King Hussein of Jordan (left), President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and Egyptian Army Chief of Staff Abdel Hakim Amer in Cairo to sign Egyptian-Jordanian-Iraqi defense pact,30 May 1967. Wikicommons/Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Some rights reserved.June 5 was the anniversary of the outbreak of the 1967 war. It is too long a time to rely on memory and since there was no internet then, web accessible historical documents tend to be sparse and subject to a selection process impacted by current ‘narratives’. I would argue that to get a more realistic understanding of how that war came about, one has to consult contemporary documents, which requires thumbing through books, often in the dusty back corner of library stacks.
In my opinion the best short description of how the war came about was written by Malcolm Kerr in the third (and last) edition of his book, The Arab Cold War: Gamal Abd Al Nasir and his rivals 1958-1970.
“It was not hard to imagine in May of 1967, that the mounting tension in the Arab world would lead to some sort of violent outbreak. The conflict to which all signs seemed to point, however, was between Arab revolutionaries and conservatives. The old quarrel with Israel seemed irrelevant: the Arabs were preoccupied not with her but with one another. Even when the Israelis first appeared on the scene in the weeks before the June war, they were merely there as a football for the Arabs, kicked onto the field by the discontented Syrians, then back again by Nasir. But of course the Israelis took a rather different view of themselves. It became a case of the football kicking the players.
