to force Israel to back down. The diplomatic crisis ended in the late afternoon of June
10, when Israel accepted a UN cease-fire. Even so, Israeli forces continued to move
into new positions on the Golan, capturing the last, remote, positions on June 12.
The June 1967 War—lasting six days—was one of the shortest major conflicts in
recent world history, but it had profound consequences that reverberate to this day.
Israel captured an enormous amount of territory—more than 40,000 square miles,
some 3.5 times the size of Israel—stretching from the banks of the Suez Canal to the
banks of the Jordan River and to the outskirts of Damascus. Nearly all the land that
the early Zionists had dreamed of possessing decades earlier was now under Israeli con-
trol, in particular, the entirety of Jerusalem. Israel also controlled the more than 1.2
million Palestinian Arabs living in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, many of them
refugees from the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948.
Some Israelis gloated about these territorial conquests, arguing that the time had
come to proclaim a Greater Israel encompassing nearly all of the captured lands. Oth-
ers saw a different opportunity: the chance to trade some of this territory for a nego-
tiated, permanent, peace with Israel’s Arab neighbors. The Israeli cabinet at first
adopted the latter position, voting secretly on June 19 to trade the Sinai and the Golan
for peace with Egypt and Syria; both countries quickly rejected the offer, relayed by
U.S. diplomats. Nearly all Israelis agreed on one thing: East Jerusalem would be kept
as part of Israel’s unified capital. To reinforce the point, Israel in late June officially
annexed East Jerusalem and some of its immediate West Bank neighborhoods. The
Israeli government evicted several hundred Arab residents from their homes and helped
Jews settle in their places—the opening round of a policy that would eventually set-
tle several hundred thousand Jews on Arab lands in East Jerusalem and the West Bank
(Israeli Settlement of the Occupied Territories, p. 178).
From a military perspective, the June war was yet another overwhelming victory
for Israel, this time against the combined force of three Arab countries with many
more citizens. Israel quickly gained air superiority over Egypt, Jordan, and Syria,
demonstrating that even Soviet-supplied weaponry could not transform Arab armies
into effective fighting forces. Israel accomplished its feats while suffering only 4 per-
cent as many casualties (dead and wounded) as its opponents.
After such a humiliating defeat, Arab rhetoric toward Israel grew even more hos-
tile. Less than three months after the war had ended, Arab leaders met in Khartoum
and, under Nasser’s continued leadership, voiced what became known as the “three
noes” in regard to Israel: no peace, no recognition, and no negotiations (Khartoum
Declaration, p. 108). On a more practical basis, Egypt for the next three years waged
a low-level “war of attrition” intended to sap Israel’s will to hold on to the Sinai.
The new realities in the Middle East led U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson to out-
line a peace plan for the region. Announced in a televised address on June 19, it advo-
cated five principles, notably the “political independence and territorial integrity” of all
states in the region (Johnson Plan, p. 103). A few days later, Johnson and Soviet prime
minister Alexi Kosygin met in Glassboro, New Jersey, and discussed prospects for peace
in the Middle East but failed to reach an agreement on how to achieve that goal. Instead
of following through on this rhetoric, the United States stepped up its support for Israel,
and the Soviet Union became an even more staunch backer of the Arabs.
The most important diplomatic outcome of the war was a renewed push at the
United Nations for a longer-term resolution of the Arab-Israeli dispute. The Security
ARABS AND ISRAELIS 97