How the Six Day War Changed the Middle East
- Emphasis mine:
- How the Six Day War Changed the Middle East
by LANCE SELFA, https://www.counterpunch.org/, 8 June 2007
It’s rare for one discrete historical event occurring over a few days to have an impact that persists for decades. Israel’s 1967 Six Day War–from June 5 to June 10, 40 years ago this week–is just such an event.
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Though perhaps not immediately apparent at the time, the war’s aftermath cast a huge shadow over the Middle East and the world. During the war, Israel’s high-tech military routed the forces of Jordan, Egypt and Syria, and began the occupations of the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula.
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The war thrust onto the world agenda all of the issues still at the center of Middle Eastern politics today.
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Israel began one of the world’s longest-running military occupations, which continues to be one of the greatest sources of Arab resentment against not only Israel, but its main cheerleader, the U.S. Israel’s military prowess decisively shifted the U.S. into the pro-Israeli camp in the Middle East.
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Plus, the Israeli occupation created the context for a “peace process,” the seemingly never-ending quest of Israel to trade occupied land for “peace”–in other words, recognition of Israel by Arab governments.
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The outcome of the Six Day War also contributed to a historical narrative–largely based on myth–that has colored Western perceptions of Israel and the Middle East since. The image of plucky little Israel, threatened with destruction, winning a smashing victory in a pre-emptive war against its more powerful neighbors, has become commonplace.
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Yet subsequent historical research has shown that Israel was well aware of its military superiority over its neighbors, and that its long-term strategic plans in the region led it to goad its neighbors into a war it knew it would win.
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In a 1997 New York Times interview, Moshe Dayan, defense minister during the 1967 war, explained that Israeli settlers’ “greed for the land” led them to provoke the Syrian army to shoot at them, opening the way for the Israeli invasion and seizure of the Golan Heights.
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Likewise, the main casus belli for the war–Egypt’s closing of the Straits of Tiran and its military buildup in the Sinai–amounted more to bluff than threat. In a 1982 speech to the Israeli National Defense College, then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin said: “The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that [Egyptian President] Nasser was about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”
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One thing that was clear at the time was the absolute illegality of Israel’s occupation and creeping annexation of the West Bank and Gaza, where more than 1 million Palestinians lived.
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No country or international body recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Occupied Territories. Even the U.S. approved the pivotal United Nations (UN) Security Council Resolution 242, which emphasized “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” and explicitly called for the “[w]ithdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.”
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But rather than look for a way to disengage from the territories, subsequent Israeli governments built settlements and encouraged Israeli settlers to create “facts on the ground”–particularly the West Bank–to assert Israeli control.
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A secret document prepared for the Israeli foreign ministry in 1967, which was made public only recently, showed that the highest reaches of the Israeli establishment knew that its settlement policies in the Occupied Territories violated the Geneva Accords, according to the Guardian.
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