There was no Israel-Hezbollah conflict in 1967
Hezbollah did not exist in 1967. The Lebanese Shia movement took shape in the early 1980s, after Israel invaded Lebanon in June 1982, and it announced itself publicly in 1985. The conflict in 1967 on Israel’s northern side was with Syria, not with any Lebanese group, and Lebanon itself took no part in the war. The rest of this article describes what actually happened on that northern border and how Lebanon’s later troubles connect to it.
The Syrian front before the war
In the months before June 1967, the Israeli-Syrian border was one of the most unstable in the region. Israeli farmers worked land near the frontier that Syria disputed, and Syrian positions on the Golan Heights, a plateau that overlooks the Galilee, regularly fired on Israeli villages below. Israel answered with artillery and air strikes. In April 1967 an air clash ended with several Syrian aircraft shot down.
Syria was governed at the time by a radical wing of the Ba’ath party, and Hafez al-Assad, then defence minister, would later become president in 1970. Syrian support for Palestinian guerrilla raids was a recurring cause of friction. When Egypt moved troops into Sinai in May, Syria was already allied with it, and the northern front was counted on by Israeli planners as a likely second theatre.
Why the Golan was left until last
When the war began on 5 June, Israel’s attention was on Egypt. Syria’s air force was hit on the first day, and Syrian forces on the Golan mainly kept to long-range shelling of Israeli settlements rather than launching an invasion. For several days Israel did not attack the plateau. Only after the Egyptian and Jordanian fronts had largely been decided did Israeli leaders, after some debate, decide to go ahead.
The Golan battle of 9 and 10 June
On 9 June, Israeli aircraft struck Syrian fortifications and Israeli ground forces climbed the steep slopes in the north of the plateau. The Syrian positions were well prepared, and the fighting was hard in the first hours. The Israeli advance nevertheless broke through, and Syrian units began withdrawing. News of the collapse of the front, and some confused Syrian announcements about the fall of Quneitra, added to the disorder.
On 10 June, Israeli forces reached Quneitra, the main town of the plateau, and a ceasefire took effect that evening. Israel was left holding the captured territories on the Golan, a strip of the Heights roughly 1,200 square kilometres in area according to commonly cited figures. A large number of Syrian civilians, usually estimated in the tens of thousands, left or were displaced from the area. The plateau has remained at the centre of Israeli-Syrian disputes ever since, and the withdrawal language of Resolution 242, adopted in November 1967, applied to it as to the other territories taken in the war.
Lebanon stays out
Lebanon, to the west, did not join the fighting. Its small army was not a match for Israel’s, its political system balanced Christian, Sunni, Shia and Druze communities in a way that made foreign wars risky, and since the 1949 armistice its border with Israel had mostly been quiet. The government under President Charles Helou followed what is often described as Lebanese neutrality: sympathy with the Arab cause, but no military role in it.
The result was that, unlike Egypt, Jordan and Syria, Lebanon lost no territory in 1967. The Six-Day War was therefore not a Lebanese war, and nothing in the events of June 1967 involved a Shia militia.
How the later Lebanon story grew from 1967
The consequences of the war nevertheless reached Lebanon. After 1967, Palestinian guerrilla groups looked for bases in the states bordering Israel. Their presence in southern Lebanon grew, especially after fighters were forced out of Jordan in 1970 and 1971, and the Palestinian refugee camps there became centres of armed organisation. Disputes over their activity divided Lebanese politics. A 1969 agreement tried to regulate their presence, but tensions kept growing, and a civil war broke out in 1975.
Israel launched a limited invasion of southern Lebanon in 1978 and a much larger one in 1982. The Israeli presence that followed, together with support from Iran, helped bring about the formation of Hezbollah among Lebanon’s Shia community. In other words, the line from 1967 to Hezbollah is indirect: the war reshaped the region, the Palestinian presence changed Lebanon, and Lebanon’s war produced new movements. Hezbollah belongs to that later story, not to the year of the Six-Day War.