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.

Egypt and Syria never accepted the 1967 defeat as permanent. Nasser launched the War of Attrition (1968–1970) — a grinding campaign of artillery duels, commando raids, and dogfights along the Suez Canal front — to bleed Israel and demonstrate Arab resilience. When Anwar Sadat succeeded Nasser in 1970, he decided that only a military shock could restart diplomacy. On October 6, 1973 — Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar — Egypt and Syria launched simultaneous surprise attacks across the Suez Canal and into the Golan. The 1973 war almost succeeded. Egypt crossed the Canal and destroyed over 100 Israeli aircraft with new Soviet SAMs in the first days. Israel recovered but at enormous cost: 2,600 dead and a shattering of the invincibility myth created in 1967.

The speed and completeness of the 1967 defeat forced a reckoning in Arab military doctrine. Egypt, Syria, and Jordan all undertook major reorganizations in the aftermath. Egypt fired its entire senior military leadership — Nasser dismissed Field Marshal Amer, who subsequently died in suspicious circumstances. The Egyptian Army rebuilt under new leadership, studied Israeli tactics, acquired new Soviet weapons including the SA-6 missile system that would devastate the Israeli Air Force in 1973, and trained for a coordinated assault that exploited Israeli vulnerabilities. The effort produced the Yom Kippur War performance of 1973 — far more impressive than 1967.

The 1967 war added a new wave of Palestinian refugees to those already displaced in 1948. Approximately 300,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from the West Bank and Gaza during and after the war, joining the refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt. The existing Palestinian refugee population — already 700,000 from 1948 — found itself stateless again under a new occupation. UNRWA, the UN agency established in 1950 to serve Palestinian refugees, saw its caseload explode. The refugees became the human face of the Palestinian national cause and the primary constituency of the PLO.

The only piece of territory captured in 1967 that Israel has permanently returned is the Sinai. Anwar Sadat's dramatic visit to Jerusalem in 1977 opened negotiations that produced the Camp David Accords in 1978 and the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty in 1979 — the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state. Israel withdrew completely from the Sinai by 1982. The peace has held for over 45 years, making Egypt and Israel unlikely but durable partners. Sadat was assassinated by Islamist extremists in 1981 for making peace, but Egypt did not reverse it.