Six-Day War

Nasser mobilised on the basis of a Soviet report of Israeli concentrations against Syria that was false, and then could not step back without losing standing in the Arab world. A move made for prestige generated commitments that outran the intention behind them.

The force existed on Egyptian territory by Egyptian consent and was removed when consent was withdrawn, which everyone had always known. Peacekeeping without a mandate to remain is a convenience that lasts exactly as long as the host finds it convenient.

Israel had stated for a decade that closing the straits would be a cause for war, and Egypt closed them. Announced redlines constrain the state that draws them: having declared this a casus belli, Israel could not let it pass without destroying the credibility of every future warning.

Three hours of air strikes destroyed most of the Egyptian air force on the ground and decided the war before the land battle began. Striking first against an opponent who has concentrated but not attacked is the pure case of preemption, and it worked completely.

Israel warned Jordan to stay out and Hussein attacked anyway, bound by a defence pact signed with Egypt days earlier. He lost the West Bank and East Jerusalem in three days. Honouring an alliance against one's own assessment is a recognisable form of statecraft and it can be ruinous.

An ally attacked an American intelligence ship in daylight, killing thirty-four sailors, and Washington accepted the explanation of misidentification because the alternative was a crisis it did not want. Alliance considerations shaped the response more than the evidence did.

The attack on Syria began after Egypt and Jordan had been defeated and hours before a ceasefire, and took the high ground from which Israeli settlements had been shelled. Seizing terrain in the closing hours of a war is a calculation about what the ceasefire will freeze.

The resolution passed unanimously because its central phrase was ambiguous enough for both sides to endorse. Withdrawal from territories, not the territories, left the extent unsettled deliberately. Ambiguity is what made agreement possible and what made the agreement useless as a settlement.

Egypt was bound to Syria by a defence pact and had been taunted for sheltering behind the peacekeepers while Syria was attacked. Alliance obligations and reputational competition pushed a state into a crisis its leadership had not planned and did not want to fight.

UNEF had been the buffer since 1957 and its removal restored direct contact between two mobilised armies. Removing the physical separation between forces that expect to fight compresses the time available for diplomacy, and the war came seventeen days later.

Israel's strategic position depended on rapid mobilisation of reserves, which it could not sustain for long without wrecking its economy. A state that cannot stay mobilised faces intense pressure to strike early, and that time constraint shaped the whole crisis.

A small state facing several larger neighbours cannot absorb a first blow and must fight short wars begun on its own timing. Israel's whole doctrine followed from that structural position, and the operation was its most successful expression.

The territories captured gave Israel strategic depth it had lacked, moving its frontier from a nine-mile waist to the Jordan valley. That depth is why withdrawal became so difficult: the security argument for holding the ground was real and it competed with everything else.

The United States was fighting in Vietnam, managing a superpower confrontation over the crisis, and needed the relationship. A great power absorbs an injury from a partner when the cost of pursuing it exceeds the cost of accepting it, which is a calculation and not an oversight.

The Golan overlooks northern Israel and its capture removed an artillery threat and created a buffer toward Damascus. Height is a durable military asset that does not depreciate, which is why this is the territory Israel has been least willing to discuss returning.

Land for peace assumed Israel wanted recognition more than territory and that the Arab states wanted territory more than they wanted to withhold recognition. Neither assumption held, and the bargain the resolution proposed was not one either side was ready to make.

Nasser's authority rested on his standing as the champion of Arab nationalism, and inaction was domestically and regionally intolerable. Leaders whose legitimacy derives from a role must keep performing it, and the performance can commit the state beyond the leader's judgment.

U Thant was widely blamed for complying too quickly, though his legal position was sound and Israel had refused to host the force on its own side. A secretary-general with no independent authority is criticised for exercising the discretion he does not have.

Eilat handled a modest share of Israeli trade, so the economic effect was limited and the symbolic effect was total. Publics understood the closure as a siege, and governments answering to publics in both countries had very little room to compromise after it.

Israel formed a national unity government days before the attack, bringing in the opposition and appointing Dayan to defence under enormous public pressure. Domestic politics shaped both the timing and the leadership, and the government that struck was not the one that had hesitated.

Around three hundred thousand Palestinians left the West Bank, many of them refugees for a second time since 1948. A million people came under military government without political rights, an arrangement described as temporary that has now lasted longer than most states have existed.

Survivors disputed the official account for decades and pressed for further inquiry through Congress and the courts. That the argument continued in public for fifty years is a function of institutions that allow a contested official finding to be challenged indefinitely.

Most of the Syrian population of the Golan left or was displaced, and the villages were largely destroyed. Occupation followed by settlement changed the territory's demography permanently, which made any later return a question about people as well as lines.

Every state's right to live in peace within secure and recognised boundaries was affirmed, which required Arab recognition of Israel and Israeli withdrawal. Both were domestically impossible for the governments concerned, and the resolution asked them anyway.

The false Soviet warning was transmitted through channels with no verification and no mechanism for the parties to check it against each other. Crises are frequently produced by information failures of exactly this kind, and no institution existed to correct one.

The design flaw was visible from the start: a force stationed on one party's territory by that party's consent, with no provision for withdrawal to be reviewed. Later mandates were written differently precisely because of this failure.

Western powers proposed an international flotilla to test the blockade and could not assemble one, because Britain was reluctant and the United States was consumed by Vietnam. A collective guarantee given in 1957 proved undeliverable when it was called upon.

The operation depended on years of intelligence about Egyptian airfields, aircraft dispersal and the daily routine of patrols. Institutional preparation of that kind is what converts a plan into a possibility, and it was accumulated long before the crisis.

Israel applied its own law to East Jerusalem within weeks while administering the rest of the West Bank under military occupation, creating two legal regimes in adjacent territory. That distinction was deliberate rather than administrative, and it has structured every negotiation since by putting one question formally beyond discussion while leaving the other open.

Israel paid compensation to the families and to the United States, which is the standard mechanism for resolving state responsibility without admitting the character of the act. Reparation settles the legal question and deliberately leaves the factual one open.

The ceasefire was arranged through the Security Council with both superpowers pressing their clients, and the hotline installed after 1962 was used for the first time in a crisis. The mechanism built after Cuba proved its value here.

The Council appointed a special representative, Gunnar Jarring, whose mission ran for years without result, since the parties would not meet. Creating a mechanism without agreement on the substance produces a mediator with nothing to mediate.

Both sides were parties to an armistice regime supervised by the United Nations, and moving armies into the demilitarised area tested what that regime actually required. Arrangements that depend on restraint reveal their emptiness the moment restraint is withdrawn.

The first great achievement of United Nations peacekeeping ended by a letter, demonstrating that the institution's presence depended entirely on sovereign permission. That is the limit of what consent-based peacekeeping can do, and it was learned expensively.

The legal question was whether the straits were international waters, and both sides argued it in those terms while preparing for war. International society supplies the vocabulary of the dispute even where it supplies no means of settling it.

Whether a first strike against a mobilised but not attacking enemy is lawful self-defence has been argued ever since, and the case is the standard example. International society has no settled answer on anticipatory self-defence, and this war is why the question stays open.

Acquisition of territory by war was already prohibited by the Charter, and the Council said so in November. International society's clearest rule about conquest met a case it could not reverse, and the resulting gap between law and fact has defined the conflict.

Attacks on neutral vessels in international waters engage clear rules, and both governments handled the incident through the machinery of claims and inquiry. Even between allies, an injury of this kind is processed through the society's procedures for state responsibility.

Israel annexed the Golan in 1981 and the Security Council declared the annexation without legal effect, a position the whole society of states has maintained since. Sustained non-recognition is the principal instrument available where reversal is impossible.

Resolution 242 remains the reference text for every subsequent negotiation, cited by Camp David, Madrid, Oslo and the Arab Peace Initiative. Its authority comes from being the one formula the whole society of states has endorsed, whatever its ambiguities.

Arab nationalism as Nasser had built it required confrontation with Israel to remain credible, and the confrontation was performed for an audience of Arab publics. The crisis was driven by what Egyptian leadership needed to be seen doing, which is a poor guide to war.

Egypt had accepted the force as a face-saving device in 1957 and its presence had come to symbolise Egyptian humiliation. Demanding its removal was a claim about restored sovereignty addressed to Arab opinion, and it made war far more likely.

For Israelis the closure evoked encirclement and destruction, three weeks of waiting with graves being dug in parks; for Egyptians it was the reversal of an imposed humiliation. The same act was understood through two histories, and neither side could see the other's.

Israelis experienced the weeks before as existential dread and the war itself as deliverance, and the shift from vulnerability to dominance in six days reshaped national self-understanding. That change in identity shaped the occupation policy that followed.

The paratroopers at the Western Wall became the war's defining image and connected a military outcome to a religious return, changing what the territories meant. Land that might have been traded acquired a significance that made trading it politically far harder.

Official investigations accepted error and many participants did not, and the disagreement has never been resolvable because it concerns intent. Where the facts are agreed and the interpretation is not, no further inquiry closes the question.

Syria's loss of the Golan became a permanent grievance and the organising fact of its policy toward Israel for half a century. Territory acquired in thirty hours generated a hostility that outlasted the regime that lost it.

The French and English texts differ on the crucial article, and each party cites the version supporting its position. A dispute about a definite article has carried fifty years of political weight, because the words are the only thing both sides have agreed to.