The Six-Day War
Israel struck first at 7:45 a.m. By noon most of Egypt's air force was burning on the runway.
Open
Call it the Six Day War and you picture six days of fighting. Tanks grinding across three fronts, cities changing hands, a war fought and refought in the field.
At seven forty five in the morning on June fifth, nineteen sixty seven, roughly one hundred and eighty Israeli jets crossed the Mediterranean below Egyptian radar and struck eleven airfields at once.
Within three hours, about three hundred of Egypt's four hundred and twenty combat aircraft were burning on the ground. The pilots who were supposed to defend Cairo never left the tarmac.
The war was decided before most of the Arab world even knew it had begun. Everything that followed for the next five days was a land campaign against an enemy that no longer had an air force.
Scene 1Nineteen days
The countdown starts three weeks earlier, with Egypt.
On May fourteenth, President Gamal Abdel Nasser moves Egyptian divisions into the Sinai Peninsula. Two days later he demands the withdrawal of the United Nations force that has patrolled the border for a decade, and U Thant complies within days.
On May twenty second, Nasser closes the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, cutting the route most of Israel's oil comes through. Israel had said back in nineteen fifty seven that closing the Straits would be treated as an act of war.
On May thirtieth, King Hussein of Jordan flies to Cairo and places his own army under Egyptian command. Israel, nine miles wide at its narrowest point, now faces three armies on three fronts.
Scene 2The waiting
Inside Israel, the three weeks in between have a name. Ha-hamtana, the waiting.
Reservists sit in the Negev with nothing to do but wait for orders. Rabbis consecrate parks in Tel Aviv as emergency cemeteries. Hotels clear their basements for casualties that have not happened yet.
This is a generation that buried Europe's Jews two decades earlier, now watching three armies mobilize on its borders.
On June first, four days before the strike, Moshe Dayan is appointed defense minister.
The cabinet, led by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, debates for days. Then it chooses to strike first.
Four days before that cabinet decision, Nasser had already told Arab trade unionists in Cairo what he believed this was.
· Speech to the General Council of the International Confederation of Arab Trade Unions, Cairo · May 26, 1967
“We are confronting Israel and the West as well, the West which created Israel and which despised us Arabs. Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel. The Arab people want to fight.”
For a state founded by Holocaust survivors, these were not abstract words. They were why parks were already being consecrated as cemeteries.
Scene 3Three fronts
By June tenth, Israel holds the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip, taken from Egypt. It holds the West Bank and East Jerusalem, taken from Jordan. It holds the Golan Heights, taken from Syria.
The land under Israeli control grows from about twenty thousand seven hundred square kilometers to roughly sixty nine thousand, more than three times its previous size, in one hundred and thirty two hours.
On June seventh, Israeli paratroopers reach the Western Wall in Jerusalem's old city for the first time in nineteen years. A photograph of three soldiers looking up at the stone becomes the war's defining image.
Scene 4What it cost
Between fifteen thousand and twenty thousand Arab soldiers die. Many of them are Egyptian conscripts who walk into the Sinai desert without water after their own officers have already fled.
Israel loses between seven hundred and seventy six and nine hundred and eighty three.
The killing runs in one direction only.
The day after the strike, Israel's foreign minister Abba Eban stood before the UN Security Council and put the choice in the starkest terms available to him.
· Address to the UN Security Council · June 6, 1967
“The choice for Israel was to live or to perish, to defend the national existence or to forfeit it for all time.”
Scene 5The morning after
On the sixth day, an estimated one million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza wake up under military occupation. That occupation is given no end date. In twenty twenty six it is fifty nine years old.
Fifteen years later, one of the men who made the decision to strike first stood up in public and said something that did not fit the story his own country told about that week.
In August nineteen eighty two, Prime Minister Menachem Begin addressed Israel's National Defense College.
· Address to Israel's National Defense College · August 8, 1982
“In June, nineteen sixty seven, we again had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches did not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”
Five accounts
Whether Israel struck to survive or struck because it could is the question this war left open. Five accounts answer it five different ways, each one in its own terms first.
victorIsraeli / Existential Pre-emption
The Israeli account
This account begins with the siege, not the strike.
A hundred thousand Egyptian troops and about nine hundred tanks in Sinai. The United Nations force gone at Nasser's own request. The Straits of Tiran closed, an act Israel had named in advance as grounds for war. Jordan's army handed to an Egyptian general.
Cairo's own state radio was broadcasting that the hour of Israel's destruction had come. For a country nine miles wide at its narrowest, with no room to absorb a first blow, pre-emption was not aggression. It was the only form of self-defense available.
The capture of Jerusalem's old city, Israeli soldiers reaching the Western Wall for the first time in nineteen years, is remembered in this account as a homecoming, not a conquest.
Abba Eban put the government's own calculation in five words.
“We knew that our limit of safety had been reached, and perhaps passed.”
Read the full account
Narrative
The Israeli account begins with a siege. Through May 1967 the noose visibly tightened. Egypt poured 100,000 troops and roughly 900 tanks into Sinai. Nasser demanded and got the removal of the UN Emergency Force that had kept the border quiet for a decade. On May 22 he closed the Straits of Tiran, cutting Israel's southern shipping route and its main oil supply. Israel had stated in 1957, in a commitment registered with the United States, that closure of the Straits would constitute a casus belli. On May 30 King Hussein signed a defense pact with Cairo and handed his army to an Egyptian general. Iraqi units moved toward Jordan. Israel, nine miles wide at its narrowest, faced three armies on three fronts.
The rhetoric left little to interpretation. Cairo's Voice of the Arabs broadcast that the hour of Israel's destruction had come. Nasser told Arab trade unionists on May 26 that the basic objective was the destruction of Israel. Ahmad Shukeiri, the first chairman of the PLO, spoke of the surviving Jews being helped to return to their countries of origin. For a state founded by Holocaust survivors, these were not abstractions. During ha-hamtana, the three-week wait, the government requisitioned hotels for casualties and consecrated parks as cemeteries. The army estimated tens of thousands of Israeli dead if it let the enemy strike first.
So Israel struck first. Operation Focus destroyed the Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian air forces on the ground in a single morning, and the ground campaign followed a defeated enemy. In this reading the pre-emptive strike was self-defense in the only form available to a small country that could not absorb a first blow. The reunification of Jerusalem, and the arrival of Israeli soldiers at the Western Wall on June 7 for the first time since 1948, is remembered as a homecoming rather than a conquest. The captured territory gave Israel strategic depth it had never had: the Sinai buffer against Egypt, the Golan escarpment above the Galilee, the Jordan River as a defensible line. Israel offered, through the United States, to return most of the land in exchange for peace. The Arab answer came from Khartoum in September: no peace, no recognition, no negotiation.
Arguments
- Closing the Straits of Tiran was a casus belli Israel had declared in advance in 1957
- Three Arab armies mobilized on three fronts against a state nine miles wide at its waist
- Arab leaders publicly proclaimed the destruction of Israel as the war aim
- Pre-emption was the only defense available to a country that could not survive a first strike
Sources
- Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East
- An Autobiography
- The Six-Day War: Background and Overview
vanquishedArab Nationalist / Nasserist
The Nasserist account
This account says the war was a bluff that got out of hand.
A false Soviet report told Cairo that Israel was massing troops against Syria. Nasser could not be seen abandoning an ally, so he moved forces into Sinai as a show of resolve, aimed as much at rivals in Amman and Riyadh as at Israel. His own generals privately doubted the army was ready for a real war.
Closing the Straits was the act of a leader who had climbed too high to climb back down. He expected a political crisis, not a first strike that would erase his air force in one morning.
Two days before the trade union speech that named Israel's destruction as an objective, Nasser had told a Cairo press conference something closer to what he said he actually intended.
“We are ready for war. Our armed forces, our people, all of us are ready for war, but we shall in no way be the ones to begin.”
Read the full account
Narrative
The Nasserist account treats June 1967 as a catastrophe produced by a bluff that no one could climb down from. It opens in mid-May, when the Soviet Union passed Cairo a false report that Israel was massing troops on the Syrian border for an invasion. Nasser, the self-appointed champion of Arab unity, could not be seen to abandon Damascus. He moved forces into Sinai as a deterrent gesture, a show of resolve aimed as much at his Arab rivals in Amman and Riyadh, who taunted him for hiding behind the UN force, as at Israel. Egyptian generals privately doubted the army was ready. The point was to restore the honor lost in the 1956 Suez humiliation, not to launch a war.
The escalation then acquired its own momentum. Demanding the UN force's withdrawal was meant as pressure; U Thant's decision to remove it entirely called a bluff Nasser had not meant to play. Closing the Straits of Tiran was the act of a leader who had climbed too high to descend without losing everything. Mohamed Heikal, Nasser's confidant and editor of Al-Ahram, wrote afterward that Cairo expected a political crisis and perhaps a limited clash, not a first strike that would erase the air force in a morning. When it came, the collapse was total. Egyptian commanders ordered a retreat across Sinai that turned into a rout; thousands of conscripts died of thirst in the desert their officers had abandoned.
In Arabic the defeat is al-Naksa, the setback, a word chosen to soften a humiliation that language could not contain. Nasser announced his resignation on June 9; crowds filled the streets of Cairo demanding he stay, and he did, a broken man who died in 1970. The defeat discredited the secular, socialist, pan-Arab project he embodied. The Khartoum Resolution's three no's that autumn are read in this tradition not as blind rejectionism but as the defiance of the humiliated, a refusal to legitimize a conquest at the negotiating table while a million Arabs lived under occupation. Later Arab historiography, and scholars such as Fawaz Gerges, treat 1967 as the hinge on which the Arab world turned from Nasser's Cairo toward the mosque, the moment secular nationalism forfeited its claim to deliver dignity.
Arguments
- Nasser's Sinai deployment was deterrence and inter-Arab posturing, not a war plan
- A false Soviet report of an Israeli buildup on Syria's border triggered the escalation
- The crisis spiraled through miscalculation, not a decision by Cairo to attack
- The defeat destroyed Nasserism and drove the Arab world toward political Islam
Sources
- The Cairo Documents: The Inside Story of Nasser and His Relationship with World Leaders
- Making the Arab World: Nasser, Qutb, and the Clash That Shaped the Middle East
- Rethinking Nasserism, Revolution and Historical Memory in Modern Egypt
vanquishedPalestinian / Naksa and the Occupation
The Palestinian account
In Arabic this is called al-Naksa, the setback. For this account, nineteen sixty seven was not six days. It was the start of a condition that has never ended.
Roughly three hundred thousand people are displaced from the West Bank and Gaza. About a hundred and seventy five thousand of them are made refugees for the second time in nineteen years.
For the one million who stay, June tenth brings military rule. Permits to build, permits to travel, permits to dig a well. Land declared state property. The first settlement goes up at Kfar Etzion that September.
In the village of Beit Nuba, in the Latrun salient, the record does not give a name to the family that told an interviewer what happened to their home.
“We were told to leave for a few days until the fighting stopped. We are still waiting to go back.”
Read the full account
Narrative
For Palestinians, 1967 was not six days. It was the beginning of a condition that has not ended. The Arabic word is al-Naksa, the setback, the sequel to al-Nakba of 1948. Between June and the months that followed, roughly 300,000 people were displaced from the West Bank and Gaza, most across the Jordan River into Jordan. About 175,000 of them were fleeing for the second time in nineteen years, having already lost homes in 1948. This time the door did not reopen. Israel barred the return of those who had left, and a UN-registered refugee population that had begun at 700,000 grew again.
Some displacement was direct. In the Latrun salient, Israeli forces emptied and demolished the villages of Imwas, Yalu, and Beit Nuba in June 1967, expelling roughly 10,000 residents; the rubble was later planted over as a recreation area called Canada Park, where picnic tables now sit on the foundations of houses. In the Jordan Valley and around Qalqilya, homes were destroyed and populations moved. Rashid Khalidi and Nur Masalha document these expulsions as continuous with 1948, not incidental to a war between armies.
For the roughly one million Palestinians who stayed in the West Bank and Gaza, June 10 brought military rule. Their lives came to be governed by military orders issued by an occupying army: permits to build, permits to travel, permits to dig a well, administrative detention without trial, land declared state property and transferred to settlers. East Jerusalem was annexed within weeks; its Palestinian residents were offered not citizenship but a revocable "permanent residency," a status inherited by their grandchildren. The first settlement, Kfar Etzion, went up in September 1967. Hundreds followed.
The occupation also changed who Palestinians looked to. For nineteen years their fate had rested with Arab states, whose armies had just been destroyed in a morning. After 1967 the Palestinian national movement stopped waiting. Fatah and the PLO, fighting at Karameh in March 1968, built an independent armed struggle from the wreckage of the Arab defeat. In the Palestinian reading, the war Israel remembers as survival is the war that placed a whole people under permanent foreign military authority, and every peace plan since has negotiated over land that was taken in those six days and never given back.
Arguments
- The 1967 war began a military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza still in force in 2026
- Roughly 300,000 Palestinians were displaced, about 175,000 of them for the second time since 1948
- Villages such as Imwas, Yalu, and Beit Nuba were demolished and their residents barred from return
- The defeat of the Arab states shifted Palestinian strategy toward independent armed struggle
Sources
- The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017
- The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory
- The 1967 Palestinian Exodus and the Displaced of the 1967 War
revisionistRevisionist Historiography / War of Choice
The revisionist account
Declassified Israeli, American, and Soviet records let historians check what the decision makers actually knew in May, and it does not match the memory of a country facing extinction.
Both Israeli military intelligence and the American CIA assessed, before the war, that Nasser was not about to attack, and that if war came Israel would win it inside two weeks. President Johnson was told the same thing.
Begin's own nineteen eighty two speech, the one already heard in this episode, is the most cited piece of evidence for this account. He called it a choice, not a necessity.
Yitzhak Rabin, who directed the campaign as chief of staff, said something close to that to a French newspaper the following year.
“I do not believe that Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent into Sinai would not have been enough to unleash an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it.”
Read the full account
Narrative
Decades of declassified records, Israeli, American, and Soviet, have let historians reconstruct what decision-makers actually knew in May 1967, and the picture is at odds with the memory of unavoidable survival. Tom Segev's 1967 and Avi Shlaim's The Iron Wall draw on Israeli cabinet minutes to show a leadership that feared not annihilation so much as the erosion of deterrence, and an army whose generals pressed a hesitant Levi Eshkol to seize the initiative while the odds were overwhelming.
The intelligence is the crux. Both Israeli military intelligence and the American CIA assessed in late May that Nasser was not planning to attack, and that if war came Israel would win it in a matter of days, most estimates said under two weeks. President Johnson was told as much. Mossad chief Meir Amit flew to Washington and returned confident of an American "yellow light." The Egyptian deployment, in this analysis, was a defensive and political posture that Israel's commanders understood as such even as the Israeli public lived in genuine dread. The gap between the terror on the street and the confidence in the war room is the heart of the revisionist case.
The most cited piece of evidence is Israeli. In August 1982, defending the invasion of Lebanon, Prime Minister Menachem Begin told the National Defense College that the Sinai concentrations "did not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us" and that "we decided to attack him." Guy Laron's The Six-Day War argues that militaries on both sides, Egyptian and Israeli, dragged reluctant civilian leaders toward a collision each general believed his side would win. Roland Popp, writing in the Middle East Journal, describes the crisis as a spiral of deterrence signals misread on every side.
None of this makes 1967 a simple story of aggression. Revisionists acknowledge the closure of the Straits, the eliminationist broadcasts, and the real fear of a society built by survivors. Their claim is narrower and harder: that the war was a choice made by a state confident of victory to reshape the strategic map, not a last resort forced on a country facing extinction, and that the difference matters because it is the difference between a defensive war and a preventive one whose gains, the occupied territories, were kept.
Arguments
- Israeli and US intelligence judged that Nasser was not about to attack and that Israel would win quickly
- Israeli cabinet records show a fear of lost deterrence rather than of annihilation
- Begin's 1982 speech and declassified minutes frame June 1967 as a preventive war of choice
- Militaries on both sides pushed reluctant civilian leaders toward a war each expected to win
Sources
- 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East
- The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World
- The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East
- Stumbling Decidedly into the Six-Day War
academicInternational Diplomacy / Resolution 242
The diplomatic account
The war ended in six days. The diplomacy it started is still unfinished fifty nine years later.
United Nations Security Council Resolution two forty two, adopted unanimously that November, calls for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from territories occupied in the conflict, paired with the right of every state in the region to live within secure and recognized boundaries.
The English text left out the word the before territories, on purpose, so Israel could read it as withdrawal from some land and the Arab states could read it as withdrawal from all of it.
Lord Caradon, the British ambassador who drafted it, admitted years later exactly what he had done.
“We did not say there should be withdrawal to the sixty seven line. We did not put the word the into it. We did not say all the territories, deliberately.”
The resolution mentions the Palestinians only once, and only as a refugee problem to be settled justly, never as a people with a claim of their own.
Read the full account
Narrative
The war ended in six days; the diplomacy it started is unfinished after fifty-nine years. UN Security Council Resolution 242, adopted unanimously on November 22, 1967, is the document every later negotiation has cited, and its power lies in an ambiguity that was deliberate. It called for the "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict." The English text omits the article "the" before "territories," so Israel reads it as withdrawal from some territories, to be settled by negotiation. The equally authentic French text says "des territoires," which can carry the definite sense, so the Arab states read it as withdrawal from all the land taken. Lord Caradon, the British ambassador who drafted it, later admitted the wording was left open on purpose, because no sharper formula could win a unanimous vote.
The resolution welded two principles that had never before been forced together: the inadmissibility of acquiring territory by war, and the right of every state to secure and recognized boundaries. Out of that pairing came the phrase "land for peace," the spine of Arab-Israeli diplomacy ever since. It worked once cleanly. Egypt and Israel invoked 242 to trade the whole of Sinai for a full peace in 1979. It has not worked again. The Jarring mission, the UN envoy sent to broker a settlement, produced nothing. Resolution 338, after the 1973 war, did little more than order the parties back to 242.
The resolution's deepest silence concerns the Palestinians. 242 mentions them only once, and only as a "refugee problem" to be justly settled, not as a people with a national claim. William Quandt's history of American peace diplomacy traces how Washington, the indispensable broker, built four decades of process on a text that treated the war's largest displaced population as a humanitarian footnote rather than a party. The war also locked the Middle East into the Cold War: the Soviet Union armed and rearmed Egypt and Syria, the United States became Israel's guarantor, and the local conflict became a superpower proxy that outlived the superpowers' own contest. Every summit since, from Camp David to Oslo to Annapolis, has been an attempt to cash the check that 242 wrote in 1967 and never fully honored.
Arguments
- Resolution 242's ambiguity over 'territories' versus 'the territories' was deliberate and remains unresolved
- The 'land for peace' formula worked for Egypt and Sinai in 1979 but nowhere else
- 242 named the Palestinians only as a 'refugee problem,' not as a national party
- The war turned the Arab-Israeli conflict into a US-Soviet Cold War proxy
Sources
- Resolution 242
- Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1967
- Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, Volume XIX, Arab-Israeli Crisis and War, 1967
The turn
And here is what each one needs the listener not to notice.
Israeli / Existential Pre-emption
The Israeli account stops at the border of its own victory. Intelligence had already judged that Nasser was not about to attack. Fifteen years later Begin himself called it a choice. And it has no room in it for the occupation and the settlements that followed.
From the record
Israeli and US intelligence assessments that Nasser was not in fact preparing to attackBegin's 1982 acknowledgment that the strike was a war of choiceThe military occupation and displacement of Palestinians that followed the victoryThe settlement enterprise begun within months of the ceasefireThe Nasserist account leaves out that its own leader had named the destruction of Israel as an objective in his own words, that closing the Straits was a recognized ground for war, and that three armies really were mobilized against a country nine miles wide.
From the record
Nasser's own public statements naming the destruction of Israel as an objectiveThat closing the Straits of Tiran was a recognized legal ground for warThe vulnerability a nine-mile-wide Israel faced from a three-front mobilizationPalestinian / Naksa and the Occupation
The Palestinian account says little about the Arab governments whose mobilization brought the war on, or about the nineteen years the West Bank had already spent under Jordanian rule before this war, with no Palestinian state then either.
From the record
The Arab-state decisions and mobilization that precipitated the warJordanian rule over the West Bank between 1948 and 1967The Israeli security rationale rooted in the pre-war blockade and mobilizationRevisionist Historiography / War of Choice
The revisionist account is written with hindsight that nobody living through May of nineteen sixty seven possessed. It has little to say about the terror on an Israeli street that could not read a classified cable, or about a rhetoric of annihilation that a country of Holocaust survivors had every reason to take literally.
From the record
The genuine terror on the Israeli home front during the waiting periodThat 1967 decision-makers lacked the hindsight later declassification providesArab eliminationist rhetoric as a real input to Israeli threat perceptionInternational Diplomacy / Resolution 242
And the diplomatic account, fluent in the ambiguity of a single missing word, has almost nothing to say about the one million people that ambiguity was drafted over.
From the record
The lived experience of the occupation the diplomacy was meant to endThe domestic political limits that constrained each government's room to negotiateThe role of non-state actors that no UN resolution addressed
Close
The occupation that began on June tenth never ended. In twenty twenty six it is fifty nine years old.
The refugee population it created, added to the one from nineteen forty eight, now exceeds five point nine million people registered with the United Nations.
In the Latrun salient, the villages of Imwas, Yalu, and Beit Nuba were bulldozed within weeks of the ceasefire. Their ruins were later planted over as a public park.
It is called Canada Park. The picnic tables sit on the foundations of the houses.
The record
By the numbers
- Span
- 5-10June 5-10, 1967
- Killed
- 15-20KArab soldiers; 776-983 Israelis
- Displaced
- ~1MPalestinians placed under military occupation; ~300,000…
- Place
- Israel/Egypt/Jordan/Syria
Key figures
- Gamal Abdel NasserPresident of Egypt; closed the Straits of Tiran and led the Arab coalition1918 to 1970
- Levi EshkolPrime Minister of Israel during the war1895 to 1969
- Moshe DayanIsraeli Defense Minister, appointed June 1, 1967 amid the crisis1915 to 1981
- Yitzhak RabinIDF Chief of Staff who directed the campaign1922 to 1995
- King Hussein of JordanPlaced the Jordanian army under Egyptian command on May 30, 1967; lost the West Bank and East Jerusalem1935 to 1999
- Abba EbanIsraeli Foreign Minister; argued the case for pre-emptive self-defense at the UN1915 to 2002
- U ThantUN Secretary-General who withdrew the UN Emergency Force from Sinai at Nasser's demand1909 to 1974
Primary sources
· Resolution 242 · November 22, 1967
“Withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict; termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries.”
· Speech to the General Council of the International Confederation of Arab Trade Unions, Cairo · May 26, 1967
“We are confronting Israel and the West as well, the West which created Israel and which despised us Arabs. Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel. The Arab people want to fight.”
· Address to the UN Security Council · June 6, 1967
“The choice for Israel was to live or to perish, to defend the national existence or to forfeit it for all time.”
· Address to Israel's National Defense College · August 8, 1982
“In June 1967 we again had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches did not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”
· Khartoum Resolution (the 'Three No's') · September 1, 1967
“No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it.”
Threads
- The Suez CrisisThe UN Emergency Force stationed in Sinai after 1956 became the tripwire for 1967. When Nasser expelled it and reclosed the Straits of Tiran in May, Israel treated it as a casus belli and retook the Sinai it had surrendered under pressure in 1957
- The Sykes-Picot AgreementThe mandate borders that Sykes and Picot sketched across the Levant in 1916 became the frontiers of the states that went to war in 1967. The Golan, the West Bank, and the Sinai lines Israel crossed were first drawn in the imperial partition of the Ottoman Arab lands.
- The Sykes-Picot AgreementThe mandate borders of the 1920s framed the states that fought in 1967. The territories Israel captured, from the Golan to the West Bank, were lines first sketched in the imperial partition of the Levant