Israel seized the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and the Golan in 1967. That is where the occupation comes from. Land taken by war, and held ever since.

The fuller answer

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You can answer this without a law degree. What you cannot do is answer it with the sentence most people reach for first, so that goes at the top.

The move that loses the argument is saying Israel was attacked first. Israel fired the first shot, on the morning of 5 June 1967, against Egyptian airfields. Anyone briefed knows it, and one wrong claim there costs you every true thing you say afterwards. The version that holds is narrower, older and much harder to answer.

What Egypt did, in dates

Egypt demanded the removal of the UN Emergency Force from Sinai in mid-May 1967. U Thant complied within days and reported it to the Security Council on 20 May. The buffer that had stood since the Suez crisis was gone, and Egyptian divisions moved up to the line. U Thant’s own assessment was that the situation was more menacing than at any time since the autumn of 1956.

On 23 May Nasser announced to his troops in Sinai that the Gulf of Aqaba was closed. “Under no circumstances can we permit the Israeli flag to pass through the Gulf of Aqaba.”

Three days later he said what the point of it was. Speaking to Arab trade unionists on 26 May: “The battle will be a general one and our basic objective will be to destroy Israel.” In the same speech, on the peacekeepers: “I said once that we could tell UNEF to leave within half an hour. Once we were fully prepared we could ask UNEF to leave. And this is what actually happened.”

That is not inference from troop counts. It is a head of state, in public, before the war.

The 1957 declaration is the fact that carries the whole thing

Ten years earlier, on 1 March 1957, Israel had told the UN General Assembly exactly what it would do if the straits were closed again. Golda Meir’s words were that interference by armed force with Israeli-flagged ships exercising free and innocent passage in the Gulf of Aqaba and through the Straits of Tiran “will be regarded by Israel as an attack entitling it to exercise its inherent right of self-defence”.

That declaration was not dug out of an archive afterwards to justify the war. On 2 June 1967, three days before Israel struck, the White House had it in front of it: Walt Rostow’s memorandum to President Johnson quotes the 1957 statement while the administration worked out whether America would stand behind its own commitment. The trigger was published in advance, and Washington was reading it back on the eve of the war.

Say pre-emptive, never defensive

Two sentences, one weak and one strong.

Weak: “Israel was attacked first in 1967.”

Strong: “Israel fired first, in the face of an announced and imminent attack, after Egypt closed an international waterway that Israel had said publicly ten years earlier it would treat as an act of war.”

The second is longer and you’ll have to learn it. It has the advantage of being true, so it survives the follow-up question. The first does not.

The two quotations you will be handed. On 8 August 1982, at the National Defense College, Menachem Begin said that the Egyptian concentrations in the Sinai approaches did not prove that Nasser was really about to attack, that Israel must be honest with itself, and that it decided to attack him. In February 1968 Yitzhak Rabin told Le Monde that he did not believe Nasser wanted war, that the two divisions Egypt sent into Sinai on 14 May were not enough to unleash an offensive, and that both sides knew it. Both are real. Learn them, and say them first, because the version of the argument that includes them is the stronger one: Israel struck first, its own leaders said the choice was theirs, and the choice was made against a blockade Israel had told the UN in 1957 it would treat as an act of war. The claim being answered here is about title to land, and neither quotation touches it. What they destroy is the weak sentence above, which is a reason to stop saying it.

The legal argument, and where it actually stands

There is a serious body of argument that territory taken while repelling an unlawful attack is not in the same legal position as territory taken by aggression. Its best-known statement is by Stephen Schwebel, later President of the International Court of Justice, writing in the American Journal of International Law in April 1970. Where the state now holding territory took it in lawful self-defence, and the previous holder had itself taken it unlawfully, Schwebel argued the former has the better title. Applied to 1967 that puts Israel in a stronger position in the West Bank and Jerusalem than Jordan, which had seized them in 1948 and annexed them in 1950 with almost nobody’s agreement.

Now the part you cannot leave out. This is a minority position and it has been losing. On 19 July 2024 the International Court of Justice held, by eleven votes to four, that Israel’s continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory is unlawful and must be brought to an end as rapidly as possible, that settlement activity must cease and settlers be evacuated by fourteen votes to one, and that the prohibition on the acquisition of territory by force applies to the whole of the territory occupied since 1967.

The honest form is this. Whether territory taken in self-defence stands differently is genuinely contested among international lawyers, one of them a former President of the Court, and the Court has now come down against Israel in an advisory opinion, which is authoritative but not binding. Say that and you cannot be caught. Say “it was a defensive war so the land is legally ours” and you will be handed the 2024 opinion within a minute.

There was no Palestinian state in 1967 to interrupt

Between 1948 and 1967 the West Bank was Jordanian and Gaza was Egyptian. Jordan annexed the West Bank on 24 April 1950, its parliament resolving on complete unity between the two banks and their amalgamation in a single state. Only Britain and Pakistan recognised it, and Britain did not accept Jordanian sovereignty in Jerusalem. Egypt never annexed Gaza, never offered its inhabitants Egyptian citizenship, and by 1959 had annulled by decree the nominal All-Palestine Government it had sponsored, leaving Gaza under Egyptian military administrators.

Nineteen years, two Arab governments, no Palestinian state, and no serious international demand that either of them create one.

And here is the limit, stated plainly, because a reader who does not state it will be made to. None of that establishes that Israel may keep the territory. It establishes something narrower: the occupation did not interrupt a Palestinian state, and the borders it is measured against were armistice lines from 1949, not the frontiers of a country. That is worth knowing and it is not a title deed.

Jerusalem, and what each side did with the holy places

This is the sharpest contrast available to you, and both halves are documented.

The armistice agreement Israel and Jordan signed at Rhodes on 3 April 1949 provided in Article VIII for a Special Committee to settle, among other things, “free access to the Holy Places and cultural institutions and use of the cemetery on the Mount of Olives”. Be precise about what that was: an agreement in principle, to be given effect by a committee. The committee never delivered it. For nineteen years Jews were barred from the Old City altogether and from the Western Wall.

An Israeli inter-ministerial committee reported on 2 November 1967 that of 58 synagogues in the Jewish Quarter, Jordan had destroyed all but two, and that tombstones from the Mount of Olives cemetery had been used for paving and for building latrines in army camps. Other counts differ, one putting it at 34 of 35, so the safest form is “the great majority of the synagogues in the Jewish Quarter were destroyed”, with the government figure behind you if pressed.

Then what Israel did with the same problem. In June 1967 Moshe Dayan left day-to-day administration of the Temple Mount and Al-Aqsa with the Jordanian-controlled Islamic Waqf, keeping security and control of entry. Muslim worship continued and continues. Israel is the sovereign that put the previous sovereign’s religious authority back in charge of the site. That arrangement is under real strain now, and the current fight over it is set out in the entry on the religious register.

Resolution 242, and the missing definite article

On 22 November 1967 the Security Council adopted Resolution 242. It opens by “Emphasizing the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war”, and then requires two things together. Paragraph 1 (i): “Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict”. Paragraph 1 (ii): “Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force”.

Read it again. Not “the territories”. Not “all the territories”. The resolution’s chief drafter, Lord Caradon, later said the omission of “all” was deliberate, and that withdrawal was to secure and recognised boundaries rather than to the lines of 4 June. Eugene Rostow made the same point in print in 1970. Arthur Goldberg told the Council on 15 November 1967 that seeking withdrawal without secure and recognised boundaries would be fruitless.

The other side has a real answer and you need it in your mouth before they put it in theirs. The equally authentic French text reads “des territoires”, which in French grammar carries the article the English drops. The preamble condemns acquisition of territory by war without qualification. And most Council members said at the time that they read the resolution as requiring full withdrawal. What you can defend: the English text is deliberately indefinite, the drafters said so on the record, and the resolution ties withdrawal to peace and recognition rather than granting it unconditionally.

Khartoum, and what it did and did not say

The Arab summit at Khartoum resolved on 1 September 1967 to work at the international and diplomatic level for Israeli withdrawal, “within the framework of the main principles by which the Arab States abide, namely, no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it, and insistence on the rights of the Palestinian people in their own country”.

Quote it, and then do not overreach, because the popular version is wrong at both ends. Khartoum was not a refusal of a concrete Israeli peace offer, and saying so invites a demand to produce the offer. And the summit was not purely rejectionist: it declined an oil embargo and set up a development fund, alongside resolving to build up military readiness. What the three noes do establish is that eleven weeks after the war the Arab states ruled out negotiating with Israel at all. Any story in which Israel refused a peace it was being offered in 1967 has to get past that sentence.

The lines

“Israel fired first. Egypt threw out the peacekeepers, massed in Sinai and closed the straits, and Nasser said out loud that the objective was to destroy Israel. That is pre-emption, not conquest.”

“Israel said in 1957, at the UN, that closing the straits would be treated as an armed attack. Egypt closed them on 23 May 1967. Nobody was surprised.”

“For nineteen years Jordan held the West Bank and Egypt held Gaza. Neither built a Palestinian state and nobody asked them to. That does not give Israel the land, but it does mean the occupation interrupted nothing.”

“Jews were kept out of the Western Wall for nineteen years and the synagogues in the Jewish Quarter were destroyed. Israel took the Old City and left the Waqf running Al-Aqsa. Compare the two records.”

“Israel agreed to return the whole Sinai in 1979 and completed the withdrawal in 1982. It was the largest piece of what Israel took in 1967. Held ever since is not what happened.”

“Begin said in 1982 that Israel decided to attack. I know. The 1957 declaration and the blockade are why that is not a confession.”

“242 says withdrawal from territories, not the territories. The man who drafted it said the omission was deliberate. And the French text has the article, so that argument is live, not settled.”

Put six dates on a card

Two lines, with a real day in them.

Action. “On Sunday night I will write six things on a card: 23 May 1967 straits closed, 26 May Nasser on destroying Israel, 1 March 1957 Israeli declaration, 5 June Israel fired first, 1 September 1967 the three noes, 19 July 2024 the ICJ opinion. Then I will read the ICJ press summary myself, so nobody can spring it on me.”

Coping. “If somebody says a defensive war gives no right to keep land, I will agree that this is the majority legal view and the Court’s, say that Schwebel argued the opposite and that it is contested, and then ask them what they think Israel had been offered by 1 September 1967.”