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Six-Day War

The Six-Day War is the June 1967 conflict in which Israel defeated the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria in six days of fighting, capturing the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. In Hebrew it is Milchemet Sheshet HaYamim (מלחמת ששת הימים), literally “the war of the six days.” In Arabic it is most often called harb 1967 (“the 1967 war”) or, from the losing side’s perspective, an-Naksa (النكسة, “the setback”), a term with its own glossary entry distinct from the 1948 Nakba. The English name is simply descriptive: the war ran from 5 to 10 June 1967, six calendar days, and the label stuck in Western reporting almost immediately.

What triggered it

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The war did not begin with an Israeli land grab. In May 1967 Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser expelled the UN Emergency Force that had patrolled the Sinai border since the 1956 Suez war, moved roughly 100,000 troops into the peninsula, and closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, an act both Israel and the United States had long said would be treated as a casus belli. Jordan and Syria signed mutual-defense pacts with Egypt within days. Facing a three-front mobilization and a shipping blockade, Israel launched a preemptive air strike on 5 June 1967 that destroyed most of the Egyptian air force on the ground within hours. The full sequence, day by day, is covered at who attacked first in the Six-Day War.

The course and outcome

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Egypt’s air force was gone by the first afternoon. Israeli ground forces swept the Sinai within four days. Jordan, despite an Israeli message urging King Hussein to stay out, shelled Jewish Jerusalem on the first day; Israel responded by taking East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank from Jordanian control, ending 19 years of Jordanian rule during which Jews had been barred from the Old City and its holy sites. Syria held the Golan Heights until the war’s final two days, when Israel took the plateau that had been used to shell Israeli farms below for two decades. By the ceasefire on 10 June, Israel controlled territory roughly four times its pre-war size.

Aftermath and how the term is used

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The war’s outcome shaped the next half-century of diplomacy. UN Security Council Resolution 242, passed that November, called for Israeli withdrawal from territories in exchange for peace and secure borders, the “land for peace” formula. The Arab League’s answer came three months later at the Khartoum summit: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel. That refusal, not the 1967 war itself, is why the territorial questions remained unresolved for decades; Israel offered to return Sinai and the Golan in exchange for peace treaties almost immediately, an offer Egypt and Syria rejected in 1967 and accepted only later (Egypt in 1979, after another war). Cross-border shelling and skirmishes continued into the War of Attrition through 1970.

In propaganda usage today, “the Six-Day War” is frequently flattened into “Israel occupied Palestinian land in 1967,” a framing that erases the preceding blockade, mobilization and shelling and treats a defensive war as unprovoked conquest. It is also sometimes conflated with the entire question of the West Bank and Gaza’s legal status, glossed over in the shorthand “the occupation,” a term examined at occupation, 1967 or 1948 and what are Areas A, B and C. Accurate usage keeps the causal chain intact: Egypt’s blockade and troop buildup, Jordan’s decision to join despite Israel’s warning, and the three-front war that followed, not a war Israel started to seize land.

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Sources

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