Status Updates From Six Days of War: June 1967 ...

“‘The streets of Cairo looked more like a carnival than a city preparing for war’…The city was now festooned with lurid posters showing Arab soldiers shooting, crushing, strangling, and dismembering bearded, hook-nosed Jews. Cairo Radio boasted …’Millions of Arabs are preparing to blow up all of America’s interests …and your entire existence, America.’” So peaceful.

“Syria’s sponsorship of Palestinian guerrilla attacks became so pronounced that American officials abandoned their long-standing opposition to Israeli retaliations. ‘An attack from a state is an attack by a state.’”

Syria’s personal reason to escalate tension with Israel: internal division. “Often the gray boredom of radically socialist Damascus was broken by explosions and the crackle of gunfire... Ranking officers and even government ministers were routinely arrested, and death sentences handed down for a range of political crimes, from ‘spreading confessional bigotry’ to ‘hindering the socialist order’.”