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Israel and Syria
The border tension between Israel and Syria played an important role in motivating Nasser's actions in May 1967, which in turn led to Israel's invasion of Egypt. The tension consisted of two elements; one being the use of Syria as a base by Palestinian militants seeking return and retribution for their expulsion from Israel, and the second being conflicts regarding the Demilitarized border zone with Syria. The peace accord at the end of the 1948 war had established demilitarized zones (DMZs) between Israel and Syria However, as recalled by UN military forces officers such as Odd Bull and Carl Von Horn, Israelis gradually took over portions of the zone, evicting Arab villagers and demolishing their homes; these actions incurring protests from the UN Security Council. Moshe Dayan, the Israeli defense minister at the time of the Six Day War, recounted in a 1976 interview that Israeli policy in the Demilitarized Zone between 1949 and 1967 was "to seize some territory and hold it until the enemy despairs and gives it to us", thus changing "the lines of the ceasefire accord with military actions that were less than a war". Dayan related further that in the process Israel had provoked more than 80% of the border clashes with Syria in the lead-up to its April 7, 1967 invasion of Syria. In defense of the Israeli actions historian Michael Oren said that "[t]here is an element of truth to Dayan's claim", but that Israeli actions were justified, as "Israel regarded the de-militarized zones in the north as part of their sovereign territory". Gluska qualified this view by pointing out that such Israeli sovereignty over all of the DMZ "was not sanctioned by the UN". The Israeli view had been rejected in 1951 by both Britain and the UN Security council (in Resolution 93). In January 1967 Israel reverted to claiming sovereignty over the DMZ.

Overall, Oren's account of the period shows Israel as the innocent victim of Syrian provocation and aggression. From the Golan Heights, Syrians had shelled Israeli settlements and other targets, such as fishermen in the Sea of Galilee, drawing punitive responsive strikes from Israel. In addition, following the 1966 coup in Damascus, attacks and acts of sabotage by Syrian-based Palestinian guerrillas (Fatah) had increased, although Jordan was still the main source. For two and a half years from the start of the attacks up until the Israeli invasion of Syria on April 7, 1967, the Fatah incursions launched from Syrian territory had resulted in three Israeli deaths, all of them soldiers. In September 1966 the Israeli Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin gave an interview in which he stated that Israeli actions "should be aimed at those who carry out the attacks and at the regime that supports them". These 'unfortunate' words were interpreted as a 'plot' to bring down the Syrian government.

Publicly, Syria claimed that the escalating conflict was the result of Israel attempting to increase tension in order to justify a large-scale military operation against Syria, and to expand its occupation of the Demilitarized Zone by dispossessing the remaining Arab farmers. Syria also claimed that Syrian shelling had always occurred in response to Israeli firing on peaceful Arab farmers or Syrian posts. This point, also raised by Dayan in his interview, is further supported by the eye-witness accounts of Dutch UN Observer force Colonel Jan Mühren who attested to the Israeli practice of using armoured tractors to farm in the DMZ in areas prohibited by the 1949 Armistice agreement. These activities would draw Syrian fire, which Israel would respond to with its own forces.

In November 1966, Egypt and Syria signed a defense pact whereby each country would support the other if it were attacked. According to Indar Jit Rikhye, Egyptian Foreign Minister Mahmoud Riad told him that the Soviet Union had persuaded Egypt to enter the pact with two ideas in mind: to reduce the chances of a punitive attack on Syria by Israel, and to bring the Syrians under Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser's moderating influence. At the end of December 1966 the IDF renewed its 'buffer fire' in the demilitarized zones, after a six-month lull due to the ‘unconditional ceasefire’ initiated by the Syrians. In January 1967 the Israeli Minister of Health, Yisrael Barzilai, warned that Egypt’s commitment to Syria under their mutual defense pact "could escalate the situation and nobody can foresee how it will end".

During a visit to London in February 1967, Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban briefed journalists on Israel's "hopes and anxieties" explaining to those present that, although the governments of Lebanon, Jordan and the United Arab Republic (Egypt's official name until 1971) seemed to have decided against active confrontation with Israel, it remained to be seen whether Syria could maintain a minimal level of restraint at which hostility was confined to rhetoric. At the same time Israel was planning, approving and executing the provocations of Syria along the DMZ referred to by Dayan. This reached a critical point when armored tractor work on land in the southern demilitarized zone close to Kibbutz Ha-On was scheduled. It was anticipated that the Syrians would react. The Israeli Air Force was placed on alert. Prime Minister Eshkol approved the plan.

Earlier in the week, Syria had twice attacked an Israeli tractor working in a forbidden DMZ area. When it returned on the morning of April 7, 1967, as predicted in the plan, the Syrians opened fire again initially with light weapons. The Israelis responded by sending in armor-plated tractors to continue ploughing, resulting in further exchanges of fire. The resulting tit-for-tat escalated, leading to tanks, heavy mortars, machine guns, and artillery being used in various sections along the 47 mile (76 km) border in what was described as "a dispute over cultivation rights in the demilitarized zone south-east of Lake Tiberias." At this point the critical departure from previous incidents occurred. Without advance planning nor having been submitted for prior approval to the Ministerial Committee on Security, Israeli aircraft dive-bombed Syrian positions with 250 and 500 kg bombs. For the first time the IAF was employed before an Israeli settlement had actually been shelled (with the exception of stray shells which fell in Tel Katzir) and Israeli planes penetrated as far as Damascus. The Syrians then responded by shelling Israeli border settlements heavily, and Israeli jets retaliated by bombing the village of Sqoufiye, destroying around 40 houses in the process. At 15:19 Syrian shells started falling on Kibbutz Gadot; over 300 landed within the kibbutz compound in 40 minutes. The "incident" had escalated into a full-scale aerial battle over the Golan Heights after Israel scrambled jets, resulting in the loss of six Syrian Air Force MiG-21s to Israeli Air Force Dassault Mirage IIIs, and the latter's flight over Damascus. The United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) attempted to arrange a ceasefire, but Syria declined to co-operate unless Israeli agricultural work was halted. The Israeli newspaper Maariv wrote "This was not an 'incident' but a real war." Under these circumstances, the Soviet Union intervened to halt the downward course of events and to deter Israel by activating the Egyptian–Syrian defense pact signed in November 1966 under Soviet pressure for this precise purpose.

Although the April 7 cross-border battle is often called an 'incident', various reactions to the event belie this description. The Israeli press called it a war. Moshe Dayan was reported by Ezer Weismann to have responded "Have you lost your minds? You are leading the country to war!". Brigadier-General Israel Lior agreed: "From my point of view, the Six-Day War had begun." On April 21, 1967 as in May 1966. the Soviet deputy foreign minister, ¥aakov Malik, relayed an oral message to the Israeli ambassador in Moscow: "The government of the Soviet Union sees the need to warn again the government of Israel that the hazardous policy it has been waging for several years is fraught with danger, and [Israel] will be held solely responsible.

Speaking to a Mapai party meeting in Jerusalem on May 11 Prime Minister of Israel Levi Eshkol warned that Israel would not hesitate to use air power on the scale of 7 April in response to continued border terrorism, and on the same day Israeli envoy Gideon Rafael presented a letter to the president of the Security Council warning that Israel would "act in self-defense as circumstances warrant". Writing from Tel Aviv on May 12, James Feron reported that some Israeli leaders had decided to use force against Syria "of considerable strength but of short duration and limited in area" and quoted "one qualified observer" who "said it was highly unlikely that Egypt (then officially called United Arab Republic), Syria's closest ally in the Arab world, would enter the hostilities unless the Israeli attack were extensive". In early May the Israeli cabinet authorized a limited strike against Syria, but Rabin's renewed demand for a large-scale strike to discredit or topple the Ba'ath regime was opposed by Eshkol. BBC journalist Jeremy Bowen reports: The toughest threat was reported by the news agency United Press International (UPI) on 12 May: 'A high Israeli source said today that Israel would take limited military action designed to topple the Damascus army regime if Syrian terrorists continue sabotage raids inside Israel. Military observers said such an offensive would fall short of all-out war but would be mounted to deliver a telling blow against the Syrian government.' In the West as well as the Arab world the immediate assumption was that the unnamed source was Rabin and that he was serious. In fact, it was Brigadier-General Aharon Yariv, the head of military intelligence, and the story was overwritten. Yariv mentioned 'an all-out invasion of Syria and conquest of Damascus' but only as the most extreme of a range of possibilities. But the damage had been done. Tension was so high that most people, and not just the Arabs, assumed that something much bigger than usual was being planned against Syria. Border incidents multiplied and numerous Arab leaders, both political and military, called for an end to Israeli attacks. Egypt, then already trying to seize a central position in the Arab world under Nasser, accompanied these declarations with plans to re-militarize the Sinai. Syria shared these views, although it did not prepare for an immediate invasion. The Soviet Union actively backed the military needs of the Arab states. It was later revealed that on May 13 a Soviet intelligence report given by Soviet President Nikolai Podgorny to Egyptian Vice President Anwar Sadat claimed falsely that Israeli troops were massing along the Syrian border. In May 1967, Hafez al-Assad, then Syria's Defense Minister declared: "Our forces are now entirely ready not only to repulse the aggression, but to initiate the act of liberation itself, and to explode the Zionist presence in the Arab homeland. The Syrian Army, with its finger on the trigger, is united... I, as a military man, believe that the time has come to enter into a battle of annihilation." The Israeli disregard for the 1949 Armistice agreement, the resultant April 7 'incident', the renewed threats by Israel to topple the Syrian regime, the rebukes that he had received for Egypt's lack of action after the invasions by Israel of Jordan in November 1966 and of Syria in April 1967, plus the Soviet urging that the Syrian-Egyptian defence agreement had thereby been triggered, left Nasser with no option other than to display solidarity with Syria.