On the morning of June 7th, 1967, Israeli paratroopers push through the narrow streets of Jerusalem's Old City and reach the Western Wall — the last remnant of the Second Temple destroyed by Rome in 70 CE. Hardened soldiers press their faces against the stone and weep. A military chaplain blows a ram's horn that echoes off the Temple Mount. A brigade commander grabs the radio and broadcasts three words: "The Temple Mount is in our hands."
In six days, Israel conquers the Sinai, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights — tripling the territory under its control and achieving a military victory so total it reshapes the map of the Middle East. For Israelis, this is redemption. For Palestinians, it is the moment the last fragments of their homeland fall under military occupation.
Episode 4 of our five-part series on Israel and Palestine covers the crisis leading up to the 1967 war — the three weeks of existential dread when Israel dug up parks for mass graves — through the war itself, the beginning of the occupation, the rise of the settlement movement, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and the first intifada, when Palestinian teenagers armed with stones transformed international perception of the conflict overnight.
This episode includes Nasser's declaration that Egypt's objective would be the destruction of Israel, Motta Gur's radio broadcast from the Temple Mount, Rabin's directive to use "force, might, and beatings" against the intifada, and Johnson's deliberately ambiguous promise to Israel: "You will not be alone unless you decide to go alone."
The victory that felt like salvation became a trap from which neither side has yet escaped.
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Suggested Sources for Listeners
These are accessible starting points for anyone who wants to go deeper into the history covered in this episode.
On the 1967 War
Michael Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East (2002) The definitive military and diplomatic history of the Six-Day War. Oren draws on Israeli, Arab, American, and Soviet sources to reconstruct the crisis, the decision-making, and the battles in extraordinary detail. Particularly strong on the three-week waiting period and the internal debates within the Israeli cabinet.
Tom Segev, 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East (2007) Where Oren focuses on the military and diplomatic story, Segev captures the cultural and emotional experience — what it felt like to live in Israel during those three weeks of dread, and how the euphoria of victory transformed the national character. Essential for understanding the mood that produced the settlement movement.
On the Occupation
Raja Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape (2007) Shehadeh, a Palestinian lawyer and writer, takes the reader on walks through the West Bank hills — and through the decades of transformation that have reshaped the landscape under occupation. Each walk covers a different period, from the early years after 1967 to the barrier wall of the 2000s. A quietly devastating book that shows what occupation looks like at ground level.
Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, Lords of the Land: The War Over Israel's Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007 (2007) The most comprehensive account of the settlement movement — its religious ideology, its political maneuvering, its relationship with successive Israeli governments, and its consequences for Palestinians and Israelis alike. Dense but essential for understanding how a handful of hilltop outposts became a network of cities housing hundreds of thousands.
David Grossman, The Yellow Wind (1988; translated 2002) Grossman, one of Israel's most celebrated novelists, spent seven weeks in the occupied West Bank in 1987 — just months before the intifada erupted — and wrote a series of dispatches that read like dispatches from a country slowly losing its soul. Prophetic and unflinching.
On Palestinian Resistance and the PLO
Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine (2020) Khalidi's chapters on the post-1967 period and the emergence of the PLO are among the strongest in this essential overview. He writes from within the Palestinian experience — his own family's history is woven through the narrative — while maintaining scholarly rigor. The best single-volume Palestinian perspective on the conflict.
Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993 (1997) An exhaustive scholarly account of the Palestinian national movement from the Nakba through Oslo. Sayigh traces the evolution from refugee politics to armed struggle to diplomacy with a level of detail that no other work matches. Academic but authoritative.
On the 1973 War
Abraham Rabinovich, The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter That Transformed the Middle East (2004) The best narrative account of the 1973 war — the intelligence failure, the desperate early battles, the turning of the tide. Rabinovich is a journalist who covered the war firsthand, and the book reads with the immediacy of someone who was there. His account of the fighting on the Golan Heights is particularly gripping.
On the First Intifada
Charles Enderlin, Shattered Dreams: The Failure of the Peace Process in the Middle East, 1995-2002 (2003) While Enderlin's focus is on the peace process era, his opening chapters on the intifada and the political shifts it produced — on both sides — are essential context for understanding how stones thrown in Jabaliya led to handshakes in Oslo.
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