By Gershon Hacohen
The 1967 Six Day War acted as a critical turning point for Israel, its adversaries, the Middle East, and the global perception of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Its after-effects continue to be acutely felt to this very day.
The war consolidated Israel’s security, and the idea that Israel can be destroyed by an Arab land invasion through organized armored formations was permanently discredited following her decisive victory over Egypt, Syria, and Jordan.
Israel no longer faced a classical existential threat.
In terms of the doctrine of the militaries involved, the Six Day War was a close echo of the ground warfare and air tactics used in the Second World War.
While the weapons were somewhat more advanced, and the jet revolution had upgraded fighter aircraft, the basic concepts of warfare as seen in World War Two remained very much in effect. The Israeli Air Force was modelled on the Royal Air Force, where Ezer Weizman, who built up the IAF ahead of the Six Day War, had flown during the Second World War. It took its inspiration from the air-to-air combat doctrines employed by the RAF in the Battle of Britain: Preventing enemy aircraft from achieving air superiority to devastate cities on the ground.
On land, both sides employed World War Two doctrines with their armored forces. The IDF relied on upgraded American-made Sherman and British Centurion tanks, U.S.-made Patton tanks, and M3 armored personnel carriers bought cheaply from the U.S.
The Syrians relied on Soviet T-34 tanks, and also had some German Panzer tanks, as well as Soviet T-55 and T-44 tanks in their inventory. The Egyptians relied on T-55s. These ground platforms are similar to those used in the Second World War.
Ground combat was fought in open areas, with defensive and offensive tactics. The resemblance to Second World War-era doctrine is no coincidence. In 1965, when Maj. Gen. Israel Tal, who was commander of the armored wartime formations, and Maj. Gen. Zvi Zamir, head of the Doctrine Department, saw that the Syrians and Egyptians were employing Soviet tank doctrines, they travelled to Germany to learn from former German military commanders who battled the Soviet army.
Had World War Two-era generals, such as George S. Patton or Erich Von Meinstein, arrived at the Six Day War battle arenas, they would have fully understood what was going on.
The failure of the Arab armies to engage with Israel in classic ground and air combat in 1967 led to a rapid learning of lessons on the Arab side, and a change of tactics by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. He understood that the Israeli victory in 1967 came from a highly temporary constellation of conditions that provided Israel with superiority. Israel had an advantage in the number of high school graduates it could call upon to operate machines – tanks and planes – giving it both a technical and conceptual edge. The Israeli field officers enjoyed a high degree of freedom, known as mission-oriented command and control, during battle, meaning that Egyptian and Syrian military high commands, with their centralized, slow-moving command chains, could not keep up with Israel.
This advantage was largely created by Moshe Dayan, who was defense minister during the war, and who was IDF Chief of Staff ten years previously, during the Sinai Campaign (Operation Kadesh), when he devised an operational concept based on creating momentum for Israel. This rested on granting field commanders broad decision-making freedom and freeing them from cumbersome chains of command.
Sadat understood that he had no chance of dealing head-on with Israel’s qualitative edge, and devised a plan for the 1973 Yom Kippur War that took away Israel’s advantages by denying the IDF the ability to move freely, in the air and on the ground, through the use of anti-tank and surface-to-air missiles.
This asymmetric approach created stagnation on the battlefield that worked against Israel, and went on to influence future adversaries of Israel to come up with ways to rob Israel’s of its built-in military advantages.
Putting the Palestinian cause in the spotlight
The Six Day War led to the Palestinian cause gaining a prominent place both on the regional and world stages.
In the eyes of the PLO, which was founded in 1964, the war validated the objective of terrorism. The late PLO chief Yasser Arafat viewed terrorism as a means to spark a regional war with Israel, and recruit Arab armies to ‘finish’ the job they started in 1948.
Even though Palestinian terrorism caused small-scale damage to Israel in the 1960s, it played a definitive role in escalating the Syrian front, creating a significant catalyst for the outbreak of the Six Day War.
Arafat was able to put his doctrine into practice soon enough, when the Fatah-faction of the PLO, based in Syria, began attacking Israel’s National Water Carrier, which drew water from the Sea of Galilee.
This occurred after Syria began diverting water away from the carrier from its side of the border.
The Syrians built their own water carrier in their territory and in Lebanon, diverting water from the natural springs that nourish the Jordan River, which feeds the Sea of Galilee.
Syria also began shelling Israeli construction work on the Israeli carrier in the Galilee from the Golan Heights. Israel retaliated against these actions with air strikes on Syrian targets.
In 1965, with Israel facing restrictions on the use of its French-made fighter jets for offensive missions, Maj. Gen. Tal took the decision to take advantage of Syria border incidents by responding in a different manner than air strikes.
He used Israeli tank fire to systematically destroy Syrian tractors that were diverting water away from Israel instead. This caused the Syrians to abandon their efforts to divert water from Israel and call a truce.
After Syria stopped its 'water campaign' and announced a ceasefire, it activated the PLO from Jordan and Lebanon (not directly from Syria), employing proxy warfare against Israel.
The situation continued to escalate in the run-up to the Six Day War. In April 1967, two months before the war, the Syrian military began shelling northern Israeli communities. IDF Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin received approval from Prime Minister Levi Eshkol to use aircraft if Israeli communities came under fire, and the IAF launched eighty sorties against Syria that day. Six Syrian MiG jets were shot down in air battles that raged between the Galilee and Damascus. Rabin was prepared to engage Syria in a broader conflict if necessary to eliminate PLO bases from its territory. But he did not believe that Egypt would get involved.
At this stage, the Soviet Union falsely told Syria that Israel was planning a large-scale military assault on it, and the Syrians activated a defense pact with Egypt, causing Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser to withdraw Egyptian forces from Yemen, and deploy them in the Sinai Peninsula, violating a demilitarization truce agreement.
The deterioration to war after these developments was rapid. And in line with Arafat’s vision, Palestinian terrorism was one of the sparks.
Following the Six Day War, the PLO became a far more significant element in the region, pioneering terrorism to get worldwide attention. Its raids from Jordan on Israel, its plane hijackings, and the Munich attacks all helped promote the Palestinian narrative as an underdog fighting the Israeli occupation.
And this narrative fit hand to glove with the new Western worldview that was taking hold in North America and Europe.
The creation of the Islamic religious fighter
A central after-shock of the Six Day War was the development of the Islamic religious fighter that replaced the collapsed Arab nationalist movements that were dominant until that time.
As Arab nationalism and Pan-Arabism fell by the historical roadside, Arab nationalist adversaries were, over the years, replaced with belief-based enemy entities such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran.
The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood ideologue, Sheikh Yussuf Qaradawi, saw the Zionist zeal of Israel’s soldiers, identified it as a religious ethos (despite the self-view of Israel’s leading secular Zionists), and concluded that secular Arab movements cannot defeat Israel.
At this time, pan-Arabism also began its dramatic collapse, which was made final by the Lebanese civil war and the sectarian Arab on Arab fighting that accompanied it. Islamism began to emerge as a successor movement.
The jihadist Palestinian ideologue Abdullah Azzam, born near Jenin, travelled to Afghanistan in the 1980s and called for jihadist fighters from across the Islamic world to join him, laying the foundation for Al Qaeda.
Al Qaeda grew out of Muslim Brotherhood ideology – the same ideology that led to the creation of Hamas, which benefits from being both a local movement and is connected to a global Islamist network.
Today, it is the Islamists who form the central adversary against Israel, and working with the Shi’ite Islamists of Iran, are planning to destroy Israel by collapsing its morale from within.
A turning point in Israeli society
The Six Day War had a profound effect on Israeli society. Between 1948 and 1967, Israelis under the leadership of the ruling Mapai party were led by a powerful Zionist redemptive vision. Following the war, young Israelis found themselves in a stagnant society that lacked new compelling narratives.
Volunteers from around the world came to Kibbutzim, which went from being symbols of Zionist pioneers redeeming land to symbols of hippies, free love, and the flower power generation.
There was no new leadership in Israel to tell a new story.
In this crisis of identity, young Israelis embraced the international peace movement that had taken hold of the West in the late 1960s as part of the cultural counter-revolution and the reaction to the Vietnam war.
Israelis adopted global universalist narratives, which themselves were developed by a new Western generation that grew up in the booming post-war years.
Following World War Two the older Western generation that fought in and managed to survive the global conflict came home exhausted and depleted of energy, spending what little resources in had left to rebuild a world ravaged by tens of millions of casualties, wrecked cities, destroyed economies, and untold mental damage. This generation clung to the ideal of normality in the post-war years.
The next generation that grew up in the stable West saw that conservative values and the idealization of the status quo had little to offer them. Young people began to look for their own life-affirming role in a world that had been frozen, and the counter-culture movement began as a result.
Israeli youths underwent a similar process. Those born in Israel after the 1948 War of Independence, children of Holocaust survivors or new immigrants who arrived in Israel with nothing, found themselves searching for new meaning in the late 1960s. They needed a new order, and this need opened them up to the Western peace movement, which deeply influenced Israeli society following the Six Day War.
Ultimately, all of these factors came together to turn the Six Day War into a moment that is more than just a transition phase in history. The war is a historical framework that provided new context to a range of national, regional, and global perceptions that continue to reverberate to this day.
Major General Gershon Hacohen served as Commander of the Northern Corps of the IDF. He previously held various positions, including Commander of the IDF Colleges, Head of Training & Doctrine Division in the General Staff, Reserve Division Commander of the Northern Command and Commander of the 7th Brigade of the IDF Armor Division. Read full bio here.