Throughout May 1967 the strongman leader of Egypt, President Gamal Abdel Nasser began to take more and more aggressive action in the Middle East. He expelled the United Nations Emergency Force from the Sinai and took over their positions, removing the peace line between Egypt and Israel.
On May 22nd he closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, an act that Israel had long signaled would be a casus belli. Then on May 30th Egypt and Jordan signed a “defense” pact. Units of the Iraqi army began to move to positions in Jordan and were bolstered by units from Egypt.
In response Israel formed a government of national unity and on June 5th, 1967 they launched all out airstrikes against the airforces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Flying over the Mediterranean in the North and the Red Sea in the South the 188 operational Israeli combat aircraft hit Egypt first. With the largest airforce in the region the Egyptians 420 Russian made combat aircraft posed the greatest threat to Israel.
In a well worked out plan the Israelis bombed and strafed aircraft on the ground and shredded the runways with specially designed bombs to prevent surviving aircraft from taking off. Israel had practiced how to turn around their returning aircraft at speed and were able to fly 4 sorties in a single day. So effective was their use of the airforce that the Egyptians later claimed they must have had help from Western powers. By the end of the day 338 Egyptian aircraft were destroyed. Their air defense was destroyed.
Later in the day Israel took out the air defenses of both Syria and Lebanon to give them total dominance of the skies. Consequently the war lasted only 6 days. Any effective defense mounted by the Arab armies was simply smashed from above. By the end of a week of fighting Israel held the Sinai, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and occupied most of Jerusalem, famously taking the Western Wall of the ancient Temple Mount, the moment captured by David Rubinger in the photo above.
The Israelis and the West call it the Six Day War or the Third Arab-Israeli War. The Arabs call it النكسة (an-naksah) or “The Setback”.
Jerusalem 1967; by Yehuda Amichai
On Yom Kippur in 1967, the Year of Forgetting, I put on
my dark holiday clothes and walked to the Old City of Jerusalem.
For a long time I stood in front of an Arab’s hole-in-the-wall shop,
not far from the Damascus Gate, a shop with
buttons and zippers and spools of thread
in every color and snaps and buckles.
A rare light and many colors, like an open Ark.
I told him in my heart that my father too
had a shop like this, with thread and buttons.
I explained to him in my heart about all the decades
and the causes and the events, why I am now here
and my father’s shop was burned there and he is buried here.
When I finished, it was time for the Closing of the Gates prayer.
He too lowered the shutters and locked the gate
and I returned, with all the worshippers, home.
In Jerusalem; by Mahmoud Darwish (trans. Fady Joudah)
In Jerusalem, and I mean within the ancient walls,
I walk from one epoch to another without a memory
to guide me. The prophets over there are sharing
the history of the holy … ascending to heaven
and returning less discouraged and melancholy, because love
and peace are holy and are coming to town.
I was walking down a slope and thinking to myself: How
do the narrators disagree over what light said about a stone?
Is it from a dimly lit stone that wars flare up?
I walk in my sleep. I stare in my sleep. I see
no one behind me. I see no one ahead of me.
All this light is for me. I walk. I become lighter. I fly
then I become another. Transfigured. Words
sprout like grass from Isaiah’s messenger
mouth: “If you don’t believe you won’t be safe.”
I walk as if I were another. And my wound a white
biblical rose. And my hands like two doves
on the cross hovering and carrying the earth.
I don’t walk, I fly, I become another,
transfigured. No place and no time. So who am I?
I am no I in ascension’s presence. But I
think to myself: Alone, the prophet Muhammad
spoke classical Arabic. “And then what?”
Then what? A woman soldier shouted:
Is that you again? Didn’t I kill you?
I said: You killed me … and I forgot, like you, to die.
-=o0o=-
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