The Six-Day War

The Six-Day War came on the heels of several decades of political tension and military conflict between Israel and the Arab states.

In 1948, following disputes surrounding the founding of Israel, a coalition of Arab nations had launched a failed invasion of the nascent Jewish state as part of the First Arab-Israeli War.

A second major conflict known as the Suez Crisis erupted in 1956, when Israel, the United Kingdom and France staged a controversial attack on Egypt in response to Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal.

An era of relative calm prevailed in the Middle East during the late 1950s and early 1960s, but the political situation continued to rest on a knife edge. Arab leaders were aggrieved by their military losses and the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees created by Israel’s victory in the 1948 war.

Many Israelis, meanwhile, continued to believe they faced an existential threat from Egypt and other Arab nations.

Origins of the Six-Day War

A series of border disputes were the major spark for the Six-Day War. By the mid-1960s, Syrian-backed Palestinian guerillas had begun staging attacks across the Israeli border, provoking reprisal raids from the Israel Defense Forces.

In April 1967, the skirmishes worsened after Israel and Syria fought a ferocious air and artillery engagement in which six Syrian fighter jets were destroyed.

In the wake of the April air battle, the Soviet Union provided Egypt with intelligence that Israel was moving troops to its northern border with Syria in preparation for a full-scale invasion. The information was inaccurate, but it nevertheless stirred Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser into action.

In a show of support for his Syrian allies, he ordered Egyptian forces to advance into the Sinai Peninsula, where they expelled a united Nations peacekeeping force that had been guarding the border with Israel for over a decade.

Mideast Tensions Escalate

In the days that followed, Nasser continued to rattle the saber: On May 22, he banned Israeli shipping from the Straits of Tiran, the sea passage connecting the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba. A week later, he sealed a defense pact with King Hussein of Jordan.

As the situation in the Middle East deteriorated, American President  Lyndon B. Johnson cautioned both sides against firing the first shot and attempted to garner support for an international maritime operation to reopen the Straits of Tiran.

The plan never materialized, however, and by early June 1967, Israeli leaders had voted to counter the Arab military buildup by launching a preemptive strike.

Six-Day War Erupts

On June 5, 1967, the Israel Defense Forces initiated Operation Focus, a coordinated aerial attack on Egypt. That morning, some 200 aircraft took off from Israel and swooped west over the Mediterranean before converging on Egypt from the north.

After catching the Egyptians by surprise, they assaulted 18 different airfields and eliminated roughly 90 percent of the Egyptian air force as it sat on the ground. Israel then expanded the range of its attack and decimated the air forces of Jordan, Syria and Iraq.

By the end of the day on June 5, Israeli pilots had won full control of the skies over the Middle East.

Israel all but secured victory by establishing air superiority, but fierce fighting continued for several more days. The ground war in Egypt began on June 5. In concert with the air strikes, Israeli tanks and infantry stormed across the border and into the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip.

Egyptian forces put up a spirited resistance, but later fell into disarray after Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer ordered a general retreat. Over the next several days, Israeli forces pursued the routed Egyptians across the Sinai, inflicting severe casualties.

A second front in the Six-Day War opened on June 5, when Jordan – reacting to false reports of an Egyptian victory – began shelling Israeli positions in Jerusalem. Israel responded with a devastating counterattack on East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

On June 7, Israeli troops captured the Old City of Jerusalem and celebrated by praying at the Western Wall.

The Liberation and unification of Jerusalem

On November 29, 1947, it was decided in the UN Partition Plan that Jerusalem would be under international control. However, when the War of Independence broke out, both sides – the Jews and the Arabs – tried to take control of the city. The Arab forces blocked the passage to Jerusalem to Jews, and cut off the water supply to the city. Only convoys of armored vehicles succeeded, at a heavy cost in human lives, in breaking through to the city and bringing supplies to its residents.

On May 14, 1948, upon the departure of the British from the country, the Israeli forces began to take over compounds held by the Mandatory government. On May 18, the Arab Legion reached Jerusalem and entered the Old City. On May 19, a Palmach force managed to enter the Jewish Quarter through Zion Gate and bring supplies and reinforcements, but on the next day the Arab troops took control of the Zion Gate area again, and the siege on the Jewish Quarter resumed. On May 28, the Jewish Quarter fell into the hands of the Jordanians, its defenders were taken prisoner and its synagogues were demolished. On June 1, 1948, Burma Road was opened, and the siege on Jerusalem began to weaken. Jerusalem was divided for 19 years; Israel held the western part of the city, while Jordan held its eastern part, containing the Old City, including the Temple Mount and the Western Wall. Mount Scopus – the site of Hadassah Hospital, the Hebrew University and the British military cemetery – remained an enclave under Israeli control in the eastern part of the city. Israel declared Jerusalem as its capital and transferred the government institutions to west Jerusalem.

On June 5, 1967, the Six-Day War broke out. The campaign in Jerusalem began when the Jordanians opened fire in an attempt to penetrate into southern Jerusalem through the area of the UN headquarters (the former seat of the British High Commissioner); this campaign lasted for just three days. The Jordanian offensive was repelled, and in a counter-attack the fighters of the IDF’s Jerusalem Brigade took control of the UN headquarters building and the nearby “Naknik” military post, and blocked the Jordanian road to Bethlehem by capturing the village Sur Baher and the “Paamon” post. This cut off access to east Jerusalem from the south. At a later stage, fierce battles were waged, which ended in the takeover of the Arab neighborhood Abu Tor.

​ The Central Command, headed at the time by Maj.-Gen. Uzi Narkiss, sent the Harel armored brigade to the Jerusalem area. The brigade’s troops cut through the Radar Hill and Sheikh Abdul Aziz military posts, and captured Nabi Samuel and the village of Bidu. On June 6, the Harel forces reached the Jerusalem-Ramallah road, and stormed Tel al-Ful and Givat Hamivtar. The Paratroopers Brigade, under the command of Mordechai “Motta” Gur, advanced to Jerusalem in order to open the road to Mount Scopus, and from there continued to the Rockefeller Museum, to enable the troops to break through to the Old City on short notice. The brigade’s fighters breached the city line, captured the Police Academy and Ammunition Hill, Mandelbaum Gate, the American Colony and Wadi Joz. The road to Mount Scopus was opened, and the fighters established contact with the Israeli enclaves on it. On June 7 (the 28th of Iyar, 5727), the order to liberate the Old City was issued by the IDF General Staff. The Central Command dispatched the Paratroopers Brigade, and its soldiers captured the Mount Scopus ridge and the Mount of Olives. A force from the Paratroopers Brigade entered the Old City from the east, through the Lions’ Gate, took the Old City without encountering further resistance and raised the Israeli flag over the Western Wall. Here is how those moments were documented in Moshe Nathan’s book, The War for Jerusalem (Tel Aviv, 1968): “[…] Zamush [the company commander] took out of his webbing the flag he had received from the Cohen family before going into battle (the same flag that the elderly Ms. Cohen had brought 19 years ago from the defeated Jewish Quarter). Less than three days had passed since he had folded the flag and packed it in his webbing, but it seemed to him as if it had been through three generations. He spread out the flag, his hands trembling with excitement, and moved forward on the roof until the point where it joined with the edge of the Western Wall. Next to him stood the deputy brigade commander, Moishe, and a few others from his company. When they reached the iron bar extending over the Western Wall, Zamush passed by them and tied the flag to two protruding iron spikes. A summer breeze that suddenly blew over the Wall spread out the flag and lifted it into the sky. The paratroopers gazed at the flag waving in the wind and their excitement was so great that they began to relieve it by roaring with joy and waving their hands. Afterwards they spontaneously formed a column and fired a volley of gunshots in honor of the flag being raised.”

Israel Celebrates Victory

The last phase of the fighting took place along Israel’s northeastern border with Syria. On June 9, following an intense aerial bombardment, Israeli tanks and infantry advanced on a heavily fortified region of Syria called the Golan Heights. They successfully captured the Golan the next day.

On June 10, 1967, a United Nations-brokered ceasefire took effect and the Six-Day War came to an abrupt end. It was later estimated that some 20,000 Arabs and 800 Israelis had died in just 132 hours of fighting.

The leaders of the Arab states were left shocked by the severity of their defeat. Egyptian President Nasser even resigned in disgrace, only to promptly return to office after Egyptian citizens showed their support with massive street demonstrations.

In Israel, the national mood was jubilant. In less than a week, the young nation had captured the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria.

Legacy of the Six-Day War

The Six-Day War had momentous geopolitical consequences in the Middle East. Victory in the war led to a surge of national pride in Israel, which had tripled in size, but it also fanned the flames of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Still wounded by their defeat in the Six-Day War, Arab leaders met in Khartoum, Sudan, in August 1967, and signed a resolution that promised “no peace, no recognition and no negotiation” with Israel.

Led by Egypt and Syria, the Arab states later launched a fourth major conflict with Israel during 1973’s Yom Kippur War.

By claiming the Judea and Smarai and the Gaza Strip, the state of Israel also absorbed over one million Palestinian Arabs. Several hundred thousand Palestinians later fled Israeli rule, worsening a refugee crisis that had begun during the First Arab-Israeli War in 1948 and laying the groundwork for ongoing political turmoil and violence.

Since 1967, the lands Israel seized in the Six-Day War have been at the center of efforts to end the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in 1982 as part of a peace treaty and then withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005, but it has continued to occupy and settle other territory claimed in the Six-Day War, most notably the Golan Heights and the West Bank. The status of these territories continues to be a stumbling block in Arab-Israeli peace negotiations.