So your position is they should have waited until the massed armies that outnumbered them 2:1 attacked?
That seems like an insane demand to thrust upon a people who had years earlier been murdered on an industrial scale.
You’re assuming they were going to attack when there is no evidence for that. Amassing troops at the border doesn’t mean you’re going to attack, like with Poland in 1939 it could just mean you’re trying to defend yourself from an expansionist nation who is threatening you. Israel a decade before 1967 had invaded Egypt to take the Sinai peninsula with the help of the French. It makes sense if you have a neighbor like that who just made a threat to you for exercising your sovereignty to put troops on the border in case they try to invade again.
Yeah Israel had a gun to its head, but so did the Arab states, it wasn’t as if Israel wasn’t also fully mobilized and ready to attack. International relations, especially in the nuclear age, is a series of guns pointed at the heads of everyone else. With ICBMs and nuclear submarines, any enemy of the u.s. is constantly under the threat of nuclear annihilation. That doesn’t give Iran the right to attack the u.s. because it constantly threatens them and is afraid they will nuke them.
Even ignoring nukes the north Koreans constantly have missiles and artillery pointed at Seoul, ready to level it at any moment, and vice versa for south Korea and the u.s. If either side attacked both could credibley claim they felt threatened, especially the north with the world’s most powerful country on its doorstep, who carried out a near genocidal bombing campaign against the north in the last war. If either side launched a “preemptive strike” they would rightly be called the agressor and should be condemned for breaking the peace. They definitely shouldn’t be rewarded with more land.
And just like Poland in 1939, Israel was threatened by an amassing, significantly larger force.
As a lot of Jews died in Israel Poland, I’m pretty sure the costs of waiting until the other side attacks were absorbed, heavily, by Israelis.
I think nuclear standoffs are categorically different, the entire MAD doctrine depends on the impossibility of a first strike.
At the end of the day, Egypt and the other Arab states took a series of recklessly aggressive steps against a rightfully paranoid and numerically inferior opponent. (And it’s not like Egypt was seriously threatened by Israel when they started massing with multiple Arab states, the previous war had been fought with heavy UK/French support after the Egyptians again acted pretty recklessly.)
Edit: A country? Crossed it out above as I should own up to a silly typo like that.
These aren’t standoffs, you think I’m talking about Russia, where yes MAD prevents either from attacking, I’m talking about the people living outside the small group of countries that have nukes. Iran isn’t covered by MAD, the u.s. could nuke Tehran tomorrow and nothing would be done besides severe diplomatic push back. Any “enemy of the u.s.” that doesn’t have nukes is subject to the constant fear of the u.s. war machine, which may not nuke you but will definitely relentlessly bomb your territory with drones. That doesn’t give them the right to attack the u.s. because they feel threatened.
Maybe they did act recklessly, that doesn’t make it right to attack them. Reckless is such a subjective term in that it’s heavily dependent on the party you sympathize with. You sympathize with Israel so you think the Arab states acted recklessly for the above reasons. I sympathize more with the Arab states because they were just blockading a single port to a country which they saw as being a serial bad actor in the region. This wasn’t some existential threat to them, they were still better off than near landlocked Jordan since they have a ton of Mediterranean coast. And again Israel was also fully mobilized, apparently a lot more then the Arab states.
Either way you and I can argue back and forth all day on who behaved more recklessly, just like north Koreans and south Koreans can argue back and forth all day on whose behaving recklessly, they won’t get anywhere because it’s a subjective opinion. This is why “preemptive strikes” are against international law, they always rely on these subjective terms like “threatening” and “reckless” such that any major power with significant sway in the international sphere can use them to justify any attack.
