Egyptian President Trash Talks His Way Into Disaster
In the months before the Six Day War (June 5 – 10, 1967), tensions steadily mounted between Israel and her Arab neighbor. Raids from Palestinian guerrillas based in Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, increased, and elicited massive Israeli reprisals. That put Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser in a bind. He was the Arab world’s most popular politician, and a hero of the masses for his defiance of Britain, France, and Israel during the Suez Crisis of 1956. Now, he was being criticized for failing to aid fellow Arab states against Israel. He was also accused of hiding behind a UN peacekeeping force stationed on the Israeli-Egyptian border.
Nasser knew that the Egyptian military was in no shape to fight Israel, but he tried to regain his stature in the Arab world by bluster. So he broadcast increasingly heated speeches threatening Israel, and sought to convey his seriousness with demonstrations short of war. He got carried away with his own rhetoric, however, and took the demonstrations too far.
He began by massing Egyptian forces in the Sinai Peninsula. A few days later, he demanded the withdrawal of the UN peacekeepers separating the Israelis and Egyptians. A few more days after that, he closed to Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping. A week later, Jordan’s king arrived in Egypt to ink a mutual defense pact. The Iraqis followed suit, soon thereafter.
However, Nasser’s bluster seemed all too real from an Israeli perspective. And the Israelis, who actually were prepared for war, had just been itching for an excuse to stick it to Nasser. So on June 5th, 1967, they launched preemptive air strikes that destroyed 90 percent of the Egyptian and Syrian air forces. Then, having secured aerial supremacy, the Israelis launched ground attacks that routed the Egyptians and seized Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula within three days. They then routed the Jordanians and seized Jerusalem and the West Bank within two. Egypt and Jordan accepted a UN ceasefire, but the Syrians, unwisely, did not. So the Israelis attacked Syria on June 9th, and captured the Golan Heights within a day. Syria accepted a cease fire the next day.
The defeat was humiliatingly lopsided: about 24,000 Arabs were killed, versus only 800 Israelis, with similarly disproportionate rates for wounded and equipment losses. Nasser’s prestige in the Arab world, which he had sought to burnish with warlike rhetoric and demonstrations short of war, took a severe hit from which it never recovered.
