One of the principal but often underappreciated effects of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war was its role in setting the stage for the rise of political Islam in the Arab world—including the terrorist extremism that now plagues the region and the globe.
The war was a devastating blow to the credibility of Arab nationalism (particularly as defined by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser), which presented itself as secular and progressive. The speed and scope of the Arab debacle in 1967 knocked the legs out from under the profoundly exaggerated claims of Arab nationalism to be leading the region into a new and brighter future.
By the late 1960s, the social and economic failure of these systems, and their repressive nature, were already readily apparent. Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, which all gained independence in the 1940s with relatively robust civil societies and promising economies, were being profoundly mismanaged and intellectually suffocated by these narrow regimes. Underneath dreams of resurgence and glory lay clear patterns of atrophy and decay. But the militarism of Arab nationalism, particularly in Egypt, with its strident anti-Western and anti-Israeli rhetoric, conjured a beguiling mirage that obscured grim realities for large majorities who were cajoled into a collective denial.
The 1967 war called this bluff completely. Most Arabs had been beyond confident in victory, yet the defeat was virtually instantaneous and total. In the aftermath, the political credibility of this version of Arab nationalism was mortally wounded, and its long-term viability was as effectively destroyed as the Egyptian Air Force had been by Israel’s surprise early morning attack on June 5.
As the Lebanese scholar Fawaz Gerges has pointed out, the rise of Islamism as a political force was neither an immediate nor an inevitable consequence of the crisis of Arab nationalism resulting from the 1967 war. Many other factors fed into the rise of an ultraconservative, reactionary, and revolutionary (in the Leninist sense) Islamist movement, its radicalization in the 1970s and 1980s, and its proliferation—including in the form of violent transnational terrorist movements like al-Qaeda and ISIS—since the late 1990s.
Things could have turned out differently. Secular Arab nationalism could have been revived, especially in a strikingly different form. Islamism could have developed differently, or thrived to the point of becoming the ideology of ruling factions in much of the Arab world (now only really the case in Gaza).
So, the connection between the 1967 fiasco and the rise of ultraconservative Islam and political Islamism is both direct, insofar as nothing did more to discredit its primary ideological antagonists (secularism and nationalism), and indirect, insofar as innumerable other factors and contingencies shaped our present realities. But it’s worth noting that these two supposedly polar opposites continue to share an underlying framework of political attitudes that remain hegemonic among Islamists and Arab nationalists alike.
During the 1950s and ’60s, Arab nationalism presented itself as entirely at odds with the socially reactionary, and politically and intellectually retrograde, Islamist movement defined at the time by the Muslim Brotherhood. Though it now seems ironic, during this period it was the Islamists who were perceived as retrograde, reactionary, pro-Western, anti-nationalist and essentially traitorous, while the mostly secular nationalist governments were the revolutionaries confronting power in the name of Arab identity, values, and dignity. In much Arab rhetoric today, these ideas have flipped: State nationalism is now frequently cast as pro-Western and retrograde, while Islamism is often cast as revolutionary and patriotic.
For example, it’s instructive that Qatar is comfortable promoting both Muslim Brotherhood Islamism and what remains of left-wing Arab nationalism simultaneously. This isn’t as incoherent as it might seem. Underlying both discourses are the same sets of enemies, the same sense of grievances, the same empty promises, and many of the same essential touchstones of what was and remains a stultifying, unrealistic, and intellectually crippling Arab political orthodoxy.