THE COUNTDOWN TO WAR
On 7 April 1967, Israeli Mirage warplanes shot down six Syrian air force MiGs in a dogfight over southern Syria, one downed jet falling onto the Syrian capital, Damascus.
This was the latest escalation along Israel’s borders with its Arab neighbours, where there had been cross-border skirmishes ever since Israel’s formation in 1948. The humiliating loss of the Syrian jets would escalate to another Arab-Israeli conflict: the Six-Day War of June 1967.
The tipping point on the road to June’s hostilities came when Syria’s ally, the Soviet Union, misleadingly told Damascus on 13 May 1967 that Israel was massing for an attack. This was a blatant lie by Moscow, part of wider Cold War machinations.
Syria had a defence pact with the panArab leader of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, so the threat of an Israeli attack meant that Nasser was duty-bound to come to Syria’s aid. Arab unity in the face of potential Israeli aggression also led King Hussein of Jordan to sign a defence pact with Nasser on 30 May, spreading any potential clash to include Jordan too. As Nasser could not ignore Syria in the face of the (non- existent) Israeli invasion, he sent troops into the Sinai peninsula. The UN had stationed buffer force peacekeeping soldiers in the Sinai after the 1956 Egypt– Israel war but Nasser’s deployment led the UN to completely withdraw its troops. The Sinai was now a war zone.
Mutual distrust, Soviet deceit and Israeli fears of destruction meant that Israel’s prime minister Levi Eshkol and his generals now saw war as inevitable. It is not clear that Nasser wanted war – much of his army was away fighting in Yemen – but to de-escalate and climb down was hard. Circumstances conspired to tip the two sides into an unwanted clash of arms.