. Stumbling Decidedly into the Six-Day War Roland Popp MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL ✭ VOLUME 60, NO. 2, SPRING 2006 In the historiography of the 1967 War, the common reading is to portray it as an “inadvertent war.” Using recently declassified documents, this article offers an alternative interpretation. In critically examining existing master plan theories, it is shown that the United Arab Republic’s (UAR) military actions were limited in size and were without aggressive intentions. The Israeli decision to strike was taken not for military reasons but rather to prevent a diplomatic solution which might have entailed disadvantages for the Israeli side. While the historiography of US involvement in the Middle East is not without controversy, no serious scholar would disagree with the notion that the year 1967 represented a watershed in the post-World War II history of the region. The Six-Day War of June 1967 1 resulted in far-reaching changes, which continue to affect Middle Eastern politics to this day. Israel’s overwhelming military victory established it as a major regional power, dramatically changed the strategic setting in the Middle East, and escalated superpower confrontation in the region. The most conspicuous element of the new regional power configuration was Israel’s territorial expansion. The new cease-fire lines established Israeli control over all of Mandatory Palestine together with the conquest of Syria’s Golan Heights and Egypt’s Sinai, thereby more than quadrupling the territory under Israeli control. The conquests also triggered a new debate inside Israel about the territorial aims of Zionism and the emergence of the settlement movement, resulting in a reshaping of the political landscape together with strong repercussions for the political culture inside Israel. 2 On the international scene, the Six-Day War brought the Arab-Israeli conflict to the forefront of international politics. A further result of the war was that the hitherto informal alliance between the United States and Israel evolved into a “special relationship,” although it was not Roland Popp is a Lecturer in History in the Cologne School of Journalism. He has published on US- Iranian relations and is currently finishing a book titled An Unconditional Ally: the United States, Iran, and the Security of the Persian Gulf, 1941-73. The author would like to extend his particular thanks to Lorraine Traynor, Pamela Rooney, Sinéad Traynor, Jost Dülffer, and Sven Adelt; he would also like to express gratitude to the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC and the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation for funding archival research. 1. For simplicity’s sake, I will use in this article Israeli (Six-Day War) and Arab (e.g., June 1967 War) designations for the Arab-Israeli military confrontation of 1967 interchangeably. 2. Moshe Zuckermann, “The June 1967 War and Its Influence on the Political Culture in Israel,” Looking Back at the June 1967 War, Haim Gordon, ed. (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999), pp. 149-55; Nadav Safran, Israel, the Embattled Ally (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 172- 179. © Middle East Institute. This article is for personal research only and may not be copied or distributed in any form without the permission of The Middle East Journal.