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"Whenever you accept our views, we shall be in full agreement with you."

Moshe Dayan's appointment as Defense Minister on June 1, 1967 — three days before the war — was a political masterstroke and a public relations phenomenon. Israel had been living under existential threat for weeks as Nasser blockaded the Straits of Tiran and massed forces in the Sinai. Prime Minister Eshkol was seen as hesitant. Dayan, whose eye patch had become globally synonymous with Israeli military capability, instantly transformed public confidence. He gave Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin the freedom to execute the pre-planned air strike and ground assault. After the capture of Jerusalem, it was Dayan who famously said 'We have returned to the holiest of our holy places, never to part from it again.' Yet he also initially opposed annexing East Jerusalem and later became an advocate for trading territory for peace.

"What was taken by force will be restored by force."

Gamal Abdel Nasser was the most magnetic Arab leader of the 20th century — a charismatic revolutionary who seized power in 1952, nationalized the Suez Canal, humiliated Britain and France through diplomacy, and became the symbol of Arab nationalism. The Six-Day War was his greatest catastrophe. His decision to blockade the Straits of Tiran, expel UN peacekeepers, and mass troops in the Sinai — without any genuine military plan — was a dramatic gamble Egypt could not back up. When Israeli jets destroyed his air force in three hours, Nasser initially believed Egyptian radio reports of great victories. By the time he understood the truth, the war was lost. He announced his resignation on June 9 — and millions of Egyptians flooded the streets begging him to stay. He did, leading Egypt until his death in 1970.

"You don't make peace with friends. You make it with very unpleasant enemies."

Yitzhak Rabin was the military architect of the Six-Day War's victory and, decades later, the man who tried to build the peace that followed. As IDF Chief of Staff, he had spent years planning the pre-emptive air strike and coordinated ground assault. The weeks of waiting before the war, as Arab states threatened and massed forces, nearly broke him — he suffered a 24-hour incapacitation from what his physician called nicotine poisoning and stress before recovering. He had planned every detail of Operation Focus and the Sinai campaign meticulously. When the war ended in six days with all objectives achieved, he was the hero. He later served as Ambassador to the United States, Prime Minister twice, and Defense Minister. His second premiership produced the Oslo Accords — the first Israeli-Palestinian peace framework. He was assassinated by Yigal Amir, a Jewish extremist who opposed Oslo, as he left a peace rally in Tel Aviv in November 1995.

"We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children."

Ariel Sharon was one of the most complex and controversial figures in Israeli military and political history — a brilliant tactician who became a divisive Prime Minister. In the Six-Day War, commanding a division in the Sinai, he planned and executed the Battle of Abu-Ageila: a textbook combined-arms assault that smashed the Egyptian strongpoint in a single night. The attack used helicopters to drop paratroopers behind Egyptian lines simultaneously with a frontal tank assault and artillery barrage — an audacious coordination that destroyed the Egyptian defensive system. Sharon then raced west, and his division reached the Suez Canal just as the ceasefire came into effect. He had a long subsequent career: hero of the Yom Kippur War, controversial Defense Minister during the Lebanon War, settler movement champion, and finally — in his last act — the Prime Minister who unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005, before his stroke ended his active life.

"I have to live with myself, and I have to live with the mistakes I have made."

King Hussein I of Jordan was the man who lost the West Bank — and spent the next three decades trying to make peace. Crowned at age 17 after his grandfather Abdullah I was assassinated at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in 1951, Hussein navigated a narrow path between Arab nationalist pressure and pragmatic reality for 46 years. In June 1967, he made the worst decision of his reign. Despite Israeli warnings and his own secret intelligence links, he joined the war after being deceived by Egyptian reports of victories that were actually defeats. The Arab Legion's British-trained successors lost East Jerusalem and the entire West Bank in four days. The loss of the West Bank — and its 750,000 Palestinian residents — transformed Jordan and created the Palestinian refugee crisis that defined regional politics for decades. Hussein made peace with Israel in 1994 and died a year after Yasser Arafat's apparent poisoning, having tried and failed to solve the Palestinian problem for 46 years.