7 - The United States and the 1967 War

Summary

America's Middle East policy today exists in the shadow of decisions made during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Those decisions were based on positions suggested by Israel, backed by persons close to President Lyndon B. Johnson, and never discussed at any level of the Johnson administration prior to their adoption. The key shift in U.S. policy was to permit Israel to retain territories conquered in the conflict until it could reach peace accords with individual Arab states, a radical change from Washington's previous stance of seeking to maintain the territorial status quo.

The basic question, addressed in 1992 at a conference on the war by retired Ambassador Alfred Atherton, was how that change in policy occurred, especially since the State Department was omitted from the discussion. Input from William Quandt, retired Ambassador to Egypt, Lucius Battle, and White House National Security staffer during the crisis, Harold Saunders, suggested that no policy discussion occurred in the Johnson White House, and that it was impossible to track the developments that led to the positions outlined in President Johnson's 19 June 1967 speech where he left peace up to the respective states; this stance became the foundation of UN Security Council Resolution 242 passed in November 1967. These comments led retired Ambassador to Israel, Samuel Lewis, to declare that “no political scientist or historian would dare write in his book that policy changes could be made in the fashion described by Messrs. Atherton, Quandt, and Battle.”