Six-Day War
Based on Wikipedia: Six-Day War
Six Days That Redrew the Map
In June 1967, Israel faced armies from three countries massing on its borders. Within 144 hours, it had tripled the territory under its control, humiliated the most powerful Arab leader of his generation, and set the terms for a conflict that continues to this day. The Six-Day War was so swift and decisive that it seemed almost impossible—and to the losing side, it literally was impossible, spawning conspiracy theories that persist decades later.
But the war's most consequential moment came before a single soldier crossed a border.
The Opening Gambit
At 7:45 in the morning on June 5th, 1967, civil defense sirens wailed across Israel. Nearly every operational combat aircraft the Israeli Air Force possessed—about 200 jets, all but twelve of them—lifted off and headed toward Egypt.
They flew low over the Mediterranean, hugging the waves to slip beneath Egyptian radar. Others approached from the Red Sea. Their targets: Egyptian airfields, where hundreds of Soviet-built warplanes sat exposed on open runways.
The Egyptians had no hardened aircraft shelters—the concrete bunkers that protect grounded planes from attack. Their jets were lined up in the open, easy targets.
And then something almost absurd happened. The Egyptians shut down their own air defense system.
Why? Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer and Lieutenant General Sidqi Mahmoud were flying from one base to another that morning, and Egyptian commanders worried that their own forces might accidentally shoot down the plane carrying these senior officers. So they simply turned everything off.
It probably wouldn't have mattered. The Israeli pilots came in so low that Egyptian radar couldn't have tracked them anyway, well below the minimum altitude at which Egypt's surface-to-air missiles could engage targets. Jordan's sophisticated radar station at Ajloun did detect the incoming waves of aircraft and transmitted the code word meaning "war" up the Egyptian command chain. But the warning never reached the airfields. Egyptian communications were that dysfunctional.
The Israeli pilots had memorized their targets in extraordinary detail. They had practiced on dummy runways, rehearsing over and over in total secrecy. They used a mixed attack strategy: strafing runs against parked aircraft, and special bombs developed jointly with France that could shred tarmac, cratering runways so that any surviving Egyptian planes couldn't take off.
By the time it was over, 338 Egyptian aircraft had been destroyed. One hundred Egyptian pilots were dead. The Israeli Air Force had achieved complete air supremacy in a single morning. For the rest of the war, Arab ground forces would fight without meaningful air cover.
How Did It Come to This?
The Six-Day War didn't erupt from nowhere. It grew from a decade of simmering tension, miscalculation, and a peculiar geographic chokepoint called the Straits of Tiran.
The Straits of Tiran are a narrow waterway at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula, connecting the Gulf of Aqaba to the Red Sea. For Israel, these straits provided the only sea route to its port city of Eilat—and through Eilat, access to trade with Africa and Asia without having to navigate the Suez Canal or the hostile Mediterranean coast.
In 1956, Egypt had closed the straits to Israeli shipping, contributing to the Suez Crisis—a war in which Israel, Britain, and France attacked Egypt. After that conflict ended, the straits reopened, and a United Nations Emergency Force (commonly abbreviated UNEF) deployed along the Egyptian-Israeli border to keep the peace.
For eleven years, this arrangement held. But in May 1967, Soviet intelligence fed Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser a piece of information that was completely false: Israel was massing troops on the Syrian border, preparing to attack.
Nasser was in a difficult position. Just months earlier, King Hussein of Jordan had publicly mocked him for "hiding behind UNEF skirts" when Israel attacked a Jordanian village and Egypt did nothing to help. Nasser's prestige as the champion of Arab nationalism was on the line.
So he acted. On May 16th, he began moving Egyptian troops into the Sinai. On May 19th, he expelled the UN peacekeepers. On May 22nd, he closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping.
Israel had stated clearly in 1957 that closing the straits would be considered an act of war.
After the war, American President Lyndon Johnson would observe: "If a single act of folly was more responsible for this explosion than any other, it was the arbitrary and dangerous announced decision that the Straits of Tiran would be closed."
The Alliance Forms
Events accelerated with terrifying speed. On May 30th, Jordan signed a defense pact with Egypt. The next day, Iraqi troops began deploying into Jordan. An Egyptian contingent followed.
Israel was now facing the prospect of coordinated attack from three directions: Egypt in the southwest, Jordan in the east, and Syria in the northeast.
On June 1st, Israel formed a national unity government, bringing opposition parties into the cabinet. On June 4th, the decision was made to go to war. The next morning came Operation Focus—the devastating air strike that destroyed Egypt's air force on the ground.
The Arithmetic of War
On paper, the Arab coalition should have been formidable. Egypt alone had massed about 100,000 troops in the Sinai, with 950 tanks, 1,100 armored personnel carriers, and over 1,000 artillery pieces. Syria had 75,000 soldiers deployed along the Israeli border. Jordan's armed forces numbered 55,000, with nine brigades stationed in the West Bank.
But numbers don't tell the whole story.
Over a third of Egypt's soldiers were veterans—but veterans of the wrong war. They had been fighting in Yemen's civil war, a grinding conflict that Egypt had been unable to win despite years of effort. Another third were reservists, called up for this crisis but lacking the training of regular forces.
Syria's army was in even worse shape. Professor David Lesch would later write that "one would be hard-pressed to find a military less prepared for war with a clearly superior foe." Years of coups and attempted coups had gutted the Syrian officer corps. The army had been purged and fractured repeatedly as different political factions fought for control of the country.
Jordan was different. Its army was a professional, long-service force, relatively well-equipped with American weapons and well-trained. Israeli intelligence assessed the Jordanian military as competent—though events would show they were consistently "half a step behind" Israeli moves.
Israel's total military strength, including reserves, was 264,000. But this number couldn't be sustained for long because those reservists were essential to the civilian economy. A quick war was not just desirable—it was necessary.
The Secret Weapon: Turnaround Time
One factor proved decisive in ways that went far beyond the first morning's air strikes.
Israeli pilots and ground crews had trained obsessively in one seemingly mundane skill: how quickly they could refuel, rearm, and send an aircraft back into combat. The result was extraordinary. A single Israeli jet could fly up to four combat missions per day.
Arab air forces typically managed one or two.
This meant that on paper, Israel might have had fewer aircraft—but in practice, its air power was effectively multiplied. The same planes could strike targets in Egypt in the morning, return to base, and be back in the air hitting targets in Jordan by afternoon.
This asymmetry was so dramatic that Arab leaders couldn't believe it. The Six-Day War gave birth to persistent conspiracy theories that Israel must have received secret assistance from American or British air forces. How else could such a small country have achieved such overwhelming results?
The answer was less dramatic but more instructive: meticulous preparation, realistic training, and ground crews who could turn an aircraft around in minutes rather than hours.
The Ground War in Sinai
Egypt had built formidable fortifications in the Sinai Peninsula. The defensive plan was sensible: attackers would have to advance along a few roads that crossed the desert, where Egyptian strongpoints could channel and destroy them.
The Israelis simply went around.
Rather than attack Egyptian defenses head-on through the expected routes, Israeli forces struck from unexpected directions, crossing terrain the Egyptians had assumed was impassable. With air supremacy already achieved, Egyptian positions that had been designed to stop a conventional advance found themselves outflanked and exposed.
After some initial resistance, Nasser ordered an evacuation of the Sinai Peninsula. By the sixth day of the conflict, Israel occupied the entire peninsula—a vast expanse of desert larger than Israel itself.
Jordan's Tragic Miscalculation
Jordan's King Hussein faced an agonizing choice. He had signed a defense pact with Egypt just a week before the war began. But he knew his forces couldn't defeat Israel in an all-out offensive.
He chose a middle path: Jordan would attack, but not with everything it had. Jordanian forces launched strikes intended to slow Israel's advance rather than to win the war outright.
It was the worst of both options. Jordan did enough to bring the full weight of Israeli military power against it, but not enough to actually threaten Israeli victory.
Israeli forces captured the West Bank, including East Jerusalem with its Old City—home to sites sacred to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. For the first time in nearly two thousand years, Jewish forces controlled the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism.
The capture of East Jerusalem would become one of the most consequential and contested outcomes of the war, generating disputes that remain unresolved more than half a century later.
Syria Joins Too Late
Syria, despite having helped precipitate the crisis, initially stayed out of the actual fighting. It wasn't until the fifth day of the war that Syrian forces began shelling Israeli positions from the Golan Heights—a strategic plateau overlooking northern Israel.
By then, Egypt had already agreed to a ceasefire. Jordan followed on June 8th. Syria's late entry meant it faced Israel alone, without the distraction of fighting on other fronts.
Israeli forces stormed the Golan Heights, capturing the strategic high ground by June 10th. Syria accepted a ceasefire on June 9th, and the agreement was formalized on June 11th.
The Human Cost
The war was mercifully brief but not bloodless.
More than 15,000 Arab soldiers died in six days of fighting. Israeli military deaths were fewer than 1,000. But the toll extended beyond combatants. Twenty Israeli civilians died in Arab air strikes on Jerusalem. Fifteen United Nations peacekeepers were killed by Israeli strikes in the Sinai as the war began.
And then there was the USS Liberty.
On June 8th, Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats attacked the USS Liberty, an American naval intelligence ship operating in international waters near the Sinai coast. Thirty-four American sailors and Marines died. Israel later claimed the attack was a case of mistaken identity. Many survivors and some American officials remained skeptical, but no definitive alternative explanation has been proven.
The Aftermath: Displacement and Occupation
When the guns fell silent, the map of the Middle East had been redrawn. Israel now controlled the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank including East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. Its territory had roughly tripled.
But the human displacement was staggering. Between 280,000 and 325,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from the West Bank. Another 100,000 Syrians left the Golan Heights. Many of these refugees and their descendants remain displaced today, their status one of the unresolved issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Gamal Abdel Nasser, the man whose decisions had precipitated the war, resigned in disgrace after Israel's victory. But mass protests across Egypt demanded his return, and he was reinstated. He would remain in power until his death in 1970, though his prestige never fully recovered.
Egypt closed the Suez Canal, the vital waterway connecting the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. It would remain closed for eight years, until 1975, forcing ships to take the long route around Africa and reshaping global trade patterns.
The Arsenal of War
The Six-Day War was also a contest between Eastern and Western military technology. With the exception of Jordan, the Arab states relied on Soviet equipment. Egypt's air force flew MiG-21s, among the most advanced Soviet fighters of the era. Of particular concern to Israeli planners were Egypt's 30 Tupolev Tu-16 "Badger" medium bombers, aircraft capable of striking Israeli cities with heavy bomb loads.
Jordan was the outlier, equipped with American M48 Patton tanks and British Hawker Hunter fighter jets. Israeli intelligence assessed the Hawker Hunter as roughly equivalent to their own best aircraft, the French-built Dassault Mirage III.
Israel's arsenal was predominantly Western. Its air force flew French aircraft. Its armored forces used British and American tanks. Some light weapons were Israeli-designed, including the iconic Uzi submachine gun, which would become one of the most recognizable firearms of the 20th century.
The war became an advertisement for Western military equipment. Soviet-built aircraft had been destroyed on the ground; Western planes had done the destroying. This performance gap would influence arms sales and military alliances for years to come.
Reinforcements That Arrived Too Late
As the war progressed, Arab states rushed to reinforce the coalition. Aircraft from Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia flew in to replace the planes destroyed on the first day. Pakistani Air Force pilots, acting as volunteers, joined the fight—one of them, Saiful Azam, would be credited with shooting down several Israeli aircraft.
Saudi Arabia mobilized ground forces for the Jordanian front. An infantry battalion entered Jordan on June 6th, followed by another on June 8th. By late June, a full brigade with tanks and artillery had assembled. These forces remained in Jordan for over a decade, not returning to Saudi Arabia until 1977.
But all of this came too late. The war was decided in its first hours, when Egyptian air power was destroyed on the ground. Everything that followed was, in a sense, epilogue.
The Predictions
Before the war, military experts had offered their assessments. Israel believed it could win in three to four days. American intelligence estimated seven to ten days, with British analysts agreeing with the American view.
Israel's confidence proved justified. The war lasted exactly six days.
A New York Times columnist, James Reston, had written just two weeks before the war that Nasser's forces were "no match for the Israelis" in discipline, training, morale, and equipment. He noted that Egypt hadn't even been able to achieve victory in Yemen, a "small and primitive country" where it had been fighting for years with 50,000 troops and its best generals.
The analysis proved prescient. The same Egyptian army that couldn't win in Yemen was routed in the Sinai in less than a week.
Legacy of Six Days
The Six-Day War created facts on the ground that have shaped Middle Eastern politics ever since. Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip put millions of Palestinians under military rule. The status of East Jerusalem became one of the most contentious issues in international diplomacy. The Golan Heights remain under Israeli control and were formally annexed in 1981, a move not recognized by most of the international community.
The war also demonstrated something that military planners around the world studied carefully: the decisive importance of air power, the value of surprise, and the potentially war-winning advantage of superior training and preparation over raw numbers.
For six days in June 1967, the Middle East was transformed. More than half a century later, we are still living with the consequences.