About the Six Day War

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The Six-Day War (June 5-10, 1967) was a strategic operation to expand Israel's land holdings (referred to by the settler movement as Erez Israel) and military supremacy in the Middle East. The West Bank is home to one of the largest aquifers in the Middle East, the Gaza Strip has natural gas reserves, and the Golan Heights of southern Syria are prime farmland.

The Six-Day War was a stunning victory for the Israeli military. On that, everyone agrees. Historians have since removed much of the idealized thinking surrounding this event; the chief idea is that the state of Israel was under imminent threat of attack and needed to strike first. It was not.

Backchannel talks between the United States and Egypt over the Sinai Peninsula were occurring when Israel attacked Egypt and Syria without provocation. Israel was not under threat, and declassified documents from the Israeli military prove the state knew it was not under threat.

The area of historic Palestine that Israel conquered in 1967 is known as the Occupied Territories. The Sinai Peninsula, also captured, was returned to Egypt in part during the 1973 war between Israel and Egypt, and later in stages beginning in 1979, following the peace agreement between the states of Israel and Egypt, brokered by US President Jimmy Carter. This 1978 peace agreement is called the Camp David Accords.

The Six-Day War continues to resonate as a foundational event creating the current facts on the ground in Israel. It marks the beginning of the complete military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights.

There are several excellent books written in the past decades that benefit from declassified historical documents on this event:

Ilan Pappe's "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine"

Benny Morris' "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited"

Jimmy Carter's "Peace, not Apartheid."

David Hirst's "Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East"

Rashid Khalid's "The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood"

Tom Segev's "1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East".

The First part of Prof. Ilan Pappe's lecture on the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine is below. The complete 40-minute four-part series is here: http://www.youtube.com/user/ilanpappevideos.