The sirens sounded, gasped into silence as if some giant animal were catching its breath, then sounded again. It was a familiar dirge amid the weathered blocks of flats on the Mediterranean seafront of Tel Aviv in the early months of 1967.
Air-raid drills were just one sign of escalating tension between the precarious, teenage state of Israel and a coalition of surrounding Arab neighbors led by then-president Gamal Abdel-Nasser's Egypt.
But this time -- on the morning of June 5, 1967 -- few Israelis doubted the wails of warning meant war. Few were confident it would end in victory. Fewer still felt that if victory did come, it would come easily, or soon. On the last score, they would be proven utterly and spectacularly wrong.
Within hours, Israeli jets would destroy virtually all Egypt's 450 combat aircraft on the ground. By the day's end, the Syrian air force would be similarly crippled.
A day later, Israeli troops were fighting their way across the concrete and barbed wire that divided the disputed holy city of Jerusalem into its Israeli-held west and its Jordanian-ruled east -- and capturing Judaism's holiest site, the Western Wall, sole surviving remnant of the ancient Jewish temple. Ground fighting, often fierce, rumbled on for four more days, with Israel ultimately going on to capture the entire West Bank from Jordan on its eastern flank; Gaza and the Sinai desert from Egypt in the south; and the towering Golan Heights from Syria in the north.
In barely 130 hours, the fighting was all over. Yet however quick, the war had not been bloodless. Israel lost about 1,100 dead, the Egyptians more than 10,000, the Syrians 2,500 and Jordan about 700. And some 300,000 Palestinians from the West Bank fled the fighting eastward into Jordan -- in some cases "double refugees," because they had also lost their homes in the fighting surrounding the establishment of Israel 20 years earlier.
It is now four decades since the Six-Day War, but its effects reverberate still -- in Israel, the occupied Palestinian territories, the Middle East and the wider world. When British Prime Minister Tony Blair shuttled to Jerusalem and Ramallah and Cairo speaking of the urgency of getting Israeli-Palestinian peace talks back on track; when US President George W. Bush and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice proclaim a commitment to the "diplomatic road map"; when a Saudi-led Arab summit urges a "land-for-peace" deal; or when al-Qaeda propagandists cite "Palestine" among the litany of grievances to recruit suicide bombers to pilot passenger planes into New York skyscrapers or blow up subway trains in London; all, in their own ways, are negotiating the unfinished business of six days of war in June 1967.
young nation
When the war broke out, Israel was barely 19 years old, and barely 16km wide at its narrowest point. There were none of the luxury hotels, pricey restaurants or all-night bars and clubs that today dot Tel Aviv's seafront; none of the high-tech businesses that lie northwards up the coast. Israel's equivalent of the BBC would not introduce television broadcasts until the following year.
The state had been established in 1948 on the back of a UN resolution partitioning British Mandate Palestine into two states: one a national home for the Jews, six million of whom had been murdered in Hitler's Holocaust, the other for Palestinian Arabs. The Arab states rejected the plan, and their armies invaded when Israel declared statehood. Israel survived, winning a protracted battle it called the War of Independence. In Arabic it is known, to this day, simply as al naqba -- the catastrophe.
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