By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 19 June 2024

Israel pre-emptively struck against the Arab armies massing on her borders on 5 June 1967 and routed them by 10 June. The intention of the Arab States in 1967 had been plainly expressed over nearly twenty years. After the pan-Arab invasion had failed to destroy the Jewish State in 1948, Arab leaders—speaking directly and through their State-run media—made clear that they intended to wage another war that would succeed in eliminating Israel. As the Arab armies moved into position in May 1967, the Arab governments openly proclaimed that this was that long-awaited war.

Below is a far-from-exhaustive compilation of Arab statements in the lead-up to the Six-Day War:

In September 1953, after a false report that Adolf Hitler was still alive and living in Brazil, one of the Egypt’s State-owned newspapers, Al-Musawar, asked various public figures what they would want to say to the Führer. A number of the responses were negative. One was very notably positive: “I congratulate you with all my heart, because, though you appear to have been defeated, you were the real victor. … There will be no peace until Germany is restored to what it was … As for the past, I think you made some mistakes, such as opening too many fronts or Ribbentrop’s short-sightedness in the face of Britain’s old man diplomacy. But you are forgiven on account of your faith in your country and people. That you have become immortal in Germany is reason enough for pride. And we should not be surprised to see you again in Germany, or a new Hitler in your place.” The author of this statement was Anwar al-Sadat,[1] the man who a year earlier had read out the proclamation of the “Free Officers’ revolution” that toppled the Egyptian monarchy.

• A year later, in 1954, after Gamal Abdel Nasser consolidated his control over Egypt, Al-Sadat would become the founding editor of Al-Gomhuria, the premier official outlet of the Nasser regime. After Nasser’s death in 1970, Al-Sadat became president and famously made Egypt the first Arab State to sign a peace accord recognising Israel in 1978-79. Al-Sadat was assassinated in 1981.
• Nazi infiltration in the Middle East after 1940 had been very extensive, and the German propaganda apparatus took antisemitism to a mass Arab audience in a way never seen before, with effects that last to this day. Overt support for Hitler and the Nazis lasted in the Arab world long after the Third Reich was demolished. “Nazi” and “Hitlerite” started to become insults among Arabs in the later 1950s and were used near-universally as epithets by the end of the 1960s, but this was a mark of the increasing influence of the Soviet Union, not a substantive revision of opinion about the Nazi experience.
• Even during the transition period from c. 1955 to 1970 when lexicographical changes were being made and States like Egypt were coming under Soviet domination, Arab officials with backgrounds as Nazi supporters and collaborators, such as Nasser and Al-Sadat, made no effort to hide the fact; rather to the contrary. The Arab leadership in Palestine’s wartime alliance with the Nazis and the spread of Nazi ideology among Arab populations were among the factors that made the 1948 war against Israel so existential for the Jews, and the dynamic had not gone away by 1967. In some ways, things had gotten worse by the second time around: antisemitism in the “proper” sense—not an ethnic prejudice but the belief that Jews are the source of cosmic evil—was more widespread in the Arab world in 1967 than it had been in 1948.[2]

July 1959, Nasser: “We want a decisive battle in order to annihilate that germ, Israel. All the Arabs want a decisive battle.”[3]

2 February 1960, Radio Cairo: “We are getting ready for the decisive battle, and, at the right moment, we will strike with power and with speed. All our coming battles with Israel will be battles of life or death.”

10 March 1960, Radio Damascus: “The Arabs are determined that Israel shall be uprooted from their midst at any price.”

30 March 1960, “The Voice of the Arabs” transnational show on Radio Cairo: “The guarantee for peace in the Middle East lies in our weapons, in the strength of our own army, and we shall impose the peace, O Israel. We shall impose the peace on the day we will drive you into the expanse of the sea.”

15 September 1960, Jordan’s broadsheet Falastin: “In all frankness, we want to eliminate Israel … and care not when Israel protests that we contemplate war and jeopardise her security … because this is exactly our aim.”

29 April 1961, Egypt’s Al-Gomhuria, declared: “Today, it is in our power to defeat Israel. … The day will yet come when we shall … purge our country [i.e., the ‘Arab nation’] of the very existence of Israel.”

15 May 1961, Radio Amman: “There is no doubt that our war with Israel is imminent. … We will strengthen our forces and liquidate Israel completely so that she will disappear from the face of the earth.”

16 June 1961, Radio Amman: “We see in Israel a plague that should be utterly rooted out.”

12 July 1961, Radio Amman: “The establishment of peace in the area will be made possible only through the liquidation of the enemy State.”

17 August 1961, Nasser: “We will act to realise Arab solidarity and the closing of the ranks that will eventually put an end to Israel. …We will liquidate her.”

23 December 1962, Nasser: “We feel that the soil of Palestine is the soil of Egypt and of the whole Arab world. Why do we mobilise? Because we feel that the land is part of our land, and are ready to sacrifice ourselves for it.”

3 March 1963, Jordan’s Falastin: “It would appear, on the face of it, that the concentration of the Jews in the Occupied Region [i.e., Israel], militates in favour of Zionism. In our view, however, in the long run it will favour the Arab nation. … Why? Because this will turn Israel into one huge, worldwide grave for this whole Jewish concentration. And the day draws near for those who await it.”

21 March 1963, Egypt’s Al-Gomhuria carried an official government statement: “The noose around Israel’s neck is tightening gradually.” On the same day, Hassan Ibrahim, a member of the Egyptian Presidential Council, said: “Egypt has rocket bases capable of destroying Israel within a short time, and panic reigns in that country.”

• The Egyptian missile program in the early 1960s was being developed with assistance from fugitive Nazi war criminals.^[4]

2 April 1963, Nasser: “Israel emerged because the Arab world was weak and divided … but unity will mean triumph and the liquidation of Israel.”

4 April 1963, Egyptian State newspaper, Al-Akhbar: “The liquidation of Israel will not be realised through a declaration of war against Israel by Arab States, but Arab unity and inter-Arab understanding will serve as a hangman’s rope for Israel.”

19 August 1963, Syria’s Defence Minister General Abdullah Ziadeh: “The Syrian Army stands as a mountain to crush Israel and demolish her. This army knows how to crush its enemies.”

22 February 1964, Nasser: “The possibilities of the future will be war with Israel. It is we who will dictate the time; it is we who will dictate the place.”

12 April 1964, Jordan’s King Husayn: “Jordan, with its Left and Right Bank, is the ideal jumping ground to liberate the usurped homeland.”

27 July 1964, president of Ba’thist-led Iraq, Abd al-Salam Arif: “A war with Israel is inevitable. There is no escaping that war.”

30 October 1964, Chief of Staff in Ba’thist Syria, Salah Jadid: “Our army will be satisfied with nothing less than the disappearance of Israel.”

16 September 1965, Nasser: “The war with Israel is an inevitable thing. … The Arabs waited seventy-five years until they succeeded in chasing out the Crusaders.” It has always been a common theme in Arab perceptions that Israel will perish as the Crusader States did.

13 March 1966, Syria’s daily Al-Ba’th newspaper: “The revolutionary forces in the Arab homeland, and the Ba’th at their head, preach a genuine Arab Palestine liberation … Our problem will only be solved by an armed struggle to … put an end to the Zionist presence. The Arab people demands armed struggle, and day-by-day incessant confrontation, through a total war of liberation”.

22 May 1966, Syria’s president Nureddin al-Atassi told troops during an inspection: “We want a full-scale popular war of liberation … to destroy the Zionist enemy.”

• Soon after Al-Atassi had come to power in the February 1966 coup within the Syrian Ba’th Party regime,^[5] Syrian-backed terrorists began being sent into Israel, often through Lebanon and Jordan; this policy was labelled “popular war” and this was the formal announcement of it.
• Arab fedayeen terrorists had been attacking Israel since the early 1950s, mostly sent from Egypt and Jordan.

24 May 1966, Syria’s Defence Minister Hafez al-Asad: “We shall never call for, nor accept peace [with Israel]. We shall only accept war. … We have resolved to drench this land with our blood, to oust you, aggressors, and throw you into the sea for good.”

18 August 1966, Radio Damascus: “Syria has resolved to pursue its way, and continue preparing itself to bring about the liberation by way of popular revolutionary war. Our last punitive operations were … [a] warning the bandit State that the hour of liberation is drawing nigh, and the Arab masses are tired of waiting. … [Syria] is convinced of victory, because all the Arab masses are behind her, tensed for action. Behind Syria, too, stand her friends in the socialist camp.”

17 May 1967, “The Voice of the Arabs” on Radio Cairo: “Egypt with all her resources—human, economic, and scientific—is prepared to plunge into a total war that will be the end of Israel.”[6]

25 May 1967, Radio Cairo: “The firm resolve of the Arab people is to wipe Israel off the map.” On the same day, Nasser himself added: “If we have succeeded in restoring the situation to what it was before 1956 [by reoccupying the Sinai], then there is no doubt that God will help us and enable us to restore the situation to what it was before 1948 [when there was no Israel].”

30 May 1967, Radio Cairo: “In the light of the blockade of the Gulf of Aqaba, two possibilities are open to Israel, each one of them soaked in blood. Either she will die from strangulation of the Arab military and economic blockade, or she will die in the hail of bullets of the Arab forces surrounding her in the south, the north, and the east.”

1 June 1967, Iraq’s president Arif: “My sons, this day is the day of the battle and of revenge for your brothers who fell in 1948. … With the help of God we will meet together in Tel Aviv and Haifa.”

2 June 1967, founder of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) Ahmad al-Shuqayri: “We shall destroy Israel and its inhabitants and as for the survivors—if there are any—the boats are ready to deport them!”[7]

• Al-Shuqayri had been sent to Jordan by Nasser after Jordan’s King Husayn had been to Cairo on 1 June 1967 to secure what he thought was a defence pact with Nasser that turned out to entail putting the Jordanian army under Egyptian control. Husayn did not like Al-Shuqayri—few did—but the King was in no position to refuse to this guest, a client of the man he had just surrendered his armed forces to. Husayn’s attempt to keep Al-Shuqayri in Amman failed. Al-Shuqayri went to Jordanian-occupied East Jerusalem, where he led a Friday prayer on 2 June,[8] and subsequently made the comment quoted above at a press conference.
• Al-Shuqayri’s comment would become a source of considerable controversy after the 1967 because it was often summarised, and sometimes even quoted, as Al-Shuqayri having said that the invading Arabs intended to “throw the Jews into the sea”. Arab propaganda before the war had said just that, and Al-Shuqayri was clearly in the same thematic zone. Nonetheless, it is not quite what he said.
• There are also, inevitably, multiple variant sources and translations of Al-Shuqayri’s statement. For example, a report in the Lebanese outlet Al-Yawm on 3 June 1967 claimed that Al-Shuqayri was asked what would happen to Israelis if the Arabs conquered their State, and he replied: “We will endeavour to assist [the Jews] and facilitate their departure by sea to their countries of origin.” When asked for clarification about the Jews born in the Holy Land, Al-Shuqayri reportedly responded: “Whoever survives will stay in Palestine, but in my opinion no one will remain alive.”
• Note: even in the Yawm report that is favoured in the most apologetic renderings of what Al-Shuqayri said, it is clear: (1) he expects all the Jews in Israel to be slaughtered in the war; (2) he has no opposition to this outcome; and (3) any survivors will be ethnically cleansed. This is not much of a defence, and it does little to support the idea that an “Israeli information campaign” after the war is the reason this statement was interpreted as so threatening: it was not unreasonable for Israelis (or anyone else listening) to feel a touch alarmed that the Arabs’ publicly-declared plan was to murder or expel all the Jews in the Holy Land.
• The Jordanian Prime Minister during the 1967 crisis, Saad Jumaa, recorded in his memoirs: “When [Shuqayri] left the mosque [in Jerusalem] on Friday [2 June 1967], he held a press conference. On this occasion he uttered his famous statement that Israel exploited so maliciously: ‘We shall destroy Israel together with its inhabitants, and for those who remain—if any do—the boats will be waiting to banish them’.” This obviously matches the above in its essentials. In terms of evidence-against-interest, Jumaa did not like Al-Shuqayri, but he liked Israel even less, and the anger in the passage where he wrote this is against Al-Shuqayri for damaging the Arab cause by saying something that fostered international sympathy for Israel.
• Al-Shuqayri spent several years after 1967 denying he had said the Arab forces intended anything even approximating “throwing the Jews into the sea”, and blamed “Zionist” propagandists for a campaign of slander against him. In 1971, however, Al-Shuqayri published a memoir, Dialogues and Secrets with Kings, and there he defended himself on quite different grounds: Al-Shuqayri admitted that he had spoken in terms of destroying Israel and pushing the Jews into the sea, but—and he was quite correct about this, as you can see from the above—those were the terms in which all Arab participants in 1967 spoke about the war they were preparing to launch against the Jewish State, so it was grossly unfair that his remarks should have been singled out as if they were aberrant extremism.

5 June 1967, “The Voice of the Arabs” on Radio Cairo: “Destroy them and lay them waste and liberate Palestine. Your hour has come. Woe to you Israel. The Arab nation has come to wipe out your people and to settle the account. This is your end, Israel. All the Arabs must take revenge for 1948. This is a moment of historic importance to our Arab people and to the holy war. Conquer the land.”

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NOTES

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[1] Bernard Lewis (1986), Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice, p. 161.

[2] Semites and Anti-Semites, pp. 204-05.

[3] In 1959, Nasser was technically president of the “United Arab Republic” that combined Egypt and Syria.

[4] Ronen Bergman (2018), Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, pp. 108-19.

[5] Syria had been a very unstable polity since March 1949, when a military coup felled the government that had presided over the failure to destroy Israel at birth. There were two more military coups that year, in August and December, the latter resulting in a restoration of civilian governance, but it soon devolved into autocracy under Adib al-Shishakli. Another military coup in February 1954 removed Al-Shishakli and another brief period of constitutional rule followed, led by the elderly Hashim al-Atassi, who was soon shunted aside. Shukri al-Quwatli, a Nasserite, became president in September 1955, took Syria decisively into the Soviet camp, and in February 1958 took Syria into the so-called “United Arab Republic” (UAR), theoretically a union of Egypt and Syria that was in reality more an occupation of the former by the latter. The UAR was dissolved in September 1961 by yet another military coup in Syria. Nazim al-Qudsi’s new Western-oriented government did not last long. The March 1963 coup brought the Ba’th Party to power and returned Syria to the Soviet camp, where it would remain for the rest of the Cold War. The February 1966 coup directed by Chief of Staff Salah Jadid saw the Alawi faction of Ba’thists seize control. Al-Atassi was of Sunni origins and it was precisely for that reason he was made the formal president during Jadid’s de facto reign. Al-Atassi was the face of the regime to a Sunni-majority population that regarded Alawis as infidels. Hafez al-Asad prevailed in the November 1970 “corrective coup”, which settled the intra-Alawi contest within the Ba’th Party and established the dynasty that still rules Syria.

[6] George Mikes (1969), The Prophet Motive: Israel Today and Tomorrow, pp. 79.

[7] Ephraim Kam (1974), Husayn Poteah Be’milhama (Husayn Opens War), pp. 284-8, quoted in: Michael Oren (2002), Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 132.

[8] Oren, Six Days of War, pp. 130-32.