Remembering the 6-Day War

La Jicarita
An Online Magazine of Environmental Politics in New Mexico

July 11, 2025

Fifty-eight years have passed since the ’67 War, a war I survived under the protection of a Palestinian family. We had no idea that the face of the Middle East had been irrevocably changed. 

June 5, 1967

I am a newlywed. Nineteen years old. An American-Jew who just married a Palestinian from East Jerusalem, Jordan—an unlikely occurrence. Although warned that war was imminent, Faisal and I are preoccupied with planning our honeymoon to Petra. We’re staying with his mother in Qalandia, a Palestinian town between Jerusalem and Ramallah. Just after sunset, we hear explosions coming from the direction of Jerusalem. The night sky lights up with flares. Ignoring the possibility of shattering glass, we stand in front of the huge living room window. Surely no one would bomb the Sacred City, I think.

By the time Faisal and I woke the next day, Israeli pilots had destroyed the Egyptian Air Force. Inspired by Genesis, General Rabin chose to name this the Six-Day War, but Israel created a new world in under two hours. Fighter jets, transport planes, and helicopters exposed in open-air hangars were demolished. Israeli pilots were ordered to “destroy and scatter the enemy throughout the desert so Israel could live secure in the land for generations.” Instead of being swept into the sea, Israel conquered 27,000 square miles, including the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria, the Gaza Strip from Egypt, and the Sinai Peninsula (returned to Egypt in 1982). Over one million Palestinians living in these territories came under Israeli military control. The conquest of historic Palestine was complete.

I will never forget the moment armed Israeli soldiers, guns poised, barged into the apartment where we had taken sanctuary. My Palestinian family and friends urged me to cry out, “I’m Jewish. American. These are my friends. My friends are your friends.” A mission I have carried since that day.  
The family who had welcomed me into their home and insisted on taking me to pray at the Wailing Wall, took me to the cave beneath the Dome of the Rock where Muslims believe Muhammad ascended to heaven, to Hebron to see the tomb of our common ancestor Abraham or Ibrahim, to float in the Dead Sea were now strangers in their own land. 

Although on a roller coaster of uncertainty, Palestinians met their latest conquerors in shops and cafes with dignity and a faint hope that everyone would be allowed to remain in their homes, reopen their shops, attend school, and pursue their business without interruption. Israeli soldiers and civilians discovered the delight of world-class knafeh in Zalatimo’s Sweet Shop. Commerce was delightfully democratic. I witnessed a reunion between cousins from Beersheba who were able to take a bus to West Jerusalem and walk into the Old City to see their family for the first time in nineteen years. For a short while after the war, there was freedom of movement. 

But the battle for demographic domination that began before 1948 was about to continue. The Egyptian Pharaoh once feared the Israelite slaves becoming “as numerous as the stars.” Now Israelis feared being outnumbered by the Palestinians. In 1948 my family celebrated the Jewish nation state created for the ingathering of Jews from around the world, but for those not identified as Jewish, it spelled dispossession. In Jaffa, Haifa, Acre, Ramleh, Lydda, and Jerusalem, Palestinians saw their villages and cities being taken over. Over 500 villages were destroyed or depopulated and at least 750,000 Palestinians became refugees— known as the Nakba, Arabic for Catastrophe. Just as trauma from the Holocaust scarred generations of Jews, there is not a Palestinian alive who hasn’t been traumatized by the Nakba (1948), the Naksa (1967), or the Genocide (2025). 

I returned to the West Bank in 2010 to witness the impact of 43 years of occupation. Nothing prepared me for the horror of standing in the shadow of the Separation Wall. Twice the height and almost three times the length of the Berlin Wall, flanked by trenches, thermal imaging scanners, video cameras, checkpoints, Jewish-only roads and settlements, and sniper towers every 300 meters, the wall snaked through the West Bank like a viper feeding on land. Upon completion, the length will exceed 400 miles, leaving Palestinian towns isolated from one another and farmers unable to access their land. In 2004, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that the route of the wall violated international law and called on Israel to dismantle it or relocate it to the internationally recognized border known as the Green Line. Israel has never complied with this ruling. With camera and pen, I obsessively recorded images and words:

This dumb wall is screaming, our blood is the same color!
Only free men can negotiate.
Existence is Resistance.
God is too big for one religion.
Friends cannot be divided.
From the Warsaw Ghetto to Abu Dis Ghetto
Here is a wall at which to weep. 

The writer of this graffiti was a student of history.

The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest Jewish ghetto established by the Nazis in Poland during World War II. About 460,000 Jews lived in an area of 1.3 square miles. Food rations averaged 181 calories a day. Limited sanitation and lack of medical supplies led to widespread disease. Over 80,000 Jews died from starvation and illness before mass deportations to death camps began. On the eve of Passover, 1943, Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto started an armed resistance. They understood it to be a suicide mission. The uprising was brutally crushed by the Nazis, but no one has ever questioned their right to armed military resistance. 

Reports from Gaza sounds chillingly similar. Starvation. Overcrowding. Lack of medicine. Hospitals, schools, universities, libraries—bombed. Disease, starvation, and death stalk a land where fishing in deep waters is forbidden, where people are killed waiting in line for food. Israel blocks humanitarian aid by land, air, and sea. Israel destroyed their international airport in 2001 and attacked a boat carrying life-saving supplies in international waters this past June, just as it did in 2010. Most recently, an International caravan crossing Egypt was attacked by Egyptian police, who deported the activists. Palestinian journalists broadcast their destruction in real time, hoping the world will do something to save them.

Abu Dis was where Faisal and I celebrated our marriage in 1967. It was a bucolic village on the southern edge of East Jerusalem, near the Mount of Olives, within walking distance to the Old City. We feasted while surrounded by olive trees, grape vines, and wandering goats. Patchwork fields of wheat and barley added to the tranquility. But in 2025, this village, once considered the capital for a future Palestinian state, is under military occupation, severed from Jerusalem by the Separation Wall. Significant portions of the land have been confiscated to build Jewish-only settlements, massive townships with green lawns and swimming pools. Palestinians are not allowed to repair, expand, or build new homes. They lack sewer infrastructure and have significantly smaller water allotments. Getting to school, work, or hospitals is fraught with humiliating and dangerous checkpoints that take hours to pass through. A casual walk to the Old City is impossible.

The elusive dream of coexistence has become dispossession, occupation, apartheid and genocide—man-made events that never needed to happen. The aftermath of the 6-Day War could have been an opening, a rare opportunity for healing. Palestinians who’d been living in the West Bank under Jordanian rule felt they were home after 19 years. Many believed Jerusalem would become an international city as promised in the United Nations Partition Plan of 1947, which aimed to protect religious sites significant to all the Abrahamic religions. If Israel had treated Palestinians with the dignity they deserved, offered them citizenship with equality, enmity and bloodshed could have been avoided. 

An almost paralyzing grief spirals me into unimaginable sorrow, to which the only antidote is action—vigils, op-eds, letters, protests, fasting, visits to government officials, donations to charitable organizations. People of conscience hold signs, “Not in my name,” “Food and humanitarian aid for Gaza,” “Jews against occupation,” “Never Again means never again for anyone—no exceptions,” and an ominous sign: “First they came for the Palestinians.”

Ongoing occupation and genocide have inspired thousands of artists to create a new palette for Guernica, Picasso’s painting of the destruction of a village during the Spanish Civil War. Thousands of Anne Franks are writing eye-witness diaries. I may not live to see the day when humankind adheres to international law and the basic human rights laid out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Signed in 1949, the document enshrines the rights and freedoms of all people. Hope that Jews, Muslims, and Christians can ever equitably share the land has become a dying ember, but it is a dream worth fighting for. “We refuse to be enemies.”

“International law, basic human rights are being tossed aside without hesitation and being supplanted by a randomly cruel violent force.”