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G.S. 3
Mahesh

06/05/22 04:20 AM IST

Israel’s Six-Day war

  • WHAT
  • WHY
  • WHEN
  • WHERE
  • WHO
  • HOW
What was the importance  of the Six-Day War?
  • Israel was forged in, and defined by, war. Each armed conflict, large and small, left its mark. But it is the shortest, the Six Day War of June 5-10, 1967, that seems to resonate more than all the others.
  • The outnumbered Israel Defense Forces (IDF) achieved a swift and decisive victory in the brief war, running over the Arab coalition that threatened the nascent Jewish state and more than doubling the territory under Israel’s control.
  • Israel’s victory included the capture of the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, West Bank, Old City of Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights; the status of these territories subsequently became a major point of contention in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
  • For many Israelis, this was a moment of euphoria. Their young state's military superiority had been amply demonstrated.
  • The whole of Jerusalem, and all of Judaism's holiest places, were back under Jewish control for the first time in 2,000 years.
  • The greatest symbol of victory lay in seizing the Old City of Jerusalem from Jordan; thousands of Jews wept while bent in prayer at the Second Temple’s Western Wall.
  • The image of young Israeli paratroopers gazing up at the Western Wall in June 1967 came to symbolize a moment of national redemption. Ever since then, Israel has regarded the whole of Jerusalem as its unified capital.
  • For the Palestinians, it was a different story. More than a million Palestinian Arabs came under Israeli military rule and hundreds of thousands fled or were driven from their homes, some of them for the second time.
  • For them, this was a grim sequel to the "Nakba" (Catastrophe) of 1948, when Israel gained its independence and more than 700,000 Palestinians became refugees in the fighting which followed it.
  • The war has its roots in the Israel-Palestine conflict, back when both territories were under the British rule.
  • Both Arabs and Jews, dissatisfied by British rule in the British Mandate of Palestine, revolted in the late 30s and 40s.
  • These revolts eventually led to the 1948 Palestine War, in which Arabs and Jews fought against each other while the region was still under British rule.
  • Once Israel was carved out of the territory, Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq tried to invade the area. This was the first of the four Arab-Israeli wars that would take place in the region.
Why this war started?
  • The Six-Day War took place June 5–10, 1967, and was the third of the Arab-Israeli wars.
  • In recognition of his contributions, IDF Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin (who would later become the fifth Prime Minister of Israel, and a proponent of peace) was granted the honor of naming the war for the Israelis.
  • From the suggestions proposed, including the "War of Daring", "War of Salvation", and "War of the Sons of Light", he chose the least flashy, Six Day War, evoking the Biblical days of creation.
  • The combatants in 1967 - Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Syria, as well as Iraq and other Arab states - were for the most part the same as those who fought in the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948, in which Israel fought off an invasion by Arab countries. The rhetoric in the days leading up to the Six-Day War also echoed that from 1948.
  • For example, on May 15, 1948, the day Arab states launched their attack on Israel, Arab League Secretary General Azzam Pasha had boasted that "this will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades."
  • Almost 19 years later, on May 18, 1967, Egypt’s government-controlled Voice of the Arabs radio station mimicked this language, announcing that "the sole method we shall apply against Israel is total war, which will result in the extermination of Zionist existence."
  • Two days later, Syrian Defense Minister Hafez Assad declared: "I, as a military man, believe that the time has come to enter into a battle of annihilation."
  • The road to war was paved by the growing tension in the area since 1963 over the issue of exploiting the waters of the Jordan River and the Kineret Lake.
  • This led to an escalation of military clashes initiated by Syria, and to an increase of Palestinian terror attacks against Israel encouraged by Arab states, particularly Syria.
  • The immediate causes for the war included a series of escalating steps taken by the Arabs: the concluding of a Syrian-Egyptian military pact to which Jordan and Iraq later joined, the expulsion of the UN Emergency Force (UNEF) from the Sinai Peninsula and the concentration of Egyptian forces there, and finally the closure by Egypt of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, constituting a casus belli for Israel.
  • When Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Lebanon moved their forces toward the Israeli border, Israel mobilized its reserve forces, and launched a diplomatic campaign to win international support to end the Egyptian blockade of Israeli shipping through the Straits of Tiran.
  • When this failed, and in reaction to Arab threats of wiping Israel out in an ‘all-out war’, the war began with an Israeli pre-emptive aerial strike on June 5, 1967.
When did Israel dominate the war?
  • If we look only at the numbers, then Israel was bound to lose the war. The Arab countries had far more soldiers, and they also had better/more equipment (the Soviet Union supplied them well).
  • But Israel had been planning for such a war for some time now. The military planners understood that Israel cannot win a long-drawn war of attrition – it just did not have enough people to taken on the combined Arab forces.
  • Its hope lay in swift and precise attacks on enemy targets. If Israel could paralyze the infrastructure of the enemy states, its ground forces could then complete the proceedings.
  • This war left Israel with no other option than to test the strength and agility of its Air Force. Israel had to play the game of speed, skill and surprise to end the Arab challenge.
  • And Israel overwhelmed the Arab forces with its agility and its determination to take the war to the enemy’s land.
  • In response to the apparent mobilization of its Arab neighbours, early on the morning of June 5, Israel staged a sudden preemptive air assault that destroyed more than 90% of Egypt’s air capacity on the tarmac. A similar air assault incapacitated the Syrian air force.
  • Without air cover, the Egyptian army was left vulnerable to attack.
  • The Egyptian soldiers were also found more eager to surrender than to fight to the finish. Within three days the Israelis had achieved an overwhelming victory on the ground, capturing the Gaza Strip and all of the Sinai Peninsula up to the east bank of the Suez Canal.
  • An eastern front was also opened on June 5 when Jordanian forces began shelling West Jerusalem - disregarding Israel’s warning to King Ḥussein to keep Jordan out of the fight - only to face a crushing Israeli counterattack.
  • On June 7, Israeli forces drove Jordanian forces out of East Jerusalem and most of the West Bank. Photos and films of Israeli troops taking control of the old city of Jerusalem have proved to be some of the war’s iconic images.
  • The UN Security Council called for a cease-fire on June 7 that was immediately accepted by both Israel and Jordan.
  • Egypt accepted the following day. Syria held out, however, and continued to shell villages in northern Israel. And Syria would have to pay with its territory for this.
  • On June 9 Israel launched an assault on the fortified Golan Heights, capturing it from Syrian forces after a day of heavy fighting.
  • Syria got the message and promptly accepted the cease-fire on June 10. In six days, Israel had more than doubled its territory fighting a war that the Arab states assumed it would easily lose.
Where did this war ended?
  • The Israeli cabinet held long, anguished discussions after the war about what to do with the territories now under its control. No formal peace offer was ever made and, at a summit in Khartoum in September 1967, humiliated Arab leaders declared there would be "no peace, no recognition and no negotiation with Israel."
  • But ten years later, after another Arab-Israeli war, Egypt's President Anwar Sadat became the first Arab leader to visit Israel, initiating a peace process that led to a peace treaty in 1979.
  • Israel withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula, which its troops had captured from Egypt in the Six Day War.
  • The Egyptian leader paid a heavy price for recognizing Israel. His fellow Arab leaders, shocked that he had chosen bilateral relations over pan-Arab solidarity, turned their backs on him. And, on 6 October 1981, Sadat was assassinated by members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad.
  • The start of an Israeli-Palestinian peace process, in the early 1990s, made it easier for Jordan to follow Egypt's example. Jordan had already renounced its claim to the West Bank and East Jerusalem, so the treaty signed in 1994 had no territorial implications, other than minor adjustments.
  • Fifty-four years after the Six Day War, the city of Jerusalem remains deeply divided.
  • There are almost no mixed neighborhoods. Development in Arab areas of East Jerusalem has been severely constrained. The demographic balance has been dramatically altered by the arrival of more than 200,000 Jewish residents.
  • Palestinians, like Israelis, see Jerusalem as their capital, but the city's 300,000 Arab residents are all but cut off from the West Bank by Israel's barrier construction and a series of large Jewish neighborhoods built on land captured in 1967.
  • The settlements started, and never stopped.
  • For a small number of Israelis, the victory was an opportunity to settle down in captured territory. In 1968, a group of Jewish settlers, posing as tourists, checked into a hotel in Hebron, in the West Bank. They refused to leave until the government agreed to let them settle - temporarily - nearby.
  • It was the start of a process which led, over time, to the colonization of large parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. By 2015, 386,000 settlers occupied 131 West Bank settlements. Until Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005, 8,000 settlers lived there too.
  • In the eyes of the international community, Jewish settlements are illegal. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring its citizens into occupied territory.
  • Israel disputes its applicability and every government since 1967 has allowed settler numbers to rise. Settlers are well-represented by nationalist political parties which regard the West Bank as part of their Jewish birthright.
  • The settlement issue has long dogged efforts to achieve peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
  • Some argue that the settlement enterprise is now so extensive and entrenched that it renders a viable peace treaty all-but impossible.
Who plotted the capture of the Old City of Jerusalem?
  • Capture of Jerusalem’s Old City was not even a passing thought when the Six Day War began, but within 48 hours the Israeli flag was flying over its ramparts – thanks to the arrogance and incompetence of its Jordanian defenders, and a fake news report aired by Radio Cairo.
  • On the eve of the 1967 conflict, Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan cautioned army commanders in Jerusalem to avoid provocation of the Jordanian forces opposite them.
  • A preemptive strike was soon to be launched against Egypt, whose army was rapidly deploying in Sinai, and Syria was waiting in the wings. Israel did not want to open yet another front.
  • On the morning of June 5, as 200 planes were returning from a preemptive strike against Egyptian air bases, Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol sent a message to Jordan’s King Hussein, who had signed a defense pact with Egypt the week before.
  • If Jordan made no hostile move, Eshkol wrote, neither would Israel. At 10 a.m., Jordan opened fire along the line dividing Jerusalem and elsewhere along the border. And Israel had anticipated this move.
  • Israel had been braced for two weeks for an existential struggle, possibly against several Arab countries; tourists had fled the country, and thousands of graves were excavated in major Israeli cities.
  • Now, as optimistic battle reports began to filter through from Sinai, mindsets began to shift, but the General Staff of Israel was still loath to expand the fight with Jordan into a war of movement.
  • The turning point came in the early afternoon when a report on Radio Cairo was picked up that Jordanian troops had captured an Israeli enclave on Mount Scopus in northern Jerusalem. Despite the Radio Cairo report, Scopus had in fact not been attacked, but Gen.
  • Uzi Narkiss of Israel took the announcement as a statement of intent. With approval of the General Staff, he set a counterattack in motion. (He would afterward maintain that had it not been for the radio report, the West Bank and the Old City might well have remained in Jordanian hands at war’s end.)
  • The Old City was now into play. Ministers living on the coast drove up to Jerusalem on the afternoon of day one to attend a cabinet meeting in the Knesset. The Knesset building, just one year old, was filled with parliamentarians and journalists exchanging rumors about the progress of the war.
  • The major subject was Jerusalem. Would – should – the army take the Old City? Two ministers from opposite ends of the political spectrum called for the first time for capture of the Old City.
  • The Old City was a prize so monumental that some ministers questioned whether a country with a population of less than three million could dare claim it.
  • On the other hand, how could the reborn Jewish state not claim it? Israel’s roots were not in Tel Aviv or even in modern Jerusalem, Israel’s capital, but in the city bearing the same name that lay across a narrow strip of no-man’s-land a mile from where they sat.
  • It was not until an hour after midnight – 17 hours after the initial announcement of clashes with Egypt – that Israel Radio introduced army chief of staff Yitzhak Rabin without prior notice. Despite the hour, almost all adults in the country were awake and listening.
  • Speaking calmly, Gen. Rabin reported that Israeli troops had reached El Arish in Sinai and that Jenin, on the West Bank, had fallen.
  • It was the first confirmation that the war was being fought not inside Israel but on enemy territory.
  • Rabin was followed by the commander of the air force, Gen. Mordecai Hod. In a dry voice he described the blow inflicted by his planes on the air forces of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq, letting drop the incredible figure of 400 enemy planes destroyed in a day, the bulk of them on the ground. Israeli losses were given as 19 planes.
  • Given the divisions within the cabinet, foreign minister Abba Eban proposed that the mooted capture of the Old City be announced as a tactical response to Jordanian shelling, thereby deferring the question of its future status and leaving open the possibility of a pullback. (Close to 1,000 buildings in Israeli Jerusalem were hit by shells, but their stone facing limited damage.) Eshkol adopted Eban’s suggestion.
  • Surviving Jordanian soldiers who had been fighting outside the Old City pulled back within its walls by dusk and the large wooden gates bolted shut. That night, the Jordanian commander, Brig. Ata Ali Haza’a, sought out the governor of Jordanian Jerusalem, Anwar al-Khatib.
  • “The battle is lost,” said Haza’a. All but two of his 23 officers had deserted, and the troops could not be controlled without them.
  • The men were demoralized and exhausted. To save them, he said, he had no choice but to pull out before the Israelis attacked.
  • Khatib was shocked. He tried to argue that Haza’a’s 500-600 men, with Jerusalemites volunteering as officers, could put up an effective fight in a maze like the Old City. “My troops are in no condition to resist,” the brigadier replied.
  • Shortly before dawn, he led them through Dung Gate, the only gate not blocked by Israeli troops, and headed for the Jordan River.
  • The final act was now set in motion. The BBC reported that the UN Security Council was about to push for a Middle East ceasefire.
  • Israel would now move quickly to capture the Old City - its eternal capital.
  • The departure of Haza’a’s force spared the Israeli paratroopers who broke through Lion’s Gate at 10 a.m. a bloody fight. (Two Israelis would be killed inside the walls in skirmishes with a scattering of Jordanian soldiers who had remained behind.)
  • At the Western Wall, Israeli defence minister Dayan read a statement to the press that momentous night: “We have returned to the holiest of our sites and will never again be separated from it.
  • To our Arab neighbors, Israel extends the hand of peace; and to the peoples of all faiths we guarantee full freedom of worship and of religious rights.
  • We have come not to conquer the holy places of others, nor to diminish their religious rights, but to ensure the unity of the city and to live in it with others in harmony.”
  • Though generous and statesmanlike, Dayan’s words meant that the Old City would not be relinquished. And it never was.
How likely is a solution to Arab-Israel conflict today?
  • Gilad Sharon, writing for The Jerusalem Post, asks, “Let’s say we withdrew from the territories after the war.
  • What would have happened? Would the Arab hostility toward us have faded into thin air? No. We would have had to go back to risking our lives along borders that didn’t allow an inch of breathing space, while they continued to declare their arrogant goal of annihilating the “Zionist entity.”
  • What conclusion would they have drawn? That launching a war against us is a viable option, with no downside. If they win, they throw the Jews into the sea; if they lose, there’s no price to pay.”
  • Palestinians, Israelis and the international community still cling to the two-state solution, the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, as the means to provide self-determination for Palestinians and end the Israeli occupation of territories conquered 54 years ago during the war launched on June 5, 1967.
  • Once a Palestinian state became a reality, Israel and the Arabs could declare peace and establish relations, ending the cycle of conflict that began with Israel’s establishment in 1948. Palestinians seek a state based on the Green Line, Israel’s pre-1967 border, comprising 22% of the territory of historical Palestine, and including East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.
  • Palestinians are prepared to accept Israeli major settlement blocs built in East Jerusalem and the West Bank but demand territorial compensation.
  • Israel seeks to annex the main settlement blocs and argues that Israelis in other settlements should be given the option of living in a Palestinian state.
  • Both sides refuse to budge.
  • What had been Jordanian Jerusalem, including the half-mile square Old City and the Mount of Olives, constituted only 6% of the land taken by Israel in 1967.
  • But the walled entity, with its ramparts and holy places, is the heart of Jerusalem, harboring narratives capable of inspiring both sublime contemplation and rocket wars. Jerusalem’s Arabs and Jews today pray in proximity while jostling for position at the gateway to heaven.
Reasons of War
  • After the first Arab-Israeli War, Israel had not only occupied the territories that were assigned to it by the UN mandate, but it had also occupied most of the territories that would have gone to Palestine.
  • The Gaza strip went to Egypt and Transjordan, as Jordan was known under British occupation, took control of West Bank.
  • Since that event, there were a number of clashes between the countries and incursions that led to loss of lives. Egypt, in particular, had a grudge against Israel after the latter’s invasion of Egypt’s Sinai peninsula in the Suez crisis of 1956 - essentially the second Arab-Israeli war.
  • But beyond all this, the immediate spark that led to a war was the closure of the Straits of Tiran - a narrow strip of sea between the Sinai Peninsula and Saudi Arabia that is Israel’s lone point of access to the Red Sea and beyond. Israel had already said the straits’ closure would amount to an ‘act of war’.
  • Egypt, after receiving false intel about Israel threatening to invade Syria, re-militarised the Sinai peninsula, expelled the UN Emergency Force from Sinai and West Bank, and closed the Straits of Tiran.

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