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Intel - History
Six Day War

"In God we trust.
All others we monitor."

• For nearly two years, the Israeli public was daily reminded of the brutal genocide of the Nazis upon the Jewish people.
• The trial refocused the Israeli population on the threat on annihilation.

• None of this is to deny that Egypt's decision to close the Straits of Tiran was a legitimate cause of concern to Israel. But it was not a harbinger of an imminent Egyptian attack, and that point was recognized by American policy makers and many Israeli leaders.  (The Israel Lobby, p. 85)

• The Six-Day War had a profound effect on the religious camp in Israel and gave rise to "religious Zionism." The conquest of the West Bank, which as Judea and Samaria had formed part of the biblical Jewish kingdom, convinced many Orthodox rabbis and teachers that they were living in a messianic era and that salvation was at hand. The war represented the Divine Hand at work and was "the beginning of redemption." Almost immediately, these rabbis began to sanctify the land of their ancestors and to make it an object of religious passion. They made the sanctity of the land a central tenet of religious Zionism. (The Iron Wall, p. 549)

• By August 1967, a group called the "Movement for the Whole Land of Israel" had sprung up, advocating the acquisition and absorption of those areas supposedly promised by God to the Jewish people of the Bible. With a membership composed of religious intellectuals and former members of Zionist terror groups, the movement put pressure on successive Israeli governments to colonise the West Bank and Gaza Strip. (Absence of Peace, p. 9)

• East Jerusalem was annexed from the Palestinian Arabs living there, the Golan Heights were taken from Syria, the Sinai including Gaza from Egypt, and the West Bank of the Jordan River was taken from Jordan

• The taproot of the present conflict between Israel and Syria involves the Golan Heights. Israel took that property from Syria in the 1967 war and drove eighty thousand Syrians from their homes. Israeli law was extended over the Golan Heights in 1981, in what was essentially a de facto annexation. There are now about eighteen thousand Jewish settlers living there in thirty-two settlements and one city. (The Israel Lobby, p. 267)

• As for peace, they believed that it could be attained only from a position of strength - by demonstrating to the Arabs that Israel could not be defeated. Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, had made the case for the creation of such an iron wall against Arab rejection forty years earlier. In this context the annexation of Jerusalem was seen as an act of peace insofar as it demonstrated to the Arabs the unflinching resolve and the power of the Jewish state. (The Iron Wall, p. 251)

• The international community had interpreted Israel's actions from 1967 as the coercion and, eventually, eviction of a native people by foreign invaders. By reviving historical and mythical memories of the original Jewish settlement two thousand years earlier, groups like Gush Emunim dismissed such charges, and encouraged Israelis to feel proud of their territorial achievements. The new understanding of the territories' importance was based on biblical injunction and a romantic vision of ancient Jewish history: the West Bank was not being occupied by Israel, but rather "reclaimed" or even "redeemed." (Absence of Peace, pp. 9-10)