Six Days That Created A Paradigm For Middle Earth

The Six-Day War split and recast power centres in West Asia, shaped jehadism, consigned Palestinians to a harrowing fate and deepened Israel’s self-justificatory, racist paranoia

- Talmiz Ahmad

FIfty years ago, in early June, in just six days, the Israeli armed forces destroyed the armies of the neighbouring Arab states. this victory ended for all time any possibility of the Jewish homeland being obliterated by its dispossessed Semitic kinsmen, the Palestinians, on whose territory this homeland had been forcibly erected. the Arabs refer to the creation of Israel and the defeat of the Arab armies in 1948 as the Naqba, ‘Catastrophe’, and the 1967 defeat as Nasqa, ‘Setback’. But, in fact, the latter is the real catastrophe for the Arabs, the Israelis and for West Asia.

In 1967, no Arab leader really wanted war or was ready for it: as Israel skirmished with Syria and laid claim to all the waters of the Jordan river, Egypt’s Nasser was pressurised to live up to his image as the stalwart of Arab nationalism and confront the Jewish interloper in the region. He peremptorily got the UN observers removed from the region, closed access to the Israeli port of Eilat, and, in an inflammatory speech on May 26, declared: “Our basic objective will be to destroy Israel”.

He projected a joint assault upon Israel by three Arab states—Egypt, Syria and Jordan—whose combined armies far outnumbered those of Israel. Israel did not wait for the attack: it launched a pre-emptive strike on June 5 that destroyed the air forces of the enemy states on the ground and then, with full mastery of the skies, wreaked havoc upon the ground troops.

Today, we know how ill-prepared the Arabs were for war: there was, as Eugene Rogan has noted, no war planning or coordination, no joint strategy, and serious technical errors were made during the fighting that compounded Arab losses. Nasser truly believed that, for all his sabre-rattling, there would be no war as the US would intervene to negotiate a peace agreement, enabling him to declare victory, as had happened in 1956.