Thursday, June 01, 2017

Not Too Bad for Six Days

The 50-year anniversary of the Six Day War is coming up.

This article about the war between Israel and the Arab states Egypt, Syria, and Jordan notes:

The Six-Day War did not, however, lead to peace, even a partial one. That would have to wait until the October 1973 war, which set the stage for what became the Camp David Accords and the Israel-Egypt peace treaty. The Arab side emerged from this subsequent conflict with its honor restored; Israelis for their part emerged chastened. There is a valuable lesson here: decisive military outcomes do not necessarily lead to decisive political results, much less peace. [emphasis added]

So the war in 1967 didn't really achieve much of a result and had to await a future war with less decisive (at least initially) outcomes?

But the author states of the 1967 war in the paragraph just before the one quoted above:

The one-sided battle and its outcome put an end to the notion (for some, a dream) that Israel could be eliminated. The 1967 victory made Israel permanent in ways that the wars of 1948 and 1956 did not. The new state finally acquired a degree of strategic depth. Most Arab leaders came to shift their strategic goal from Israel’s disappearance to its return to the pre-1967 war borders. [emphasis added]

Did I miss something important unstated between those paragraphs?

I'm going to make the amazing statement that putting an end to the dream in the front line Arab states that Israel could be eliminated and making Israel a permanent fixture of the Middle East was a decisive political result.

But that's just me, I guess.