The sirens sounded, gasped into silence as if some giant animal were catching its breath, then sounded again. It was a familiar dirge amid the weathered blocks of flats on the Mediterranean seafront of Tel Aviv in the early months of 1967.
Air-raid drills were just one sign of escalating tension between the precarious, teenage state of Israel and a coalition of surrounding Arab neighbors led by then-president Gamal Abdel-Nasser's Egypt.
But this time -- on the morning of June 5, 1967 -- few Israelis doubted the wails of warning meant war. Few were confident it would end in victory. Fewer still felt that if victory did come, it would come easily, or soon. On the last score, they would be proven utterly and spectacularly wrong.
Within hours, Israeli jets would destroy virtually all Egypt's 450 combat aircraft on the ground. By the day's end, the Syrian air force would be similarly crippled.
A day later, Israeli troops were fighting their way across the concrete and barbed wire that divided the disputed holy city of Jerusalem into its Israeli-held west and its Jordanian-ruled east -- and capturing Judaism's holiest site, the Western Wall, sole surviving remnant of the ancient Jewish temple. Ground fighting, often fierce, rumbled on for four more days, with Israel ultimately going on to capture the entire West Bank from Jordan on its eastern flank; Gaza and the Sinai desert from Egypt in the south; and the towering Golan Heights from Syria in the north.
In barely 130 hours, the fighting was all over. Yet however quick, the war had not been bloodless. Israel lost about 1,100 dead, the Egyptians more than 10,000, the Syrians 2,500 and Jordan about 700. And some 300,000 Palestinians from the West Bank fled the fighting eastward into Jordan -- in some cases "double refugees," because they had also lost their homes in the fighting surrounding the establishment of Israel 20 years earlier.
It is now four decades since the Six-Day War, but its effects reverberate still -- in Israel, the occupied Palestinian territories, the Middle East and the wider world. When British Prime Minister Tony Blair shuttled to Jerusalem and Ramallah and Cairo speaking of the urgency of getting Israeli-Palestinian peace talks back on track; when US President George W. Bush and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice proclaim a commitment to the "diplomatic road map"; when a Saudi-led Arab summit urges a "land-for-peace" deal; or when al-Qaeda propagandists cite "Palestine" among the litany of grievances to recruit suicide bombers to pilot passenger planes into New York skyscrapers or blow up subway trains in London; all, in their own ways, are negotiating the unfinished business of six days of war in June 1967.
young nation
When the war broke out, Israel was barely 19 years old, and barely 16km wide at its narrowest point. There were none of the luxury hotels, pricey restaurants or all-night bars and clubs that today dot Tel Aviv's seafront; none of the high-tech businesses that lie northwards up the coast. Israel's equivalent of the BBC would not introduce television broadcasts until the following year.
The state had been established in 1948 on the back of a UN resolution partitioning British Mandate Palestine into two states: one a national home for the Jews, six million of whom had been murdered in Hitler's Holocaust, the other for Palestinian Arabs. The Arab states rejected the plan, and their armies invaded when Israel declared statehood. Israel survived, winning a protracted battle it called the War of Independence. In Arabic it is known, to this day, simply as al naqba -- the catastrophe.
The Arab world -- politically at least -- was also unrecognizably different in the early days of June 1967. The Palestinian issue was, then as now, a central rallying cry. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, after all, had fled or been forced out of what became Israel in the 1948 war. But as an independent political voice, they were so feeble as to be barely audible, dismissed not only by Israel but by Arab kings and presidents whose own national interests, or pretensions to claim leadership of a wider nationalist cause, took precedence. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) existed. Yet it was a creature of Nasser and run by an acolyte named Ahmad Shukeiri.
By the spring of 1967, Nasser -- with his charismatic podium presence and Soviet-supplied military -- was determined to fashion a powerful alliance of Israel's Arab neighbors to reverse once and for all the humiliation of 1948. He found an avid partner in another Kremlin ally, then-Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, and a willing, if less eager, one in the pro-western King Hussein of Jordan. For months, tension had been mounting, with strikes and counter-strikes on Israel's borders. Whether either side truly wanted, or expected, full-scale war remains uncertain four decades later. What is clear is that each side, increasingly, became convinced the other was bent on confrontation.
In Israel, then-prime minister Levi Eshkol -- a competent but colorless successor to the country's founding leader, David Ben-Gurion -- was so halting in his response to the rising tension that he was sowing something very near to panic among his generals. Addressing the nation on the radio in May, he fumbled at his notes, stumbled in his delivery and within days was forced to bring the eyepatched war veteran Moshe Dayan into his Cabinet as defense minister in an emergency "unity" government to steady the country's nerves.
saber-rattling
In Egypt, Nasser was saber-rattling, but had yet clearly to demonstrate that he was poised to move from rhetoric to battle. But in the final weeks of May he took a series of steps that were to make war inevitable. On the 16th, he demanded the removal of a UN buffer force deployed in the Sinai since the disastrous British-French-Israeli seizure of the Suez Canal in 1956. On May 22, Nasser announced what amounted to a blockade of Israel, closing the Strait of Tiran and the top of the Red Sea to Israeli shipping. And he then ordered some 100,000 troops, with almost 1,000 tanks and 1,000 other armored vehicles -- well over half of his armed forces -- into the Sinai, near Israel's southern border. At the month's end, he declared: "The Arabs are arranged for battle. The critical hour has arrived."
It was Israel, shortly after 7am on June 5, that struck first, attacking and destroying Egypt's air force. When Jordanian troops and artillery joined the war from the east, and the Syrians from the Golan, Israel struck on both those fronts. And by June 10, the fighting was over.
The next morning, Eshkol's top aides were gathered in his office in a mood of relief, astonishment and celebration, when the prime minister walked in and -- one of them later recalled -- said: "What are you so happy about?"
In military terms, the victory had been extraordinary. Within the space of a week, a narrow, seaside Israel had tripled in size. Militarily and strategically, it had been transformed from precarious prey to regional superpower.
"Eshkol's mood was surprisingly sober," the aide recounted. "He saw that our political problems were only just beginning."
And they were. The initial hope among Israel's political leaders was that at least the bulk of land they had captured could be traded for treaties of peace with Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Yet there were early signs that they saw the prospect of a deal with Jordan -- involving, as it did, the future of the West Bank and of Jerusalem -- as by far the most complicated. Egypt's Sinai and the Syrian Golan were fairly sparsely populated. The only reason to hold on to them would be as a strategic buffer, a function the Israelis figured could be retained in a future land-for-peace deal by ensuring they were "demilitarized."
Jerusalem was different: it was Judaism's holiest site and ancient capital, for 19 years divided, now wholly under Israeli rule. The West Bank, too, had powerful historical resonance for Israelis. For the assertively Orthodox, a minority in Israel whose huge effect on settlement policy began in the months after the 1967 war, the attraction was particularly powerful: the place names of its towns and villages were part of the biblical narrative they read aloud each week in synagogue.
But in the weeks after the war other, secular Israelis also voted with their picnic baskets. They eagerly visited the undivided Jerusalem -- with the area around the Western Wall and the ancient Jewish Quarter of the walled Old City soon cleared by Israeli bulldozers. They also visited not only West Bank cities with biblical echoes such as Hebron, but sites such as Gush Etzion, where Jewish residents were twice violently forced out, first in 1929 and then a week before the establishment of Israel in 1948.
A year after the war, the first of the Jewish settlements on the West Bank had been approved: at Gush Etzion and near Hebron. The decision came under a broadly secular labor government, though amid pressure stoked by a burgeoning movement of Orthodox nationalist settlers known as Gush Emunim, the Bloc of the Faithful. Other settlements followed, particularly under Menachem Begin's right-wing Israeli government in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By then, the aim of the settlements was clear and openly stated: to underline Begin's determination to hold on to overall control of the West Bank under any future peace deal, and to rule out ever agreeing to a Palestinian state there.
no compromise
In truth, though, whatever early hopes Israeli harbored for peace deals after the 1967 war were, in any case, soon scotched by Arab leaders. Having suffered a battlefield humiliation far worse than 1948, they were more determined than ever to reject a political compromise. At an Arab summit held in Khartoum two months after the war, they made their rejection official. They formally adopted a platform of "three nos" -- no to recognition of Israel, no to negotiations, no to peace with Israel.
But while it was not widely recognized at the time, the most far-reaching effect of the war in the Arab world would be to destroy the ability of Nasser, or any other Arab president or monarch, credibly to speak any longer on behalf of the Palestinians. An Egyptian-born Palestinian nationalist named Yasser Arafat and a tight band of comrades had in the late 1950s formed a new Palestinian group called al-Fatah. Within months of the Six-Day War, Arafat began to emerge as the voice of a new, militant and independent brand of Palestinian nationalism. By 1969, he -- not Nasser's Shukeiri -- was head of the PLO.
Israel was slow to recognize, or at least accept, the implications. It was not until more than a decade after the Six-Day War that Israel made serious attempts to negotiate a peaceful resolution of the core problem it created -- the future of the West Bank and Jerusalem -- with the local Palestinian Arabs who lived there rather than through Jordan or Egypt. It would be a further two decades before any direct talks with Arafat or the PLO.
The years since have been blighted by diplomatic failure, terrible violence and suffering on both sides. But neither side doubts any longer that the only workable alternative is a directly negotiated agreement, however elusive, on the future of the ancient towns and olive hilltops of the West Bank, of Jerusalem and of the Israelis and Palestinians who live there.
In short, no one doubts that Middle East peace depends on resolving the decades-long repercussions of those six days of war.
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