The Six-Day War, 1967

What happened

The Six-Day War ran from June 5 to June 10, 1967. Israel fought Egypt, Syria, and Jordan at once, after weeks of Egyptian troop buildups in Sinai, the closure of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, and mutual defense pacts among the Arab states. ¹ By the time it ended, Israel held the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. ¹ Israeli forces also took the Temple Mount and the Western Wall in East Jerusalem, sites Jews had been barred from under Jordanian control since 1948. ¹ The territorial change was enormous relative to how briefly the fighting lasted. Israel entered the war roughly the size it had been since 1949 and came out of it controlling Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights, all within a single week. ¹

The war reordered Arab diplomacy almost immediately. At a summit in Khartoum that September, Arab League states issued a resolution built around what became known as the "three noes": no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiation with Israel. ⁴ The same resolution also called for Israeli withdrawal from the territory it had just taken. ⁴

The United Nations Security Council tried to bridge that gap two months later. Resolution 242, adopted unanimously on Nov. 22, 1967, called for "withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict" alongside "termination of all claims or states of belligerency" and recognition of every state's "right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries." ² It didn't specify all territories or a timeline, and the ambiguity in that wording has been argued over ever since. But the basic trade it proposed, land in exchange for peace and recognition, became the template diplomats reached for in every peace process that followed. ²

Why it still matters

The 1949 armistice lines that had marked Israel's border before the war, known as the Green Line for the color of ink used to draw them on the map, were never meant to be a permanent border. They were cease-fire lines. ¹ But because Israel held that territory for 19 years before 1967, the Green Line became the reference point for what "Israel" meant before the war, and the phrase "1967 lines" or "pre-1967 borders" is still how international bodies and peace proposals describe where a two-state solution would draw the boundary. ¹

Israel did not annex most of what it captured in 1967. It began building civilian settlements in the West Bank almost immediately, starting with Kfar Etzion in September 1967 under the Labor government of the day. ¹ Decades later, by recent counts, more than 450,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank outside East Jerusalem, in a territory of roughly 3 million people that is about 85% Palestinian. ³ At Oslo II in 1995, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin told the Knesset Israel would not go back to what he called "the 4 June 1967 lines," making clear that no Israeli government since 1967 has planned to fully withdraw to the pre-war border. ¹

That is the argument that sits underneath most Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab diplomacy since: what, if anything, from the territory captured in six days in 1967 gets returned, and on what terms, and to whom. Resolution 242 itself never resolved that question. It affirmed the general principle of withdrawal for peace without settling whether that meant all of the territory or some of it, which is exactly why both Israeli and Arab governments have been able to quote the same resolution in support of opposite positions for more than half a century. ²

It is also why the war, though it lasted less than a week, gets more space in the history of the conflict than wars that lasted years: the territory it produced is still, as of 2026, the territory being argued about. ¹

The words you'll hear

The Green Line. The 1949 armistice line that marked Israel's de facto border before 1967. Used today as shorthand for "pre-1967 Israel." ¹

UN 242. Shorthand for Security Council Resolution 242, the November 1967 resolution that proposed Israeli withdrawal from occupied territory in exchange for recognition and secure borders, without specifying exactly how much territory or when. ²

Land for peace. The general framework Resolution 242 is credited with establishing: Israel gives up territory captured in 1967 in exchange for recognition, security guarantees, and formal peace. ²

The three noes. The September 1967 Khartoum Resolution's declaration that the Arab League would offer Israel no peace, no recognition, and no negotiation, a position that formally held until Egypt broke from it after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. ⁴

Settlements. Israeli civilian communities built in territory captured in 1967, mostly in the West Bank, starting the same year the war ended. ¹