What the war left behind
Between 5 and 10 June 1967, Israel fought Egypt, Jordan and Syria and came out in control of territory it had not held before. The causes and course of the fighting are covered in the main article on the Six-Day War. This one is about the results: what was captured, what happened to the people living there, and how the Arab states and the wider world responded in the months that followed.
The fighting lasted six days, but the consequences are still part of the politics of the region, which is why the war is often described as a turning point.
The territories
Israel’s gains came from three different countries and from five areas, taken at different times.
- The Sinai Peninsula was taken from Egypt in the first days of fighting, as Israeli forces advanced to the east bank of the Suez Canal. The peninsula is large and sparsely populated, and it was later the site of a long Israeli military presence.
- The Gaza Strip, also taken from Egypt, was a small coastal area densely populated with Palestinian refugees from 1948 and their descendants, alongside the local population.
- The West Bank was taken from Jordan, which had held it since 1948 and had formally annexed it in 1950, an act few other countries recognised. Fighting there took place from 5 June, and Jordan accepted a ceasefire on 7 June.
- East Jerusalem, including the Old City with its Jewish, Christian and Muslim holy places, was captured on 7 June. It had been under Jordanian control since 1948.
- The Golan Heights were taken from Syria in the last stage of the war, on 9 and 10 June, after the other fronts had fallen quiet. The heights had overlooked Israeli villages in the Galilee.
The ceasefires followed one by one: Jordan on 7 June, Egypt on 8 June and Syria on 9 June, with the last fighting on the Golan ending on 10 June. The total area under Israeli control increased several times over, though the new territory was mostly desert in the Sinai.
People and displacement
The territories contained hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, most of them in the West Bank and Gaza. Many of them had already been displaced by the earlier war of 1948. During and after the 1967 fighting, a significant number left or were forced to leave, with estimates of those leaving the West Bank commonly running to several hundred thousand, many of them going east to Jordan. Some were refugees for the second time. Numbers differ between sources and the totals are disputed, and so is the balance between flight and expulsion. The Golan Heights also lost most of its Syrian population, with the exception of some communities in the north, and thousands of people were displaced.
Israel carried out a census in the West Bank soon afterwards, and those who were not counted lost the right to return. In the Palestinian communities that remained, daily life now took place under a military administration.
Jerusalem and early decisions
In late June 1967 Israel extended its law and municipal boundaries to include East Jerusalem and some surrounding land, a step it described as administrative integration. The United Nations General Assembly voted in July to call such measures invalid, and the international position on the status of the city remained contested. Israeli authorities also demolished a district near the Western Wall to clear a plaza, an act that displaced residents of a quarter of the Old City.
Within months, the first Israeli settlements in the occupied areas had begun, starting with Kfar Etzion in the West Bank, where a settlement had existed before 1948. The settlements became a lasting source of dispute. Much of the world considered them contrary to international law, while Israeli governments gave varying justifications. This issue continues to shape diplomacy today.
Diplomacy: land and peace
Soon after the war, Israeli leaders discussed what to do with the new territory. According to accounts of the cabinet’s discussions in June 1967, the government reportedly agreed to a proposal to offer a return of the Sinai and the Golan in exchange for peace treaties, though the proposal’s exact status and whether it was ever properly conveyed to Egypt and Syria are disputed by historians. No decision was made to return the West Bank or East Jerusalem on similar terms.
The wider diplomatic effort led in November to a United Nations resolution, which linked Israeli withdrawal from territories to the end of the state of war. That text, and its ambiguous wording, are the subject of the article on Resolution 242. In the longer run Israel and Egypt did make peace, in the treaty of 1979, and Israel returned the Sinai in stages. Israel annexed the Golan Heights in 1981, a step that most countries did not recognise, and in 2005 it removed its settlements and soldiers from Gaza.
The Khartoum summit
The Arab governments also had to decide how to respond. In the last days of August and the first day of September 1967 the Arab League held a summit in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. The mood was one of humiliation, and the leaders sought to present a united front. The Khartoum summit is best known for a statement of principles that was later summarised as the “three noes”: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel and no negotiations with it.
Historians read the summit in different ways. Some stress the refusal of any dealings. Others point out that the resolutions also allowed for “political” efforts to secure the withdrawal of Israeli forces, that the leaders left room for diplomacy and that Egypt and Jordan afterwards accepted the November resolution. The Arab states also looked to Moscow to rearm them, a matter that belongs to the story of Soviet Middle East policy after the war. The summit also settled some inter-Arab tensions, with wealthier states such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Libya agreeing to provide financial support to Egypt and Jordan, whose economies had been badly hit by the loss of territory, the closure of the Suez Canal and the end of Sinai oil revenues.
A lasting turning point
The war ended some things and began others. It left Israel stronger in military terms and raised its confidence, while at the same time creating the question of how to govern a large Palestinian population without political rights. It discredited the leaders of the Arab states most closely associated with the pan-Arab nationalism of the 1950s and 1960s, and it helped pave the way for the rise of Palestinian armed groups as independent actors in the following years. And it set the terms of a diplomatic debate, about land, security and recognition, that remains unsettled.