Reflections on the Six Day War

The Six Day War was a stunning victory for Israel. For the first time since the State of Israel was founded in 1948, Israel was truly within secure borders. It was able to protect itself from attack from the Golan Heights or across the Sinai/Israel border and no longer had to fear that a Jordanian armored advance could cut Israel in half where Israel was nine miles wide between the West Bank and the Med. It was in control of all of Jerusalem, Judaism's holiest city.

Here's how Time Magazine reported the war in the days after the war ended.

In the flush of a victory that surprised even Dayan and his officers ("I thought it would take a day or two longer," Chief-of-Staff Rabin said laconically), the Israelis are clearly not yet sure what to do with their spoils. Indeed, they hardly had time to count the full cost of their victory—or of the Arab defeat. Casualty figures, as yet, are fragmentary, but the few days of desert warfare may well have accounted for more dead than a whole year's fighting in Viet Nam. And historians will be a long time calculating the price in Arab morale, to say nothing of Russia's tremendous loss of face as it stood helplessly by, watching its expensive Middle Eastern adventure being ground to dust by the advancing Israelis. Among the major Israeli spoils were several captured Russian SAM missiles.

What seems certain now is that, for the moment at least, Israel is the absolute master of the Middle East; it need take orders from no one, and can dictate its own terms in the vacuum of big-power inaction, U.N. fecklessness, and Arab impotence.

How did Israel manage to win so big so quickly? Much of the answer can be found in the almost incredible lack of Arab planning, coordination and communications. Despite their swift defeat in 1956, this time the Arabs seemed to expect a long, leisurely war of attrition. Though two squadrons of Algerian MIG-21s arrived, they were a fatal 24 hours too late because Egyptian commanders had failed to instruct them which airbase to head for. In retrospect, it might have been even worse if they had arrived in time for the Israeli raids. Five planeloads of Moroccan troops actually got to Cairo, but five others were grounded in Libya because Egypt had not given them clearance to enter Egyptian airspace. More than 100 truckloads of Algerian troops crossed southern Tunisia on the way to the Sinai front, which crumbled long before they arrived. Tunisian troops ready to move for Nasser were never asked for by Cairo.

The Third Temple. Though the destruction of Arab airpower played the largest part in turning the battle, the Arabs' field performance was nothing to write home about. Their Russian-trained officer corps was a disaster; it fought far better with words than with weapons. Of all the Arab troops, only the Jordanians handled themselves ably and well—and paid for it with what Hussein called "tremendous losses" that included as many as 15,000 dead. Lebanon fired not a shot at Israeli ground forces during the entire war; as they manned their border positions, its soldiers played a backgammon-like game called tricktrack and watched the Syrians and Israelis trade shellfire. Breastbeating to the contrary, Syrian ground forces made no significant move to relieve the pressure on Jordan and Egypt. Few Arab pilots had a chance to show their skills; and those that did came out second best. The Israelis shot down 50 Arab fighters while losing only three.

To this day, Israelis are still trying to deal with the repercussions of that war. Israel has made peace with Jordan and Egypt, but the Palestinians and Syrians continue to agitate for Israel's destruction.

Elder of Ziyon notes Nasser's lies and Arabs' sense of honor continue to provide a wealth of alt-reality to the leftists and thugs that dominate the Middle East. Of course, that alternative reality/revisionist history continues to this day. Yid With Lid has the details.

My earlier coverage is here. Honest Reporting has a good archive of information about the situation leading up to the war.

Just like today--The United States tried to prevent the war through negotiations, but the other side did not want peace, The US could not persuade Nasser or the other Arab states to cease their belligerent statements and actions. Still, right before the war, President Johnson warned: “Israel will not be alone unless it decides to go alone.” Then, when the war began, the State Department announced: “Our position is neutral in thought, word and deed.”

While the Arabs were falsely accusing the United States of airlifting supplies to Israel, Johnson imposed an arms embargo on the region (France, Israel’s other main arms supplier, also embargoed arms to Israel). By contrast, the Soviets were supplying massive amounts of arms to the Arabs. Simultaneously, the armies of Kuwait, Algeria, Saudi Arabia and Iraq were contributing troops and arms to the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian fronts.


Today, the retrospective tell a different story, the tale of the cynical Zionist nation that saw an opportunity to deal a blow to the Arab nation, expand her territory, and rule over the Palestinian people. All of these articles that I have been reading say that looking back on it, Maybe the Six Day War was not the best thing for Israel, "since it lead her to become the evil rogue nation she is today"

But there is one indisputable fact that todays revisionist history keeps forgetting, if Israel didn't fight and win the Six Day War---there would be no Israel today. Just as if Israel doesn't protect herself from the likes of Hamas, Hezbollah and Fatah today--there will be no Israel in 40 years.

Israel continues to defend itself to this day against terrorists and regimes hellbent on Israel's destruction. They may seek to undermine Israel with papercuts - Fatah, or with kassam rockets - Hamas, or invasions and bloody wars - Hizbullah. Those terrorist groups are proxies of regional thugs in Damascus and Tehran who want to exert their power and influence and don't care how many are killed in the process.

As Ralph Peters notes:

We Americans face a fundamental problem in interpreting Israel's history: We imagine that every problem has a solution, if only we can figure it out. But there are no solutions - none - to the Middle East's problems, short of atrocities too horrific for us to contemplate. Israel may dream of peace, but must be content to survive and muddle through. An erratic ebb and flow of violence may be as good as the region gets.
The Six-Day War didn't create the Middle East's problems, it only changed the math. For Israel, it marked a coming of age. Taken together with the Yom Kippur War six years later - two rounds in a single fight, really - the war of June 1967 meant the end of Israel's basic struggle for existence and the beginning of its "quality of life" wars.

We also forget that those two intertwined wars in 1967 and 1973 resulted in four decades of de facto peace between Israel and the Arab states it had fought in four wars. Intifadahs make great TV, but they can't destroy Israel.

Intifadas might not destroy Israel, but proxy wars could - and that's exactly what Hizbullah seeks to do. They've got the firepower of a military force, that while insufficient to destroy Israel's vaunted IDF, is sufficient to wear down Israeli resolve and destabilize Lebanon and Israel's northern border.

The situation also shows the folly of the US attempting to play neutral in the conflict. Time and time again, the US is accused of assisting Israel, despite all facts to the contrary. Israel is forced to go it alone, while Israel's enemies receive support from all corners of the Middle East and the Soviets/Russians. Expect to see China get involved in the game as well.

Others with posts on the Six Day War:
BabbaZee, Fiery Spirited Zionist, and LGF.

UPDATE:
And the Arab World characteristically finds yet another reason to gather and blame Israel for all their self-inflicted woes (via LGF):

Forty years after Israel’s stunning victory over three Arab armies, the defeat still lingers in the Arab world — so much so, some blame it for everything from a lack of democracy in the region to the rise of religious extremism.

On June 5, 1967, Israeli warplanes destroyed 400 aircraft belonging to Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq — most of them sitting on airport tarmacs. Egypt lost the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip, Syria gave up the Golan Heights, and Jordan relinquished the West Bank and east Jerusalem.

Trying to minimize the defeat, Arabs have long called the Six Day War the “naksa,” or “setback,” but its impact remains a deep wound.

Egyptian columnist Wael Abdel Fattah wrote in the independent weekly Al-Fagr newspaper that Arabs blame the defeat for “everything” — from “price hikes, dictatorship, religious extremism, sectarian strife, even sexual impotence.”

Let that last bit sink in. The hatred and disconnect with reality is pathological and is reinforced on a daily basis by thugs in charge who seek only to remain in power and use Israel as the ultimate bogeyman for their own failings.