Six Days: The 1967 Six Day War
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Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it. I'm Zach Cornwell, and this is the fifth and final episode of Season 1, Six Days. Two thousand years ago, in a fortress high above the Dead Sea in ancient Judea, time was running out.

967 Jewish defenders, trapped, starving, and hopeless, knew the end was close. From the top of their isolated fortifications, they could hear the crews of Roman engineers working day and night on the mountain below, getting closer and closer with every passing hour. For three months, thousands of slaves at the sword points of Roman legionaries had been constructing a colossal ramp.

The Jewish defenders were situated behind tough walls protecting a towering plateau, and the only way for the Romans to reach the top was to build a massive earthen structure. Hundreds of feet tall, 60 feet wide, one shovel full of dirt at a time. This ramp grows inexorably, slowly. A gravity-defying glacier of wood and slaves and soldiers rising higher and higher into the blue desert sky.

Three years earlier, the Hebrews had risen up in revolt against the draconian subjugation by the Roman Empire. The rebellion had been quickly and mercilessly crushed under the heels of the highly disciplined legions. Jerusalem, the holy city, had been brutally sacked, its one million inhabitants either butchered or scattered into the deserts of Judea. The Roman commander, a future emperor by the name of Titus Flavius, had the Jewish temple burned, demolished, and looted.

only a small solitary wall on its western side remained standing the last gasp of jewish resistance had managed to cling to life for the next three years in a nearly impregnable fortress called masada

But the Romans were thorough and meticulous in their suppression of dissent, and in 73 AD, the legions arrived at the foot of that plateau, intent on snuffing out the rebels and putting an end to this nasty, inconvenient little war in the middle of nowhere. And now, after months of construction under the Syrian-Judean sun, the ramp was finally complete.

A huge wooden siege tower, 30 feet tall and armed with an iron-tipped battering ram, is hauled up the incline of this ramp towards the gates of Masada. The final assault is very, very close. On the eve of this attack, the Jewish commander in Masada, a man named Elazar bin Ya'ir, gathers the 1,000 men, women, and children together for one final prayer. The next day, the Roman legionaries batter down the gates of the fortress.

And to their shock and uneasiness, they face no resistance. Not a single arrow flies at them, not a single stone is thrown. The legionaries climb over the sandy rubble that used to be the walls of Masada, ready for a fight. But all they find is silence and empty buildings. A few of the legionaries shout out taunts, trying to goad the defenders to come out and fight, but no one answers.

They explore the exterior defenses of the fortress, like the walls and the barracks and the sleeping quarters, but they don't find a soul. One thousand men, women, and children have just vanished into thin air. Finally, the Romans enter the palace in the interior of Masada, and they find what they're looking for. The dead are sprawled all around in heaps, dried blood standing the earth beneath them. Women are slumped over, cradling perfectly still children in perfectly still arms.

The men are all around them with daggers and swords, half clutched in lifeless hands. The night earlier, Elazar ben Yair had gathered all the defenders and their families into the palace and he'd said, "We long ago resolved to serve neither the Romans nor any other than God himself, who alone is the true and righteous Lord. The time has now come that forces us to make that resolution true in practice.

We must not choose slavery now, and with it the penalties that will mean the end of everything if we fall living into the hands of the Romans. We were the very first that revolted, and we are the last to fight against them. And I cannot help but think that God has granted us the privilege that it is still in our power to die bravely and as free men. It is clear that at daybreak our resistance will end, but we are still free to choose an honorable death with our loved ones. Let our wives die unabused,

Ten men are chosen at random by drawing lots, and these ten men have been tasked with the inconceivable burden of killing every other man, woman, and child in the fortress, and then themselves. The next day, the Romans find the grisly aftermath of this mass suicide. The siege was over, the rebellion was crushed,

And the Romans, robbed of their long-awaited battle, could do little more than turn the bodies over in search of loot and trinkets. The story of the siege of Masada and its tragic outcome may be entirely new to you, but it looms large in the minds of the Israeli people. It's a fascinating mixture of myth, folklore, and history, both hotly debated and lovingly passed down across multiple generations.

That speech from Elazar Ben-Yair comes to us from a man named Josephus, an ancient Judean historian who wrote the only surviving record confirming that this siege ever took place at all. And in the years since his account was unearthed in 1923, this event has evolved to hold a very special place in the hearts and minds of Israeli citizens. For many, it represents courage and sacrifice in the face of insurmountable odds. For others, it's a tale of delusional zealotry and failure to compromise.

Some archaeologists assert that it never even happened at all. But whatever your opinion on it, the deaths of the defenders at Masada marked the beginning of a very different kind of siege, a more abstract kind of siege, one that would last for two millennia and be waged in nearly every corner of the world. When the Romans destroyed Jerusalem, they destroyed the concept of a Jewish homeland and gave rise to a phenomenon called the Diaspora.

The diaspora refers to the mass migration of Jews out of their ancestral homeland and subsequent settlement in different areas across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, North Africa. No matter where they settled, the Jews found themselves besieged and embattled by hostile attitudes and fearful rhetoric. They encountered relentless anti-Semitism in every form, both casual and catastrophic. It was a siege without walls, without fortifications, without engines of war,

but a siege all the same, one seemingly without end, until, in the 1880s, a spark of hope. An idea begins developing among European Jewish intellectuals. It's called Zionism. Stemming from the word Zion, which is a reference to Jerusalem, this fledgling movement ignites a conversation about returning to the Jewish homeland.

Now, millennia have passed since the kingdom of Judea was crushed by the Romans. But these Zionist thinkers start to ask the question, what if we went back? What if we went home? You know, finally reestablished a safe haven for ourselves. So migration begins back to the Holy Land. It's a trickle at first, but it's a steady one.

Just a handful of decades later, World War I had ripped the global status quo to shreds. Millions dead, an entire world order irrevocably altered. One of the losers of that war was the Ottoman Empire. Their seat of power was in Istanbul, Turkey, and they ruled over a huge portion of the coastal Middle East. Well, when their side lost in 1918, the Ottoman Empire collapsed and it left a void.

Now, we talk a lot about power vacuums on this podcast. They're basically the commercial breaks between various eras and epochs of history. Well, into this vacuum of defeat steps two of the victors of World War I, Britain and France. The British and French carve up much of the Middle East between themselves. Britain seizes control of a particular region called Palestine, the area that was once the Kingdom of Judea back in ancient times.

Now, the Arab peoples of the Middle East were never completely content under Ottoman rule. But European oversight caused particular consternation. During World War I, Arab revolutionaries had been equipped, organized, and led by British agents like the celebrated Lawrence of Arabia.

Fed by grand promises of independent statehood once the Ottomans were brought down, the revolutionaries were shocked and angry when the Europeans didn't deliver on those promises and instead absorbed those various areas into their own colonial spheres of influence. Lawrence of Arabia summarized the British viewpoint in a 1916 intelligence memo. Quote,

End quote.

The Arab peoples of the Middle East really see this as an unforgivable deception, and it sets the stage for a long-simmering distrust they begin to have for outside forces occupying their land, any outside force. The Middle East had been burned so many times by foreign powers, whether it was the fanatical European crusaders of the early Middle Ages, or the abject butchery and mass murder perpetrated by Genghis Khan and his descendants,

It's a region that has been passed around like a football over and over and over again. So as you can see, you have these two opposing polarities hurtling towards each other. You have an influx of Jewish Zionists eager to establish an official home for their people after centuries of persecution, and you have a deeply angry patchwork of Arab principalities who resent being passed back and forth between huge oppressive empires and just want to govern themselves for once.

The concept of an official Jewish homeland was of only negligible importance to the Western powers for the next several decades, until Hitler's Third Reich waged its horrific war of extermination and genocide on the entire Jewish population of Europe. In the shadow of those atrocities, Zionism roared back into the global consciousness with newfound urgency.

By 1948, in the aftermath of World War II, the bell has really kind of tolled for the old globe-spanning empires of the world. Great Britain decides it's got to get out of the Middle East, with a few lucrative exceptions here and there. They essentially just pass off the problem to the United Nations, which arranges for what's called the Partition of Palestine. The general idea is to split Palestine in half.

One half will be an official area for a Jewish state to exist. That's called Israel. And the other half will belong to the native Arab Palestinians who've lived in that area for a very long time. The city of Jerusalem, which isn't just a holy place for Judaism anymore, but also Islam and Christianity, will exist in a neutral international zone, basically belonging to everybody. Sounds like a pretty good plan, right?

So finally in 1948, the nation of Israel was created. The Jewish people had returned home. But this is where it gets a little thorny. What makes a place home? Is your home always your home? Even if you haven't lived there for a very long time? And furthermore, does that give you the right to evict the current occupants? The native Palestinians and the surrounding Arab countries certainly didn't think so.

Because when the UN partition goes into effect and the state of Israel is legislated into existence on May 14th, 1948, it triggers a war the very next day. All of Israel's Arab neighbors attack the fledgling nation at the same time with the intent of completely destroying it. But the Israelis are prepared and bolstered by the knowledge that they're not just fighting for land, but their right to exist.

After months of bloody fighting and losing a full 1% of their entire population, the Israelis win this war. But they've only secured their survival by a thread. They're still in a dangerously fragile position, surrounded by enemies on all sides, committed to the goal of literally killing or deporting every single Jew in Israel.

But the human cost for the birth of Israel wasn't just paid by the Israelis. 700,000 Palestinians, the people who have lived in that land for hundreds of years, have suddenly been told it's not theirs anymore. An outpouring of Palestinian refugees either voluntarily flee or are forcibly removed from Israel's territory. It seems to have been a mix of both.

And the Israelis were far from gentle in their application of force during this exodus. There are reports of casual violence, robbery, and even outright murder of Arab men, women, and children during this process. For the Palestinians, it's a time of intense, indescribable panic. Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi said, "...hundreds of people blocked the narrow lanes and pushed and heaved against one another, each trying to save himself and his children."

Many children, women, and old men fainted and were trampled by the surging crowds." The Palestinians are ushered into refugee camps along Israel's borders and told that they can never return to their homes. Nor are they welcomed into neighboring Arab countries. Instead, they're condemned to this kind of limbo, barred from returning to their homes, and denied the possibility of anything resembling a new one. Ironically, and certainly tragically,

In returning to their ancestral homeland, the Jews had triggered an entirely different kind of diaspora, one that persists to this very day. This displacement became known among Palestinians as al-Nakhba, or the Disaster. The first leader of Israel, David ben Gurion, is said to have initially shrugged off the Palestinian problem in 1949, saying, quote, "...the old will die and the young will forget."

Naturally, that's a highly disputed quote, but it certainly sums up the Palestinian perception of Israeli cruelty and callousness. Suffice to say, the young did not forget. And now, after establishing 2,000 years of context, we've arrived at the true focus of this episode. Today, we're going to be talking about the Six-Day War.

fought in 1967 between the State of Israel and its Arab neighbors, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. It lasted, that's right, only six days. In less than a week, this conflict would irrevocably reshape the Middle East, and in many ways the world, for decades to come. It would have seismic, far-reaching consequences that have indirectly affected almost every single person in the modern world.

It's also a conflict that is controversial to say the very least. Depending on who you are, where you come from, and what you believe, it's a topic that could hold deep significance and even provoke intense anger in you. The challenge in writing about this subject lies in the fact that most sources are very, very biased and have a clear side that they're representing or advocating for.

With that in mind, I'm going to try and approach this subject with the utmost care and sensitivity. Now, I'm not promising the narrative will be scrubbed of all opinion. When talking about history, it's important to have a perspective. But I just wanted to start out by saying that I fully understand that we're talking about events that are still very fresh and in some ways very in progress for millions of people around the world. Now, I realize that by attempting to be even-handed with everyone, I may just end up pissing off everybody.

That's absolutely a possibility. But it was important to me to give all the players involved a voice to some degree. The fact is, history is very rarely clear cut and it's always a little messy. And that's what excites me most about this topic. So without further ado, let's try and wrap our heads around this thing. Ryan Reynolds here from Int Mobile. With the price of just about everything going up during inflation, we thought we'd bring our prices down.

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To even begin to understand the Six-Day War, how it's going to unfold, and why it's important, we need to get the literal lay of the land. We need to first understand the basic geography of the Middle East in the early months of 1967. So what I'm going to try and do is draw a mental map for you. Let's start with the most recognizable piece of the puzzle, Egypt. So we all know where Egypt is, right? At the northeast corner of Africa, right at the tippy top, right on the Mediterranean Sea.

If we go east, we find the Sinai Peninsula. It looks a little bit like an arrowhead jutting down into the Red Sea, which separates Egypt from the huge Arabian Peninsula. If we continue northeast, following the coast along that little elbow, that crook that forms the bottom corner of the Mediterranean, we find Palestine.

Moving eastward into the interior of Palestine slash Israel, we find the city of Jerusalem. And if we keep going east, we run into the River Jordan. It runs north to south, eventually emptying into the Dead Sea. The area west of the River Jordan is called the West Bank, and the area to the east is called the East Bank. During this period we're talking about, both the east and west banks are controlled by a country called Jordan, named for the River Jordan.

In 1967, Jordan controls the eastern half of Jerusalem, called the Old City, and along with it, Judaism's most holy site, the Western Wall. This is the last remaining wall of the temple that Titus Flavius destroyed back in the 1st century AD. But the Old City is home to profoundly important religious sites for Islam and Christianity as well, the Dome of the Rock and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, respectively.

But at this time, only Christians and Muslims are allowed to visit their holy shrines. In 1967, no Jew has seen the Western Wall with the naked eye in 19 years. Now, if we make a beeline north, we reach the country of Syria. And right where Syria borders Israel, there's this high plateau called the Golan Heights. It's an elevated area that overlooks miles and miles of farmland and agricultural developments controlled by Israel.

Okay, all in all, we've just traveled about 400 miles. So it's a big stage for what's about to happen, with lots of complex topography that we'll get into later. But you start to get the general picture right. We've got Israel situated on the Mediterranean Sea with hostile powers to its southwest, direct east, and northeast. Hopefully you were able to follow all of that, or I guess you could just look on a map and fast forward through my droning.

Either way, I think it really helps visualize events, at least for me, if the mind's eye can hop around fluidly from country to country, capital to capital, and so on. But the story of the Six-Day War is only partly a story of land. It's also a story of personalities, very big personalities. In 1967, the leader of Egypt is a man named Gamal Abdel Nasser.

That's N-A-S-S-E-R, Nasser. He's been Egypt's president since 1954, when he and a cadre of fellow military officers led a coup to overthrow the Egyptian monarchy and seize control, installing a secular, autocratic government of which Nasser would be the head. Nasser was one of those guys that just radiates a kind of indefinable charm. First off, he's very charismatic. When he steps into a room, he's like a magnet.

He has this big, flashy smile, a Hollywood square jaw, a Clark Gable mustache. He wears expensive Western-style suits. Suffice to say, you can tell this was the kind of guy who spent a considerable amount of time in front of a mirror. But more importantly, Nasser is a frighteningly talented public speaker. He can work a crowd.

He's very, very popular with the Egyptian people, and that's largely because he has some pretty big aspirational ideas about the future of his country. His biggest idea, and perhaps his most enduring legacy, was the concept of pan-Arabism. So in a nutshell, this is the idea that, finally freed from the yoke of European colonialism, the Arab nations of the world could unite together into a single political entity.

But old Lawrence of Arabia kind of had it right in his cynical prediction that these different countries would never be able to fully get organized. Nasser has a very difficult time wrangling all of these different peoples, ethnic and religious groups, kings, ministers from the Arab world. It's a very fractious region with competing interests and long-held grudges. So Nasser has a big abstract vision, but no sense of cohesion among the nations he wants to unite under his banner.

He needs to focus them somehow. Frankly, he needs an enemy. And he found the perfect enemy in the young nation of Israel. The way Nasser saw it, Israel wasn't a safe haven for a historically oppressed ethnic group. It was yet another colonizer, yet another tendril of European imperialism worming its way into Arab land, displacing and oppressing the rightful owners of that land, the Palestinians.

Nasser seemed to view Israel like a splinter embedded in the flesh of the Middle East. It didn't belong there, and given time and pressure, it would inevitably be pushed out. In one press conference, he said, quote, End quote.

Nasser gets very cozy with the militant groups that spring up to fight Israel in quote-unquote occupied Palestine. Groups like the Notorious Palestinian Liberation Organization, or the PLO. You've probably heard of them. They're very aggressive, they're very violent, and they provide a convenient channel for Nasser and his allies to wage a never-ending proxy war against Israel without igniting a full-scale conflict.

Because as much as the Arab world howled for the destruction of Israel, it wasn't as simple as just attacking. Israel's victory in 1948, as well as its trouncing of Egypt in a 1956 war over the Suez Canal that we do not have time to get into, had left deep psychological scars on Nasser. For him, it was a matter of timing. Attacking Israel too soon, before the Arab nations could build up adequate strength to ensure victory, could lead to catastrophe.

But the hatred of Israel was the common cause Nasser could use to further his ultimate goal of uniting the Arab nations under his banner. So he was always trying to strike this delicate balance, right, between stoking the fires of anti-Semitism with hawkish speeches and reining in his allies from aggressive actions that could provoke a full-scale war.

In one speech, he said, quote, Unfortunately for Nasser, not all of his neighbors were on the same page.

To the east of Israel lay the Kingdom of Jordan, ruled by Husayn bin Talal, or King Husayn. When he was only 15 years old, Husayn's grandfather, King Abdullah, had been shot dead in front of his eyes while leaving prayer at a mosque in East Jerusalem. The king died instantly, but the teenage prince immediately sprinted after his grandfather's attacker, determined to run him down.

The assassin fired a bullet into the prince's chest, but it was deflected by a metal pendant his grandfather had given him, saving his life. The throne naturally passed to Hussein's father, but tragedy stalked the young man like a shadow, and his father's mental state quickly deteriorated over the next year. It was determined that the new king had schizophrenia.

So, in 1953, his father abdicated the throne and this 17-year-old kid was crowned King of Jordan. There are so few sympathetic characters in this story, to be honest. But King Hussein strikes me as a person resembling one. He strikes me as a man being pulled back and forth by more powerful forces who he didn't really want any of this.

In 1967, King Hussein is in his early 30s, and his country's geographic proximity to Israel is a source of tremendous anxiety. Nasser is the prom king of the Arab world, a charismatic strongman banging the drum for Israel's annihilation with one hand and whispering advice of time-biting caution with the other.

King Hussein, because of his country's proximity to Israel and control of the eastern half of Jerusalem, is an invaluable piece on Nasser's chessboard. It's worth noting that these are not natural allies. One, a hereditary monarch. The other, an overthrower of a monarch. But they begrudgingly acknowledge that their fates are intertwined, for better or worse.

Nasser's calls for patience are undermined by a factor that Hussein has very little control over. Jordan is overrun with terrorist cells who strike at Israel constantly, exacerbating the tensions and making it incredibly difficult to lull Israel into a false sense of calm and security. The origin of those cells is the country to the north, Syria.

In the years leading up to the Six-Day War, Syria becomes a breeding ground for anti-Zionist terrorist movements. The Syrian government turns a blind eye and even outright encourages these groups to train their operatives within its borders. Now, they're very firm on the point that none of these attacks should be launched from Syria proper. They don't want to provoke Israel too much. But they're certainly not going to stop these groups from traveling south into Jordan and launching attacks from there.

This causes huge headaches for King Hussein, whose country is being used as a conduit for terrorist operations. Now, he can't clamp down on them too much because Nasser might accuse him of being uncommitted to the cause of Israel's destruction, which could lead to revolts that might remove Hussein from power completely, an outcome that would likely end in he and his family's death.

But if these terrorist groups aren't controlled and reined in to some degree, the full wrath of the well-equipped Israeli military could come hammering down on him. Basically, it really sucks to be King Hussein right now. But Syria is causing problems in other ways, too.

Remember that area we talked about earlier, the Golan Heights? Well, the Syrians have positioned hundreds of artillery pieces all along those elevated ridges with perfect sight lines to Israeli farming communities called kibbutzes. Technically, the areas that these kibbutzes occupy are demilitarized zones, meaning they're supposed to be neutral. But Israeli settlers have inched into these areas to farm the fertile land.

Periodic shelling from these artillery positions is a basic fact of life for Israeli farmers. It's not a full-on barrage, but it just kind of comes and goes like the weather. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't. You don't really know. But people die, civilians die, homes and farms are destroyed. It's a really terrible place to live. Because of those guns on the Golan Heights, Israel has an essentially indefensible border with Syria.

The Israelis would love nothing more than to take control of those artillery positions and reclaim this irritating geographic advantage from their northern neighbor. Syria is arguably the most aggressive of the three big Arab nations that we've talked about thus far. But paradoxically, they're also the weakest militarily.

As Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan would later say in the first few days of the Six-Day War, quote, We're afraid of the Egyptians, even though they're far away, because they're very strong. And we're afraid of the Jordanians, though they're very weak, because they're very close. But the Syrians are weak and far away. There's no immediate need to attack them. End quote. However, Syria has a powerful benefactor.

which is why they're so aggressive and are prone to saber rattling. Syria is like the little guy at the bar who talks a lot of shit, but only because his seven-foot-tall buddy is right behind him backing him up. In this case, the seven-foot-tall friend is none other than, cue the ominous music, Soviet Russia. In 1967, the world is locked deep within the throes of the Cold War.

The United States and the Soviet Union have emerged as two opposing superpowers in the aftermath of World War II and are engaged in a shadowy struggle across the entire world. Fundamentally, it's an ideological conflict. Soviets deeply distrust the capitalist West, and the West wants to stop the spread of communism across the globe. Vietnam is going on at this time. It's going really badly, in fact. The Cuban Missile Crisis was only five years earlier, so tensions in the international community are very, very high.

The Soviets and the Americans see certain regions as battlegrounds for influence. The Middle East just happens to be one of those regions. But like, why? Why would anyone care? Well, a lot of oil shipping and trade goods flow through the Suez Canal, controlled by Egypt. This area connects the economies of the West to their eastern counterparts. Basically, it's an area that you want friends in, to put a long story short.

The Soviet Union has flooded both Syria and Egypt with state-of-the-art military hardware. Fighter jets, tanks, artillery, guns, you name it. The result of all this is just this ridiculously tangled diplomatic web of back channels and ambassadors, arms sales and espionage. It's an absolute mess. It's not surprising at all that the introduction of Cold War chaos into this hair-trigger region

exacerbated the tensions and eventually culminated in a war. In the summer of 1967, the nation of Israel is only nine miles wide at its thinnest point. Surrounded by hostile governments to the north, the east, and the south, its back was pressed against the waters of the Mediterranean. But its military, the Israeli Defense Force, or IDF for short, they're strong.

Equipped with French fighter jets, souped up American tanks, and a passionate citizen's army to wield them, they're ready for a fight. The Israeli Prime Minister, Levi Eshkol, was all too aware of this fragile balance. In his book, Six Days of War, Michael B. Oren gives us a window into that thought process. Quote, "...Arabs wanted war, and Israel was at once militarily invincible and mortally vulnerable."

what Levi Eshkol called in Yiddish "Shimshon der Nevekdikar" or "Poor Little Samson." I probably butchered the hell out of that Yiddish, so sorry. Uh, yeah. The Arab nations were fully aware of their advantage. They may not have been able to launch a decisive all-out assault on Israel just yet, but in addition to the constant terrorist attacks and shelling from the Golan Heights, there were other ways of putting the squeeze on their nemesis.

At one point, the Arab coalition, led by Nasser, conspires to choke off Israel's water supply by diverting the rivers that flow into Israel. Now, the IDF shuts these engineering efforts down pretty quickly, but it shows the creative length that Nasser and his allies were willing to go to in the effort to weaken Israel. But it wasn't freshwater that Israel most feared being deprived of. It was seawater.

At this time, Israel only has one port that can connect it to the trade routes in the eastern hemisphere. And all that ship traffic goes through an area called the Straits of Tehran, which Egypt controls. At any time, Egypt can deny the flow of trade goods, oil, and other materials to Israel. For Israel, this is a red line. Nasser has his power over them, but if he ever uses it, that's the last straw. The whole region is like a tripwire, just waiting to be sprung.

And in the summer months of 1967, a chain of events is set in motion which alters the destiny of all nations involved forever. As we've covered thus far, there's a very long list of factors pushing this region towards war. Decharged rhetoric, the military escalation, the constant violence, the Cold War tensions...

There's a temptation to use the tired old powder keg analogy, but to me the situation is really more of a deranged Rube Goldberg machine. All these little factors and variables are clicking into place, leading everyone down this long, twisting, turning road that can really only lead to one outcome. And the thing that activates the final phase of this machine happens on May 13th, 1967.

Egypt receives a secret communique from Moscow, warning of a massive Israeli buildup along the Syrian border. It appears, Moscow says, that Israel is planning to attack Syria and will do so within a week. Well, Egypt is allied with the Syrians, and if Israel attacks them, Nasser will have no choice but to go to war. Here's the thing, though. That Russian intelligence? It's a complete fabrication. It's a lie.

In May 1967, Israel has no intention whatsoever of launching a full-scale attack into Syria. There's still not much of a consensus on why Moscow chose to pass this false intelligence to Egypt, but whatever their reasons, it sparks a crisis, which unfolds over the next several weeks. Just 24 hours after the warning is received, Egypt's armed forces go on full alert.

Nasser expels all of the UN peacekeeping forces in the Sinai desert, the buffer zone between Egypt and Israel. And he deploys thousands of Egyptian troops into that desert region. On May 22nd, Nasser closes the Straits of Tehran to Israeli shipping. This is the red line that Israel has long maintained would be considered an act of war. Full-scale conflict starts to look inevitable.

On May 30th, King Hussein, under intense pressure from Nasser, Syria, and the rest of the Arab world, signs a treaty with Egypt, placing all of Jordan's armed forces under Nasser's control. All of this reckless brinkmanship was exacerbated by radio broadcasts from Egypt, essentially calling for Israel's complete and total destruction. One said, quote,

That sounds extreme, but Nasser and his allies had been saying stuff like this for years. Nothing short of promising the complete annihilation of Israel and the people within it if the opportunity ever presented itself.

President Arif of Iraq said, The existence of Israel is an error which must be rectified. This is our opportunity to wipe out the ignominy which has been with us since 1948. Our goal is clear, to wipe Israel off the map. End quote. The president of Syria had once said to his troops, We want a full-scale popular war of liberation to destroy the Zionist enemy. End quote.

The leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, or the PLO, said, "...we shall destroy Israel and its inhabitants, and as for the survivors, if there are any, the boats are ready to deport them." And from Gamal Abdel Nasser's own lips, "...we shall not enter Palestine with its soil covered in sand. We shall enter it with its soil saturated in blood."

The Israelis had every reason to believe that they were facing a second Holocaust. All of this paints a picture, in my mind, of a siege. The nation of Israel itself had become a modern-day Masada, and the Israelis would be damned if they'd let this siege end in the same way it had 2,000 years ago. But as you can imagine, the mood among the Israeli people is grim. As Michael Oren describes in his book, quote,

For Israelis, the ordeal was all-consuming. Throughout the country, thousands were hurrying to dig trenches, build shelters, and fill sandbags.

In Jerusalem in particular, schools were refitted as bomb shelters, and air raid drills were practiced daily. Most buses and virtually all taxis were mobilized, and an emergency blood drive was launched. Upward of 14,000 hospital beds were ready, and antidotes stockpiled for poison gas victims. Some 10,000 graves were dug in preparation. End quote. Israelis start fleeing the country in droves.

The common joke at the time was, "If you're the last to leave Israel, please remember to turn off the lights." One Israeli lieutenant named Ziv Barkay said he couldn't stop thinking of The Doors' song, "The End." The vibe was that apocalyptic. In this critical hour, the Israeli government was divided and decisive. Their friends and allies, one by one, had refused to commit their support in the event hostilities erupted. The French had cut off shipments of military hardware.

The U.S., under President Lyndon B. Johnson, had refused to honor a defense agreement made years earlier under Eisenhower's administration. They even went so far as to say the Pentagon had literally lost the official paper document guaranteeing American support for Israel. The Israeli Prime Minister, a guy named Levi Eshkol, decides to give a speech to reassure the Israeli people. Everyone is listening. Soldiers, civilians, students,

Everyone is glued to their radio sets, desperate to hear a calming message from their leader. Many think Eshkol will declare war on Egypt officially. And when he takes to the airwaves, he can't stop stuttering. He gives a horrible speech. He sounds weak and hesitant. He's mumbling. He's reverting into his first language, Yiddish. He's like calling the studio technician over because he can't read the words on the page. The nation is devastated.

Instead of the strong declaration of a confident leader, they got what many thought was a joke, and it even brought a few enlisted men to literal tears. Now, to Levi Eshkol's credit, he was suffering from a cold, he had complications from eye surgery, and his speech had been heavily edited, with whole sentences and paragraphs crossed out by aides. It would have been a miracle for anyone to have delivered that speech confidently.

But no one knows about those factors. They just know that in this dire hour, their leader seems to have just had a complete breakdown. At this moment, the Israeli people need someone strong. They need someone who can inspire confidence and give people a reason to hold their heads up and fight. Enter a man named Moshe Dayan. Honest question, how many people do you know in your life that could legitimately pull off an eyepatch?

Not a small, tasteful one, but a huge, black, Pirates of the Caribbean-style eye patch. Not many, I'd imagine. Well, Moshe Dayan knew how to rock a frickin' eye patch. After this episode ends, I want you to Google this man. I want you to click the image tab and just peruse some photos of this guy. If the first phrase that pops into your head is,

isn't some combination of the words badass, metal, or hoss, then I can only assume you've spelled his name wrong and are looking at pictures of someone else. Basically, guys, he's Jewish Nick Fury. In the days following Levi Eshkol's disastrous speech, Moshe Dayan is appointed to the position of Defense Minister of Israel and is effectively Commander-in-Chief of the IDF. For me, the story of Moshe Dayan is also the story of the Israeli Defense Force as a whole.

Over the decades, he played a huge role in shaping the core values and virtues of Israel's military. It was those instilled cultural traditions that really gave the IDF the edge in the coming war. So let's take a quick look at those. During the 1948 War for Independence, when Israel establishes itself as a regional power, the IDF is very rough and tumble. It's more of a militia than an army.

In those early days, they were not well armed. They had no artillery. They had to make do with outdated firearms and scarce ammunition. And the Israeli Air Force was really more of an air quotes Air Force, consisting of only a handful of planes that they had to literally borrow, bag, and steal.

There's one story of Israeli agents falsely renting a plane under the pretenses of filming a movie and then just flying it back to Israel, stealing it. But as the nation becomes more established, starts gaining more international support, brokering alliances and arms deals, their military capabilities grow and grow and grow. Moshe Dayan was a prominent commander in the IDF, although legend is a more accurate description. The men worshipped him.

And he never lets his soldiers forget those early, scrappy days. The source of the IDF's strength, in his eye, was its ability to improvise and make decisive, split-second decisions when war became unpredictable, which of course it always does, when things didn't go according to plan.

Dion believed in empowering his officers all the way down the chain of command to make decisions without having to seek approval from 36 different people. If they saw an opportunity to make a gain or exploit a strategic advantage, they could do so. Dion was also very practical and had nothing but disdain for the pageantry and the empty showmanship of more established militaries. After seeing the United States Marine Corps on parade on one occasion, he said, quote,

But proud and prickly as he could be, Dion wasn't above listening to other opinions and adjusting his perspective when he realized he was wrong. According to a passage from author Steven Pressfield's book The Lion's Gate, quote,

He liked it when people contested him. He listened. Only a donkey, he would say, never changes his mind. End quote. Another interesting aspect about Dayan was that despite fighting wars against Israel's Arab neighbors for decades and decades, he didn't seem to harbor any hatred or zeal towards his adversaries. Before he died, he explained his feelings in his memoirs. Quote, I am no hater of Arabs.

I grew up with Bedouin herders and farmers. We have plowed together and planted and sat side by side in the furrows to take our morning meals. Who is the Arab? No man makes a better friend than he. None will stand his ground with greater courage. To the Arab, honor is all. He will drain his blood for the clan and the tribe and for the stranger he has taken in at the gate. No one laughs like an Arab or loves his children with such tenderness.

No one dances like him or worships God with greater devotion, and none is more compassionate for the weak and the helpless. The modern world, in which the sons of Ishmael have fallen behind and become a backward people, is a nightmare of shame from which the proud Arab cannot awaken. This is the source of his violent and inextinguishable rage. I fear Nasser, not for his Soviet arms or for his brilliance as a provocateur and brinkman,

but because he has planted the standard of his ambition within the soil of wrath and shame. My people will bleed for this, but his will bleed more. End quote. Kind of takes a not-so-great turn there at the end, but it's an interesting quote. However, not all Israeli soldiers shared Dayan's enlightened perspective. Lou Linnert, a Jewish pilot fighting with the Israelis during the 1948 War of Independence, was one of them.

After some Israeli soldiers had been brutally killed near an Arab village, he and the future Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, then just a commander, had argued over what to do with the villagers. Lou Linnert recalled later in his life, quote, I told Rabin again, shoot the mayor, burn the village. He refused, saying, we are Jews, we can't do that. Rabin was an idealist.

That's what was wrong with Israel then, and it's what's wrong with Israel today. The founders had suffered pogroms and persecution for so many centuries in Russia and Eastern Europe that it became a point of honor with them that if they ever got their own country, they would not treat others with the same cruelty that they had been treated with. You have to admire that. It's honorable. It's noble. But in war, it's bullshit. If you ask me today whether I have any regrets in my life, I will say only one.

that I didn't shoot the mayor right then and there and let them do what they wanted with me. End quote. Wasn't kidding about the strong feelings, folks. So, fast forward back to the present day of the story, summer 1967. The country's morale has recovered somewhat with the ascension of Moshe Dayan to the position of defense minister.

But if you're someone in America or Europe looking at this situation right now, you don't know what's going to happen. All you know is that it is tense. But then some weird TV footage starts coming out of Israel. The footage appears to show IDF soldiers relaxing at the beach, enjoying R&R with their families on weekend leave. Starting to look like the IDF is demobilizing, standing down. As a result, Egypt's army relaxes a little bit.

Some of the generals go on vacation for a few days. Even Nasser himself goes on a little weekend getaway. Maybe, just maybe, it might not come to war after all. ♪

I'm Ken Harbaugh, host of Burn the Boats from Evergreen Podcasts. I interview political leaders and influencers, folks like award-winning journalist Soledad O'Brien and conservative columnist Bill Kristol about the choices they confront when failure is not an option. I won't agree with everyone I talk to, but I respect anyone who believes in something enough to risk everything for it. Because history belongs to those willing to burn the boats. Episodes are out every other week, wherever you get your podcasts.

At 7.30 in the morning on Monday, June 5th, 1967, Egyptian Air Force pilots all over the Nile Delta are having breakfast. They've completed their dawn reconnaissance flights, observing nothing but clear, cloudless skies. Most of their planes are parked on the runways. They're relaxing in the hazy morning heat, reading their papers, chatting, eating, and

What they don't know is that 184 Israeli fighter jets are currently screaming over the waves at 733 feet per second right towards them. To avoid detection by Egyptian radar, these Israeli jets are flying dangerously low, only about 50 feet above the water, so close that the pilots can't even take their eyes off the horizon for even a second or else they might crash into the sea.

Strict radio silence is observed. Prior to takeoff, the IAF pilots were told they could not communicate with each other or their flight control towers. If their planes malfunction or have a critical failure, they're not allowed to call for help. Their only option is to crash into the waves. Everything hinges on the element of surprise. Jordanian radar technicians pick up this massive swarm of air power rocketing towards Egyptian airspace.

They try to warn their Egyptian allies, but the Egyptians had changed the encryption codes the day before without notifying them. Their warning goes completely unheard. The Israeli fighters are divided up into squadrons, each one bearing down on a specific pre-selected target. Every single pilot knows their mission down to the most arcane, minute detail.

On dozens of Egyptian air bases spread across the delta, hundreds of state-of-the-art MiG fighter jets supplied to Egypt by Russia sit parked on wide asphalt runways, unmanned and unprotected. As Israeli Air Force Commander Mordechai Hod would later say, quote, a fighter jet is the deadliest weapon in existence, but on the ground, it is utterly defenseless, end quote.

At 7:40 AM, these squadrons are minutes from reaching all of their targets simultaneously. This attack has been planned literally down to the second. They know the precise angle and altitude of attack. They know the position and the orientation of every single runway. The Israelis have memorized the names and daily routine of every single Egyptian pilot, not to mention their wives' names, their children's names, even the sound of their voices.

At 7.45 a.m., the IAF descends upon a completely unprepared Egyptian air force and unleashes what can only be described as a hellish display of firepower. 200-pound bombs whistle through the air, landing on runways and leaving jagged craters 16 feet wide and 5 feet deep. The Egyptian pilots realize they're under attack and sprint to their aircraft, pulling on their equipment and hiking up flight suits mid-run.

Those massive craters prevent any Egyptian jets from taking off, and the Israeli fighters strafe them like sitting ducks. 30mm cannons shred the expensive MiG jets and the pilots inside to pieces. At 7.50am, these attacks are happening at airbases all over the Nile Delta at exactly the same time.

When one wave of Israeli pilots finishes its bombing and strafing runs, they fly back to Israel, which only takes about 20 minutes. They fuel up, rest, rearm, which only takes about 10 minutes, and then they fly back to attack all over again. The result was an almost continuous, uninterrupted assault that absolutely mangles Egypt's ability to put their planes into the air. An Israeli pilot named Giora Rom described the scene from the air, quote,

Columns of black smoke rise from all over the delta. Everywhere, buildings and airplanes are blazing. End quote. Another, named Arnon Levushin, said, quote, It is as if the sky has exploded. Planes are zooming in all directions. End quote. In only 30 minutes, 204 Egyptian planes have been destroyed. At 10.35 a.m., back in the Israeli capital of Tel Aviv,

IAF Commander Mordecai Hod hangs up the phone, turns to Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin, and says, quote, The Egyptian Air Force has ceased to exist. This preemptive attack was called Operation Mulkhed, or Focus in English. It had been secretly and meticulously planned for years by the Israeli Air Force, a first-strike option in the event of a looming war with Egypt.

In those first few hours, on the morning of June 5th, Israeli leadership could barely believe what a complete and total success it was. They had confidence in the plan and hoped it would succeed, but no one could have predicted how flawless the execution and how decisive the results would be. Within the span of a few hours, Israel had established complete air superiority over the region. In modern warfare, that is a checkmate.

Moshe Dayan was astonished and relieved, saying later, Meanwhile, a very different story was being relayed to Gamal Abdel Nasser. His military advisors and generals, absolutely terrified of telling him the truth, report that it was actually Israel who had suffered devastating losses in a botched aerial attack.

Cairo radio stations are blasting propaganda all over the airwaves that Israel had lost dozens of planes, that this was the long-awaited moment of revenge for decades of humiliation, struggle, and defeat. Quote, Our airplanes and our missiles are at this moment shelling all of Israel's towns and villages. Every Arab must avenge the dignity lost in 1948 to advance across the armistice line to the den of the gang itself, to Tel Aviv.

Nasser, flushed with ego and high on the adrenaline rush of perceived success, calls up his frenemy, King Hussein of Jordan. He urges Hussein to seize the opportunity and attack. The king agrees. Jordanian artillery crews start shelling Israel, completely unaware that the planes rocketing towards Tel Aviv in the distance aren't Egyptian fighters, but Israeli pilots returning from their early morning annihilation of Nasser's air force.

With air supremacy established by Operation Mulkhed, Israeli ground forces move west into the Sinai Peninsula to confront Nasser's army. To put it bluntly, the Sinai Peninsula is not a very nice place. It's a desert, filled with craggy rock formations and impassable sand dunes. It's also nightmarishly hot. Triple digits, day and night. So if you're from Texas, like me, think Dallas in August.

Topographically, it's not an environment you can just drive a tank or a jeep through easily. And Egyptian forces have dug in, with networks of trenches constructed in the Soviet style, meaning you have stacks upon stacks of trenches stretching back into the distance.

Now what this does is it makes it very difficult for attackers to really gain a foothold. Your guys attack and they clear one trench. Okay, great. But there's like eight, nine, ten more trenches behind it. And as your guys attack, they just get worn down by the endless layers of trenches, barbed wire, machine gun nests, artillery barrages. Eventually, you're out of dudes and that's it. Now this worked really well for the Soviets in World War II and their military advisors taught the technique to the Egyptians.

Well, this is not World War II, and the Sinai is not Stalingrad. Israeli General Uzi Narkis said, quote, The Arab forces are like soap bubbles. One pin will burst them. End quote. IDF armored divisions punch through these Egyptian formations with brutal expediency. With cover from the Air Force, the IDF roll over these fortifications with tanks and nimble jeeps.

Israeli infantrymen leap into the trenches with compact little Uzi submachine guns and slaughter these Egyptian soldiers. But it's not a flawless victory. The IDF faces some stiff resistance. It's an ugly, bloody fight. An Israeli trooper named Menachem Shaval remembered his convoy getting hit by an artillery barrage. Quote, a shell, maybe artillery, maybe a tank round, has hit my friend Saul's jeep head on. The smoke starts to clear.

I see the jeep with no people. There's no one there. The jeep is sitting there, miraculously intact. I'm thinking, hey, my friends have jumped clear. They got out in time. Then the smoke clears a little more. I see three half-corpses sitting in the jeep. The shell has passed at the height of the driver, shearing all three in half. This is the picture I am carrying with me of my friends being there and then not being there."

With no aerial opposition, Israeli jets are free to saturate Egyptian positions with napalm bombs. An Egyptian commander named Mahmoud Abu Faris recalled, quote, I found one of my soldiers shriveled down to the size of my hand, end quote. Eventually, the Egyptian morale breaks, and they start abandoning their positions, leaving their artillery and weapons behind. It turns into a panicked retreat,

Nasser and his generals had done a very poor job of preparing their soldiers for actual pitched conflict. There's no strategy, there's no organization, no plan B. One Egyptian source remarked that the army was better suited for marching in parades through the streets of Cairo than fighting the IDF in the dunes of the Sinai. And as they overtake Nasser's forces, the Israelis don't have the capacity or the supplies to keep prisoners of war.

According to historian Michael Oren, the IDF holds onto captured officers, but tells the rank-and-file guys that their only alternative is to run into the desert, back towards Egypt. The Sinai turns into a death trap for the Egyptian army. They flee into the sand dunes, their transportation either abandoned or destroyed, with hundreds of miles between them and the safety of the Nile Delta.

In the heat of a desert like the Sinai, with no shelter, the human body produces 20 liters of sweat a day. That's about 10 party-sized Coke bottles of hydration pouring out of your body every 24 hours. And if you don't replenish that with about a liter of water every hour, you're going to die.

There's a photograph I found while researching this part of the war, and it was taken from an Israeli helicopter, and it shows three little black dots in the middle of this endless beige blob under a bright blue sky. The dots were three Egyptian soldiers wandering aimlessly in the desert, fleeing the IDF. It is said that in the Six-Day War, more Egyptian soldiers died of heat and exposure than of actual fighting. They lose 10,000 men.

The Israelis only lost about 300. Back in Cairo, the full gravity of this defeat is beginning to dawn on President Gamal Abdel Nasser. By now, he knows his Egyptian force has been completely destroyed. He knows his army is wasting away in the Sinai, and he knows that his emphatic prodding of King Hussein to attack Israel has likely doomed the Jordanians as well.

So he does what people do when they are panicked, backed into a corner, and have no idea what to do. He cooks up a lie. He calls King Hussein and informs him of the shitty situation. But he has an idea, and he runs this idea by Hussein. Our armies have been defeated, right? That's a given. But what if we could bring the full might of our Soviet benefactors into the war?

What if we could provoke the Soviets to intervene on our behalf and bring the sledgehammer of the Russian military down on Israel? In this phone call, Gamal Abdel Nasser and King Hussein of Jordan agree to lie to the world. They both agree to tell the international community that American and British planes were the ones that bombed Egyptian air bases, that the U.S. was taking direct actions against them in support of Israel.

This was, of course, untrue, but it muddies the water, not only for the UN and governments around the world who now have to parse out what's fact and what's fiction, but also the people on the ground. It stirs animus and hatred among the Arab peoples in particular who have been told that the U.S. is directly attacking them and killing their brothers, husbands, and fathers. One Cairo radio station broadcasted the following, quote,

You know how I said earlier that I almost feel a little bad for King Hussein? Well, my sympathy really starts to erode a little bit when I think about this part of the story.

This was a reckless, monstrous lie, one that could have brought the great powers to blows in unforeseen and disastrous ways. Thankfully, it did not, because Nasser and Hussein's conversation had been secretly recorded. Israeli Mossad operatives had the phone lines tapped and recorded every single syllable of their conspiracy.

The Israelis released the recording, and Nasser was revealed as the instigator of what later became known as the Big Lie. All of these diplomatic shenanigans bring even more interest, pressure, and scrutiny down upon this relatively small regional conflict in the Middle East.

Now, this is the point where events start to unfold very quickly. Every hour brings new information, new developments, and new decisions to be made, not only by the nations fighting each other, but by the international community. Time becomes a critical resource to the Israelis. The UN will impose a ceasefire at some point. The international community will demand an end to the fighting, and to avoid becoming global pariahs, everyone will have to stand down.

But before that happens, Israel wants to make as many territorial gains as possible. They want to snatch up as many strategic pockets of land as they can while they have the Arab coalition on the run. And the reason they want to do this is because every square mile of Arab territory they grab is a bargaining chip in the peace negotiations to come. It's leverage that they can use to get a more favorable outcome in the UN-mediated negotiations.

But there's more than cold logic and rationality animating the Israeli offensives. There's also a deeply personal, emotional factor to consider. Jordan's entry into the war has brought with it a unique opportunity. They have the chance, the briefest of windows, to recapture the old city of Jerusalem, to take back the beating heart of their religious heritage.

Before King Hussein made the fateful decision to join Egypt in attacking Israel, Moshe Dayan was adamant in stressing that the IDF was to do nothing that might provoke a hostile response from Jordan. Israel was strong militarily, but they could only fight one war at a time. One front was manageable. Opening a second could stretch the IDF's capabilities to its breaking point.

A reservist stationed in Jerusalem at the time, named Yoram Galon, said after the war, quote, But once King Hussein threw his lot in with Nasser and okayed artillery barrages on Israeli territory, the entire dynamic shifted.

Moshe Dayan and the IDF have justification they needed to advance into the West Bank and Eastern Jerusalem. Israeli paratroopers advance into Eastern Jerusalem and engage with the Jordanian army. As this fighting is raging in the outskirts of the city, Moshe Dayan is wrestling with an agonizing choice.

Dayan has deep reservations about moving troops into the Old City, the sector of Jerusalem that houses some of the holiest places for three major world religions. This is not the wilderness of the Sinai, where you can drop bombs, spray machine gun fire, and hammer positions with artillery. This is a population center with centuries of religious significance.

Not only is the situation fragile in a figurative sense, Jerusalem itself is literally fragile. It's a very old, densely packed city. What if, in recapturing the city, they damage a holy site? What if, to protect themselves, the soldiers have to fire towards something that holds tremendous religious significance to Islam or Christianity? Dayan expressed his concerns, saying, quote,

How will 300 million Catholics respond if Israeli mortar rounds tear holes on the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre? How will 200 million Muslims react to the sight of Jewish half-tracks in the square before the Dome of the Rock? But he also acknowledges the tremendous weight of the opportunity in his hands and what it could mean for Israel. 2,000 years of exile cry out for this.

What is the alternative? Do I wish to be remembered as the commander who stood at the threshold of the greatest feat of arms in Jewish history and refused to let my brothers consummate it? End quote. The prospect of success also terrifies Dayan. What if they capture the old city and the Western Wall and then are forced to give it back by the UN? What if he delivers this incredible gift to the Israeli people only to have it ripped from their hands again?

In his memoirs, he says it would be like amputating a limb. Nothing short of a national trauma. For this reason, he holds off on giving his approval to take the old city. The Israeli forces establish a ring around it, driving Jordanian forces back, often finding their positions empty or abandoned. On the international stage, a different kind of battle was playing out.

It was a battle waged not with bullets and bombs, but with verbs and adjectives, turns of phrase, and appeals to emotion.

The big lie had successfully inflamed the Arab world against the U.S. and Britain, but had done immense damage to Nasser and Hussein's moral credibility within the halls of the U.N. Phone calls were flying back and forth between Washington and Moscow, each government trying to rein in their allies in the region and push the parties involved to negotiate a ceasefire. There's a lot of debate on who's right, who's wrong, and what should be done.

Into this maelstrom of public opinion steps Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eben to deliver the rhetorical death blow to Nasser's cause. In an address to the UN that the Chicago Tribune would later call, quote, one of the great diplomatic speeches of all time, end quote, Abba Eben attempted to justify Israel's preemptive action through the lens of Nasser's brinkmanship, specifically his closing of the Straits of Tehran.

Abba Ibn said, quote, He wrapped his speech up with a call for peace, quote,

Let us build a new system of relationships from the wreckage of the old. Let us discern across the darkness the vision of a brighter and gentler dawn. End quote. Back in Jerusalem, Dayan and his commanders realized that a UN-mandated ceasefire is becoming more and more likely. If that comes down, they will lose their opportunity to lay claim to the Old City and the Jewish holy sites within it. So on June 7th, Moshe Dayan gives his commanders the go-ahead.

Israeli tanks blow a hole in the entrance to the old city, known as the Lion's Gate, and retake ancient Jerusalem. At this point, the Jordanian forces have mostly abandoned their positions. There's not much fighting or violence, and after a little searching and some blind wandering, Israeli paratroopers see the clusters of poplar trees that mark the location of the western wall.

If you've seen pictures of the Western Wall, you know it's not an architectural marvel. It's just what it sounds like. It's a 35-foot limestone wall. The stones are ancient and worn, pockmarked and ragged. There are weeds and branches growing out of the cracks between the stones. But for the Israeli soldiers who first saw it on June 7, 1967, these rocks represent the end of a journey that's taken 2,000 years.

This little pile of stones was all the Roman legionaries had left behind. And to these Israeli soldiers, it's an intensely emotional moment. Moshe Dayan arrives at the Western Wall and gives a speech to his soldiers. The moment is soured somewhat when the chief rabbi of the IDF, Shlomo Goren, suggests attaching explosive charges to the Islamic mosques on the Temple Mount and reducing them to rubble.

Thankfully, Dayan completely ignores this cruel, fanatical suggestion. And in contrast to this serene, spiritual moment in the shadow of the Western Wall, the rest of the West Bank, a big chunk of Jordan's territory, is a conflagration of death and displacement. The Jordanian army has been routed. Palestinians, many of them refugees from the 1948 war, are heartbroken to see Israeli tanks rolling through their villages yet again.

From the driver's seat of his personal jeep, King Hussein looks across the Jordan Valley and sees the straggling remnants of his army. Quote, I will never forget the hallucinating sight of that defeat. Roads clogged with trucks, jeeps, and all kinds of vehicles, twisted, disemboweled, dented, still smoking, giving off that particular smell of metal and paint burned by exploding bombs.

Back in Moscow, the Soviets were understandably furious.

Over the last decade, they had pumped $2 billion worth of state-of-the-art weaponry into Egyptian arsenals. High-tech jets, armored tanks, fearsome artillery, even Soviet advisors to teach them how to operate it all. And what was the result? Nasser and his reluctant ally, King Hussein, had seen their armies routed and crushed in only four days. One Soviet official said bitterly, quote,

The war has shown that the Arabs are incapable of unity, even when their vital interests are at stake." For the Soviets, this was starting to reflect pretty badly on them. What were Soviet arms and weapons worth if they couldn't secure a victory against a numerically outmatched nation like Israel? Every second the war dragged on, every Russian-made tank the IDF blew apart in the desert, the worse and worse the USSR looked. This war had to end.

A ceasefire must be reached as soon as possible. A quick aside about ceasefires between warring countries. They're hard enough to negotiate between two countries. They're almost impossible to achieve when four countries are fighting each other. And when you have the added layer of complexity brought by the UN mediators and the nuclear superpowers, basically this is all just a diplomatic nightmare.

While all of this hemming and hawing in New York is going on, Israeli farmers in the shadow of the Golan Heights are still being shelled by Syrian artillery positions. The death count isn't particularly high, but this valuable agricultural land is just getting torn apart. Orchards are burning, fields are being destroyed, and the Israeli farming communities are putting a lot of pressure on Levi Eshkol, Moshe Dayan, and the rest of the cabinet leadership to put a stop to this shelling and make sure it never happens again.

At one point, a Kibbutz representative calls an Israeli cabinet member and literally screams into the phone, quote, We are being shelled non-stop. We demand the government free us from this nightmare, end quote. Just like in Jerusalem the day before, Moshe Dayan is of two minds about the situation. On one hand, he'd love nothing more than to take the Golan Heights away from Syria and remove that huge geographical advantage from them once and for all. But on the other hand, Russia...

If the Soviets decide to enter the war on Syria's behalf, best case scenario, Israel is defeated and their Arab neighbors get to pick apart the carcass of a nation that's only managed to exist for 20 years. Worst case scenario, the Soviet intervention pulls the United States into the conflict in an effort to maintain stability, and boom, World War III.

Exhausted, after four days of monitoring the war day and night, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol and Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin go home and get some much-needed sleep. They've been pulling all-nighters for days straight and were not in the best condition to be making world-shaping decisions. Well, for better or worse, one man doesn't go to sleep. Moshe Dayan stays up and spends the entire night looking through intelligence reports, maps, and troop positions.

He'd actually been a staunch opponent of invading Syria and risking Soviet intervention. How much more Arab land do we need? He'd scoffed. Well, in the morning, the IDF commander at the Syrian border receives a phone call. The voice on the other line asks a short, simple question. Quote, Can you attack? Yes, the commander says. Then, attack.

Moshe Dayan had changed his mind. Without Levi Eshkol, without Yitzhak Rabin, without the consensus of anyone in the Israeli government. The decision baffles basically everyone close to Moshe Dayan. But like it or not, this was happening. The Golan Heights were going to be retaken.

Two years earlier, in 1965, an Israeli spy named Eli Cohen had been captured and executed by the Syrians. His story is interesting enough to be an episode all by itself, but we don't have time for that. Long story short, this prolific intelligence agent manages to pass along a very important piece of information before he is eventually found out and killed.

Eli Cohen was such a talented spy that he managed to infiltrate the Syrian government itself and became best buds with a lot of movers and shakers in the military.

Well, on one occasion, Cohen is touring Syrian artillery emplacements in the Golan Heights, and he notices that the Syrian gunners don't have any shade. He says, you know what we should do? Let's plant some big, tall trees at all these gun emplacements so the soldiers can be sheltered from the sun. If they're more comfortable, they'll fight better, they'll stay focused.

Well, the Syrian generals think this is a great idea and plant trees at the site of every single gun emplacement in the Golan Heights. Now, because there are very few trees in the Golan Heights, these groves stick out like a sore thumb. Two years later, in 1967, as Israeli tank gunners and artillery officers are searching for Syrian targets, they know exactly what to look for. Those groves essentially become signs that say, shoot here.

After a bloody but relatively short battle, the Syrian resistance on the Golan Heights is cracked like an egg. An IDF secures the plateau. The Soviet Union, despite all its threats and saber-rattling, does nothing. A Soviet UN diplomat named Arkady Shevchenko later said, The Soviet Union was ready to supply weapons to some Arab countries to train their armies, to give them economic aid,

but it was not prepared to risk military confrontation with the United States and the region. On June 11th, a ceasefire is put into place and the Six-Day War ends. In just six days, Israel had conquered 42,000 square miles. It had established defensible borders on three fronts, upended the balance of power in the Middle East, and saved itself from a looming existential threat.

It was an undisputed triumph for Israel. But there was a poison pill buried in that feast of territorial gains. In the process of conquering the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Israel had almost overnight brought 1.2 million Arabs under its rule. People who were not jazzed to suddenly be living within the borders of what was ostensibly a Jewish ethnostate.

Many of these displaced peoples saw their homes bulldozed and their property seized in the afterglow of Israeli victory. The problem of the Palestinian refugees had been deeply exacerbated and compounded by the war. To this day, Israel in particular and the international community at large is dealing with the humanitarian legacy of this conflict.

One positive result, depending on where you're standing, was the development of a close relationship between Israel and the United States. Nasser's duplicitous shenanigans and the big lie had inflamed anti-American sentiment all across the Arab world, which in turn deepened the coziness between the U.S. and Israel. Bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy there.

And despite all of his earth-shaking rhetoric, Nasser's dream of a unified, pan-Arabic power block died with him in 1970, just three years after the war. He was deeply mourned by the Arab world. Now, I could do the thing that you might see at the end of like an 80s movie, where a picture of every character is shown, and the white text comes up and tells you what happened to them after the story ends.

Like, King Hussein went on to open a successful sporting goods chain in South Beach, California. Or, Moshe Dayan passed away in 1981. His famous black eye patch was sold on eBay for $75,000.

One of those statements is actually true, by the way. But no, I'm not going to go character by character and tell you how their lives played out. It's not all that relevant to the story. No, instead, as we wrap this episode up, I want to do something else. I want to talk about the concept of home for a second. Because the idea of home is something that drives this entire story. What makes your home your home?

Today, when you hear a news story about Israel, it's most often a story about the strained relations between Israelis and Palestinians. As we know, history is not a closed book. And the Six-Day War is just one chapter in the awful story of how these two groups have clashed again and again and hurt one another in horrible ways. Each side is driven by the fundamental longing and aching for a true home.

This is a story that continues to be written at this very moment, as you're listening to this. The wounds inflicted by the outcome of the Six-Day War and the fundamental question that caused it still persists. Who has the ultimate claim to this land? Well, I don't know the answer to that question. If that seems like a cop-out to you, I understand. The purpose of this episode was never to untangle the knot that has baffled some of the most talented diplomats in the history of the world.

The purpose of this episode was to grapple with the roots of the issue, educate people about it, and hopefully drive more informed conversation on why the situation remains such a fractious issue 60 years after the fact. Of all the topics we've covered this season, this was by far the most challenging, not only in terms of scope, complexity, and content, but also because it's a living, breathing issue that millions of people are still struggling with and being affected by,

today, no matter which side of the issue you fall. I hope you enjoyed the story. This has been Conflicted. Thanks for listening.

Welcome to Anthology of Heroes, the podcast that explores the most pivotal moments of history through the eyes of those who lived it. In this podcast, we don't spend our time recounting facts and dates. Instead, we follow in the footsteps of national heroes, kings, or ordinary people who lived and breathed the moments that shaped our world. We're not hemmed in by eras, borders, or religions. Instead, we seek out the tales of those who defied the odds and fought passionately for their beliefs. Whether they're right or wrong is up to you to decide.

From Vercingetorix's doomed rebellion against Rome, to Osceola's unshakable war against the USA, all the way up to the inspiring Sobibor concentration camp uprising in World War II. Each episode is an immersive listening experience, blending music and sound effects to really draw you into the story. Our episodes go for about 45 minutes, making them perfect for your commute.

and are crafted using a wealth of historical sources which I list on our website if you want to learn more. I'm the host, Eliot Gates, and I'm thrilled to have you joining me as we uncover history's hidden gems and illuminate the faded pages of our past. Look out for the Anthology of Heroes podcast on Spotify, Apple Music, or anywhere else you get your podcasts from.