Still, a compelling argument can be made that the 1948 conflict was more foundational, creating as it did the state of Israel, the Palestinian refugee problem, and a political revolution in Arab politics that would see various coups and revolutions. And it is the “1948 identity issues”—refugees and acceptance of a Jewish state—that remain to this day among the most intractable issues in the negotiations.

Nor can we diminish the import of the October 1973 conflict. The 1967 war led to six years of impasse broken only by the 1973 Egyptian-Syrian attack and the U.S. diplomacy that followed. Indeed, it was the 1973 war, not the 1967 war, that would see Harold Saunders, Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, coin the much celebrated and maligned term “peace process” during the Kissinger shuttles, and that would lay the basis for the ensuing Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty.

“There were very real and missed opportunities for Arab-Israeli agreements in the wake of the war.”

Not really. There was a flurry of initiatives, statements, and U.S. and Russian maneuvering during the postwar period. And in November 1967, U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 established the guiding principles for Arab-Israeli peace negotiations, representing the war’s most important diplomatic legacy. But counterfactuals are at best a tricky and risky business. From my personal experience serving Republican and Democratic Secretaries of State as an adviser on Arab-Israeli negotiations between 1988 and 2003, I can attest that diplomats and would-be peacemakers often imagined openings and opportunities where there were none.

On June 19, 1967, the Israeli Cabinet secretly decided to exchange Sinai and the Golan for peace agreements with Egypt and Syria; but no consensus was reached on the West Bank, though the Cabinet agreed to incorporate Gaza into Israel and to resettle refugees elsewhere in the region. The Cabinet proposal narrowly passed by a single vote; divisions between the military and the politicians (and within these groups, as well) made a serious initiative almost unthinkable. Meanwhile, the Arabs, reeling from defeat, were more focused on keeping their own houses in order and maintaining some measure of unity in the wake of their latest military humiliation. Even if the Israeli offer had been concretized, it would have faced impossible odds. Egypt’s launching its war of attrition and the public hardening of Arabs’ attitudes seemed to make any serious process impossible. The Arabs’ three no’s at the Khartoum summit of August 1967—no peace; no negotiation; no recognition—seemed to sum up the impasse, even though Egypt’s President Nasser was apparently prepared to consider U.S. and Russian mediation and demilitarization of the occupied territories.*

“The war was an unmitigated disaster for the Palestinians.”