It is not clear whether Egypt did in fact intend to invade Israel in June 1967. Egypt, however, mobilized its forces and moved them into Sinai near the border with Israel, placed the Jordanian army under Egyptian command, coordinated its military plans with other Arab States, demanded the removal of UNEF and closed the Strait of Tiran. These actions, combined with bellicose statements, it can be argued, gave Israel legitimate reason to apprehend that an attack was imminent. It might well be that the closing of the Strait of Tiran, was, in itself, an armed attack. Israel’s use of force was legitimate if it had, at the time, a reasonable belief that an Egyptian attack had taken place or was imminent. According to modern international law, Israel’s use of force was not legitimate if it was a preemptive strike to prevent the possibility of an Egyptian attack. Neither the UN Security Council nor the UN General Assembly took a position as to who was the aggressor in the Six Day War. As a result of the June 1967 Six Day War, the region’s strategic geography was drastically changed.

No problem has proved more intractable for the United Nations than that of the former British mandate of Palestine. Seventy years after the organisation first dealt with the problem, Israel occupies some of the territory of one of its neighbours, has poor relations with others, and has an unresolved relationship with the Palestinian state that was meant to have been born in 1947, but which has still not successfully emerged into the light. It is possible to argue that UN policy in the area has been wrong-headed from the start: certainly, it has not been successful. Only Kashmir can rival it for longevity on the United Nations’ agenda: seven decades after the organisation took up the issue of Palestine, there is no solution in sight.

The election of the Labor government led by Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in December 1972 marked a major change in Australia’s approach to international peacekeeping. To a large extent, the change grew out of the philosophy of the Australian Labor Party (ALP). A self-declared ‘internationalist’ party, in government it was far more willing than its conservative predecessors to look to the United Nations to help solve world problems, and hence it was keen for Australia to play its part in international peacekeeping missions. This approach was championed by Whitlam, who was also Minister for Foreign Affairs in the first year of his government.