How the 1967 Six-Day War Reshaped the Mideast
In the countdown to war, Israel would dispatch Foreign Minister Abba Eban to Paris, London, and Washington in search of support. France had been the principal supplier of Israel's arms, an ally and a diplomatic protector. But a different wind now blew: Charles de Gaulle had walked away from the fight over Algeria and had embarked upon a great accommodation with the Arab-Islamic world. "Don't make war," de Gaulle told the visiting Israeli. "At any rate, do not be the first to shoot." Reminded that France had championed Israel's rights in the Gulf of Aqaba a decade earlier, de Gaulle crystallized the change that had overtaken French diplomacy: "That policy was correct, but it reflected the heat of the hour. That was 1957. It is now 1967." The Franco-Israeli alliance had been severed.
No diplomatic way out was to be offered by the British or by the Americans. Eban had known Lyndon Johnson for a dozen years or more, but the man he encountered had a "tormented" look in his eyes. Vietnam was now Johnson's nightmare. He sympathized with Israel but was averse to being drawn into new entanglements. He was not a "feeble mouse or a coward," Johnson was to tell Eban, but Israel had to show patience. Johnson knew that America had given commitments to Israel's freedom of navigation, but these commitments, he said, "will not be worth five cents if the people and Congress did not support their president now. Without the Congress, I am just a 6-foot-4 Texan." He was not worried about Israel, Johnson added, for American intelligence was unanimous in its judgment that "you will whip the hell out of them."
In the years to come, an intense debate would arise over the color of the light that Washington had given Israel. In one version, Johnson had given Israel a clear red light, an admonition not to use military force. In the other, the light had been green from the start, aimed perhaps at toppling the Egyptian ruler. On the 25th anniversary of the war, the debate was settled by William Quandt, an American foreign policy analyst with considerable government experience. Quandt's analysis sustains a "yellow light" interpretation of the diplomacy that preceded the war. In the early days of the crisis, Johnson had "genuinely hoped to avoid war in the Middle East," Quandt wrote. But this would change as Johnson realized that the only way to avoid a crisis entailed an American military commitment to reopen the Strait of Tiran, the waterway from the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aqaba. "As far as Johnson was concerned, Israel was free to act, but on its own. The red light turned yellow--but not quite green. For the Israeli cabinet, that was enough."
Decisive actions. When the war came on June 5, its military outcome was sealed in the first hours. It had been predicted that the war would start with an Israeli airstrike against Egypt's air bases. The Egyptians had known this and insisted that they could handle the first blow. But when Israel's strike came, the Egyptians were unprepared, and their Air Force was eliminated as a factor in this war. A Jordanian chronicler, Samir Mutawi, in an unsentimental account, Jordan in the 1967 War, wrote of the military outcome in stark terms: "From the afternoon of the first day of the war the Arabs fought with virtually no air cover at all. As a result, the war was lost almost as soon as it had begun."
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