“The 1967 war was purely defensive — Israel had no choice”

The undisputed sequence is that Israel struck first: on 5 June 1967 the Israeli air force destroyed Egypt’s air force on the ground. The defensive case rests on the claim that Nasser was about to attack — and that claim was later contradicted by the men who led Israel at the time. Yitzhak Rabin, Chief of Staff in 1967, told Le Monde (28 February 1968): “I do not think Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to the Sinai in May would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it.” General Mattityahu Peled, a member of the General Staff, said in 1972 that the cabinet “never heard from the General Staff that the Egyptian military threat was dangerous for Israel.”

The most cited admission is Menachem Begin’s. Addressing the National Defense College on 8 August 1982, Israel’s prime minister classified the state’s wars into wars of no choice and wars of choice — and placed 1967 among the latter: “In June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.” In fairness to the record, Begin immediately added that he regarded this preemption as “a war of self-defence in the noblest sense of the term.” That is exactly the point: even Israel’s own leadership framed 1967 not as an unavoidable defensive war but as a chosen, justified preemption — which is a different claim from “purely defensive.”

The documented consensus among historians, including Israeli ones, is correspondingly nuanced: Egypt’s escalation (expelling UNEF, closing the Straits of Tiran, troop movements, rhetoric) created a genuine crisis that Israel’s leadership chose to resolve by striking first, seizing the Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank including East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. One may debate whether that choice was wise; what the documentary record will not support is the formula “no choice, purely defensive” — the men who made the choice rejected it themselves.

Sources

• Address by Prime Minister Begin at the National Defense College, 8 August 1982 — Israel State Archives / gov.il
• Gabriel Glickman, “Rewriting the Six-Day War” (on the Begin and Peled statements, in context) — Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies
• “Arab-Israeli Conflict” — Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law (Oxford), quoting Rabin’s Le Monde interview