This research paper discusses the six-day war between Israeli and Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and Syria of early June 1967, its causes, the strategies pursued by the belligerents, the role of the great powers on its periphery, the course of the war, its results and its aftermath.
The Arab-Israeli conflict, which has resulted in four wars and periods of great tension, communal violence and political and economic change throughout the Middle East, was primarily produced by events and forces generated outside that region. Zionism, or the demand for a homeland for the Jews in Palestine, became a reality, as a result of the effects of the two world wars, the destruction of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 and the Nazi holocaust, which accelerated large-scale Jewish immigration into Palestine and produced a head-on collision with Arab nationalism.
The British, who had promised the Zionists a Jewish homeland under the Balfour Declaration of 1917 while at the same time making promises to the Arabs during World War I which it failed to carry out, attempted to limit Jewish immigration to Palestine, which nevertheless exceeded 350,000 in the late 1930s and encroached on Arab interests. Torn between its need for Middle Eastern oil and its promises to the Zionists, Britain found itself impossibly stretched after World War II and in 1948 withdrew from Palestine. After the new state of Israel was proclaimed in 1948 and a hastily contrived partition plan failed, Arab armies attacked Israel, only to suffer a resounding defeat, largely because of Arab disunity.
Lacquer (1968) says that the essential issue in the wars of 1956 and 1967 "was between Israel's survival and the Arabs' pride and dignity" (p. 241). Even with more immigrants, Israel was out- numbered by more than 40 to one by the surrounding Arab nations. Left with insecure borders by the 1948 temporary truce, Israel used the next eight years to build its population, military strength and economy...