A war with a Palestinian dimension
There was no separate Israeli-Palestinian war in 1967. The “violence” in the title refers to the June war itself, fought mainly between Israel and the armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria, and to the displacement and insecurity that followed it. For Palestinians, though, the war was a turning point as large as 1948. It put the whole of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip under Israeli control, and it began a military occupation that has shaped Palestinian life ever since.
Before the war
After the 1948 war, the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, came under Jordanian rule, and Jordan formally annexed it in 1950. The Gaza Strip was administered by Egypt. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had fled or been driven out in 1948 lived in these areas, many in camps. Others lived in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. In 1964 the Arab League sponsored the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization, or PLO, but in its early years it was closely tied to Arab governments. A separate guerrilla group, Fatah, founded in the late 1950s with Yasser Arafat among its leaders, began raids on Israel in 1965.
Military rule begins
When the fighting ended, Israel set up military government in the West Bank and Gaza. Orders issued by Israeli commanders became the main source of law, covering matters from movement and public assembly to land and property. A census was carried out in the summer of 1967, and Palestinians who were away from home during it, including many who had left during the fighting, were generally not counted and so lost their right to return.
Daily life changed in other ways. Over time many Palestinians found work in Israel, and the economy of the West Bank and Gaza became closely tied to Israel’s. But residents had no vote and little say over the military authorities that governed them.
Displacement and refugees
During and just after the war, a large number of people left the West Bank and Gaza, mostly heading east across the Jordan River into Jordan. Commonly cited estimates put the number at roughly 300,000, and a substantial share of these were Palestinian refugees from 1948 who were being displaced for a second time. Separately, tens of thousands of Syrians left the Golan Heights. Several villages in the Latrun area were emptied during the fighting and later demolished. Israel did not permit most of those who left to return, although a limited family reunification scheme existed later.
The UN Relief and Works Agency, which had supported the 1948 refugees since 1950, extended its work to meet new needs, and new camps appeared in Jordan. Resolution 242 called for a just settlement of the refugee problem, but it did not say what that would mean, and the question was left open.
East Jerusalem
Israeli forces took the Old City of Jerusalem on 7 June. In the following days, the area beside the Western Wall known as the Mughrabi Quarter was cleared of homes to create a plaza. In late June, Israel extended its law and administration to East Jerusalem and an area of the surrounding West Bank, in effect annexing it. The step was not accepted internationally, and the United Nations General Assembly voted in July 1967 to call on Israel to rescind it. Palestinian residents of the annexed area were given the status of permanent residents, not citizens, a distinction that continues to matter.
The first settlements
The first Israeli civilian settlements in the captured territories appeared in the months after the war. A well-known early example was Kfar Etzion, south of Jerusalem, resettled in September 1967 by families and descendants of people who had lived in the area before 1948. Others followed in the Jordan Valley and on the Golan Heights in 1967 and 1968. The settlement programme was debated within Israel from the start. Most governments outside Israel have treated it as contrary to international law, a view Israeli governments have rejected.
Fatah, the PLO and a new Palestinian politics
The Arab armies’ defeat discredited the idea that Palestinians could rely on Arab governments to recover their land. Guerrilla groups gained prestige. In March 1968, a clash at the Jordanian village of Karameh, in which Fatah fighters and the Jordanian army resisted an Israeli raid, became a symbol of Palestinian resolve. Over the next year Fatah took over the leadership of the PLO, and Arafat became its chairman in February 1969. Those events belong to 1968 and 1969, but their roots lie in the summer and autumn of 1967, when the Khartoum summit left the Palestinian cause formally supported by Arab states and in practice unresolved.
The Six-Day War did not create the Palestinian national movement, which was already decades old. It did change who led it, where it was based and what it demanded.