Who started the wars?

The question has a documented answer for every war Israel has fought, and the answers run one way. In 1948 five Arab armies invaded a day-old state that had accepted partition, and announced the invasion themselves, in writing, to the UN. In 1967 Egypt expelled the UN peacekeepers, massed 100,000 troops on the border and blockaded Israel’s shipping before Israel preempted, and Jordan attacked first on its own front anyway. In 1973 Egypt and Syria invaded by surprise on Yom Kippur. In 2006 Hezbollah raided across a UN-certified border. On October 7 Hamas carried out a massacre during a ceasefire. And in the four wars where Israel fired the first shot, 1956, 1967, 1982 and Iran in 2025, the shot followed a blockade, a massed invasion force, years of cross-border attacks, or a nuclear program in the hands of a state pledged to Israel’s destruction, and Israel acknowledged striking first every time.

Two questions, not one

Two different questions hide inside “who started it,” and honest history keeps them apart. Who fired the first shot is a matter of record: a date, a place, a unit. Who committed the first act of war is a matter of law. A naval blockade is an act of war in itself, whatever the blockader intends; so is massing an invasion force on a border after expelling the peacekeepers, and so is a sustained campaign of cross-border raids. Egypt’s closure of the Straits of Tiran in May 1967 was aggression before a single Israeli plane took off, which is why the “Israel attacked first in 1967” line is technically true and completely misleading at the same time.

The method matters as much as the distinction. Check the openings of wars against period documents: the UN record, treaty texts, the belligerents’ own declarations and broadcasts. Retellings get re-edited; the 1948 Arab League cablegram to the UN does not.

The century, war by war

The record, in order, each war with its own page:

1920 to 1939, before the state existed: Arab riots and pogroms. Nebi Musa in April 1920 (5 Jews killed), Jaffa in May 1921 (47), the August 1929 massacres incited by the Mufti’s al-Aqsa lie (133 Jews in a week, 67 of them in Hebron), then the 1936 to 1939 Arab Revolt. This violence predates the state, the “occupation” and the refugees, so it cannot be explained by any of them.
30 November 1947, after the partition vote: the Jewish leadership accepted UN Resolution 181; the Arab Higher Committee rejected it, and gunmen ambushed two Jewish buses near Petah Tikva the next morning, killing seven.
15 May 1948, the War of Independence: Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon invaded the day-old state. No serious historian disputes who invaded whom. The war Palestinians call the Nakba was a war their leadership and five Arab governments started, and lost.
1967 to 1970, the War of Attrition: Egypt, by Nasser’s own formal declaration, after the Arab League’s Khartoum Resolution answered Israel’s land-for-peace signal with no peace, no recognition, no negotiations.
1987 and 2000, the intifadas: the first erupted from below; the second began weeks after Arafat walked away from a state at Camp David, and the PA’s own communications minister admitted it had been planned since his return.
12 July 2006, the Second Lebanon War: Hezbollah crossed the UN-certified Blue Line, killed three soldiers and abducted two more. Israel had withdrawn from every inch of Lebanon six years earlier.
2008, 2012, 2014, 2021, the Gaza rounds: every round opened with rockets or attacks from a strip Israel had fully left in 2005. The honest footnote is Israel’s November 2008 raid on a cross-border tunnel during a fraying truce; the pattern around it holds.
7 October 2023: Hamas, during a ceasefire, murdered some 1,200 people and took 251 hostages. No framing changes who attacked whom that morning.
8 October 2023, the northern front: Hezbollah opened fire “in solidarity” the next day, unprovoked; the Houthis followed from November, a thousand miles from any front line.

The four wars where Israel fired first

An honest page states these plainly, because the pattern survives them.

1956, Suez. Israel invaded Sinai on 29 October 1956 with Britain and France. What preceded it: Egypt had closed the Suez Canal and the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping in defiance of Security Council Resolution 95, and had spent seven years arming fedayeen raiders from Gaza and Sinai who killed and wounded hundreds of Israeli civilians. First shot: Israel. First act of war: Egypt, years earlier.

1967, the Six-Day War. Israel destroyed Egypt’s air force on the ground on 5 June. The month before: Nasser expelled the UN force from Sinai on 16 May, massed roughly 100,000 troops and 900 tanks on the border, signed war pacts with Jordan and Iraq, closed the Straits of Tiran on 22 May, and announced that “our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel.” And on the eastern front the question does not even arise: Israel begged Jordan to stay out, and Jordan shelled Jerusalem and Tel Aviv on the war’s first morning. That choice, not the preemption, is why the West Bank changed hands.

1982, Lebanon. Israel invaded on 6 June 1982 after the PLO had spent a decade running “Fatahland” in south Lebanon and attacking across the border, from the Avivim school-bus and Ma’alot massacres of 1974 to the Coastal Road massacre of 1978, 38 dead, 13 of them children. The trigger, the 3 June shooting of ambassador Shlomo Argov in London, came from the Abu Nidal group, a PLO rival, a detail the simple version skips. The invasion’s length and scale remain contested inside Israel itself; who turned that border into a firing line does not.

2025, Iran. Israel struck first in June 2025 and said so, hitting Iran’s nuclear program and military leadership the day after the IAEA board formally found Iran in violation of its nuclear obligations, and after Iran had fired roughly 300 drones and missiles in April 2024 and 180 ballistic missiles in October 2024, and had run the proxy war through Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis for decades.

1973, the counter-example that proves the rule

The Yom Kippur War is the cleanest test of the “Israel always shoots first” claim, and it fails the claim decisively. Egypt and Syria attacked by surprise on 6 October 1973, the holiest day of the Jewish year. Israel had hours of warning that morning, and its cabinet explicitly decided not to preempt, accepting the first blow and thousands of casualties rather than fire first again and hand the world the 1967 argument twice. A country that attacks first as a rule does not, when warned of invasion, choose to absorb it.

The story told against the record

The revision has a standard shape. History is started in 1967, so that “the occupation” can stand in as the cause of wars that predate it by decades, including riots from 1920 and an invasion from 1948. Each opening is dissolved into a “cycle of violence,” which treats the raid and the response as interchangeable. And the four Israeli first shots are quoted without the blockade, the massed army, the school-bus massacres or the nuclear findings that preceded them. The framing runs through activist media and, increasingly, through the endlessly re-edited encyclopedia versions of the wars themselves, which is why this record cites period documents instead. The counter-question stands at the end of every version of the story: a country that attacks first as a rule does not spend a century being attacked first as a fact. And when an Arab state chose peace instead, it got it: Egypt in 1979 received every inch of Sinai back, Jordan made peace in 1994.

Who attacked first, every war · Who attacked first on October 7 · The Khartoum Resolution · UN Resolution 242 · Second Intifada · The History They Skip

Sources

From Asked & answered on the main site.