1967's Lost Victory

Early the morning of June 5, Israeli jets attack and destroy the air forces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Before noon that day the war is essentially over. Some 400 Arab aircraft are demolished. In the course of the subsequent week of combat, Israel destroys or captures more than 500 tanks and 70 percent of all other Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian military equipment. Israeli losses are small in comparison: 20 planes and 60 tanks. More than 11,000 Egyptian, 6,000 Jordanian and 1,000 Syrian soldiers are killed. About 700 Israeli soldiers are killed.

By the end of the war, Israel has occupied Syria’s Golan heights, Egypt’s Sinai and the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian-Jordanian West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem, territories that add up to more than three time the size of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. More than 300,000 Palestinians are added to the refugee rolls.

The war discredits Arab leaders, especially Egypt’s Gamal abdel Nasser, whose nationalist bluster and pledge to eliminate Israel proved as hollow as his military’s capabilities. For Israel, the war was a victory in military terms only. As Patrick Tyler writes in A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East from the Cold War to the War on Terror ( Farrar Straus Giroux 2009) , “Nothing would ever be the same. The Six-Day War was a failure of American diplomacy—a costly failure whose consequences would bleed through decades marked by further outbreaks of war and unending strife. Unlike Eisenhower, who had invoked the United Nations Charter against Israel’s occupation of Sinai in 1956, Johnson would not demand that Israel give up its 1967 conquests. Johnson embraced what seemed to him a perfectly reasonable argument that Israel, having been provoked, should trade the conquered lands for a permanent peace with the Arabs. Johnson did not see how profoundly he had undermined the high principle of the United Nations Charter—the inadmissibility of conquest as a means of settling disputes—nor did he foresee the corrosive effects of military occupation on lands populated by more than one million Arabs.”

In November, the United Nations passes Resolution 242 calling on Israel to withdraw from all occupied territories and for Palestinians to recognize Israel.

See Also:

• UN Security Council Resolution 242 (1967)
• Charles De Gaulle Condemns Israel's Occupation of Arab Territories