In a recent article, published by The Arab American News, Attorney Kassem Dakhlallah argues that Israel legitimately resorted to self-defense by preemptively striking the air forces of Egypt, Jordan and Syria in the June 1967 war. This is as an astoundingly flawed reading of the existing historical facts. 

Many folks continue to subscribe to the long debunked theory that Israel faced an “existential threat” to its survival in 1967 and that the Six-Day War was one of necessity, borne by the desires of Arabs to drive the Jews into the Mediterranean Sea. Specifically, pro-Israeli sympathizers point out that on May, 14 1967, Gamal Abdel-Nasser sent the first, of what were to be several thousand Egyptian soldiers, into the Sinai Peninsula. Two days later, Nasser ordered the evacuation of the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) from Egyptian soil. Finally, on the night of May 22-23, Nasser declared the Straits of Tiran closed to Israeli shipping (Gat, 608).  In his argument, Mr. Dakhallah adds to a cumulative list of actions, pointing to an impending armed attack; statements made by the Egyptian government at the time and the massing of Egyptian troops in the Sinai Peninsula. Many consider these collective actions as constituting a legitimate casus belli (i.e., a justification for initiating war).  

Thankfully, the declassification of historical evidence now proves that such a claim is flat out wrong. Although President Nasser did, in fact, mobilize about 80,000-90,000 troops stationed in the Sinai Peninsula, the evidence suggests that this was an entirely defensive, as opposed to offensive, troop deployment (Kurtulus, 233). The same was true for Jordan and Syria–neither country, as far as intelligence assessments at the time, could imply an impending attack against Israel. Moreover, as some have noted, in 1967 it would have been utterly unrealistic, if not considered shear madness, for Egypt to go to war with Israel. At that time, Nasser had thousands of troops in Yemen, fighting a proxy war in the North-South divide against the forces of Saudi Arabia, and that conflict had surely depleted considerable resources of the Egyptian military (Gat, 609). 

According to many sources, Nasser’s decision to send Egyptian forces into Sinai was a political one, intended to provide defensive deterrence against Israeli threats that had been issued against Syria and to score points with the Arab masses across the Middle East (Gat, 611). Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli chief of staff in 1967 and who would later become the Israeli Prime Minister, endorsed this view in full. In Rabin’s opinion, Nasser, by sending his troops into the Sinai, had merely wanted to improve his increasingly shaky position in the Arab World and prove, at little risk, that he and he alone, could challenge Israel (Gat, 611). 

Key insight into about whether Israel went to war in 1967 because it felt that its survival, as a nation, along with the physical survival of its people, were at stake, or for other, necessarily less ‘moral’ reasons, was given on the fifth anniversary of the Six-Day War. On June 5, 1972, the government of Israel took the unusual step of publishing the official text of the Israeli cabinet’s decision of 4 June 1967 to go to war. In it, General M. Peled, the quartermaster-general of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in 1967 claimed that Israel’s survival was not in question in May 1967 and that the Israeli cabinet, under Menachem Begin, “never heard from the General Staff that the Egyptian military threat was dangerous for Israel” (Geist, 631).  Moreover, it was an undisputed fact that Israel’s military command, without exception, assured the government of Israel, during the continuous deliberations of 20 May-4 June 1967, that if war broke out, Israel would undoubtedly inflict heavy damage on the Arabs and come out the superior party in the Middle East. 

In the spring of 1972, General Matetiyahu Peled, Chief of Logistical Command during the war and one of 12 members of Israel’s General Staff, addressed a political literary club in Tel Aviv. He said, “The thesis according to which the danger of genocide hung over us in June 1967, and according to which Israel was fighting for her very physical survival, was nothing but a bluff, which was born and bred after the war” (Geist). 

During the June 1967 Six-Day War, Bar-Lev served as the Deputy Chief of Staff in the IDF. Bar-Lev also agreed, “No, there was no danger of destruction on the eve of the Six-Day War and neither did we speak or think in these terms. This danger existed only in the War of Independence, and it became clear very quickly that, actually, even then this danger was not serious” (Geist, 641). Most damning of all is the admission by Prime Minister Begin in 1982: “In June 1967 we had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches did not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him” (Hammond, 2007). Rabin also would later tell the French Le Monde newspaper, in the year following the ’67 war, “I do not think Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to the Sinai would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive war. He knew it, and we knew it” (Hammond, 2007). All in all, it is quite clear that Israel could not legally conclude that an armed attack was imminent, which is what would merit the monstrous war it waged against the Arab World in 1967. 

Mr. Dakhallah’s application of the armed attack and self-defense provisions in the UN Charter to the Israeli aggression of 1967 is not only fundamentally misplaced, but flat out wrong. 

— Ahmed Chehab is an attorney licensed in the State of Michigan with a criminal defense practice.

Bibliography (sources)

Ersun N. Kurtulu, The Notion of a “Pre-Emptive War:” The Six Day War Revisited, Middle East Journal, Vol. 61, No. 2 (Spring, 2007), pp. 220-238

Benjamin Geist, Question of Survival Benjamin International Journal, Vol. 28, No. 4, The Arab States and Israel (Autumn, 1973)

Jeremy Hammond, Israel’s Attack on Egypt in ’67 was not ‘Preemptive,’ //palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=16105

Moshe Gat, Nasser and the Six Day War, 5 June 1967: A Premeditated Strategy or An Inexorable Drift to War? Israel Affairs, Aug. 6, 2006