Chapter 1- THE WAR BEFORE THE SIX DAY WAR No more vulnerable boundaries could be imagined (for Israel). Along its middle strip, on the Mediterranean coast, the country was nowhere more than ten miles wide. Within this narrow waist were crowded the main centers of the Israeli population: Tel Aviv, with its smaller sister towns Ramat Gan and Petah Tiqva to the east, Bat Yam and Holon to the south, Herzliya and Natanya to the north. These formed its main commercial concentrations and most of its industry. Overlooking the strip from the east was the central range of Palestine's mountains - the mountains of Ephraim - and holding these mountains were the Arabs of the Kingdom of Jordan. This central area of the State of Israel could be raked with shellfire, clear through from border to border, without a single gun having to be moved across the frontier. In the early morning of June 6, 1967, a shell fired from the Arab village of Kalkilieh, beyond the northeastern corner of the coastal strip, sailed southwestward through half its length and all its width and exploded half a mile from the Mediterranean beach in an apartment near Masaryk Square in Tel Aviv. In the northeastern section of the state, the Huleh plain, reclaimed from the swamp, dotted with Israel's green villages, lay flat as a billiard table under the stark overhang of the Golan Heights - and the heights were held by the Arabs of Syria. In the southwestern sector, the Sinai Desert, though almost empty of population, was nevertheless well provided with Egyptian military airfields, within three to ten minutes' flying time from Israel's densely populated coastal strip. It was from these frontiers that on June 5, 1967, Israel launched her air force and her army against the Egyptian armed forces (which were blocking the Suez Canal), subsequently resisted the invading forces from Jordan and Syria, defeated them all, and gained control of the remainder of western Palestine clear to the Jordan River, of the Golan Heights, and of the Sinai Peninsula down to the Suez Canal and the Red Sea. In simultaneous action, they (the Arab nations) set in motion all the available means of communication with the world at large to make known Israel's forthcoming annihilation. Israel saved herself from that threat and that purpose by the only strategy feasible in her topographical circumstances: a preventive attack on the forces of Egypt, the main enemy. The battles that followed on three fronts, for all their startling, spectacular, even historic success, cost Israel in six days twice as many dead in proportion to her total population as the United States lost in eight years of fighting in Vietnam. The offensive that took shape in Arab minds and began to emerge in May 1967 was the climax - indeed, the grand finale - of eighteen years of hostilities against Israel on every front except the direct confrontation of the military battlefield. During those eighteen years, the various hostile acts of the Arab states broke every relevant paragraph in the Armistice Agreements of 1949, which all the states had negotiated and signed and which theoretically governed their relations with Israel. The Arabs' war against Israel in the years between 1949 and 1967 was accompanied and dramatized by an incessant diplomatic offensive and a campaign of propaganda that grew progressively in volume and scope. Its purpose was not kept secret. It was repeated again and again. "Our aim," it was epitomized by Nasser on November 18, 1965, "is the full restoration of the rights of the Palestinian people. In other words, we aim at the destruction of the State of Israel. The immediate aim: perfection of Arab military might. The national aim: the eradication of Israel." At that time Israel was pressed and urged from many sides to make concessions. What could these concessions have been? In those years, too, Israel was pressed to make concessions of "territory." But it was the Arab refugee problem that was named as the prime cause of Arab intransigence, as the fons et orlgo of all the trouble in the Middle East. That was then proclaimed the major obstacle to peace.