Origins of the Six-Day War

Arab nationalists, led by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, continued to be hostile to Israel's existence and made grave threats against its Jewish population.

According to political scientist Zeev Maoz, most scholarly studies now attribute the crisis to a complicated process of unwanted escalation, which all sides wanted to prevent, but for which all were ultimately responsible.

[29][30] However, as recalled by UN military forces officers such as Odd Bull and Carl von Horn, Israelis gradually took over portions of the zone, evicting Arab villagers and demolishing their homes; these actions incurred protests from the UN Security Council.

According to Moshe Shemesh, a historian and former senior intelligence officer in the IDF, Jordan's military and civilian leaders estimated that Israel's main objective was conquest of the West Bank.

[45] The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) attacked the diversion works in Syria in March, May, and August 1965, perpetuating a prolonged chain of border violence that linked directly to the events leading to war.

Syria, aligned with the Soviet bloc, began sponsoring guerrilla raids on Israel in the early 1960s as part of its "people's war of liberation", designed to deflect domestic opposition to the Ba'ath Party.

[47] Speaking to the UN General Assembly in September 1960, Nasser had stated that "The only solution to Palestine is that matters should return to the condition prevailing before the error was committed — i.e., the annulment of Israel's existence."

King Hussein, the Hashemite ruler, was in a bind: he did not want to appear as cooperating with Israel in light of the delicate relationship of his government with the majority Palestinian population in his kingdom, and his success in preventing such raids was only partial.

[65] The whole battle was short: the Israeli forces crossed the ceasefire line at 6:00 a.m. and returned by 10:00 a.m. Hussein felt betrayed by the operation which shattered the fragile trust between Israel and Jordan.

Israel's attack increases the pressure on him to counterattack not only from the more radical Arab governments and from the Palestinians in Jordan but also from the Army, which is his main source of support and may now press for a chance to recoup its Sunday losses...

[83] In January 1967 the Israeli Minister of Health, Yisrael Barzilai, warned that Egypt's commitment to Syria under their mutual defense pact "could escalate the situation and nobody foresee how it will end".

The resulting tit-for-tat escalated, leading to tanks, heavy mortars, machine guns, and artillery[dubious – discuss] being used in various sections along the 47 mile (76 km) border in what was described as "a dispute over cultivation rights in the demilitarized zone south-east of Lake Tiberias."

This, combined with Israeli threats to topple the Syrian regime and the Soviet urging that the Syrian-Egyptian defence agreement had thereby been triggered, left Nasser feeling as though he had no option other than to display solidarity with Syria.

[124] The Permanent Representative of Egypt then informed U Thant that the Egyptian government had decided to terminate UNEF's presence in the Sinai and the Gaza Strip, and requested steps that would withdraw the force as soon as possible.

[150]Nasser publicly denied that Egypt would strike first and spoke of a negotiated peace if Israel allowed all Palestinian refugees the right of return, and of a possible compromise over the Straits of Tiran.

[165] Abdel Magid Farid,[166] suggests that Nasser did actually consider the first strike option until early on 27 May, when he was hauled out of bed at mid night by the Soviet Union ambassador (his only source of arms and spare parts) and warned not to precipitate a confrontation.

Harold Wilson's proposal of an international maritime force to quell the crisis was adopted by President Johnson, but received little support, with only Britain and the Netherlands offering to contribute ships.

On May 30, Nasser responded to Johnson's request of 11 days earlier and agreed to send his Vice President, Zakkariya Muhieddin, to Washington on June 7 to explore a diplomatic settlement in "precisely the opening the White House had sought".

According to Mutawi, Hussein was caught on the horns of a galling dilemma: allow Jordan to be dragged into war and face the brunt of the Israeli response, or remain neutral and risk full-scale insurrection among his own people.

[172] On June 3, days before the war, Egypt flew to Amman two battalions of commandos tasked with infiltrating Israel's borders and engaging in attacks and bombings so as to draw IDF into a Jordanian front and ease the pressure on the Egyptians.

[citation needed] In May 1967, Hafez al-Assad, then Syria's Defense Minister declared: "Our forces are now entirely ready not only to repulse the aggression, but to initiate the act of liberation itself, and to explode the Zionist presence in the Arab homeland.

[189] The Soviet leadership considered the armed forces of Egypt, Syria, Algeria and Iraq as superior to the IDF in number of troops, tanks, planes, ships and amount of armaments.

There is no difference in civil law between murdering a man by slow strangulation or killing him by a shot in the head... From the moment at which the blockade was posed, active hostilities had commenced, and Israel owed Egypt nothing of her Charter rights.

[196] Writing in 2002, American National Public Radio journalist Mike Shuster expressed a view that was prevalent in Israel before the war that the country "was surrounded by Arab states dedicated to its eradication.

When the 1967 crisis broke they felt certain of their ability to win a 'decisive, quick and elegant' victory, as one of their number, General Haim Bar Lev, put it, and pressed the government to start the war as soon as possible".

[203] The USSR had come to similar conclusions: "... it is clear that the Soviet assessment from mid-May 1967 that Israel was about to strike at Syria was correct and well founded, and was not merely based on the public threats issued by Eshkol, Rabin and Yariv.

[105] The U.S. president at the time, Lyndon Johnson, said that action by Egypt was the leading cause of the war:[205] If a single act of folly was more responsible for this explosion than any other, it was the arbitrary and dangerous announced decision that the Straits of Tiran would be closed.

[6] According to Ferris, Nasser's decisions to ask for the removal of UNEF from Sinai and to block the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping, are commonly accepted as the point where war became inevitable.

[5] According to Shlaim & Louis, in the end of May 1967, Nasser claimed in a public speech to have been aware of the Straits of Tiran closure implications: "Taking over Sharm El Sheikh meant confrontation with Israel.

[206] General Abdal Muhsin Murtaji, the commander of the Sinai front in 1967, wrote that the failed union with Syria and the debacle in Yemen forced Nasser to find an outlet for his failures, which he found through the 1967 war.