April 27, 2007
Today, another installment of the Online Guide to the Middle East:
Why did the Six Day War occur?
The Six Day War of 1967 wasn’t the first conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors----nor would it be the last. In 1948 Israel defeated an Arab coalition in the Jewish state’s war of independence. Israeli and Egyptian forces also clashed during the Suez Crisis (1956).
Tensions leading up to the Six Day War began with a conflict over water, of all things. In the early and mid-1960s, Israel’s population was increasing rapidly. The Knesset had passed the Law of Return in 1950, granting Jews from around the world the right to resettle in Israel. Many members of the vast Jewish diaspora were taking Israel up on the offer.
This influx of people put a strain on water resources in Israel. (The country is, after all, largely desert.) In 1964, Israel’s national water service began a project to transport water from the Jordan River into the heart of Israel.
The Arab countries saw this as an opportunity to strike Israel’s Achilles heel. At the Arab Summit of the same year, they agreed to collaborate to deprive Israel of water.
So Lebanon and Syria launched water-related projects of their own. They began work on an ambitious scheme to reroute the waters of the Hasbani and Banias Rivers, which feed the Jordan. If this effort succeeded, they would be able to deprive Israel of water---a circuitous but nevertheless certain way to create a crisis for the Jewish state.
Israel told the governments of Syria and Lebanon that it would consider a continuation of the river projects to be acts of war. Neither Arab nation backed down; so Israel took out the construction works with artillery and air strikes. The waters of the Jordan continued to flow as they had for eons.
In 1966, a radical faction of the Ba’ath Party staged a coup in Syria and took over the government. Under new leadership, Damascus began to take ever more provocative acts against Israel. Syrian snipers took potshots at Israeli fishermen in the Sea of Galilee; and the Syrian army sporadically lobbed shells into Israeli farm villages that were within range of the Golan Heights. Israel sent jets to destroy the artillery, and shot down a handful of Syrian MiG-21s.
Then in May 1967, a Syrian terrorist squad infiltrated Israeli territory and planted an explosive device on a highway. The terrorists detonated the bomb when an Israeli military vehicle passed by.
Egypt and Jordan were also needling Israel. Jordan was allowing Fatah terrorists to use its territory as a base for cross-border attacks against Israel. Egypt was also harboring anti-Israel terrorists; and Nasser closed the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping.
It wasn’t long before Israel announced that it would take whatever actions were necessary to defend itself; but the government was vague about the specifics.
Syria and Egypt placed their armed forces on high alert. At this time, the two nations were closely cooperating under the terms of a mutual defense arrangement known as the Cairo-Damascus Defense pact. The pact placed the Egyptian and Syrian armed forces under joint command in the event that either one went to war with Israel. At the last moment before the outbreak of hostilities, King Hussein of Jordan also joined the pact, and placed his military under the command of Egypt’s President Nasser.
On June 6, 1967 Israeli forces launched a preemptive strike. The IDF began by destroying the Egyptian air force and capturing the Egyptian Sinai. This took all of three days. The Israeli military then spent the next three days capturing Jerusalem and the West Bank (from Jordan) and the Golan Heights (from Syria). This incredibly short war turned out to be a one-sided victory for Israel.
But this wasn’t the end of the story. Israel’s Arab foes were down but not out. The next Arab-Israeli war, the Yom Kippur War of 1973, would be far more costly for the Jewish state.