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, I’m pretty sure the costs of waiting until the other side attacks were absorbed, heavily.
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.)
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, I’m pretty sure the costs of waiting until the other side attacks were absorbed, heavily.
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.)