How did the war affect Arab-Israeli diplomacy?
It fundamentally changed the terms. Already in mid-May, weeks before hostilities started, the Middle East hand at the White House, Harold Saunders, suggested that Israel should be allowed the time to trounce its enemies, seeing in this a way “of settling borders and, maybe even refugees.” By the second day of warfare, President Lyndon Johnson had formulated the outline of the land-for-peace policy that 35 years later still drives U.S. diplomacy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict: Israel should return the land it conquered in 1967 in exchange for its recognition by the Arabs. Americans expected the scale of Israel’s military triumph to show the Arabs the futility of their hopes to destroy the Jewish state, an analysis that found immediate agreement among some Israelis (including Yitzhak Rabin, later the prime minister who initiated the Oslo negotiations, which was premised on precisely this assumption). But, as recent events have so vividly proved, the land-for-peace premise was false. Wi
