Road to the Six Day War, 1964–67
A Region Calmer on the Surface
By 1964 the Sinai front had been quiet for eight years. UNEF still patrolled the Egypt-Israel border under the agreement that ended the Suez Crisis. Israel had used the years of relative peace to build its army, develop its agriculture and divert water from the Sea of Galilee through the National Water Carrier. Yet the underlying disputes had not been resolved: no Arab state recognised Israel; the Palestinian refugees remained in camps; the Straits of Tiran were technically open but politically contested. By 1967 a chain of small decisions, miscalculations and pieces of bad intelligence would turn three years of fragile calm into the most decisive war of the conflict.
The Cairo Conference and the Founding of the PLO, 1964
In January 1964 the first Cairo Conference brought thirteen Arab heads of state together. Two decisions shaped the years that followed. First, the conference agreed a coordinated response to Israel’s National Water Carrier — a plan, eventually unworkable, to divert the headwaters of the Jordan before they reached Israel. Second, Nasser sponsored the founding of the PLO — the Palestine Liberation Organisation — as an umbrella body intended to keep the Palestinian cause under Cairo’s control. From the start the PLO had a rival: Fatah, founded by Yasser Arafat in 1959, which believed that only armed Palestinian action would force the issue and was unwilling to be an Egyptian instrument.
The 1964 Cairo Conference founded the PLO under Egyptian sponsorship to control the Palestinian cause. Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, founded in 1959, refused to wait for Arab state action and pushed independent guerrilla raids on Israel from 1965, sponsored increasingly by Syria.
Fatah Raids and the Samu Reprisal, November 1966
From 1965 Fatah raids into Israel grew in number. Most originated in Syria, whose new Ba’athist government treated confrontation with Israel as core ideology, but the fighters often crossed into Israel through Jordan because the Jordanian-Israeli border was easier to cross unobserved. After a Fatah landmine killed three Israeli soldiers in November 1966, the IDF retaliated — not against Syria, but against the West Bank village of Samu. Israeli troops destroyed about 125 houses and killed sixteen Jordanian soldiers and three civilians. King Hussein of Jordan was humiliated; Palestinians on the West Bank rioted because Hussein had failed to defend them; Egypt was accused by other Arab states of hiding behind UNEF rather than confronting Israel. The raid against Hussein had pushed all three Arab front-line states closer to a confrontation Egypt had been trying to avoid.
The Air Battle of 7 April 1967
In April 1967 a long-running argument over Israel-Syria water rights along the Sea of Galilee turned into open shooting. On 7 April Israeli jets engaged Syrian aircraft over the Golan Heights and shot down six Syrian MiGs, two of them in dogfights over Damascus itself. The episode was a humiliation for Syria and a warning that Israel could strike inside Syrian airspace at will. Cairo radio still broadcast confidence; in private, Egyptian generals were uneasy about being dragged into a war their army was not yet ready to fight.
Soviet Misinformation, May 1967
In mid-May the Soviet Union told Egypt that Israel was massing eleven to thirteen brigades on the Syrian border ready to invade. The information was wrong — Israeli officials offered to take Egyptian or Soviet observers to the border to prove there were no troops there — but Nasser had to act on it. He could not let pan-Arab opinion accuse him of abandoning Syria. On 14 May 1967 Egyptian troops moved into Sinai. On 18 May Nasser asked the UN to remove UNEF; Secretary-General U Thant agreed, and the buffer that had kept the peace since 1956 disappeared within hours.
Many narratives reduce the road to 1967 to Nasser’s aggression. The fuller picture is that Cairo was responding to Soviet intelligence it could not verify, to pressure from Damascus to back the Ba’athists after the air battle of 7 April, and to a domestic audience that expected him to lead the Arab world against Israel. He removed UNEF and closed the Straits of Tiran in May 1967 partly to bluff Israel into accepting Egyptian deterrence; he did not expect Israel to strike first. Israeli decision-makers, for their part, treated his moves as a casus belli even though there is no documentary evidence that Egypt planned to invade. Cold War alignments — Soviet support for Egypt and Syria, US tilt towards Israel — turned a regional spiral into a flashpoint with global stakes.
Closure of the Straits of Tiran, 22 May 1967
On 22 May Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping — cutting off the Israeli port of Eilat from oil deliveries. Israel had said publicly since 1957 that closure of the Straits would be a casus belli — an act justifying war. Diplomats in Washington and London tried to assemble an international flotilla to reopen the Straits, but the effort got no further than meetings. From 22 May to 5 June, Israel had two weeks in which to decide whether to strike first.
A consequence question on the closure of the Straits needs two distinct consequences pitched at different time horizons. The strongest pair is (i) immediate — the Israeli cabinet treated closure as a casus belli, accelerating the decision to launch a pre-emptive strike within fourteen days; (ii) longer-term — closure escalated Arab confidence and pulled Jordan into the 30 May mutual defence pact, which made the West Bank a battlefield in June and produced the second wave of Palestinian refugees. Weaker answers offer two near-identical ‘Israel wanted to fight’ points; the question asks for different effects, not the same effect twice.
Mutual Defence Pacts and the View from Washington and Moscow
On 30 May King Hussein of Jordan flew to Cairo and signed an Egyptian-Jordanian mutual defence pact, accepting Egyptian command of Jordanian forces in any war. Iraq joined a few days later. To Israeli planners the encirclement was now physical: Egyptian forces in Sinai, Syrian guns on the Golan, Jordanian artillery within range of Tel Aviv. The Johnson administration in Washington warned Israel privately not to strike first; the Soviet Union sent similar warnings to Egypt to avoid being the aggressor. Both superpowers, distracted by Vietnam and Berlin, hoped a diplomatic solution could be found in time. Neither succeeded. By the night of 4 June Israel’s cabinet had voted for war; the strike came at dawn on 5 June.
Four decisions made war almost inevitable: Egyptian troops moved into Sinai on 14 May 1967; UNEF was withdrawn at Egypt’s request on 18 May; the Straits of Tiran were closed on 22 May; and on 30 May Jordan signed a mutual defence pact placing its army under Egyptian command.