# Six-Day War The war of **5–10 June 1967** in which Israel, opening with a pre-emptive strike that destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground, defeated Egypt, Jordan and [[Syria]] and took the **Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip** from Egypt, the **West Bank and East Jerusalem** from Jordan, and the **Golan Heights** from Syria — roughly tripling the territory under its control and bringing well over a million Palestinians under military government. Nothing in the region's politics since has escaped it. Every subsequent negotiation — the [[Camp David Accords]], the [[Oslo Accords]], the Arab Peace Initiative, the [[Abraham Accords]] — has been about the disposition of what was taken in those six days. ## What it created **In Israel, a territorial constituency.** The religious-nationalist settlement movement, organised as Gush Emunim from 1974, read the outcome as redemptive rather than merely military and began establishing communities in the West Bank. Successive governments of both parties funded, secured and legalised them. The settler population of the West Bank excluding East Jerusalem **passed half a million in early 2023**. **In the United States, a theological constituency.** For American dispensationalists, the capture of the Old City of Jerusalem was prophecy visibly fulfilled on television, and it converted a fringe interpretive tradition into a mass political movement within a decade. Hal Lindsey's *The Late Great Planet Earth* (1970) sold in the millions on the strength of it. That story is filed at [[Christian Zionism]] and [[Dispensationalism]]. **In international law, UN Security Council Resolution 242** (November 1967), whose formula — withdrawal "from territories occupied in the recent conflict" in exchange for peace and recognition — is the origin of the land-for-peace framework and of a fifty-year argument over a missing definite article. > [!important] ⭐ The finding: one event created two constituencies in two countries that want different things from the same land > The Israeli settlement movement wants the territory as an **end**. The American dispensationalist movement wants it as a **precondition** for an eschatological sequence in which most Jews do not survive. Both have known this the whole time and have cooperated for fifty years anyway. **An alliance can be entirely stable while resting on a shared mechanism rather than a shared purpose** — this is the same structure the vault documents at [[Ethiopian History Hub]] in the Garvey–Cox collaboration, and it is a recurring pattern worth naming wherever a coalition looks inexplicable. ## The counter-case Sinai was returned. Begin — a maximalist from [[Revisionist Zionism]] — gave back the largest of the 1967 acquisitions at the [[Camp David Accords]] in exchange for a peace with Egypt that has held for nearly fifty years. Whatever the territory's status is, "non-negotiable" is not an accurate description of the historical record. ## See Also - [[Israeli History Hub]] · [[Zionism]] · [[Revisionist Zionism]] · [[Likud]] - [[Christian Zionism]] · [[Dispensationalism]] · [[Christian Eschatology]] - [[Camp David Accords]] · [[Oslo Accords]] · [[Abraham Accords]] · [[Gaza War]] - [[Israel]] · [[Egypt]] · [[Palestine Liberation Organization]] · [[Lebanese History Hub]]