http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2012/6/4/main-feature/1/on-the-eve-of-the-six-day-war/e
This week, Jewish Ideas Daily commemorates the forty-fifth anniversary of the Six-Day War with a day-by-day synopsis. Below, the first of a seven-part series.
Forty-five years ago today, on June 4, 1967, Israel and the Jewish world were in suspense. Today, we recall the Six-Day War as a stunning martial victory by the Jewish state; but on the war’s eve, this outcome was wholly unforeseeable. Indeed, the odds appeared firmly stacked against Israel; that is why its victory became such an inspiration to Jews worldwide—an experience as formative, to the generation that watched it, as the Holocaust and Israel’s founding were to the preceding one.
But how did war break out? Michael Oren, historian of the war and current Israeli ambassador to the United States notes, “Even a discussion of a context must have a starting point,” even if this point represents a somewhat “arbitrary choice.” One starting point is Soviet-backed Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. He came to power in 1954 and by 1956 had already fought a war with Israel in the Sinai. Israel routed the Egyptians in that conflict but withdrew from Sinai after promises that it would have freedom of navigation through the vital Straits of Tiran, off the Sinai coast. As insurance, the United Nations put a peacekeeping force on the armistice line.
Nasser was also president of the United Arab Republic, a union between Egypt and Syria, and made the UAR position on Israel clear. “I announce on behalf of the United Arab Republic people,” he declared in 1959, that “we will exterminate Israel.” Egyptian Fedayeen guerrillas mounted cross-border attacks. There were occasional Israeli reprisals.
Another starting point is Yasser Arafat, who in 1964 led an abortive attempt by al-Fatah terrorists to infiltrate Israel. In that year the Arab League, meeting in Cairo, founded the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which Arafat would later lead. The PLO’s announced goal was to liberate the “usurped part” of the “Palestinian Arab people’s homeland”—not from Egypt, which held Gaza, or from Jordan, which held the West Bank, but from Israel.