danger of an Egyptian attack. Yitzhak Rabin, future prime minister and chief of the General Staff of the Israeli army during the war, said in a 1968 interview:
I do not believe that Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent into Sinai on May 14 would not have been enough to unleash an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it.
General Matityahu Peled, a member of the General Staff during the war, later said:
The thesis according to which the danger of genocide weighed on us in June 1967, and that Israel struggled for its physical existence is only a bluff born and developed after the war.
Our General Staff...never told the government that the Egyptian military threat represented any danger to Israel.
Fifteen years after the war, in 1982, then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin said;
in a speech:
In June 1967 we again had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him... [The government decided to] take the initiative and attack the enemy, drive him back, and thus assure the security of Israel and the future of the nation.
Aftermath
Israel’s victory was a watershed moment in the history of the modern Middle East and in the Arab-Israeli conflict, with widespread repercussions that continue to reverberate today.
As a result of the Arab defeat, Palestinians stopped looking to Arab states like Egypt to redress the wrongs done to them during Israel’s creation nearly two decades earlier. In 1969, Yasser Arafat and his Fatah party took control of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which had been created by the Arab League in 1964 to manage and contain the growing Palestinian national movement spreading across the Arab world. In the process, the PLO was transformed into an independent umbrella organization representing a cross section of Palestinian political parties, attracting the support of Palestinians around the world. In 1974, the PLO was formally recognized by the UN as the “sole legitimate representative” of the Palestinian people.
Amongst the Israeli public, raised on a steady stream of propaganda portraying Israel as constantly facing annihilation at the hands of hordes of Arabs and Muslims, the war was widely seen as a miraculous triumph. However, it proved a Pyrrhic victory.
In 1967, the remainder of Palestine was invaded and occupied by the Zionists and another 350 thousand Palestinian were expelled or fled. In the 1970’s, the “Judaization of the Galilee” (the term Zionists use to describe the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from this area for exclusively Jewish settlement) followed the same pattern of settlement familiar throughout historic Palestine:
The confiscation of agricultural and grazing land in the areas surrounding Palestinian population centers.
The freezing of growth in Palestinian villages by denying building and planning rights.
The systematic demolition of Palestinian homes and businesses.
Planned Jewish settlement aimed at breaking up the territorial continuity of Palestinian areas.
The denial of access to basic services such as water (the theft of that water).
Policies aimed at preventing Palestinian economic subsistence and forcing dependence on settlers.
For with the conquest of the occupied territories came the beginnings of the settlement movement that, 56 years later, has made the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel all but impossible. As they realize that the facts Israel continues to create on the ground in the West Bank and East Jerusalem preclude a sovereign Palestinian state ever emerging there, more and more Palestinians are demanding civil rights within one, secular, democratic state comprising Israel and the occupied territories – the so-called “one state solution.”