Exposing the Lies of Ben Shapiro and The History of Palestine #3
EBP Files (3) This is Myth#2 where he attempts to distort historical events.
Events prior to 1939, have been covered here:
In this article, we’ll discuss the events from 1939 to the 1967’s 6-day War.
Myth#2: Land partitioning failure is Israel’s fault
Ben’s Statement — Claim#5: In 1939, the British in response again to Arab pressure restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine just as the Nazis began World War 2 and just before the Holocaust. Nonetheless, the Jews sided with the Brits, the Arabs sided with Hitler.
In 1939, the British White Paper did significantly restrict Jewish immigration to Palestine. However, it’s important to note that this policy existed before the outbreak of World War II and was largely motivated by the escalating violence between Jewish and Arab communities in Palestine, not solely Arab pressure.
The violence in 1929 (Western Wall riots) and 1930s was the main reason why Jewish immigration had to be restricted. Throughout the 1930s, violence continued in the form of riots, strikes, and attacks on both sides. The formation of militant groups like the Haganah (Jewish) and the Fada’iyun (Arab) contributed to the escalation.
The Broken promise of an independent Palestine and the looming threat of becoming a minority in their own land led to tension between the Jews and Palestinians. You can watch in-depth about this here.
The White Paper was issued in May 1939, several months before the official start of World War II in September. While the rise of Nazi Germany and antisemitism certainly played a role in Jewish aspirations for a homeland, it’s important to avoid simplifying the timeline and motivations behind the White Paper.
The claim paints a stark binary of Jews “siding with the Brits” and Arabs “siding with Hitler.” The Arab world was not monolithic in its response to WWII. While some individuals and groups collaborated with the Axis, others actively supported the Allied war effort. Additionally, various Arab communities and leaders voiced opposition to Nazi ideology and policies.
Ben’s Statement — Claim#6: In 1948, the British mandate ended and Israel declared its independence “David Ben Gurion, read the Proclamation of Independence to 13 other members of the Israel provisional National Council, Israel had taken its place among the nations of the world.”
What about the events of 1947?
In Gaza, as in the rest of Palestine, the year 1947 took on the character of a protracted calm before the storm. Jewish terrorism obliged British officials to barricade themselves into their positions, with the official in charge of Gaza scarcely leaving the fortified security of his headquarters.
On 4 February, the families of expatriates and ‘non-essential civilians’ were evacuated from Gaza, which aggravated the widespread feeling of instability and uncertainty. A month did not pass without the foundation of a new Jewish settlement in the region, and the Zionist activists no longer hesitated to attack any Bedouin tribesmen who entered their territory. Violence was also in the air in Gaza. On 25 March, there was an attack on a Jewish merchant who was saved by the intervention of the British police, and on 19 August a Jewish bus passenger was lynched. On 31 August the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) submitted a report in which it recommended the partition of Palestine into a Jewish entity and an Arab entity, possibly within a federal structure of the two states or alternatively in an economic union.
The Arab Higher Committee rejected both options, and leading figures in Gaza who dared to think about partition, now that it seemed inevitable, were soon cowed into silence. Mustafa Abdul Shafi, a medical doctor, who took the view that a negotiated partition would be preferable to an imposed solution, for example, was detained because of his ideas. In October 1947, he withdrew himself from the situation and emigrated to Egypt to work on an anti-cholera campaign.
Zionist activists who supported the partition plan began to act as if the Mandate had already come to an end, while the Arab population could hardly comprehend the full range of consequences that would follow the British departure.
As the local British administrator observed on 18 November 1947, ‘Gaza has begun to grasp that Britain is about to leave the country, but Beersheba is yet to be convinced.’ It was only a matter of days, however, before war would break out. (1)
And Boy did the War break out.
On 29 November 1947, the UN general assembly approved a resolution partitioning British-mandated Palestine into a Jewish state incorporating 56 percent of Palestine, and an Arab state incorporating the remaining 44 percent.
In the war that ensued after passage of the resolution, the newly born State of Israel expanded its borders to incorporate nearly 80 percent of Palestine. The only areas of Palestine not conquered comprised the West Bank, which the Kingdom of Jordan subsequently annexed, and the Gaza Strip, which came under Egypt’s administrative control.
Less than one percent of Palestine was set aside for an international zone (Corpus separatum) incorporating Jerusalem. (2)
Jewish population that amounted to only a third of the population of Palestine was to gain more than half its territory, including the most fertile lands in the coastal plain next to Lake Tiberias, as well as the Negev Desert. The resolution deemed the city of Jerusalem a ‘corpus separatum’, a zone not forming part of either state to be administered directly by the United Nations on the basis of a special legal status. (3)
In December 1947, a three-day general strike in protest against the partition plan was observed throughout the region, and in one month the British authorities registered the deaths of twenty-four Jews and seven Arabs, including the mukhtar of the village of Huj and his brother, both of whom were murdered for ‘collaboration with the Jews’ during a visit to Gaza City.
The Zionist activists based in isolated settlements in the Negev, who refused to contemplate the possibility of any kind of retreat, paid the highest price for these clashes. It was against this background that the British government announced its intention to leave Palestine on 15 May 1948. The National Committee, established in Gaza on the same pattern as in other towns in Palestine, comprised fifty-two members who represented all shades of local opinion. However the committee failed to install competent management.
By this time security in the region depended on a variety of militias, some of which were under the National Committee’s direction and some which were not, while the British now limited themselves to patrolling the zone and made no further attempt to involve themselves in its administration.
In this situation, the Islamist fighters and their Egyptian allies had the advantage. By February 1948, there were still less than 100 volunteers from Egypt, but in the following month Cairo secretly sent officers to take charge of the activists that had been infiltrated.
On 12 March 1948, a large Zionist convoy was attacked at Faluja by the village militias, with the loss of thirty-seven of their men as against seven Zionists. The Haganah carried out a punitive operation on the same day, dynamiting a dozen buildings in Faluja, including the Town Hall and the post office. From 19 to 22 March 1948, Hassan al-Banna came in person to encourage the Muslim Brothers in the Gaza region, taking possession of the former British camp at Nuseirat for the Brotherhood’s operational base.
During the month of April, Palestinian and Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood guerrillas began a campaign of attrition against the Jewish settlements in Gaza and in the Negev. (4)
The Deir Yassin massacre took place on April 9, 1948, when around 130 fighters from the Zionist paramilitary groups Irgun and Lehi killed at least 107 Palestinian Arab villagers, including women and children, in Deir Yassin, a village of roughly 600 people near Jerusalem, despite having earlier agreed to a peace pact. The massacre occurred while Jewish militia sought to relieve the blockade of Jerusalem during the civil war that preceded the end of British rule in Palestine. The atrocities committed by the Zionists were inhumane, to say the least. You can read the testimonies here.
Turning Point: In April 1948, the massacre of Palestinian villagers in Deir Yassin by Zionist forces became a pivotal moment. The brutality of the event sent shockwaves through the Arab community, solidifying fears of ethnic cleansing and further fueling the conflict.
This was an intentional act and not a result of any riots. To prove my point, here's Plan Dalet was a Zionist military plan executed in the civil war phase of the 1948 Palestine war for the conquest of territory in Mandatory Palestine in preparation for the establishment of a Jewish state. The Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary force, implemented Plan Dalet in March 1948. This plan aimed to conquer strategic territories and expel Arab populations from areas designated for the Jewish state. The plan was requested by the Jewish Agency leader and later first prime minister of Israel David Ben-Gurion, and developed by the Haganah and finalized on March 10, 1948.
The Deir Yassin Massacre was a part of the Operation Nachshon. According to the Israeli Yehoshafat Harkabi, “Plan Dalet” called for the conquest of Arab towns and villages inside and along the borders of the area allocated to the proposed Jewish State pursuant to the UN Partition Plan. In case of resistance, the Arabs of conquered villages were to be expelled outside the borders of the Jewish state. If no resistance was met, the Arab residents could stay put, under military rule. Operation Nachshon was carried out by the Haganah’s Givati and what was later to be known as the Harel Brigade of the Palmach.
In the early hours of 14 April, Mahmoud Labib, the Brotherhood’s head of operations in Palestine, headed a fruitless attack against Kfar Darom. On 11 May, at dawn, a further attack was launched against the same kibbutz, this time led by an Egyptian officer. The Islamists suffered heavy losses, but still failed to occupy Kfar Darom. However, they partly compensated for this defeat with a successful attack on a Jewish convoy.
On 13 May, Zionist commandos of the Givati Brigade took the villages of Batani al-Sharq and Bureir to the north of the Gaza district. There were less than 400 Arab fighters in the Gaza region facing the impressive efficiency of these organised units, and their dispersal throughout the region hampered their ability to organise. According to Muhammad al-Azaar, in May 1948 there were only 365 Arab fighters in Gaza: eighty were Muslim Brothers, and 209 belonged to local nationalist militias, including 109 for ‘Holy Jihad’ and 100 for the ‘Army of Salvation’, who were supplemented by seventy-six volunteers of various nationalities, including some Palestinians from elsewhere sent by the Arab Higher Committee.
On Friday, 14 May, in a ceremony that began at four in the afternoon, local time, before the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath, in anticipation of the formal termination of the Mandate at midnight, the Zionist leader David Ben Gurion proclaimed the existence of the State of Israel, which was recognised in the same evening by the United States.
The armies of the Arab states, which had thus far refrained from acting, launched what Israel calls the ‘War of Independence’, which is often also referred to as the ‘First Arab–Israeli War’.
Arab Forces from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq marched to Palestine. This was the first time the Arab League was formed to protect Arab Palestine.
The rivalry between the dynasties of Transjordan’s King Abdullah and King Farouk of Egypt exacerbated this strategic contradiction. Farouk had ordered his prime minister and a reluctant government to become involved in the war. At the same time, King Abdullah was engaged in secret negotiations with the Zionists. (4)
The armies of the Arab League launched an attack and in just a few weeks, Israeli forces were surrounded facing a possible defeat.
On 11 June 1948, a four-week truce was declared under the auspices of the United Nations. (5)
This ceasefire worked in favor of Israel. Ignoring the UN arms Embargo, Israel imported heavy armaments from Czechoslovakia and used the time to reorganize. And as soon as the ceasefire was over, Israel launched a counteroffensive, occupying two strategic Arab towns which were allocated to Arab Palestine by the UN 70,000 Palestinians who lived there were forced to flee. The Israelis closed in and continued occupying the areas allocated to the allocation.
On 15 October 1948, the second truce in what was referred to by the two sides respectively as either the ‘War of Independence’ or the ‘Palestine War’ was broken by Israel, which opened an anti-Egyptian front, launching what came to be known as Operation Yoav (was an Israeli military operation carried out from 15–22 October 1948 in the Negev Desert, during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Its goal was to drive a wedge between the Egyptian forces along the coast and the Beersheba–Hebron–Jerusalem road, and ultimately to conquer the whole Negev).
Forces commanded by Yigal Allon, commander of the southern front, pushed back the enemy lines and forced the Egyptian troops to fall back towards Gaza after fierce fighting. Artillery and aerial bombardments terrified the population in the most exposed Palestinian localities, while Gaza (on 17 October) and Majdal (on 21 October) were shelled by the Israeli naval forces.
Transjordan, meanwhile, remained aloof. Glubb Pasha, the commander-in-chief of the Arab Legion, wrote to his commanding officer on the ground that ‘if the Jews want to fight a private war with the Egyptians and the government in Gaza, we don’t want to be involved. The Gyppies and the Gaza government are almost as hostile to us as are the Jews.’ By now the Israeli forces had free access to the Negev and had laid siege to Beersheba, which surrendered on 21 October. (6)
The Arab states who were led by Egypt responded by forming a Gaza-based Palestinian government but this was more of a strategic movement by King Faruk to prevent King Abdullah’s ambitions to expand his borders. By the end of the year, the Egyptians were defeated in Gaza. Desperate to preserve its territories, Egypt turned to Britain for help and an armistice was signed with Israel and the other Arab states followed suit. (In 1949, Israel signed separate armistices with Egypt on 24 February, Lebanon on 23 March, Transjordan on 3 April, and Syria on 20 July).
Before telling me that “Palestinians are to be blamed for what happened to them because they rejected the UN Partition Plan of 1947” or “Palestinians left their homes voluntarily or as a result of a call by their leaders”
This allegation ignores the colonialist nature of the Zionist movement. It would have been unlikely that the Algerians, for instance, would have accepted the partition of Algeria by the French settlers — and such a refusal would not be deemed unreasonable or irrational. What is morally clear is that such an objection, in the case of any other Arab country, should not have justified the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians as a “punishment” for rejecting a UN peace plan devised without any consultation with them.
Similarly absurd is the myth that the Palestinians left their homes voluntarily or as a result of a call by their leaders and those of the neighboring Arab states, supposedly to make way for the invading Arab armies that would come to liberate Palestine. There was no such call — this myth was invented by the Israeli foreign minister in the early 1950s. Later Israeli historians changed the mythology and claimed that the Palestinians left, or fled, because of the war. But the truth of the matter is that half of those who became refugees in 1948 had already been expelled before the war commenced, on May 15, 1948.
The Arab states sent only a relatively small contingent of troops to Palestine, and they were smaller in size and far less equipped and trained than the Jewish forces. Moreover, and highly significant, is the fact that these troops were sent into Palestine after May 15, 1948, when Israel had already been declared a state, as a response to an ethnic cleansing operation that the Zionist forces had begun in February 1948. (7)
Wikipedia on the number of soldiers : Israel: 29,677 (initially)
117,500 (finally)[Note 1]Arab Liberation Army: Total:
13,000 (initial)
51,100 (minimum)
63,500 (maximum)
What did the first Arab-Israeli war bring?
An Egyptian military presence in the Gaza strip and Jordan was gifted the West Bank as a token for it’s loyalty to Britain and the Zionists. By April 1949, more than 500 villages and 10 cities were captured by Israelis. Over 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes and over 13,000 Palestinians and 6,373 Israelis were killed.
Today, Israel occupies the whole of Historical Palestine. Israelis continue to build illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian territories. Palestinians in the West Bank live under military law which subjects them to curfews, checkpoints, and arbitrary arrests. Palestinians in Gaza live under a blockade imposed by Israel.
Ben’s Statement — Claim#7: In 1964, with the Arabs still in full control of the Gaza Strip and West Bank, the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded calling for the destruction of Israel. Here is a contemporaneous British report ‘I am the first chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization.’ “One of the most extreme anti-Israeli politicians in the Arab world Ahmed Al Shukar the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization as the spokesman for 1 million Palestine refugees, he’s found the flames of hatred for Israel with unflagging energy.”
In October 1959 Yasser Arafat secretly founded the Palestinian Liberation Movement (harakat al-tahrir al filastini) in Kuwait under the name of its reversed acronym, ‘Fatah’. The word fatah also refers to the Islamic idea of ‘conquest’ or ‘victory’, in a conscious reference to the victory over Mecca by the Prophet Muhammad in AD 630 and to Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem in 1187. Fatah had soon attracted a few hundred supporters among the Palestinian diaspora, and a month after its launch acquired a public voice with the launch of its publication, Filastînuna (Our Palestine), which appeared in Beirut.
Egypt was now less inclined than ever to relax its control because it had become embroiled in an ‘Arab Cold War’ with Saudi Arabia, to use the expression coined by the American political scientist Malcolm Kerr. The two countries had become the Middle East proxies of the Soviet Union and the United States respectively, confronting each other in Yemen and levelling mutual accusations against each other of betraying the Palestinian cause. In this confrontation, which took many forms, Nasser won a symbolic victory in 1963 when he recruited to his side the Saudi ambassador to the United Nations, Ahmed Shuqayri, a naturalised Saudi citizen of Palestinian origin. (8)
Syria’s increasing involvement with Palestine, and its support for the position of Yasser Arafat and Fatah, had again left Egypt on the defensive. Nasser was aware that he could not fight on every front, and he thus sought to be reconciled with King Hussein of Jordan. It was in this context that he convened the first Arab Summit under the auspices of the Arab League in January 1964. The various heads of state agreed that Shuqayri should be put in charge of the Palestinian question.
A relentless schemer, Shuqayri soon went well beyond his formal mandate. In May 1964, under the aegis of King Hussein, he convened a ‘Palestinian National Council’ (PNC), which ended with the official inauguration of the ‘Palestine Liberation Organisation’ (PLO).
The PLO was to be run by a fifteen-member executive committee, headed by Shuqayri, among whose members were five personalities from Gaza, including Haydar Abdel Shafi and Farouk al-Husseini.
The second Arab Summit, which was held in Alexandria in September 1964, endorsed the measures taken by Shuqayri’s PNC, including the imminent formation of a Palestine Liberation Army (PLA), whose leader, it was announced, would be the Palestinian commander of the emir of Kuwait’s personal guard, Wajih al-Madani, to be assisted by Qusai al-Abadla, a judge born in Khan Yunis who was president of Gaza’s Arbitration Tribunal but who was also a graduate of the military academy in Cairo. (9)
- The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO; Arabic: منظمة التحرير الفلسطينية Munaẓẓamat at-Taḥrīr al-Filasṭīniyyah) is a Palestinian nationalist coalition that is internationally recognized as the official representative of the Palestinian people.[14][15] Founded in 1964, it initially sought to establish an Arab state over the entire territory of the former Mandatory Palestine, advocating the elimination of the State of Israel. However, in 1993, the PLO recognized Israeli sovereignty with the Oslo I Accord, and now only seeks Arab statehood in the Palestinian territories (the West Bank and the Gaza Strip) that have been militarily occupied by Israel since the 1967 Arab–Israeli War.
- Control of Territories: While it’s true that Arab authorities administered the Gaza Strip and West Bank in 1964, their control was limited. Egypt exercised significant influence in Gaza, while Jordan managed the West Bank. Both Israel and its Arab neighbors engaged in military actions within these territories, contributing to the instability.
Ben’s Statement — Claim#8: In 1967, the Arab League announced the 3 NOs — No peace, no recognition, and no negotiations. With all of Israel’s enemies mobilizing against it, Israel launched a preemptive strike on the Egyptian airforce inaugurating the 1967’s 6-day war. This ended with Israel gaining miraculously, the Sinai Desert, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, Judea, and Samaria, now known as the West Bank as well as the entirety of Jerusalem.
Misleading Generalizations:
- The 3 No’s were issued after the war, not before the 6-day war.
- Why was this treaty (Khartoum Resolution) issued and what did it mean?
The 1967 Arab League summit was held on August 29 in Khartoum as the fourth Arab League Summit in the aftermath of the Arab defeat by Israel in the Six-Day War, and is famous for its Khartoum Resolution known as “The Three No’s”; No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel.
Avi Shlaim has argued that Arab spokesmen interpreted the Khartoum declarations to mean “no formal peace treaty, but not a rejection of peace; no direct negotiations, but not a refusal to talk through third parties; and no de jure recognition of Israel, but acceptance of its existence as a state” (emphasis in original). Shlaim states that the conference marked a turning point in Arab-Israeli relations by noting that Nasser urged Hussein to seek a “comprehensive settlement” with Israel.
Shlaim acknowledges that none of that was known in Israel at the time, whose leaders took the “Three Nos” at face value. Fred Khouri argued that “the Khartoum conference cleared the way for the Arab moderates to seek a political solution and to offer, in exchange for their conquered lands, important concessions short of actually recognizing Israel and negotiating formal peace treaties with her.”
- “Miraculously”: Framing Israel’s military victory as “miraculous” minimizes the complex factors at play. Israel had strategic advantages in terms of planning, intelligence, and airpower, which contributed to its success.
- “All of Israel’s enemies”: While there was significant tension with Arab countries, not all Arab states were equally engaged in the conflict against Israel.
Morris documents that until the 1955 Israeli raid on Gaza, the “overriding concern” of Egypt “in its relations with Israel was to avoid sparking IDF attacks”; “Egypt generally sought tranquility along its border with Israel.”
However, “from some point in 1954,” IDF chief of staff Moshe Dayan “wanted war, and periodically, he hoped that a given retaliatory strike would embarrass or provoke the Arab state attacked into itself retaliating, giving Israel cause to escalate the shooting until war resulted.”
The “policy of trapping Nasser into war was hammered out between [David] Ben-Gurion and Dayan.” The predicate of their indirect strategy of provocation was that “because Israel could not aff ord to be branded an aggressor, war would have to be reached by a process of gradual escalation, to be achieved through periodic, large-scale Israeli retaliatory attacks in response to Egyptian infractions of the armistice.”
When “Egypt refused to fall into the successive traps set by Dayan,” Israel colluded with Great Britain and France to attack Egypt outright.
After the cessation of battlefield hostilities in 1949, Egypt kept a tight rein on the activity of Fedayeen (Palestinian guerrillas) in Gaza. But in early 1955, Israeli leaders plotted to lure Egypt into war in order to topple President Gamal Abdel Nasser. They launched a bloody cross-border raid into Gaza killing 40 Egyptian soldiers. The Gaza raid proved a near-perfect provocation, as armed border clashes escalated.
In October 1956, Israel (in collusion with Great Britain and France) invaded the Egyptian Sinai and occupied Gaza, which it had long coveted.
The prominent Israeli historian Benny Morris described what happened next: Many Fedayeen and an estimated 4,000 Egyptian and Palestinian regulars were trapped in the Strip, identified, and rounded up by the IDF [Israel Defense Forces], GSS [General Security Service], and police. Dozens of these Fedayeen appear to have been summarily executed, without trial. Some were probably killed during two massacres by the IDF troops soon aft er the occupation of the Strip. On 3 November, the day Khan Yunis was conquered, IDF troops shot dead hundreds of Palestinian refugees and local inhabitants in the town. One UN report speaks of “some 135 local residents” and “140 refugees” killed as IDF troops moved through the town and its refugee camp “searching for people in possession of arms.” In Rafah, which fell to the IDF on 1–2 November, Israeli troops killed between forty-eight and one hundred refugees and several local residents, and wounded another sixty-one during a massive screening operation on 12 November, in which they sought to identify former Egyptian and Palestinian soldiers and Fedayeen hiding among the local population. . . . Another sixty-six Palestinians, probably Fedayeen, were executed in a number of other incidents during screening operations in the Gaza Strip between 2 and 20 November. . . .The United Nations estimated that, all told, Israeli troops killed between 447 and 550 Arab civilians in the fi rst three weeks of the occupation of the Strip.
In March 1957, Israel was forced to withdraw from Gaza after US president Dwight Eisenhower exerted heavy diplomatic pressure and threatened economic sanctions. By the operation’s end, more than a thousand Gazans had been killed. “The human cost of the four-month Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip was alarmingly high,” a historian recently observed. “If the figures for those wounded, imprisoned and tortured are added to the number who lost their lives, it would seem that one inhabitant in 100 had been physically harmed by the violence of the invaders.”
The etiology of Gaza’s current afflictions traces back to the Israeli conquest. In the course of the 1967 war, Israel reoccupied the Gaza Strip (along with the West Bank) and has remained the occupying power ever since. As Morris narrated the story, “the overwhelming majority of West Bank and Gaza Arabs from the fi rst hated the occupation”; “Israel intended to stay . . . and its rule would not be overthrown or ended through civil disobedience and civil resistance, which were easily crushed.
The only real option was armed struggle”; “like all occupations, Israel’s was founded on brute force, repression and fear, collaboration and treachery, beatings and torture chambers, and daily intimidation, humiliation, and manipulation”; the occupation “was always a brutal and mortifying experience for the occupied.” (10)
Here’s what’s on Wikipedia (Israel’s intentions to occupy the West Bank and Gaza Strip were always a part of it’s plan):
The peace accord at the end of the 1948 war had established demilitarized zones (DMZs) between Israel and Syria. 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. Moshe Dayan, the Israeli defense minister at the time of the Six Day War, recounted in a 1976 interview that Israeli policy in the Demilitarized Zone between 1949 and 1967 was “to seize some territory and hold it until the enemy despairs and gives it to us”, thus changing “the lines of the ceasefire accord with military actions that were less than a war”.
Operation Focus (Hebrew: מבצע מוקד, Mivtza Moked) was the opening airstrike by Israel at the start of the Six-Day War in 1967. It is sometimes referred to as the “Sinai Air Strike”. At 07:45 on 5 June 1967, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) under Maj. Gen. Mordechai Hod launched a massive airstrike that destroyed the majority of the Egyptian Air Force on the ground. Following Syrian and Jordanian attacks in retaliation, the Israeli Air Force proceeded to bomb air bases in those countries. By noon, the Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian Air Forces, totaling about 450 aircraft, were destroyed. It was also very successful in disabling 18 airfields in Egypt, hindering Egyptian air operations for the duration of the war, and remains one of the most successful air attack campaigns in military history.
Dayan related further that in the process Israel had provoked more than 80% of the border clashes with Syria in the lead-up to its April 7, 1967 invasion of Syria. In defense of the Israeli actions historian Michael Oren said that “[t]here is an element of truth to Dayan’s claim”, but that Israeli actions were justified, as “Israel regarded the de-militarized zones in the north as part of their sovereign territory”. Gluska qualified this view by pointing out that such Israeli sovereignty over all of the DMZ “was not sanctioned by the UN”. In fact, the Israeli view had been rejected in 1951 by both Britain and the UN Security Council (in Resolution 93). In January 1967 Israel reverted to claiming sovereignty over the DMZ.
Publicly, Syria claimed that the escalating conflict was the result of Israel attempting to increase tension in order to justify a large-scale military operation against Syria, and to expand its occupation of the Demilitarized Zone by dispossessing the remaining Arab farmers.
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. They felt that Israel was striving to drag all of the Arab countries into a war. After the Samu raid, these apprehensions became the deciding factor in Jordan’s decision to participate in the war. King Hussein was convinced Israel would try to occupy the West Bank whether Jordan went to war, or not.
You can watch a short explanation of the war here, and a more detailed one here.
What did the 6-day War Bring?
Israel captured and occupied the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank (incl. East Jerusalem) from Jordan, and the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. Israel had gained administration of 1 million Palestinians in West Bank and Gaza. Israeli settlements in the West Bank were built with more settlements in Egypt’s Sinai and Syria’s Golan Heights were also under construction. Ultimately, the 6-day war paved the way for an over-zealous Israeli leadership and to this day, border issues remain unresolved.
Lastly, I recommend my readers to read this article by Mounir Mouawad.
(1): Gaza — A History by Jean Pierre Filiu (The Allies Against the Axis)
(2): Gaza — An inquest into its martyrdom by Norman Finkelstein (Operation Cast Lead).
(3): Gaza — A History by Jean Pierre Filiu (1947–67: The Generation of Mourning: The Catastrophe)
(4): Gaza — A History by Jean Pierre Filiu (1947–67: The Generation of Mourning: The Catastrophe — From One War to Another)
(5): Gaza — A History by Jean Pierre Filiu (1947–67: The Generation of Mourning: The Catastrophe — Egypt’s Intervention)
(6): Gaza — A History by Jean Pierre Filiu (1947–67: The Generation of Mourning: The Catastrophe — A Sea of Humanity)
(7): Gaza in Crises by Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappe (The Ten Mythologies of Israel, Myth no:3)
(8): Gaza — A History by Jean Pierre Filiu (1947–67: The Generation of Mourning: The Catastrophe — The Competition for Palestine)
(9): Gaza — A History by Jean Pierre Filiu (1947–67: The Generation of Mourning: The Catastrophe — The First PLO)
(10): Gaza — An inquest into its martyrdom by Norman Finkelstein (Operation Cast Lead, Self Defense)
