The 1967 War
June 1967 saw war between Israel and Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Known to Palestinians as the Naksa, or ‘setback’, the Six Day War dramatically redefined the political, geographic and demographic realities of the Middle East. Claiming that it suspected an imminent invasion by Egypt, Israel launched an attack against Egypt's airforce on June 5th. In just six days Israel was victorious over its Arab neighbors and had expanded the territory under its control to include the whole of historic Palestine by gaining control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and beyond to include the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt and the Golan Heights from Syria. As part of the Camp David Accords, Israel returned Sinai to Egypt in 1978. Notwithstanding Israel’s ‘disengagement’ from the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2005, however, Israel remains in control of the rest of the territories it occupied in 1967.
For many Arabs 1967 marked a catastrophic loss – it was not only a loss of the war and territory, but of the military prowess of the recently independent Arab states, a vanquishing of the promise of Arab nationalism and the dignity it embodied. For Palestinians it meant the loss of the remainder of their historic homeland and the beginning of the illegal military occupation which continues to this day.