The Arab-Israeli War of 1967 would be known as the Six-Day War because of its brevity. The fighting began June 5, 1967, but the tensions behind this particular episode had a long history and would continue long after this one major conflict. The causes of the war were several, some of long standing, and some of more recent origin. The Six-Day War was started by Israel with an air attack against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Israel emerged from the war with new territory, notably that of Palestine and portions of Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and Syria's Golan Heights and the West Bank of Jordan. The territorial issue from this war remains unsettled today, though arguably the war produced a changed situation in the Middle East that has made compromise and settlement that much more difficult.
The state of Israel was created in 1948, emerging with conflict between the newly declared state and her Arab neighbors. In 1949, the fighting ended with armistice agreements between Israel and Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Israel as a state developed out of the Palestinian question. When the British wanted to turn the state of Palestine over to the United Nations, a solution to the issue of what people would reside in Palestine was reached in the form of partition. Jerusalem would be made an international city in which there would be free access for worship in Christian, Islamic, and Jewish shrines and holy places. The Jews accepted the partition, but the Arabs did not, feeling that the agreement actually gave Jewish landowners more than 50 percent of Palestine. After the war and the creation of the state of Israel, Israel now controlled half of Jerusalem, and nearly 60 percent of the Palestinians had been uprooted from their homes. Displaced Palestinians lived in crude refugee camps, and the remaining Palestinians lived within the 22.6 percent of the territory the Israeli's had failed to capture (Neff 23-24).
Israel thus began in...