THE SIX DAYS WAR: A MIRACLE OR NOT?

The Six Days War was fought by Israel against Jordan, Egypt and Syria between 5 and 10 of June 1967. It resulted in acquisition by Israel of the territories of Judea and Samaria, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights and Sinai Peninsula. The control over Gaza Strip and Sinai has been ceded since.

Of all wars Israel ever engaged in, the Six Days War was the most significant for the Israeli and Jewish morale – it was won in a manner and at a speed that would make Israelis and Jews all over the world to use the word ‘miracle’ in their descriptions of the War.

Professor Yoel Elitzur is a Hebrew Linguistics professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He works closely with biblical archaeologists and other experts in ancient Jewish history. In that area there are two approaches: the maximalist that says ‘everything described in the Torah is the truth, give and take a few details’ and the minimalist that says ‘it did not happen’, ‘it is all tall tales’. I created a caricature of approaches, things are ‘more complicated than that’ but you get the picture. Professor Elitzur, who is also a religious man, is with the maximalist approach. ‘These approaches, the minimalist and the maximalist, will continue in the future’- said Professor Elitzur in an interview (I am paraphrasing a bit). ‘And in 1,000 years, the only people who would still hold a maximalist position will be the religious. And that would be a general situation, not just concerning the Bible, but to the Jewish history is general.. Because it is , as a whole, and some events in it, are too big to understand. Take the Six Days war, I can tell you that in 1,000 years only the religious would believe that the Six Days war actually happened. The non-religious would say: it did not happen, or it did not happen like this, these people misunderstood, they exaggerated, embroidered…’

So, miracle or not? Uri Milstein, an eminent Israeli military historian says ‘no’. The war was won due to the genius invention of one person who created a method of intercepting the activity of the radars used by the Egyptian airforce. Israeli Army, simply put, could see the exact picture appearing on Egyptian radars and direct the Israeli military airplanes in a way that totally avoided the radars. The rest is known: Israeli airforce annihilated the Egyptian airplanes, over 300 of them, mostly while still parked in the airfields. Everything else about that War was less glamorous, says Milstein, everywhere else Israel won not because it was strong but because the Arabs were weak, and terrible errors of judgement were made in places. I will leave it to other military historians to contest or confirm Milstein’s claim. While I stick to what I know well. And that is the effect of the War on the world Jewry, that had all signs of the miracle.

The world Jewry did not know about the invention that brought the victory on the Egyptian front. And it did not know about the errors of judgement on other fronts. It did not know that the Israeli Army had no military academy (which it should have had-according to Milstein) and that it worked more like a guerrilla army, from which it developed (which it should not have done, according to Milstein). It knew full well just one thing: Israel won a war that it was not expected to win, and it did so exactly and precisely 22 years after the Holocaust, not even a full demographic generation apart. The Soviet Jewry, glued to the radio at night and sitting stone-faced at the Communist party gatherings during the discussions of the ‘Israeli aggression’, had a moment that Identity Politics patrons of today can only dream about. Nothing as good is going to happen to them – mark my words. It cannot.  To have good moments like this, one needs to believe in miracles.

The Six Days War for the Soviet Jews meant national revival, restoration of the national pride and of the sense of self. Miracle much? And it was not just them. From all over the world Jews started going back to Israel, including places from which they never really came before , the ‘free world’, as they call it. Britain, France, the rest of Europe, the USA… The circa-war immigration peak, clearly visible in Israeli immigration statistics, happened not in the summer of 1967, but when the War finished. That late-1960s peak was, in relative terms, at about the same level as the wave of immigration in 1948, when the gates of Israel were first open for unrestricted immigration. These people came because they realised, under the spell of the miracle they witnessed, that ‘Jews could’. Still not a miracle?

And now to the military losses in the Six Days War. Being the most significant to the morale, it was not the most significant in terms of military losses. In that sense, Yom Kippur War of 1973 was the most significant of all Israeli post-independence wars. Direct military losses in the Six Days War, i.e. soldiers killed in battle, amounted to nearly 750 persons. This is three times lower, for example, than the number of soldiers’ deaths in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, a major national trauma. Still, it is much higher than the number of deaths in each of the most significant British military campaigns. In fact, it is more or less at a level of three British military campaigns (The Falklands War, the War in Iraq and the War in Afgahanistan) taken together.