Six-Day War: A crazy quilt of territories, with pockets of isolation

The Six-Day War increased Israel’s territory threefold. The “borders of Auschwitz” were gone; the vulnerable 14.5km narrow waist acquired a thick cuirass with the mountains of the West Bank. Israel soon annexed East Jerusalem with some surrounding land; it did the same with the Golan Heights in 1981. Elsewhere, it left the status of the occupied territories undefined, waiting for a peace that never came even as Jews settled there.

After the Yom Kippur War of 1973, when Israel was caught off-guard by Egypt and Syria, the US mediated a limited “disengagement” in Sinai and the Golan. In 1979 Israel agreed to give back all of Sinai under a peace treaty with Egypt.

The Oslo accord of 1993 set out a five-year period of Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It left the hardest issues — borders, settlements, Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees — to be sorted out later. The interim arrangements created a crazy quilt of territories: in Area A, the main Palestinian cities, the Palestinian Authority was given full civil and security control; in Area B, mostly taking in Palestinian villages, it had civil affairs and some law-and-order powers, but Israel retained ultimate security control; in Area C, the biggest zone, encompassing settlements, access roads, nature reserves and so on, Israel kept full control.

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