17
~The Tide Turns
1369-1421 AH
1950-2001 CEI
N MAY, 1967, Nasser began to spout martial rhetoric at Israel; to prove
he meant business, he even blockaded Israel's access to the Red Sea. Ac-
tually, of course, with seventy thousand of his best troops bogged down in
Yemen, Nasser could not possibly take any real military action; but a man
can talk. Talk, if it's tough enough, will sometimes do the job.
And sometimes not. On June 5, without warning, Israel attacked
Egypt, Jordan, and Syria simultaneously. "Without warning" should be ut-
tered with an asterisk here: Arab-Israeli tension had been ratcheting up for
months. Yet none of the Arab states were expecting a war on that June
morning; and none of them were ready.
In the first twenty-four hours, Israel destroyed virtually the entire
Egyptian air force on the ground. In the next five days, Israel conquered all
the territories penciled in by the United Nations as the state of Palestine.
These became instead the Occupied Territories, ruled by Israel but popu-
lated mostly by Palestinians. By the seventh day, the war was over, and the
world would never be the same.
You might think there can be no such thing as a triumph too decisive.
And maybe not, in a conflict between two monolithic sides. But in 1967,
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