By Zachary Foster
5 June 2026
In June 1967, Israel invaded and occupied the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights. During and after the war, they depopulated the Golan, Latrun, Jordan Valley, Gaza’s refugee camps and villages near Hebron, and destroyed large swaths of the Golan, Qalqiya, Tulkarem and Jerusalem. Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank were loaded onto buses with varying degrees of coercion and shipped off to the border with Jordan, where they were forced to voluntarily leave Palestine forever.
Altogether, Israel pushed out 300,000 Palestinians and 130,000 Syrians from their homes, levelling 131 Syrian villages and destroying 30 Palestinian villages, hamlets, herding communities, and refugee camps in whole or part (1, 2, 3). Israel wanted the land it conquered, just not the people living on it, the core principle of the Zionist movement, past and present. This is a brief history of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and Syrians in 1967.
The origins of the June 1967 war
Israeli leaders lamented the failure to conquer all of Palestine in 1948. “I never forgave the Israeli Government under Ben-Gurion for not letting us finish the job in ‘48-49,” once said Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Alon. Or, as Moshe Dayan put it in 1949, the “frontier of Israel should be on the Jordan [River]… present boundaries [are] ridiculous.” The feeling among many was “we had not completed the job in the War of Independence.” Or, as Abba Eban once said, the map of Israel from 1948-1967 “reminds us of memories of Auschwitz.” Anyone who believed Israel ought to exist within its borders apparently also supported another Holocaust.
Israel never declared its borders after 1948 as it was unhappy with them, insisting the armistice deals resulted in armistice lines, not borders. That is why Israel repeatedly crossed the lines, pushing Israeli control beyond the lines in Gaza, the West Bank and Syria, if at the margins.
Although many Israeli leaders believed the country could realize its national aims within its 1948 borders, many also supported their expansion should an opportunity present itself. This aligned with a new military doctrine gradually adopted in the 1950s, namely, “Israel must not leave the initiative in enemy hands.” Israel had to choose the conditions and timing of the fighting.
In 1962, Levi Eshkol was elected Prime Minister of Israel, and, in 1963, his deputy Israeli army chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin, outlined to him Israel’s ideal boundaries: the Jordan River in the east, the Suez Canal in the south and west and the Litani River in the north.
Many high-ranking army officers wanted to avenge their losses in 1948 in Jerusalem, Latrun, Bab al-Wad and other areas of the West Bank. Plans were developed to occupy Jerusalem and the Latrun area, the entire West Bank, and a separate plan to conquer Qalqilya and destroy it. There was also a plan to carry out “a transfer” in Hebron to avenge the 1929 massacre. “The idea that the Israel Defence Force might actively seek to expand Israel’s borders came up repeatedly during the mid-1960s,” as one scholar put it.
On 1 Jan 1964, Yitzhak Rabin, now the army’s Chief of Staff, explained his military doctrine. For Rabin, the military would bring peace closer by “readying itself for war [through] a greater momentum for operational activity.” War was apparently the gateway to peace. Rabin also discussed the possibility of an Israeli pre-emptive strike and the need to prepare talking points to support one. He saw “‘no moral flaw in thinking that the State of Israel must be large.” It was apparently a moral flaw to think Israel should remain within its borders.
Israel’s road to war in 1967—Nasser’s moves were an opportunity, not a threat
After the 1966 military coup in Syria, Israel repeatedly threatened to overthrow the new government in Damascus if it did not cease support for Palestinian militant groups. The Soviets, worried their ally in Damascus would fall, sent a false report to Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser of an imminent Israeli threat to Syria in May 1967 to shore up support for the Syrian regime, leading Nasser to move troops into the Sinai. The Egyptian army expelled United Nations forces from the Peninsula and closed the straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. Israeli and US intelligence assessments agreed Israel would destroy the combined Arab armies with ease, even if Egypt attacked first.
But to Israeli leaders, this was not a crisis, it was an opportunity. The feeling among Israel’s military leadership was that Israel had a narrow window to act. Israel could transform the balance of power in the region and renew its deterrence capacity if it acted first.
After the war, Israel’s apologists claimed the country faced a threat of annihilation and had to strike first. Yet, no Israeli leaders who went to war in 1967 believed that. The existential threat was contrived after the fact to justify the war of choice. Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, Haim Bar-Lev, Ezer Weizman, Mordechai Bentov and Matityahu Peled all confessed as much in the years after the war.
And so, beginning on 5 June 1967, Israel launched a surprise attack on Egypt and then invaded and occupied the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip, the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula, the Jordanian occupied West Bank and the Syrian Golan Heights. Within six days, it conquered the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan, tripling the size of the country. It spent the better part of the year trying to uproot as many Arabs in the territories conquered as possible. This is a history of Israel’s crime of forcible displacement, from June 1967 to December 1967.
No Arabs to remain in the border areas: Israel control for ever
During and after the war, Israel depopulated large swaths of the territories occupied. The expulsions were born out of the wartime goal and the post-war principle of no Arabs in border areas. Israel focused on seven regions: the Latrun area, the Qalqilya-Tulkarm region, south Hebron area, the Jordan Valley, Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights. These were areas of religious, military or political significance, and so needed to remain under Israeli control forever, and so needed to be emptied. The campaigns began during the war itself and continued for weeks, months and in some cases years after the war’s end.
On June 6, Israeli forces invaded the Latrun area, the region situated along the highway connecting Israel’s two most important cities, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Israeli troops forcibly expelled the entire populations of Imwas, Yalu and Beit Nuba, about 10,000 people. Palestinians were given hours, sometimes minutes, to leave and ordered by gunpoint to march dozens of kilometres eastwards towards Ramallah. “There were old men hardly able to walk, old women…babies in their mother’s arms … small children weeping, begging for water,” as one soldier who took part in the atrocity wrote. “One man was carrying a 50-kg sack of flour on his back, and that was how he had walked mile after mile.” As one of the victims, Nihad Thaher Abu-Ghosh recalled, they “told us not to return to our houses and threatened to kill us if we did.”