Terrorism, the War of Attrition and Yom Kippur, 1967–73
After 1967: A Stalemate Both Sides Tried to Break
The defeat of June 1967 left Egypt without Sinai, Jordan without the West Bank and Syria without the Golan, and the ‘three nos’ of Khartoum left no diplomatic route to recover them. Each side tried different tools to break the stalemate. Egypt under Nasser fought a low-intensity war along the Suez Canal. Palestinian groups switched to international terrorism to force the world to notice the cause. Sadat, after Nasser’s death in 1970, prepared a limited war designed to make negotiation politically possible. The years 1967–73 ended the post-1967 freeze and set up the diplomacy of the late 1970s.
The War of Attrition, 1969–70
From March 1969 to August 1970 Egypt fought a War of Attrition against Israeli forces along the eastern bank of the Suez Canal. Egyptian artillery hammered Israeli positions; Israeli aircraft struck deep inside Egypt; the Soviet Union sent in surface-to-air missile crews and pilots, drawing the superpowers very close to direct contact. About 1,400 Israeli and 5,000 Egyptian soldiers died over eighteen months. The war ended in a US-brokered ceasefire on 7 August 1970. It produced no territorial change but it taught Sadat, who succeeded Nasser in September 1970, that pure attrition would not move Israel; only a war that threatened to escalate to the superpowers could do that.
PFLP Hijackings: Dawson’s Field, September 1970
In early September 1970 the PFLP — the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — hijacked three civil airliners on the same day and a fourth three days later, flew three of them to a desert strip in Jordan they renamed Revolution Airport (the British called it Dawson’s Field) and held about 310 hostages. The PFLP’s aim was political theatre: to force Western governments to release Palestinian prisoners and to put the Palestinian cause on every front page in the world. Most hostages were released; the aircraft were blown up in front of news cameras. The hijackings became the most-watched televised act of political violence to date and gave international air travel a new permanent feature: passenger and luggage screening.
The PFLP hijackings of September 1970 took three civil airliners to Dawson’s Field in Jordan and held about 310 hostages. The challenge to King Hussein’s authority on his own soil triggered the Jordanian army’s assault on the PLO and the expulsion known as Black September.
Black September, 1970
By September 1970 the PLO and its associated factions had effectively built a state within a state in Jordan: armed checkpoints, refugee-camp courts, taxes on Palestinian businesses. King Hussein decided that the PFLP hijackings on Jordanian soil were a direct challenge he could no longer survive. On 17 September the Jordanian army moved against PLO bases in Amman and the camps. Fighting lasted ten days and killed several thousand Palestinians; Syria briefly intervened with tanks before withdrawing under Israeli pressure. By July 1971 the last PLO fighters had been pushed out of Jordan into Lebanon. Palestinians remembered September 1970 as Black September — and the militant group that took the same name carried it forward into the 1972 Munich Olympics.
Munich Olympics, September 1972
On 5 September 1972 eight members of the Black September Organisation entered the Israeli compound at the Munich Olympic Village, killed two Israeli athletes and took nine hostages. A botched West German rescue attempt at Fürstenfeldbruck airfield ended with all nine hostages, five of the eight attackers and one police officer dead. The attack was watched live by an estimated 900 million people. For the Palestinian movement it produced a publicity bonanza followed by an enormous political price: most Western opinion turned against terrorism as a tactic, and Israeli intelligence launched ‘Operation Wrath of God’, a long campaign of targeted killings against those it judged responsible. International attitudes towards the Palestinian cause hardened in the short term, even as the cause itself became impossible to ignore in any later peace process.
A common misconception is that hijackings and Munich strengthened Palestinian sympathy. A top-band answer analyses both effects at once: visibility went up, sympathy went down, and crucially Palestinian leaders lost their base in Jordan. The same logic applied at Munich: the cause became globally famous and globally toxic in the same moment. By 1974 Arafat himself was distancing the PLO from international terrorism — and his UN speech that November used the line ‘I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun’ precisely to manage that mixed legacy.
Sadat, the Soviets and Settlement Building
Anwar Sadat succeeded Nasser in September 1970 with a plan few in Cairo or Washington took seriously. In July 1972 he expelled around 20,000 Soviet military advisers, the move Henry Kissinger only later realised had cleared the way diplomatically for the United States to broker a postwar settlement in which Egypt could not be accused of being a Soviet client. Inside the Occupied Territories, Israeli policy was hardening. From 1967 Israeli governments authorised the first Jewish settlements in the West Bank (Kfar Etzion) and Golan; settlement-building became a normalised state policy under both Labor and Likud governments. The negotiating space was shrinking even as Sadat was preparing to force one open.
The Yom Kippur War, October 1973
On 6 October 1973, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, Egyptian forces crossed the Suez Canal under air-defence cover and Syrian forces stormed the Golan Heights. Israeli intelligence had detected the build-up but the Cabinet, like its allies in Washington, had assumed Sadat would not actually attack. The first ten days of the Yom Kippur War were the worst military shock Israel had experienced since 1948. Settlements on the Golan came under direct attack; Israeli reservists were rushed to the front; tank battles in the Sinai were the largest of any conflict since the Second World War. The United States organised a major airlift of weapons (Operation Nickel Grass) on 14 October. By 22 October Israel had pushed back, crossed to the west bank of the Canal and cut off the Egyptian Third Army in Sinai, and was within striking distance of Damascus.
Resolution 338 and the Settlements That Followed
A US-Soviet brush with confrontation forced both superpowers to push for a ceasefire. Resolution 338 on 22 October called for an immediate ceasefire and the implementation of Resolution 242 — reactivating the land for peace principle for the first time since Khartoum. The Egyptian Third Army was rescued from encirclement by US diplomatic pressure on Israel; Sadat had achieved his political objective — restoring Egyptian honour and forcing the United States to mediate — even though Egypt had been militarily outflanked by the war’s end. Inside the Occupied Territories, Israeli settlement-building accelerated under the new Likud government from 1977. The Yom Kippur War therefore set up two contradictory legacies that the next twenty years would have to reconcile: a renewed diplomatic track that would lead to Camp David in 1978, and an entrenched occupation that would lead to the First Intifada in 1987.
The Yom Kippur War began on 6 October 1973 with Egyptian and Syrian attacks on Sinai and the Golan; the ceasefire under UN Resolution 338 on 22 October reactivated the land for peace principle of Resolution 242 and made the diplomacy of the late 1970s possible.
Some students reduce the Yom Kippur War to who won militarily and conclude that Israel did. The political picture is more interesting and matters more. Sadat’s aim was never to recover Sinai by force; it was to shock the Israeli public out of its post-1967 confidence, restore Egyptian honour after the humiliation of 1967, and force the United States to take Egyptian negotiation seriously. All three were achieved by 22 October. The encirclement of the Egyptian Third Army in the war’s last days — lifted only by US pressure on Israel — gave Kissinger the leverage to begin shuttle diplomacy in November and produced the Sinai disengagement agreements of 1974 and 1975. The road to Camp David in 1978 began on the night of 6 October 1973.