Six Days and Forty Years

David Aikman

David Aikman looks back on the Six Days War and its unexpected outcomes.

The Six-Day War of 1967 was one of the most startling military victories in history. In the course of six days, from June 5 through June 11, the Israeli Defense Forces essentially wiped out on the ground the air force of Egypt, crippled for years the air forces of Jordan and Syria, and triumphed over the armies of those three Arab states deployed against Israel.

More significantly, after just a few days’ fighting, Israel found itself in military control over 1.2 million Arabs in the West Bank (part of British Mandate Palestine and annexed by Jordan in 1950) and Gaza (before 1967 under the control of Egypt). Arabs killed, wounded, and imprisoned were in the scores of thousands; Israeli casualties were listed at the almost mythical level of 777 (which seems small but is a higher proportion of the 1967 Israeli population than all the 57,000 Americans killed during the Vietnam War).

In the months before the war, Israel had been beset by domestic political crises and infighting and was deeply worried about national morale. In the two weeks preceding the beginning of hostilities, the country had been on full mobilization status and its economy was hemorrhaging seriously. Before the war, by contrast, Egyptian president Gamel Abdul Nasser, in the full thrust of pan-Arab nationalism, had predicted that the forthcoming hostilities would drive the Jews “into the sea.” The Israeli victory brought a new confidence not only to the infant country of Israel, just nineteen years old, but also to Jews worldwide. By contrast, it plunged the entire Arab world into a period of self-questioning that led to the tumultuous upheavals that continue to shake it to this day.

Though Israel had good intentions during its initial governance of the West Bank and Gaza, and indeed encouraged municipalities to operate more or less as they had under Jordanian rule, far-sighted people realized that military occupation was not sustainable indefinitely. After Yasser Arafat emerged as chairman of the recently-formed Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1968, the Israelis realized they would face organized resistance, even terrorism, within what they called “the territories.” They did. Egypt learned from its pre-1967 mistakes. After Nasser’s death in 1970, President Anwar Sadat carefully planned a face-saving military assault upon Israel by launching the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, and then made a dramatic visit to Jerusalem in 1977 that led to an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty in 1979.

Yet the larger Egyptian response to the humiliation of the Six-Day War was a tectonic one, barely visible aboveground. Before 1967, secular, leftist Arab nationalism had dominated the thinking of intellectuals in those parts of the Arab world that had achieved independence from Britain and France after World War II. After 1967, that approach to Arab empowerment was essentially discredited; President Sadat himself, gunned down by assassins in 1981, was its first prominent victim.

Islamist groups, suppressed for decades by secular Arab governments, had conspired to murder Sadat, and they began to gather strength throughout Egypt and the Arab world. After the success of the Iranian Islamic revolution in 1979, they grew more confident. In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the writing was on the wall as early as 1980 when Islamist student organizations began to assume power in such hitherto secular campuses of the West Bank as Bir Zeit University, outside Ramallah, north of Jerusalem.

Since the early eighties, in fact, the dominant tendency of the Arab world has been a repudiation of the secularism that Nasser championed. It has also comprised an often-violent search for empowerment through an expression of Islam based on idealized conceptions of the religion during its militant expansionist phase in the seventh and eighth centuries. One Arab state that before 1967 was regarded as a model of inter-confessional secular harmony, Lebanon, is even now fighting for its life against Islamist forces that have gathered strength in the festering refugee camps of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war. Gaza, conquered by the Israelis in 1967 but handed over to the Palestinian Authority after the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles, is now mired in a brutal civil war in which the Islamist forces subordinate to Hamas—the Islamist political party that won a majority of the legislature in the 2005 elections—seem determined to establish a full Islamic regime even if West Bank Palestinians don’t go along with it.

There remain many unanswered questions from the Six-Day War. What, for example, motivated the Soviet government of Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin to spread false information to the government of Syria that the Israelis were mobilizing against it? It was fear of an Israeli attack that led Syria to ask Egypt for a defensive alliance against Israel, which in turn led to Egyptian mobilization that Israel felt compelled to match. Why didn’t Jordan stay out of the war? Even as they planned a pre-emptive strike against the Egyptian air force, the Israelis never originally intended to fight Jordan. And it was a false Egyptian radio report of Jordanian military successes around Jerusalem that finally unleashed the Israeli military assault upon the West Bank. Would Arab states have responded positively if Israel had offered to trade land for peace in 1967? Would Palestinian attitudes toward Israel be radically different today if various Israeli governments after 1967 had not authorized the establishment of Israeli residential communities—“settlements” in the popular jargon—on the West Bank?

Most of these questions can never be satisfactorily answered (though historical researchers might in future learn about the thinking behind Soviet disinformation to Syria). What is apparent, however, is that victory in a war, even for national survival—as all Israeli wars except for the 1982 invasion of Lebanon have essentially been—does not guarantee peace. The Six-Day War sort of “happened,” unanticipated and unplanned. But its decisive military result not only failed to resolve long-term political tensions, it gave rise to more of them than even the most pessimistic analysts in 1967 could have foreseen.

War, Clausewitz said, is always an extension of politics by other means. But in the end, there is always politics, the painstaking, often exasperating challenge to reconcile the differing needs, aspirations, and fears of human communities at odds with each other. War can indeed change politics enduringly and successfully—World War II decisively removed from the global arena two particularly virulent varieties of political despotism, the Nazis and the Japanese militarists—but it cannot do so on its own. Good wars require good politics for lasting good results. The Six-Day War lacked the first and the Middle East today lives with the absence of the second.  

Dr. Aikman, a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, was for many years senior correspondent for Time.

2 Responses (comments are closed) • Columns, David Aikman, Global Culture, War and Peace, Mon 11 Jun 2007