THIRTY years ago today Israel launched the air raids that transformed the Middle East.
Executing a carefully conceived and meticulously rehearsed plan, the Israeli airforce demolished the airforces of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq in a single morning and won the conflict which came to be known as the "Six Day War".
Control of the skies gave Israeli ground forces an easy triumph over the four Arab armies. This enabled the Jewish state to quadruple its territorial holdings by completing its conquest of Palestine, begun in 1948, and occupying the Syrian Golan and Egyptian Sinai.
For the Arabs June 5th 1967 marked a comprehensive defeat, a second naksa (disaster), far worse than the naksa of 1948 when they were soundly beaten on the field of battle by the fledgling Jewish state.
The Six Day War was far more traumatic and damaging to the Arabs than the Arab Israel war of 1948 because the Arab regimes Israel took on in 1967 were products of the first naksa, independent governments rather than relics of the colonial era. Indeed, three of the Arab leaders who prosecuted the 1967 war had come to power by overthrowing corrupt and inefficient consorts of the colonialists.
The new generation of Arab leaders belonged to panArab parties which fired the idealism and enthusiasm of Arab youth from Muscat to Tangier. Arab nationalism was seen as the panacea for all the ills of the area, and a united Arab military front the means to right the wrongs done to the Palestinians when Israel seized 80 per cent of their country in 1948.
During the late 1950s and early 1960s Arab governments constructed the military machines that failed in 1967. At the same time they forged close political and trade ties. Several Arab countries reached the takeoff stage in economic development and there was a flowering of Arab art, music and writing.
The June war dealt a comprehensive blow to Arab nationalism and inter Arab cooperation, destroyed Arab self confidence and made the Arabs realise there could be no full scale "liberation" of Palestine. Israel was a permanent fixture in the region.
But the defeated and humiliated Arab governments refused to accept the new situation and fought further unsuccessful wars with Israel. Egypt began by waging a "war of attrition" against Israel. Egypt and Syria staged the first ever Arab attack on Israel in 1973. The Palestinians carried on guerrilla warfare against Israel from 1967 until 1982 and staged an uprising in the occupied territories, the Intifada, from 1987 to 1993.
But the Arabs lost their wars and were compelled to accept a new formula to end the conflict: the "return" by Israel of the 1967 occupied territories in exchange for an end to Arab belligerency.
The Arab regimes - military dictatorships and monarchies - paid no political price for the defeat of 1967. They remained in power (although there were some adjustments in personnel) and shifted their focus from the pan Arab plane to the internal situation, where their main preoccupation was staying in power.
While the regimes squabbled and attempted to subvert one another, Israel became the major military power in the region. At the same time the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) emerged as the Arab world's only hope for securing an end to the Israeli occupation of lands captured in 1967.
Although the Intifada captured the imagination of Arab youth the young found their trust betrayed, for the PLO soon became just another brutal and corrupt Arab regime, particularly after it took up residence in Gaza and the West Bank in 1994.
There was a surge of optimism in the Arab world in 1993 when the PLO signed the Oslo accord with Israel; but optimism has been replaced by pessimism.
The accord did not deliver Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza, or negotiations with Syria over the Golan and Lebanon over the strip of southern territory Israel still occupies.
The failure of the peace process has placed the two Arab regimes which signed treaties with Israel - those in Egypt and Jordan - in a difficult position because the people in both countries are not prepared for peace with the Jewish state until it evacuates all the lands occupied after the devastating air raids on that crisp morning 30 years ago today.
