Repercussions

Israel's capture of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula, and Golan Heights created an occupation that has now lasted 57 years. The West Bank's 3 million Palestinians have lived under Israeli military administration without citizenship, voting rights, or sovereignty. Israeli settlements — built since 1967 despite international law designating them illegal — now house 700,000 Israeli citizens and have made a two-state solution increasingly impractical. The occupation is the central unresolved issue in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

At the Arab League summit in Khartoum, August–September 1967, the Arab states adopted a declaration of three 'nos' in response to UN Resolution 242: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel. This position, maintained for years, prevented any diplomatic resolution of the war's territorial consequences and locked the Middle East into permanent confrontation. It was eventually abandoned — Egypt broke ranks with the Camp David Accords in 1978, Jordan recognized Israel in 1994, and the Abraham Accords created more normalizations after 2020.

The capture of the West Bank immediately created a constituency of Israelis who saw the territory as biblical 'Judea and Samaria' and sought to settle there permanently. Rabbi Moshe Levinger led the first settlers into Hebron in 1968. The settler movement has grown into a political force with 700,000 residents in hundreds of settlements, backed by powerful lobbying organizations and deeply embedded in the Israeli government. The settlements have made territorial compromise increasingly difficult and are widely considered the primary obstacle to a two-state solution.

The 1967 defeat discredited Arab states as liberators of Palestine — they had promised to destroy Israel and been destroyed instead. Palestinian nationalist organizations concluded that they must fight for themselves. The PLO, led by Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, launched cross-border raids and eventually airline hijackings and international terrorism. The 1972 Munich Olympics massacre — 11 Israeli athletes killed — brought the Palestinian cause to global attention in the most destructive way possible.

Passed by the UN Security Council in November 1967, Resolution 242 called for Israeli withdrawal from 'occupied territories' (deliberately ambiguous — the Arabic version says 'the' territories, the English says 'territories'), recognition of all states in the region, and a just settlement of the refugee problem. It has been the foundational document for every subsequent peace negotiation between Israel and Arab states — and the ambiguity of its language has been debated in every one of them. Every peace deal from Camp David to Oslo to the Abraham Accords references 242.

The capture of the Western Wall — the holiest accessible site in Judaism, under Jordanian control since 1948 — was the most emotionally transformative moment of the war. IDF paratrooper Mordechai Gur's radio message 'The Temple Mount is in our hands' and the photographs of battle-hardened soldiers weeping at the Wall became iconic images of Israeli identity. The Wall became a site of pilgrimage, national ceremony, and political contestation. The tensions between Jewish, Muslim, and Christian claims to the Old City it anchors continue to generate crises.