A Brief Guide for the Perplexed 15
heavily-armed Arab forces likely to attack at any moment , launched a preemptive strike .
Within six days , Israel defeated its adversaries and , in the process , captured land on the Egyptian , Jordanian , and Syrian fronts .
Israel had made strenuous — and fully documented — efforts , via UN channels , to persuade King Hussein to stay out of the war . Unlike Egypt and Syria , whose hostility toward Israel was unremitting , Jordan had quietly cooperated with Israel and shared concerns about the Palestinians ’ aggressive designs . Years later , King Hussein publicly acknowledged that his decision to enter the 1967 war , in which he lost control of the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem , was one of the biggest blunders he ever made .
Another lost peace opportunity
Shortly after the Six-Day War , Israel signaled a desire to exchange land for peace with its Arab neighbors . Israel was unprepared to relinquish the sector of Jerusalem which contained Judaism ’ s holiest sites and which , in blatant violation of the terms of the Israeli-Jordanian armistice agreement , had been entirely off limits to Israel for nearly nineteen years ( while Jordan desecrated fifty-eight synagogues in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City and the world remained silent ). But it was eager to exchange the seized territories for a comprehensive settlement . Israel ’ s overtures were rebuffed . An unmistakable response came from Khartoum , Sudan ’ s capital , where Arab leaders gathered to issue a resolution on September 1 , 1967 , announcing the three noes : “ no peace , no recognition , and no negotiation ” with Israel .
In November 1967 , the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 242 .
This resolution , often cited in discussions about the Arab- Israeli conflict as the basis for resolving it , is not always quoted with precision . The resolution stresses “ the inadmissibility of the