by Sheldon Richman Wednesday, June 6th, 2012 Forty-five years
ago at this time the Six-Day War raged between Israel and Egypt,
Syria, and Jordan, leading to the occupation of the West Bank,
East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai
Desert (the last since relinquished). The Palestinians of the
West Bank and Gaza have lived under Israeli control since that
time, with the land of the West Bank progressively annexed de
facto with Jewish-only settlements and a forbidding wall that
surrounds Palestinian towns and separates families’ homes from
their farmland. In Arabic this is known as an-Naksah, the
setback. What follows is excerpted from my “‘Ancient History’:
U.S. Conduct in the Middle East Since World War II and the Folly
of Intervention,” published by the Cato Institute August 16,
1991. (See full paper for references.) For more, see my
“Israel’s 1967 Attack Was Aggression; Israel’s Current
Occupation Is Illegal,” Washington Report on Middle East
Affairs, July 1991. The Six-Day War, 1967