Story

The Six-Day War

June 5-10, 1967

Biblical Narrative

In the weeks before the war, Israeli civilians dug trenches in the public parks of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Rabbis prepared lists of mass-burial procedures. Egypt, under President Gamal Abdel Nasser, had expelled the United Nations Emergency Force from Sinai on May 18, 1967, moved seven divisions to the Israeli border, and on May 22 closed the Strait of Tiran to Israeli shipping. Defense Minister Levi Eshkol's halting radio address on May 28 — he stumbled over a corrected text — convinced much of the country that the political leadership was paralyzed. Within days, in a ״national unity״ reorganization, Moshe Dayan was appointed defense minister.

On the morning of June 5, 1967, the Israeli Air Force flew low over the Mediterranean to evade Egyptian radar and struck nineteen Egyptian airfields almost simultaneously. By the end of the day, more than 300 Egyptian aircraft had been destroyed on the ground; Jordanian and Syrian air forces were destroyed in similar strikes the same afternoon. Without air cover, the Egyptian armored divisions in Sinai disintegrated within four days. Jordan, which had entered the war on the morning of June 5 in coordination with Egyptian commander Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer, lost the West Bank within three days; Syria lost the Golan Heights on June 9–10.

On June 7, 1967, paratroopers under the command of Colonel Mordechai (״Motta״) Gur entered the Old City of Jerusalem through the Lions' Gate after a brief and costly fight on Ammunition Hill. Gur's radio transmission — ״The Temple Mount is in our hands״ — became one of the most replayed audio recordings in Israeli memory. The chief military rabbi, Shlomo Goren, blew a shofar at the Western Wall. For the first time since the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, the Western Wall — and the Temple Mount above it — were under Jewish sovereignty.

The religious response was complex and remained so. The Chief Rabbinate instituted Yom Yerushalayim on the 28th of Iyar to commemorate the reunification of Jerusalem; Hallel was recited. Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook, who had famously delivered an emotional sermon on Independence Day three weeks earlier mourning the loss of biblical Hebron, Shechem, and Jericho — and would now find them under Israeli control — read the outcome as a clear redemptive sign. Many religious anti-Zionists and many secular leftists read the same outcome differently. The debate, half a century later, has not closed.

The Temple Mount is in our hands. I repeat: the Temple Mount is in our hands.Colonel Motta Gur, radio transmission, June 7, 1967

Archaeology · History · Genetics

The 1967 war is one of the most extensively documented conflicts of the twentieth century, with full archival access available since the early 2000s. Michael Oren's Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East (2002) draws on Israeli, American, Soviet, Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian sources and is widely cited as the standard one-volume history. Tom Segev's 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East (Hebrew 2005, English 2007) emphasizes the Israeli home-front and the political-cultural dimension; Avi Shlaim's The Iron Wall (2014 ed.) supplies a counter-reading more sympathetic to Arab perspectives.

The proximate causes are largely settled in the historiography. Soviet intelligence in mid-May 1967 passed false reports to Cairo and Damascus indicating that Israel was massing troops on the Syrian border for an imminent attack — reports that historian Isabella Ginor (Foxbats over Dimona, 2007) attributes to a deliberate Soviet provocation aimed at drawing the United States into a regional crisis at the height of the Vietnam War. Nasser's response — UN expulsion, troop concentration, closure of the Tiran Strait — escalated faster than Egyptian operational planning had prepared for. Egyptian Field Marshal Amer's memoirs and the post-war Egyptian inquiry (the so-called Sami Sharaf papers, partially declassified after 2011) make clear that Egypt was not, in fact, ready for the war it had triggered.

The territorial outcome was substantial: Israel quadrupled its land area, taking the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. Approximately 250,000–300,000 Palestinian Arabs were displaced from the West Bank during and immediately after the fighting, many of them refugees a second time after 1948; the demographic data are reconstructed in Nur Masalha, The Politics of Denial (2003) and Yoram Meital, Egypt's Struggle for Peace (1997). UN Security Council Resolution 242, adopted on November 22, 1967, established the ״land for peace״ formula that has framed every subsequent diplomatic effort.

The strategic legacy was equally substantial. The collapse of the Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian armies in six days produced an Arab strategic reassessment that led directly to the Khartoum Conference of August–September 1967 (״three no's״ of no peace, no recognition, no negotiations) and to the long preparation for the 1973 war. On the Israeli side, the speed and scale of victory produced a confidence — sometimes characterized in the literature as ״konzeptzia״ — that would prove dangerous in October 1973. Yigal Allon's territorial proposals, the early settlements at Kfar Etzion and on the Golan, and the long political contest over the West Bank all date from the immediate post-war months.

Six days that have not ended. The political consequences of June 1967 still structure every conversation about the region.Michael Oren, Six Days of War (2002), preface to the 2017 edition