Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East: Summary & Key Insights

The months before June 1967 were charged with uncertainty and escalating hostility. The fragile calm along Israel’s borders had been punctuated by Palestinian guerrilla raids, particularly those launched from Syria and Jordan. Egypt’s leader, Nasser, had become the emblem of Arab unity and defiance; his speeches electrified the Arab world, promising the defeat of Israel and the restoration of Arab dignity after the humiliation of 1948 and the Suez Crisis. Yet beneath the rhetoric lay internal fragility. Arab armies were strong in numbers but weak in coordination and strategic vision.

In Israel, the mood oscillated between confidence in its military and anxiety over its isolation. The memory of Auschwitz lingered as a psychological backdrop to national defense policy, mixing existential fear with a fierce determination to survive regardless of the odds. Border clashes in the spring of 1967 turned deadly. When Syria and Israel exchanged artillery fire in April, the Soviet Union warned Damascus of Israeli invasion plans—a misreport that rippled disastrously. Nasser, responding to this false intelligence, mobilized Egyptian forces into Sinai, expelling the United Nations Emergency Force that had guarded the frontier since 1956.

In that fateful move, deterrence transformed into provocation. As Egyptian troops advanced toward the border, the prospect of war became inevitable. Yet Nasser’s calculus was largely political: he sought prestige, not confrontation. Unfortunately, the mechanism of international politics failed him—each gesture of power was interpreted by Israel as an existential threat, while each Israeli mobilization fed Arab fears of aggression. By late May, the stage was set. Armies were poised, borders tense, diplomacy spinning.

Through archival cables and interviews, I show how mutual misperception dominated those weeks. Leaders on both sides gambled their nations’ futures on assumptions about the other’s intentions. The prelude to war was not a march toward conquest, but toward misunderstanding—the perfect storm that would explode on June 5.

Before the first bombs fell, diplomacy had already failed. In Cairo, Nasser played a dangerous game of brinkmanship, relying on Soviet support while insisting he did not desire war. In Tel Aviv, Israeli leaders wrestled with contradictory intelligence reports and growing public anxiety. Washington and Moscow, meanwhile, observed the mounting crisis through opposing prisms of Cold War rivalry. The United States sought restraint—President Lyndon Johnson feared any military strike would plunge the region into superpower confrontation—while the Soviet Union, deepening its ties with Egypt and Syria, provided ambiguous encouragement.

The so-called Tiran Straits crisis was the diplomatic point of no return. When Nasser closed the Straits to Israeli shipping, he effectively strangled Israel’s southern commerce and symbolically encircled the nation. Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol convened stormy cabinet meetings, weighing an agonizing decision: whether to strike preemptively or continue to wait for Western intervention. The perception of isolation and imminent annihilation pushed Israel toward unilateral action. Diplomacy, despite frantic attempts by the Americans to dissuade both sides, became irrelevant.

In recounting these exchanges, I show that the Six-Day War was not the result of a single political choice but of cascading misjudgments. The Arab leaders overstated their unity; Israel underestimated their weaknesses yet overestimated their intent; the superpowers misread the local motives altogether. Letters, envoys, and secret meetings painted an image of hope, but time was running out. Every nation involved was trapped by its own narrative. For the Arabs, resistance itself became the measure of honor; for Israel, survival required preemption. June 5 approached as an hour predestined by diplomacy’s collapse.