The Six-Day War, whose 55th anniversary will be marked this month, represents a historical turning point in the annals of Israeli history, and in the Jewish state's relations with the Arab world. Indeed, that war forged the first crack in the wall of Arab hostility and rejectionism, which at the time was predicated on the unwavering belief that the Arabs would ultimately succeed in defeating and destroying Israel.
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Alongside all these things, however, the war was also an important turning point in the annals of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as its consequences essentially "created" the Palestinian nation.
In an effort to promote the Palestinian narrative and its inherent demands for ownership of the Land of Israel, the Palestinians have gone as far as to claim that not only did they precede the Zionists who came here in the late 19th century, but also the Israelites, as Palestinians – they argue – are the descendants of the ancient Canaanites and therefore have first rights over the land.
However, even the Palestinians themselves don't buy the historical revisionism and fundamental fabrication linking present-day Palestinians to the Canaanites and Jebusites, who controlled Jerusalem prior to King David's conquest of the city. Case in point, when the Palestinians systematically destroy archaeological remnants to erase any reminder of the Jewish past in this land, they also don't spare those artifacts and sites from the period prior to the Israelites' conquest of the land.
On the other hand, one very common claim, which many Israelis also happen to echo, is that the Palestinian national movement is essentially a mirror image of Zionism and first began in the early part of the 20th century as a type of response by the local population to the Zionist movement, which sought the help of the British to settle the land and establish a Jewish state.
The truth, however, is that in one fell swoop the Six-Day War was the event that turned the Arabs of the Land of Israel into Palestinians.
Up until that war, the residents of Judea and Samaria were considered, in their own eyes as well, Jordanians, and held Jordanian citizenship.
Ariel Sharon repeatedly said that "Jordan is Palestine" every time he was asked to conjure a solution to the conflict with the Palestinians. This statement, however, was actually coined by King Abdullah I, the grandfather of the current king, who established the Jordanian monarchy and annexed Judea and Samaria into his kingdom after the War of Independence in 1948.
In contrast to the inhabitants of the West Bank, the resident of Gaza found themselves under the rule of the Egyptian military, which treated the coastal enclave as part of Egypt and of course never even thought to make it an independent entity.
In June 1967, however, the Arabs dragged Israel into a war that no one expected and no one wanted. The price of their adventurism was losing Judea and Samaria and the Sinai Peninsula.
The millions of Arabs who to that point had lived under Egyptian military rule were now under Israeli rule, and somehow instantaneously "discovered" or "were informed" that they were, in fact, Palestinians. Their demand to be recognized as a people with national rights was promptly supported by those same Arab countries that had previously never contemplated establishing a Palestinian state in the territories under their control, yet were now eager to adopt such an idea to hurt Israel.
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It must be said that the indecisiveness, hesitancy, and mainly unwillingness on the part of Israel to determine the future of the territories it captured in the Six-Day War, let alone demand them for itself, played into the hands of the Palestinians who became the vanguard of the Arab struggle against Israel.
It goes without saying that the Arabs of Israel also rushed to join this party, and instead of serving as a bridge for Arab-Israeli peace and a model of coexistence, they adopted a Palestinian identity that since June 1967 has only impeded their integration into Israeli society.
Ultimately, Israel conceded to a process that had seemed to be inevitable and irreversible, and in the Oslo Accords of 1993, it recognized the Palestinians as a people and the PLO as their representative.
And thus, thanks to Israel's victory in the Six-Day War, the Palestinians were born into the world.
