Still today, 48 years on, there are relatively few people who know the whole truth about how Israel set the stage for war in June 1967 to grab more Arab land. The single most decisive event that made war inevitable happened on Thursday 1 June, four days before Israel launched its attacks. What was it?On that day in Israel there was a coup organized and executed by the IDF’s top generals and other security chiefs without a shot being fired. They required Prime Minister Levi Eshkol to form a unity government and bring into it as minister of defence Israel’s one-eyed war lord, General Moshe Dayan. Up this point Eshkol had been both prime minister and minister of defence; and for two years Dayan had been in the political wilderness, devoting his time to archaeology. Effectively Eshkol was stripped of his command of Israel’s war machine.
The problem with Eshkol for Israel’s military and other security establishments was that he didn’t want Israel to go to war because he knew the assertions of its hawks that the Arabs were about to attack were propaganda nonsense (more on this in a moment). He also understood and accepted the advice given to his foreign minister Abba Eban by French President Charles de Gaulle. In a conversation with Eban in Paris de Gaulle said Israel should not go to war because, if it did, it would create Palestinian nationalism which would never go away. (In my opinion that was the best advice anybody ever gave Israel).
But even more to the point was that Eshkol believed Israel should not take more Arab land and be prepared to make peace on the basis of the Zionist state’s borders as they were.
And that was the main reason why the hawks, military and political, wanted Dayan as minister of defence (for which read attack) in a unity government. They knew he would take Israel to war to complete Zionism’s unfinished business of 1948 – grabbing more Arab land including and especially the West Bank.
Another important aspect of the whole truth about how the stage was set for war in June 1967 is that Israel set a trap for Egypt’s President Nasser. And the key to understanding here is the fact that that on 4 November 1966 Egypt and Syria signed a Defence Agreement, in the hope on Nasser’s part that it would enable him to prevent war.
The problem from then on for Nasser was that if Israel did attack Syria he would have to make a choice – either to be seen to be going to the defence of an Arab state under attack or to do nothing and lose face and his credibility as the leader of the (so-called) revolutionary Arab world.
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