Fifty years ago this week a coalition of Arab states, backed by Soviet Russia, attacked the Jewish homeland on its holiest day.
The Arab-Israeli Six-Day War of 1967 was inevitable. Israel’s restive Arab neighbours – preoccupied by gratuitous resentment – had been taking potshots at their neighbour since a UN resolution in 1947 decreed that Britain’s former Palestinian mandate be divided to create a Jewish homeland.
On the night of Israel’s independence in 1948 the armies of four nations attacked it – Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq and Syria – while Saudi Arabia sent soldiers to fight under Egyptian command. Israel gained the upper hand and some ceasefires were negotiated while the fighting petered out but was never completely extinguished.
Those six days in 1967 were a war in waiting. All it needed was the spark and that came in May that year when the Soviet Union, which courted the Arab nations and supplied them with arms, shared intelligence reports – possibly a sales pitch – mischievously suggesting Israel was planning to attack Syria.
But Israel’s success in 132 hours, the territories it seized, and the Arabs’ humiliation resolved little; the victor’s expanded lands included the Golan Heights, West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and the sprawling Sinai Peninsula.
Read the article by Alan Howe in The Australian.