1. Background
2. Causes
3. Consequences
--We began this section of lectures with the creation of Israel and the 1948-49 Arab-Israeli War. We then looked at the Arab unity phase of the 1950’s and 1960’s, in its own way an equally important challenge to the political map of the region left behind by colonialism. We now take up the end of the Arab challenges to that map, as least for awhile, with the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. It did change the map, but not in the way that Arabs would have expected.
The frustrations that Nasir felt in his Pan-Arab campaign in the 1960's led him to return to an issue that had generated great popularity for him in the 1950's -- the Arab-Israeli conflict. Israel provided a vehicle for a reassertion of his Arab leadership. The conflict had pretty much been frozen in place by the Suez War of 1956 -- U.N. forces along the border between Egypt and Israel and at Sharm al-Sheikh; clear sign of Israeli superiority, so Nasir does not want to provoke the Israelis. Political energies had shifted to inter-Arab politics across state boundaries.
The Israeli government in 1963 announced a plan to divert the waters of the Jordan River for irrigation projects within Israel. The Bacthist government in Syria reacted with violent rhetoric and threats to militarily confront Israel to prevent the project. Both Husayn in Jordan and Nasir had no interest in being drawn into a war with Israel at the time, and sought some way to deflect the Syrians from their adventurous course. Nasir, taking advantage of the crisis atmosphere to reassert his Arab leadership, called for a summit meeting of the Arab kings and presidents to formulate an Arab response to the diversion plan. Regimes like the Saudi and Jordanian monarchies, which had felt the wrath of Nasir's opposition, were eager to take advantage of what seemed to be a new moderation and respect for diplomatic forms that the summit represented. The first Arab summit met in Cairo in January 1964.
The Cairo summit, and follow-up summits in Alexandria (Sept. 1964) and Casablanca (1965), did much to moderate the tone of Arab politics, at least for a few years. The summit process was successful at containing the increasingly radical Syrian regime, preventing it from pursuing an adventurous policy vis a vis Israel. The Cairo summit set up the Palestine Liberation Organization as a response to the Jordan River diversion plan, a move which had little effect on the plan itself, but had enormous repercussions for the modern history of the Middle East. (We will talk at length about the development of the PLO and Palestinian nationalism in our next class.) What the summit period did was to lower the ideological temperature of Arab politics, to a certain extent, and to reconfirm that, whether politics was to be conventional and diplomatic, or unconventional, propagandistic and ideological, it was Nasir who would take the lead.
Even as Saudi and Jordan were challenging Nasir in 1965-66 with the Islamic Conference proposal, changes in Syrian domestic politics changed the situation from the leftist-radical side. In 1966 an internal Bacth Party coup in Syria brought to power an extremist group that called for an immediate strategy of armed conflict with Israel. The Syrians put Nasir in a predicament: he did not want to fight the Israelis then, and especially did not want the Syrians to draw him into a war; on the other hand, to maintain his Pan-Arab reputation, it would be difficult to be seen as less committed than the Bacth to confrontation with Israel. Thus, the Syrian, and to a lesser extent, the PLO, rhetoric about Israel and guerilla attacks on Israel during 1966-67 period forced Nasir to the "left" -- toward a more publicly hostile stance toward Israel, toward Israel's main ally, the US, and to US friends among the Arab states of the region. It was this dynamic in Syrian-Egyptian relations, the kind of bidding war to see who could be more opposed to Israel, that began the political spiral which ended in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.
Today we will look at the lead-up to the war, asking the question: Why did Nasir escalate the crisis of May 1967 into a clash of destinies with Israel, when he had worked so hard during the previous decade to avoid just such an all-out battle, and when much of his army was still tied down in the Yemen Civil War? And we will then look at the consequences of the war. Of necessity, our analysis of the consequences will be sketchy, because the entire course of the Arab-Israeli conflict since that point can be considered a consequence of the 1967 War. We will look at how the bargaining situation between the Arabs and Israel changed as a result of the war, how the acquisition of the new territories began to affect the Israeli polity, and how the defeat affected the balance of power among the Arab states. One of the most important results of the War was the emergence, for the first time since the Mandate period, of an independent Palestinian nationalist movement.
The most interesting and still puzzling question about the 1967 War is why Nasir chose to fight it, especially given that Israel's overall military superiority was generally acknowledged, because, as we will see from our analysis, the choice was clearly his. In fact, Nasir was drawn into the conflict by a series of small escalatory steps that, given the Israeli, Arab and superpower reactions, convinced him that the time was ripe for a climactic confrontation with Israel. The beginning of this escalatory process had its roots not in Arab-Israeli arena itself, but in the dynamics of inter-Arab politics and Syrian domestic politics, as we mentioned earlier. In 1966, Damascus escalated border clashes and military manuevers on the Israeli border, and Palestinian groups also used Jordanian territory for raids. Major Israeli responses: raid on al-Samu’ in Jordan in November 1966; air attacks on Syria in April 1967.
The new regime in Damascus had a powerful friend in the Soviet Union. More than any Arab regime since Qasim's in Iraq, this new Bacthist government was willing to bring local Communists into the government. 2 Communists held ministerial positions in the Syrian Cabinet. The Soviet Union thus committed itself to this new government in Syria, and sought to bring about Egyptian support for it also, urging a united Arab front against Israel (good way to isolate the US in the Middle East as well). November 1966 Syrian-Egyptian defense pact, negotiated under Soviet prodding, was the result. The Soviets even passed on to Egypt on May 13, 1967 false information about a planned Israeli invasion of Syria. There was certainly a crisis atmosphere in Israeli-Syrian relations, from the April air battle, and perhaps some signs that Israel was considering a major retaliation, but no signs of major troop movements. Moscow hoped that this information would consolidate the Egyptian-Syrian axis and lead Egypt to take steps to relieve some of the pressure on the Damascus government, pressure that Damascus itself caused by its escalation of conflict with Israel.
Nasir knew that the Soviet information was false. His own Defense Minister had flown to Damascus and investigated the front himself, and reported back to Nasir that the Soviets must be hallucinating. However, in response, Nasir mobilized the Egyptian armed forces and began sending units into the Sinai Peninsula. Why did he do this? Partially, perhaps, to deter the Israelis from even planning an attack on Syria. But also, I would argue, he chose to interpret the Soviet disinformation as a signal that Moscow was finally ready to back the Arabs to the hilt in a confrontation with Israel. Since the breakdown of the summit period in inter-Arab relations and the return to Saudi-Egyptian and Jordanian-Egyptian hostility, Riyad and cAmman had been taunting Nasir about his aggressive stance toward fellow Arabs while hiding behind UN troops on his Israeli border. Thus, Nasir could use the crisis atmosphere on the Syrian-Israeli front to reconfirm his own position of Arab leadership and take advantage of what he saw as a change in the Soviet position. At this point, it is highly unlikely that Nasir thought such a step would lead to war. But it would pressure Israel, unite the Arabs, isolate the United States and commit the Soviets to a strategy of confronting Israel directly.
As part of this move into Sinai, the Egyptian military command requested that the UNEF be redeployed into the Gaza Strip. Secretary General U Thant responded that it was within Egypt's rights to ask for withdrawal of the force, but that it could not dictate its deployment. Since the Egyptian request for redeployment had already been made public, U Thant's response left Nasir little option but to either back down or request the complete withdrawal of UNEF. Given the low-key response made by Israel and the US to his original mobilization, and the great credit it gained him in the Arab world, Nasir saw little risk and many possible benefits to ordering the removal of UNEF.
He took this step on May 18. Egyptian troops moved up toward the border, and re-occupied Sharm al-Shaykh. Israel, which had mobilized only some reserve units in response to Nasir's original move, called up more reservists but took no other steps. The Israeli military up to this time believed Nasir's moves to be a bluff, but with the removal of UNEF began to re-evaluate their earlier judgments. However, the Israeli government was divided on how to react to this new provocation. On May 22, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol in a speech to the Knesset said that Israel had no intentions of attacking Syria or any other Arab country, and called for a relaxation of tensions -- a very conciliatory stance.
It was at this point that Nasir chose to up the ante considerably. On May 22, after the Eshkol speech, Egypt declared that it was closing the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. The relatively passive Israeli reaction to the previous Egyptian moves influenced Nasir to continue on his roll; the resounding support he was receiving from Arab governmental and public opinion made such a move seem advantageous. If Israel did not respond to what in the past it had identified as a vital national interest, then Nasir would have won a major psychological and political victory. If Israel did decide to go to war, Nasir still had Soviet support and plenty of time to further mobilize his forces. Closing the Strait was wildly popular among Arab publics, and began a process whereby even Nasir's staunchest Arab enemies, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, fell in behind his leadership in the confrontation with Israel.
The closing of the Strait of Tiran to Israeli shipping made the crisis into a matter of the highest importance to Israel, and led to serious strains within the Israeli government. Prime Minister Eshkol was publicly committed to finding a peaceful solution to the crisis. In the Israeli cabinet meeting of May 23, it was generally agreed that some action must be taken to reopen the Strait. While the military and some powerful Cabinet members were coming around to the need for Israeli military response, the cabinet as a whole opted to explore diplomatic avenues for defusing the crisis. Foreign Minister Abba Eban flew off to consult with the US, France and Britain. Eban's conversations were not encouraging, as each of the powers counseled restraint and the continuation of diplomatic efforts. Meanwhile, the USSR had publicly warned that it would strongly oppose any "aggression" in the Near East against the united Arab front.
The Israeli government, meeting on May 27, was evenly split on whether to take pre-emptive military action or continue the diplomatic effort. Moreover, members of the government were now openly challenging Eshkol's resolve, and some called for him to give the Defense portfolio, which he also held, over to Moshe Dayan. Dayan was a political opponent of Eshkol, and someone whose military background made him a more credible figure to those who saw Eshkol as weak and vacillating. The Israeli General Staff on the same day told Eshkol that every day that he waited to respond militarily would cost Israel 200 more casualties. Eshkol's speech to the country on May 28, in which he announced the government's intention to continue diplomatic efforts, was a public relations disaster, and increased the already feverish pitch of the Israeli polity. Two days later, Eshkol's own party repudiated his leadership by voting for a "wall-to-wall" coalition with Dayan as Defense Minister to meet the crisis.
With Israel apparently vacillating and the United States taking very modest steps, Nasir was emboldened to up the ante even further. This tendency was further strengthened by the Soviets, who informed Nasir on May 28 that they would neutralize any US involvement should Israel decide to go to war. On May 30 an agreement between Jordan and Egypt, placing the Jordanian forces under Egyptian command, was announced. Iraqi forces also on that day moved into Jordan to take up positions. Nasir now had behind him the combined Arab forces of Syria, Jordan and Egypt, some of the Iraqi forces, and a commitment by the Soviet Union to counter any US moves to come to Israel's aid. Israel seemed incapable of taking a decisive stand, and its governing elite seemed trapped in a paralyzing fragmentation. The US, through its emphasis on diplomatic action, also seemed unwilling to resort to force to counter Nasir's escalation. In this atmosphere, on May 29, Nasir told the Egyptian National Assembly that "the issue today is not...Aqaba or the Strait of Tiran, or UNEF. The issue is the rights of the people of the Palestine, the aggression against Palestine that took place in 1948...We want the rights of the people of Palestine-complete." From an important but limited strategic issue (Tiran), Nasir had publicly raised the stakes of the confrontation to the level of the existence of the state of Israel.
But Nasser clearly did not intend to initiate an armed conflict: Soviet urgings, his general belief in international reaction (Suez analogy), his belief based on military advice that the Egyptian army could absorb a first strike. He was very happy to pocket his gains in inter-Arab terms without fighting, and had agreed to send his vice-president to the US for talks on managing the crisis.
In Israel, the government crisis that Eshkol's policies had brought about was coming to a head. As I mentioned earlier, on June 1 his own party repudiated him, and a grand coalition with the hawkish Moshe Dayan as Defense Minister took office. The United States continued, rather unsuccessfully, to go through the motions of organizing an international naval force to challenge Nasir's blockade of the Straits of Tiran. Meanwhile, the Israeli government decided on a pre-emptive strike against its rapidly mobilizing Arab opponents. The US was beginning to give back-channel signals that it would understand if Israel felt it had to pre-empt, particularly from May 30, on. (Quandt book). On the morning of June 5, the Israeli air force struck in depth at Egypt, destroying most of the Egyptian air force on the ground. Quick tank and infantry thrusts at its major opponents, combined with dominance of the air, won for Israel a stunning victory. Israeli troops occupied all of Sinai and Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. On June 8, Jordan requested a cease-fire; on June 9, Egypt; on June 11, Syria. In 6 days Israel had vastly increased the territory under its control and inflicted a humiliating defeat on the combined Arab armies.
Let's consider, for the purposes of review and summary, the case of Nasir's decision to risk war in May-June 1967 from the standpoint of our analytical model -- the four factors which we have been looking at as central to understanding international politics in the Middle East. We can see that all four factors combined to lead to Nasir's historic miscalculation. Although the war clearly falls within the category of the Arab-Israeli factor, Nasir's purposes in escalating the crisis were as much to revive his inter-Arab position as to gain a decisive victory against Israel. It was his relations with Syria, not any particular incident on the Egyptian-Israeli front, that drew him into the crisis in the first place. His miscalculation of the risks involved resulted in part from an overcommitment of one superpower (USSR) and the passivity of the other (US). He felt his hand was strengthened by the rallying to his side of the other Arab states, even those which he had been confronting just a few weeks earlier. The fact that states such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia would support Nasir in this crisis is an indication that there are certain basic issues, among them the Arab-Israeli conflict, on which the Arab world can usually be brought together, despite the real differences and conflicts among the Arab states. Israeli domestic politics factors, and the specifics of US-Israeli relations at the time, gave Nasir the false impression that Israel would not move, or at least not move effectively and swiftly, to meet his challenge. The crisis demonstrated that, despite over 10 years of relative stability in the Arab-Israeli conflict, particularly on the Egyptian-Israeli front, the conflict still had its own dynamic which could quickly rivet the attentions and energies of all the states in the area. In order to understand the lead-up to the 1967 War, it is necessary to take into account all four factors in our matrix of Middle East analysis.
On to the post-war diplomacy, and the consequences of the war. Unlike the case of the Suez War, Israel was not forced to give up its territorial gains. The United States on June 9 announced that it would not press Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories until the Arab states were prepared to join in peace negotiations. Negotiations took place among the great powers at the UN to devise a formula under which such peace negotiations could begin. Out of this effort came, on November 22, 1967, the now famous UN Security Council Resolution 242. Given its subsequent importance, we should take a brief look at just what 242 said. The resolution talked of the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force, and the need for each state in the area to be able to live in security. Specifically, 242 called for Israeli withdrawal from "territories occupied in the recent conflict" and for "termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every state in the area..." In its ambiguity, the resolution was acceptable to all the relevant parties, as each read into it its own interpretation of how the conflict should end. Israel and the US saw it as calling for an exchange of land for formal peace; the Arab parties, backed by the Soviets, saw the possibility of negotiating limited "states of non-belligerency" with Israel in exchange for the return of the captured territories, without having to make formal peace with Israel. The big losers in 242 were the Palestinians, who were dealt with only in terms of a "just settlement of the refugee problem", not in terms of any Palestinian political rights. This formulation is the major reason why the PLO refused to publicly state its acceptance of 242 as the basis for Middle Eastern peace (always in context of all relevant UN resolutions on Middle East) up until the late 1980’s.
In any event, 242 was more of legal and future than practical, present and political significance in the Arab-Israeli dispute. The Arab states, meeting at Khartoum in August 1967, had agreed on a post-war diplomatic strategy that permitted the front-line states to engage in negotiations to recover their lost territories, as long as those negotiations involved no direct dealings with Israel, no formal peace with it, and no diplomatic recognition of it. Nasir had orchestrated the 3 no's strategy, and in exchange for Arab support of it and direct financial support of Egypt's rebuilding effort, he agreed to compose his differences with the conservative Arab states. No more propaganda assaults or attempts at destabilization, and an immediate Egyptian withdrawal from Yemen.
Nasir meanwhile had sought a Soviet commitment to support Egypt in a continued war effort to liberate the Arab territories. The Soviets refused to go that far, but did promise substantial help in rearming Egypt. Thus Nasir, just a few years after the 1967 defeat, felt secure enough to launch what came to be known as the War of Attrition -- air and artillery exchanges along the Suez Canal -- with Israel, in an effort to regain some of the political and military initiative he lost in 1967.
Let us conclude today with a brief discussion of how the 1967 war changed politics in the Middle East, placing those changes once again in our framework of the 4 important variables for understanding the international politics of the region. First and foremost, it changed the nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict. From being on the back-burner, so to speak, during the heyday of Nasirist Pan-Arabism, the Arab-Israeli factor was to become the dominating issue in the Middle East for the next decade. For the first time in the conflict, a bargaining situation came into being, built around the general formula of land for peace. Each of the front-line Arab states now had a particular state interest in dealing with Israel, balanced against the previously existing Arab responsibility of opposing the existence of the Jewish state. This bargaining situation did not lead immediately to formal peace agreements, but in the end formed the basis of the Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement and is the basis for all the various peace plans being discussed in the Middle East now.
On the inter-Arab level, the defeat spelled the effective end of Nasir's ability to dominate Arab politics. He personally had suffered a stunning setback; the charisma that he had developed going from victory to victory was now broken. His ideology, revolutionary Pan-Arabism and Arab unity, lost much of its appeal to many in the Middle East. The war was as much a defeat for Pan-Arabism on the ideological battlefield as it was a defeat for the Arab armies in Sinai, the Golan, and the West Bank. The resurgence of Islam as a motivating political ideology in the present day can be traced back, in part, to the search for an alternative approach to politics in the wake of the discrediting of Nasirist Pan-Arabism.
For the superpowers, the 1967 War had very important consequences. The United States early on in the fighting committed itself to a policy of supporting Israeli retention of the newly occupied territories until the Arab parties were willing to make peace. This position strengthened the developing US-Israeli strategic relationship. A logical and practical corollary of this policy was to keep Israel militarily strong enough to resist Arab and Soviet pressure to return the territories without peace treaties. Shortly after the war, the first really big American-Israeli arms deal was culminated, with the US selling 50 Phantom jet fighters to Israel, in response to Soviet rearming of the Arab states.
Of necessity Egypt and Syria began to rely more heavily on the Soviet Union to rearm them and to provide a strategic back-up in the face of the superior Israeli military force. The Soviets became more directly involved in both countries, gaining strategic bases (although they were never called that) and deploying large numbers of Soviet personnel (nearly 20,000 in Egypt by 1972). Both superpowers became more closely tied to their local allies. This raised the global stakes of the Arab-Israeli conflict. At the same time, this new type of great power involvement set the stage for more serious disagreements between the superpowers and their allies, as their interests were not completely identical. The USSR was hesitant to back Egypt fully in a direct conflict with Israel, because of its fears of confrontation with the US. Israeli and US views on the proper disposition of the occupied territories came to diverge, though this issue was kept submerged for the first few years by Arab unwillingness to negotiate.
In the domestic politics of the various states, the War had a major impact. For Egypt, it meant the end of the Nasirist era of political dominance, and a setback to development efforts, as the national economy was concentrated on war preparations. This was particularly acute, as the state-led development phase spearheaded by Nasir was beginning to run up against limits. In essence, there was nothing left to nationalize, and there was an acute shortage of capital in the country for investment. In Israel, the acquisition of the new territories brought with it the problem of reconciling the Jewishness of the state with the fact that a substantial minority of the people within its new borders were not Jewish. The dilemma of being a democracy and an occupying power has grown more acute with each passing year. On another level, the question of what to do with the territories, what an acceptable peace settlement would look like, has come to divide the Israeli polity, creating factions within political parties, and becoming a major issue separating the two prominent political alignments in the country.
The war also brought about the revival of an independent Palestinian nationalism, perhaps its most important result. This fact had a major impact not only on the nature of the Arab-Israeli dimension itself, but on inter-Arab politics and on the domestic politics of Jordan and Lebanon, where many of the refugees from both 1948 and 1967 ended up. In our next lecture we will discuss at length the phenomenon of the emergence of the PLO as an independent actor in the Middle East, and the effects of that emergence.