The Six Day War of 1967: Myths and Facts

The 1967 “Six Day” war between the Arab states and Israel remains one of the most significant wars in modern Middle Eastern history. The war had a great impact on the Arab-Israeli conflict and its impact remains critical within the Israel-Palestine conflict till this day after over 50 years. The war ended with Israel scoring a divining victory by occupying the West Bank, the Gaza strip, the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula and the Syrian Golan Heights. However the mainstream narrative of the war paints the causes of the war in a way that puts the blame on the Arab states for their actions that made Israel’s “preemptive” strike and its occupation morally justifiable due to the Arab “threat” of the destruction of Israel.

To cite the arguments made for that narrative I will cite the book Myths and Facts by Mitchell Brad, the director of Jewish Virtual Library because I believe that his arguments almost perfectly represent those made by the mainstream. Brad argues that Israel’s military strike was provoked due to “combination of bellicose Arab rhetoric, threatening behavior, and—ultimately—an act of war left Israel no choice but preemptive action,” in addition to the fact that “Israel was under actual attack from Arab terrorists,” as well as Syria’s attacks on Israel from the Golan Heights (p. 49). Brad’s views of the Arab’s “threatening behavior” are “Nasser order[ing] the UN Emergency Force, stationed in the Sinai since 1956, to withdraw on May 16” (p. 49) however – he leaves the crucial fact that he “order[ed] the removal of UN troops solely from their positions along the Egypt–Israel border, and not from Gaza or Sharm el-Sheikh, which controls passage through the Straits of Tiran.”[1] Brad also ignores the fact that Israel refused U Thant’s proposal to deploy the UN troop on its side of the border.[2] But most importantly, Brad leaves out the reason behind Nasser’s actions. The reason Nasser deployed his troops in the Sinai Peninsula in the first place was not to “destroy Israel” - as he alleges - but rather to deter Israel from a strike it was planning against Syria. Israeli strategic analyst Ze’ev Maoz concludes that “The Egyptian troop movement into the Sinai was an act of extended deterrence. Nasser wanted to send the Israelis a simple message: back off Syria”.[3] That happened after the Soviet Union told Nasser that its intelligence is expecting an Israeli strike on Syria. It is alleged in the “official history” of the war that the Soviet report was a false alarm[4] however, the U.S National Security Council disputes that:

In early May, it is probable that Soviet agents actually picked up intelligence reports of a planned Israeli raid into Syria. I would not be surprised if the reports were at least partly true. The Israeli have made such raids before; they have been under heavy provocation; and they maintain pretty good security (so we might well not know about a planned raid). Intelligence being an uncertain business, the Soviet agents may not have known the scale of the raid and may have exaggerated its scope and purpose.[5]

Similarly, the most recent scholarly research by Israeli historian Ami Gluska suggests that “the Soviet assessment from mid-May 1967 that Israel was about to strike at Syria was correct and well founded, and was not merely based on the public threats issued by Eshkol, Rabin and Yariv.”[6]

Brad claimed that the Arab states’ goal was the destruction of Israel, citing statements by the Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser and the Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad as evidence (p. 49-51) however, despite all these statement evidence suggested that Nasser was not looking to attack Israel let alone cause its destruction. Both US and Israeli intelligence did not expect an Arab attack on Israel, and they were both confident that Israel’s existence was not in danger even in the case of an Arab attack. On the 26th of May U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson informed Foreign Minister Abba Eban that “all of our intelligence people are unanimous regarding the assessment; that an attack is not imminent” and that if the Arabs attack “you will whip hell out of them”[7] then on the 1st of June, the Mossad chief Meir Amit informed the US Secretary of Defense McNamara that “there were no differences between the U.S. and the Israelis on the military intelligence picture or its interpretation.”[8] “The IDF command was not too worried about an Egyptian surprise attack” Maoz concluded “Rather, the key question was how to restore the credibility of Israeli deterrence” [9] and “The Egyptian build-up in Sinai lacked a clear offensive plan,” Israeli scholar Avraham Sela reports, “and Nasser’s defensive instructions explicitly assumed an Israeli first-strike.”[10] So it is clear by those fact that Israel was not too worried about an Arab attack on Israel, and even if the Arab states attacked, Israel didn’t face any “threat of annihilation”. A CIA estimate concluded that Israeli ground forces “can maintain internal security, defend successfully against simultaneous Arab attacks on all fronts, launch limited attacks simultaneously on all fronts, or hold on any three fronts while mounting successfully a major offensive on the fourth.” In the air, the judgment is less clear: the Israelis “probably could defeat the Egyptian air force if Israel’s air facilities were not damaged beyond repair.”[11] The Israelis were also aware of these facts where Foreign Minister Abba Eban informed the United States that “Israel believed its forces would win and he agreed that the balance of power had not been shifted by deployment of the last few days.”[12]

Brad argues that when “Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran to all Israeli shipping and all ships bound for Eilat” (p. 51) that was “the casus belli in 1967” (p. 52). However, both premises of the argument are wrong.

First of all, there was no actual blockade on the Strains of Tiran. While Nasser did enforce a blockade at first he later quietly lifted it and let Israeli ships pass freely.[13]

Secondly, a blockade is not a casus belli under international law. The United Nations’ charter 51 gives you the right to take an action of self-defense against “an armed attack”[14] and a blockade is not an armed attack. Furthermore, both Nasser and U Thant tried to submit the issue of the blockade to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – however Israel rejected those proposals.[15] Former Israeli Foreign Minister and former history professor at the University of Tel Aviv Shlomo Ben-Ami observes that “up to the very eve of the war Nasser hoped he could avert it and win politically . . . Egypt was definitely not ready for war and Nasser did not want a war. ‘He wanted victory without a war,’ as Abba Eban preferred to put it”[16] and Maoz similarly observes that “up to the outbreak of the war, Nasser was interested in finding a ladder to climb down from the tall tree he found himself on.”[17] Even Middle East Record, a semi-official Israeli compilation, observed that “a number of facts seem to indicate Abdel Nasser’s belief in the possibility of terminating . . . the conflict through diplomacy.”[18]

Brad states that one of the other alleged reasons of the Israeli strike in 1967 is “Israel was under actual attack from Arab terrorists” and another being “Syria’s attacks on Israeli kibbutzim from the Golan Heights” (p. 49). However, the attacks from so-called “Arab terrorists” (namely the PLO and other Palestinian militia groups created by mostly refugees displaced from 1948) did not pose a significant danger to Israel. In an October 1966 Knesset speech Secretary of Defense Moshe Dayan stated that “There is no major wave of infiltration today. Just because several dozen bandits from al-Fatah cross the border, Israel does not have to get caught up in a frenzy of escalation,”[19] and, former head of Israeli military intelligence, Yehoshaphat Harkabi, concluded that “in the thirty months from [their] debut to the six-day war are not impressive by any standard” and that those attacks “did not endanger Israel's national life”.[20] Furthermore, Maoz writes that “The number of Al Fatah infiltrations from the Golan Height was limited, causing few casualties. Syria did not pose any serious strategic threat to Israel. Therefore, there was nothing to deter and little cause for compellence.”[21] Brad alleged that Syria’s attacks from the Golan Heights “provoked a retaliatory strike” (p. 49) however, he suppresses the real cause of the border clashes between Syria and Israel. In an interview Secretary of Defense Moshe Dayan confirmed that:

I know how at least 80 percent of all those incidents there [along the Israeli-Syrian border] got started. In my opinion, more than 80 percent, but let us talk about 80. It worked like this: we would send a tractor to plow some place in the demilitarized zone where nothing could be grown, and we knew ahead of time that the Syrians would shoot. If they didn’t shoot, we would tell the tractor to move deeper [into the DMZ], until the Syrians got mad eventually and fired on it. And then we would activate artillery, and later on the air force. . . . I did it, and Laskov [Haim Laskov, Dayan’s successor as COS], and Chera [Zvi Zur, Laskov’s successor], and Rabin too when he was there [as head of the northern command], but it seems to me that the one who enjoyed most these kinds of games was Dado [David Elazar, the head of the northern command in 1965–67].[22]

References:                                                                     

[1] Bregman, Israel’s Wars, p. 46.

[2] Thant, View from the UN, New York, p. 223.

[3] Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, p. 90.

[4] See for example: Bergman, R. (2017, June 7). How the K.G.B. Started the War That Changed the Middle East. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/07/opinion/how-the-kgb-started-the-war-that-changed-the-middle-east.html

 [5] Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Volume XIX, Arab-Israeli Crisis and War, 1967, Doc. 136.

[6] Gluska, The Israeli Military and the Origins of the 1967 War, p. 118.

[7] Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Volume XIX, Arab-Israeli Crisis and War, 1967, Doc. 77.

[8] Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, Volume XIX, Arab-Israeli Crisis and War, 1967, Doc. 124.

[9] Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, p. 89.

[10] Sela, Decline of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, p. 91.

[11] FRUS, 1964-168 Volume XIX, Arab-Israeli Crisis and War, 1967, Doc. 44.

[12] Ibid, Doc. 69.

[13] Segev, 1967, p. 240-43; Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Volume XIX, Arab-Israeli Crisis and War, 1967, Doc. 108 “The real question was what Nasser was doing and there is no sign yet that he was bent on enforcing his announced blockade. . . Our information was that at least two ships had passed through for Eilat recently.” (emphasis added).

[14] Charter of the United Nations, Chapter VII — Action with respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression, Article 51.

[15] Finkestein, Image and Reality, 129.  Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Volume XIX, Arab-Israeli Crisis and War, 1967, Doc. 129.

[16] Ben-Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, p. 103

[17] Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, p. 87.

[18] Daniel Dishon, Middle East Record, 1967, p. 199.

[19] Finkestein, Image and Reality, p. 188.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, p. 110.

[22] Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, p. 103.