The Six-Day War Analysis

When Egypt suffered devastating defeat in Sinai, losing most of its air force within a few hours to Israeli air raids, the disaster came as a terrible shock to Nasser. He described the aftermath as ‘one continuous nightmare’ and that Egyptian diplomats were ‘…in a state of confusion, uncertainty and doubt.’ While Nasser himself knew that the inflated propaganda that had been released on Arab media channels were exaggerations aimed at threatening Israel, he had not expected Egyptian forces to lose so quickly, and so entirely. Egyptian diplomats hence had to provide both the Arab and international world with an explanation for the devastating losses incurred – for how Goliath was slain and replaced – given the overbidding and overconfidence they …show more content…
Instead of jumping the gun to accuse the US of intervention in the war, however, the USSR found its target in Zionism, presenting it as ‘a hidden, all-powerful, and perfidious international force’ that had been present, albeit under the surface of Jewish communities across the world. A Soviet Zionism ‘specialist’ Evgeny Evseev claimed that Israel’s military appetite was whetted by ‘the support of an unseen, immense and powerful empire of Zionist financiers and industrialists, which is on no map of the world but which exists and operates everywhere in the capitalist camp…’, perhaps suggesting that Israel had never been weak, but that its latent strength was gradually being displayed through its history of various military victories. The USSR hence saw Israel go from David to Goliath not in terms of military and material capability, which it believes Israel possessed all along, but in terms of the political power it commanded from other