The unrevised six-day war

Ralph Peters:

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In the late spring of 1967, Egypt's "President" Gamal Abdel Nasser massed more than 100,000 troops on Israel's southern border. Thousands of Egyptian combat vehicles lined up an hour's drive from Tel Aviv. In an effort to deprive Israel of fuel and international trade, Egypt also closed the Strait of Tiran - an act of war.

In the north, Syrian forces massed on the Golan Heights, their guns pointing down into Israel. With his throne threatened by his Arab "brothers," Jordan's King Hussein reluctantly put his forces under Egyptian command.

By the traditional logic of warfare, Israel didn't have a chance. And Israel's leaders sought peace. Until one minute before midnight.

With an Egyptian invasion looming and incitements to genocide filling the Arab airwaves, Israel had to move. In a desperate gamble, its aircraft struck. To the initial disbelief of the Israelis themselves, they destroyed three-quarters of the Egyptian air force on the ground, with minimal friendly losses.

There were passages of tough ground combat, but Israel's tanks - largely cast-offs of World War II vintage - tore through the massive Egyptian army.

Nasser had counted on numbers, but his regime was corrupt to the core, and his army was poorly led and largely untrained. Egyptian officers abandoned their soldiers, leaving them to die of thirst in the desert. A chaotic Egyptian retreat became a disaster.

In a bid to turn the war around, Nasser fell back on lies. In the days before instant global news and satellite imagery for all, he told King Hussein and Syrian dictator Hafez Assad that his victorious forces were approaching Tel Aviv. Cairo radio reported a string of imaginary victories. Even Egyptian diplomats abroad believed they were winning.

Encouraged, Syria pounded northern Galilee with artillery fire. Goaded by Egypt, Jordan set out on a short route to disaster.

Israel struggled to avoid fighting either Syria or Jordan. Worried by Egyptian military might, even the legendary Moshe Dayan, recalled to serve as defense minister, wanted to concentrate on a single front. But the Syrian and Jordanian determination to have a war forced Israel's hand.

The result? Incompetent Egyptian generalship wasted King Hussein's small, but capable, military in disorganized attacks, exploding the myth of Jordan's "invincible" Arab Legion. Syrian lieutenants resisted tenaciously - as their superiors fled to the coffee houses of Damascus.

On every front, Israeli soldiers fighting for their country's existence defeated numerically superior and better-equipped enemies. And on the seventh day, Israel found itself in possession of all Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and the Sinai and Gaza.

Israel didn't want to be an occupier and hoped to trade land for peace as rapidly as possible. But Arab autocrats didn't want peace. They realized that only the illusion of a great, enduring cause enabled them to remain in power.

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The Six-Day War didn't create the Middle East's problems, it only changed the math. For Israel, it marked a coming of age. Taken together with the Yom Kippur War six years later - two rounds in a single fight, really - the war of June 1967 meant the end of Israel's basic struggle for existence and the beginning of its "quality of life" wars.

We also forget that those two intertwined wars in 1967 and 1973 resulted in four decades of de facto peace between Israel and the Arab states it had fought in four wars. Intifadahs make great TV, but they can't destroy Israel.

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The attempt to suggest that Israel could have avoided the Six-day War are ludicrous. These attempts imply a logic within the minds of leaders in Egypt and Syria that did not exist because of their religious bigotry. It is that same religious bigotry that keeps any agreement with the Palestinians from happening. As Long as Muslims think they are on a mission from God, to destroy Israel, they are incapable of making a rational decision for peace with Israel.

Bret Stephens also has an interesting peace on the war.

On the morning of June 5, 1967, a fleet of low-flying Israeli jets surprised the Egyptian air force on the ground and destroyed it. This act of military pre-emption helped save Israel from what Iraq's then-President Abdul Rahman Aref had called, only several days earlier, "our opportunity . . . to wipe Israel off the map." Yet 40 years later Israel's victory is widely seen as a Pyrrhic one--"a calamity for the Jewish state no less than for its neighbors," according to a recent editorial in The Economist.

And the alternative was?

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I think the same think when I see the terrorist rights groups like Amnesty International suggest that Israel pull back all of its defenses to Palestinian terrorist attacks because they inconvenience the Palestinians. While they also say the Palestinians should quit exploding around Israelis, no one can credibly suggest they will quit if Israel takes down it defensive measures.