Israel 1967

The Six-Day War.

On Wednesday, I provided an overview of the Jewish people’s ancient connection to Israel, from 4,000 years ago to the State of Israel’s birth in May 1948.

Today, I’ll look at the pivotal Six-Day War of 1967, how it came to pass and how the Jews defended their national home so successfully that its territory expanded.

But first, the rest of the independence fight.

In November 1947, the United Nations adopted the resolution recommending the creation of independent Arab and Jewish states, with international supervision of Jerusalem. Its partition plan included Gaza and the West Bank, as follows:

On the day of Israel’s birth, the Arab League of nations denounced it and attacked.

Fighting had begun long before Israel’s national sovereignty was formally declared, dating back to the end of the First World War and Britain’s fraught control of “Mandatory Palestine.” In World War II, Palestinian Arabs aligned with Nazi Germany, making obvious the magnitude of Arab-Jewish antipathy.

The day after the UN recommended the creation of independent Arab and Jewish states, Arab militants killed seven Jews near Tel Aviv. Turmoil continued up to the proclamation of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948, and intensified afterward. The new phase involving the infant Israel received its own name: the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

Arabs attacked Tel Aviv by air. Forces from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt invaded. Saudi Arabia sent a formation to fight under Egypt’s command. British troops from Jordan intervened in territory that had been designated as part of the Arab state in the UN partition. Bitter fighting ensued. In Jerusalem, Arabs and Jews engaged in ferocious house-to-house combat. The Arab Legion and other Arab combatants prevailed. They nearly eliminated Jews from the Old City, and razed the Hurva Synagogue, Jerusalem’s main Ashkenazi worship site.

On May 30, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported in “Old City of Jerusalem Falls to Arabs; Jews Gain in Battle for Tel Aviv Highway” that two days earlier, two rabbis had crossed Arab lines “under a white flag of truce” to hear surrender terms laid down by King Abdullah I of Jordan:

“The Old City, ancient walled town in the center of Jerusalem in which Jews have dwelt for tens of generations, fell this afternoon to King Abdullah’s Arab Legion after a siege of eleven days during which the outnumbered and outgunned Jewish defenders turned every stone and house into a sniper’s post and a fortress.”

The war dragged on. Air, land, and sea battles erupted. Israel struggled to defend against onslaughts from every direction.

By June, the British considered Jewish forces too weak to succeed, and brokered the first of two truces recognized by both sides during the war. The first truce lasted from 11 June to 8 July 1948. As it began, one British officer predicted that the four-week pause “would certainly be exploited by the Jews to continue military training and reorganization while the Arabs would waste it feuding over the future divisions of the spoils.” He was right.

Before the truce ended, Egypt attacked Negba, a kibbutz 10 miles northeast of Gaza, but Israel had prepared an offensive on three fronts. After 10 days of fierce fighting that saw the tables turn in Israel’s favor, the UN brokered another truce, followed by a third attempt in October (defied by the Arab Liberation Army). With each pause in fighting, Israel’s military effectiveness improved while the Arabs’ did not. Steadily, Israel expunged its attackers and pushed out the borders of its original UN partition.

In 1949, Israel signed separate armistice agreements with Egypt on February 24, Lebanon on March 23, Jordan on April 3, and Syria on July 20. After barely surviving a year of fighting against five Arab armies, Israel emerged with more territory. Demarcation lines from the armistice agreements redrew the area’s map, as follows:

All sides assumed the new lines would be temporary, with the West Bank controlled by Jordan, and Gaza occupied by Egypt.

In December 1949, with the opening war of its existence over, Israel was ready to welcome Jewish brethren worldwide. The country’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel, and the following July the government granted all Jews the right to immigrate to Israel and become citizens.

But this was no happily ever after.

Instead it led to an even bigger war in 1967. The 18 intervening years saw Israel grow as a military power. No longer the plebe that five Arab armies nearly vanquished in 1948, Israel’s new power would achieve overwhelming success on the battlefield — and sow the seeds of today’s Israel-Hamas war.

In 1964, Israel completed its National Water Carrier to transfer water from the Sea of Galilee in the north of the country to population centers in the central area and arid south. Ben-Gurion had expressed a dream of building Jewish settlements in the Negev desert. The water project was an essential precursor.

Aside: Ben-Gurion’s dream came true. After retiring from politics, he moved with his wife in 1952 to a modest home in kibbutz Sde Boker in the Negev, 38 miles southeast of Gaza, 23 miles east of Egypt. Sde Boker’s population today is less than 500. Ben-Gurion’s home is now a tourist site.

Arabs disliked the potential for improvement in Israel’s economic growth and regional power, and in January 1964 convened an Arab League summit in Cairo to discuss a response. Participants decided they could not halt Israel’s ambitions militarily and instead planned to divert the Jordan River headwaters away from the Sea of Galilee to the Yarmouk River. From the preamble to their decision:

“The establishment of Israel is the basic threat that the Arab nation in its entirety has agreed to forestall. And since the existence of Israel is a danger that threatens the Arab nation, the diversion of the Jordan waters by it multiplies the dangers to Arab existence. Accordingly, the Arab states have to prepare the plans necessary for dealing with the political, economic, and social aspects, so that if the necessary results are not achieved, collective Arab military preparations, when they are completed, will constitute the ultimate practical means for the final liquidation of Israel.”

Israel began pumping from the Sea of Galilee in June 1964. In November, Syria’s military attacked Jews around National Water Carrier facilities, and Israel retaliated. The Arab plan to divert the Jordan would have removed nearly a third of the water that Israel wanted to redirect, and Israel said it considered the diversion to be a violation of its sovereign rights.

More border fights broke out. Syria’s army attacked Israeli farmers and security patrols, Israel destroyed Syrian tanks and earth-moving equipment working on the diversion plan. This resistance by Israel, combined with the technical complexity of the project, led the Arabs to abandon the scheme.

Arab resentment simmered. It seemed that nothing could halt Israel’s progress. Far from shrinking out of existence, the Jews sank their roots deeper into the sands of the Middle East. Israel’s gross domestic product looked unstoppable:

Israel GDP
Annual Growth (%)
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11.2 in 1961
10.2 in 1962
10.7 in 1963
7.9 in 1964
9.1 in 1965

In May 1967, Israeli musician Naomi Shemer performed her song “Jerusalem of Gold” (Yerushalayim Shel Zahav), describing the 2,000-year longing of the Jewish people to return to Jerusalem. It became a hit in Israel, and further enraged Arabs who considered it a blatant celebration of a Jewish homeland. No Israeli disagreed, and their collective response of “that’s right” raised Arab temperatures higher.

Two days after Shemer’s performance, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria amassed troops on Israel’s border.

Egypt blockaded the Straits of Tiran, restricting Israeli maritime commerce. Oil tankers awaiting passage through the straits needed to submit documents proving their cargo was not headed to Israel, impeding Israel’s effort to develop the Negev desert.

Worse, Egypt began radio broadcasts predicting an imminent genocide in Israel. Calls for war sounded across the land, with Egypt devising a plan to bomb strategic sites in Israel — including its Dimona nuclear reactor in the Negev — and deploy tank battalions across the Negev desert to Jordan, cutting Israel in half. On 26 May 1967, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, referred to in Hebrew media at the time as “the Egyptian tyrant,” declared: “The battle will be a general one and our basic objective will be to destroy Israel.”

Egypt, Jordan, and Syria formed a coalition. Iraq deployed troops to all three countries. Egypt amassed military forces along the Egypt-Israel border and ordered the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula. The UNEF had been established to end the Suez Canal Crisis, caused by Egypt’s Nasser closing the vital shipping lane from November 1956 to April 1957.

In May 1967, Israel reiterated its post-Suez Crisis position that blockading the Straits of Tiran constituted an act of war, rallied civilian military reserves, and formed a national unity government.

According to Egyptian Military Historian Ibrahim Shekib, Nasser attended several meetings with Egyptian leadership in which the question was raised, “What if we allow Israel to strike first?” The commander of the air force rejected this idea, but was then asked, “Would you prefer to strike first and fight Israel and America, or to receive the first strike and fight only Israel?”

The latter, of course, and the Jews obliged.

On 5 June 1967, Israel’s “Operation Focus” preemptively bombed Egypt’s airfields where its planes sat parked, neutralizing the Egyptian Air Force in one fell swoop. Nearly 200 Israeli jets flew out over the Mediterranean to avoid detection, then turned and attacked Egypt from the north, not from the east as the Egyptians had anticipated. Throughout the day, Israel obliterated other Arab air forces as well. The number of enemy aircraft reported by Israel to have been destroyed was so enormous that Western media assumed it to have been an exaggeration, but the failure of Arab planes to appear in the following days authenticated Israel’s reports.

The overwhelming success of Operation Focus set the stage for the rest of the war. Israel outmaneuvered and outgunned the Arabs at every turn, from Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula, to the West Bank with hand-to-hand combat between Israelis and Jordanians, to the Golan Heights where air power and armored divisions routed the Syrian army.

On June 10, the war ended with a complete victory for Israel. It had taken the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank and all of Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. In six days, Israel defeated three Arab armies, gained territory four times its original size, and became the preeminent military power in the region.

The outcome fundamentally reformed the landscape:

Two days after the war ended, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol addressed the Knesset (Israel’s legislature), reviewing events preceding the war, including what he described as Israel’s efforts to avoid armed hostilities through diplomatic initiatives, and the military operations of the previous week. From his 12 June 1967 speech:

“A week ago the momentous struggle opened. The existence of the State of Israel … hung in the balance.

“Now, only a week after the last session of the Knesset, which took place to the accompaniment of the thunder of the guns, we meet with the tidings of victory ringing in our ears. The aggression of the enemy has been repelled, the greater part of his power has been broken, his military machine destroyed, the bases for aggression cleared. The threat of war has been lifted from our country. The skies above our heads are safe. The threat to Jerusalem, to the coastal plain, to the villages of the north and the corridor, to the whole of the Negev and Galilee, has been removed.

“The Israel Defense Forces dominate the Sinai Peninsula as far as the Suez Canal, the West Bank of the Jordan, and the Golan Heights. The passage through the Strait of Tiran to the Gulf of Aqaba is free. Jerusalem has been reunified. For the first time since the establishment of the State, Jews pray at the Western Wall, the relic of our holy Temple and our historic past, and at Rachel’s Tomb. For the first time in our generation, Jews can pray at the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron, the city of the Patriarchs. …

“[Our military is powerful because it] is inspired by the mission of our people in its Land. Our forces are a people’s army: when they fight, the entire nation fights; when they fight the whole of Jewish history watches them. When our army fights, it fights not only for the life of the people, but for its redemption. …

“Plans were immediately made to ensure that the arrangements in places sacred to Christianity should be entrusted to Christian religious dignitaries, and in places sacred to Islam to Muslim religious dignitaries. …

“When the State of Israel was born, nineteen years ago, the Arab armies tried to strangle it at birth. When the State successfully resisted them, armistice agreements were signed. In these agreements it was expressly stated, in the clearest terms, that their purpose was to serve as a transitional stage on the road to peace. And indeed, that was the attitude which Israel adopted towards them.

“However, in the course of the years we found that our neighbors regard these agreements as an expedient for gaining time in order to prepare for renewed aggression, with the aim of destroying Israel. The United Nations chose to ignore this attitude on the part of the Arabs. The UN Charter obligates member-states not to use force or the threat of force, and to solve disputes by peaceful means. Yet the United Nations refrained from condemning Arab hostility towards Israel. Thus for nineteen years, this unique situation, unparalleled in international relations, persisted.

“All the nations of the world, their leaders and their representatives heard the incitement of the Arab leaders and the rattling of the swords that were entrusted to them, but they were silent.

“To the nations of the world I want to say: Be under no illusion that the State of Israel is prepared to return to the situation that reigned up to a week ago.

“The State of Israel arose and continued to exist as a matter of right, and this nation has been compelled to fight and fight again for that right. Alone we fought for existence and our security; we are entitled to determine what the true and vital interests of our country are, and how they shall be secured. The position that existed up till now shall never again return. The Land of Israel shall no longer be a no man’s land, wide open to acts of sabotage and murder.

“We have already explained to the nations of the world that we look, not backward, but forward — to peace. We shall faithfully observe the ceasefire if it is observed by the other side.”

It would not be, and the violence continued.

With all of historic Palestine under its control, Israel now had its hands full in a new way. The Arab world was stunned. Three developments influenced its Palestinian cause, as outlined by Shibley Telhami at The Brookings Institution:

• A creeping sense among Arabs that Israel wasn’t about to disappear.
  

• In occupying Syrian and Egyptian sovereign territories, Israel acquired direct levers with those states, possessing assets that they wanted back even more than they wanted to help Palestinians.
  

• Disillusioned by Arab governments after Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinians decided to take things into their own hands.

That’s where we’ll pick up next time.

Before I go, here’s a happy follow-up to a tragedy you read about at the top of this article.

In Israel’s 1948 fight for independence, the Arab Legion destroyed the Hurva Synagogue, Jerusalem’s main Ashkenazi worship site. After Israel captured East Jerusalem from Jordan in the Six-Day War, it deliberated on how to rebuild Hurva — for more than three decades. A plan was finally completed in 2000, and the new synagogue, rebuilt in its 19th-century style in the heart of the Jewish Quarter, was dedicated on 15 March 2010. It’s beautiful:

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SOURCES

Wikipedia
Map of UN Partition Plan for Palestine

US Department of State
The Arab-Israeli War of 1948

The Wall Street Journal
In the Holy Land, a Rebuilding for the Generations (March 2010)

Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Sunday, May 30, 1948 Daily News Bulletin

1948: A History of the First Arab–Israeli War
by Benny Morris
Yale University Press, 2008

Christian Friends of Israel
Maps of Israel’s History

The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World
Updated and Expanded Edition
by Avi Shlaim
W. W. Norton & Company, 2014

Ben-Gurion’s Desert Home in Kibbutz Sde-Boker

World Bank
GDP Growth (Annual %) - Israel

Jordan in the 1967 War
by Samir Muwawi
Cambridge University Press, 2002
Nasser quote about destroying Israel, p. 95, at Google Books

The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
The Six Day War and Its Enduring Legacy

Al Jazeera English
Six Days that Changed the Middle East
Uri Avnery describing Hebrew media calling Nasser a tyrant
Ibrahim Shekib on allowing Israel to strike first

Wilson Center
The 1967 Six-Day War

Center for Israel Education
Prime Minister Levi Eshkol Speech to the Knesset at conclusion of June War, 12 June 1967

The Brookings Institution
The Dual Effects of the 1967 War on Palestinians Reverberate 50 Years Later

iTravelJerusalem
The Hurva Synagogue