The Six-Day War

On May 14, 1967, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser began moving troops into the Sinai Peninsula, acting on a false Soviet report that Israel was massing forces against Syria. Within days the crisis accelerated. On May 18 and 19, Egypt formally demanded the withdrawal of the United Nations Emergency Force, the 3,500-strong peacekeeping contingent that had patrolled the Egypt-Israel line since the 1956 Suez war, and the UN complied without resistance. Then, on May 22 and 23, Nasser announced that the Straits of Tiran would close to any ship flying an Israeli flag or carrying strategic cargo, effective the 23rd. For Israel this was not an abstract insult. Roughly 90 percent of its oil imports passed through those straits, and closing them had been Israel's declared red line for a decade. By the eve of war, Egyptian deployment in Sinai had swollen to roughly 100,000 troops and nearly 1,000 tanks, dug in along a border Israel could not ignore. In the space of nine days, Nasser had erased the buffer that had kept the two countries apart since 1956, expelled the peacekeepers meant to prevent exactly this, and cut a shipping lane Israel considered essential to its survival. The question in Jerusalem was no longer whether war was coming, but who would move first, and when.