User:John Z/drafts/Six-Day War

Background
At the time no Arab state had recognized Israel's right to exist. At the time no Arab state diplomatically recognized Israel.

The aftermath of the 1956 war saw the region return to an uneasy balance, maintained more by the competition among Egypt, Syria and Jordan than any real resolution of the region's difficulties. Egypt and Syria, who were aligned with the Soviet bloc, and Jordan, which was aligned with the West, maintained a constant pressure of guerilla raids on Israel.

This is just plain false. Syria, after 1964 supported rather minor terrorist actions, mainly through Jordanian territory, and was strongly opposed by Jordan, cf below in this article. The Egyptian border was quiet.

In 1956, when the US withdrew its support of Egypt's Aswan High Dam facility, Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez canal, a move which incensed Britain and France, who were the majority shareholders. The two former Middle Eastern colonial powers partnered with Israel, which attacked Egypt. This alliance quickly collapsed under the weight of overwhelming world condemnation. The US, USSR, and UN were uncharacteristically in agreement on the issue; the USSR even issued veiled threats to use nuclear missiles against Paris or London. Israel was able to obtain the stationing of a UN peacekeeping force in the Sinai, U.N.E.F. (United Nations Emergency Force), to keep that border region demilitarized.

Should be Nasser agreed to, not Israel obtained.

In 1957, at the UN, 17 maritime powers declared that Israel had a right to transit the Straits of Tiran. Moreover, the Egyptian blockade prior to the 1956 Suez War violated the Convention on the Territorial Sea and Contiguous Zone, which was adopted by the UN Conference on the Law of the Sea on April 27, 1958.

The Egyptian blockade in 1956 violated the 1958 convention? Hmm? Anybody see something wrong with that?

Several years later, in response to Israel's construction of the National Water Carrier, Syria initiated a plan to divert the waters of the Dan/Baniyas stream so that the water would not enter Israel and the Sea of Galilee, but rather flow through Syria to Jordan and into the Jordan river. In addition to sponsoring attacks against Israel (often through Jordanian territory, much to King Hussein's chagrin), Syria also began shelling Israeli civilian communities in north-eastern Galilee, from positions on the Golan Heights. Although Israel destroyed the water-diversion facilities in 1964, the border remained a scene of constant conflict.

Should be something about DMZ's, Hussein's chagrin contradicts what was said above.

On April 7, 1967, a minor border incident escalated into a full-scale aerial battle over the Golan Heights, resulting in the loss of seven Syrian MiG-21s to Israeli Air Force (IAF) aircraft, and the latter's flight over Damascus. Border incidents multiplied and numerous Arab leaders, both political and military, called for an end to Israeli reprisals. 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 13 May a Soviet intelligence report falsely claimed that Israeli troops were massing along the Syrian border.

On May 17, Nasser demanded that U.N.E.F. evacuate the Sinai, a request with which UN Secretary-General U Thant complied. Thereafter Israel refused to allow UN peacekeepers to deploy on its territory. Nasser began re-militarization of the Sinai. Egypt ordered United Nations peacekeeping forces to leave the Sinai, and in their place, Egyptian tanks and troops were concentrated on the border with Israel. On May 23, Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran (Israel's main shipping route to Asia and other major places of trade) to Israeli shipping, and also blockaded the Israeli port of Eilat at the northern end of the Gulf of Aqaba. In accordance with international law (United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea, (Geneva: UN Publications 1958, pp. 132-134), Israel considered the closure of the straits to be a casus belli. Almost overnight the tense Middle East had slid from a relatively stable status quo to the brink of regional war.

Redundancies. Its interpretation.

The few regional forces which might have prevented war quickly crumbled. In spite of the will of Jordan's Hussein, who felt that Nasser's pan-Arabism was threatening his rule, it had numerous supporters in Jordan, and May 30 saw Egypt and Jordan signing a mutual defense treaty. President Nasser, who had called King Hussein an "imperialist lackey" just days earlier, declared: "Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel. The Arab people want to fight." 

Several days later Jordanian forces were given to the command of an Egyptian general. Israel called upon Jordan numerous times to refrain from hostilities. Hussein, however, was caught on the horns of a galling dilemma: allow Jordan to be dragged into war and face the brunt of the Israeli response, or remain neutral and risk full-scale insurrection among his own people.

Should be something about the raid on Samu here.

Israel's own sense of concern regarding Jordan's future role originated in Jordanian control of the West Bank. This put Arab forces just 17 kilometers from Israel's coast, a jump-off point from which a well co-ordinated tank assault could cut Israel in two within half an hour. Although the size of Jordan's army meant that Jordan was probably incapable of executing such a maneuver, the country was perceived as having a history of being used by other Arab states as staging grounds for operations against Israel; thus, attack from the West Bank was always viewed by the Israeli leadership as a threat to Israel's existence. At the same time several other Arab states not bordering Israel, including Iraq, Sudan, Kuwait and Algeria, began mobilising their armed forces.

Israel watched these developments with alarm, and tried various diplomatic routes to try settling them. The U.S. and U.K. were asked to open the Tiran straits, as they guaranteed they would in 1957.

this is false.

Jordan was asked by the Jewish lobby in the USA through numerous channels, weeks before the war, to refrain from entering the conflict. All Israeli requests for peace were left unanswered, creating a feeling of grave concern for the future of the country. Israelis claimed that the closing the Straits met the international criteria for an act of war. On June 3 the Johnson administration gave its acquiescence to an operation against Egypt,

this is still hotly debated.

and plans for war were finally approved. Israel's attack against Egypt on June 5 began what would later be dubbed the Six-Day War.