Forty Years Ago Today

Yes, it was the release of the Beatles's Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band LP, forty years ago but it was also the The Six-Day War (Arabic: حرب الأيام الستة, ħarb al‑ayyam as‑sitta ; Hebrew: מלחמת ששת הימים, Milhemet Sheshet Ha‑Yamim), also known as the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the Third Arab-Israeli War, Six Days' War, an‑Naksah (The Setback), or the June War, was fought between Israel and its Arab neighbours Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Algeria also contributed troops and arms to the Arab forces. In the months before June 1967, Egypt expelled the United Nations Emergency Force from the Sinai Peninsula, increased its military activity near the border, blockaded the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships, and called for unified Arab action against Israel. In June 1967, Israel launched a pre-emptive attack on Egypt's airforce fearing an imminent invasion by Egypt. Jordan then attacked western Jerusalem and Netanya. At the war's end, Israel had gained control of eastern Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. The results of the war affect the geopolitics of the region to this day.

I read this article last week in The Nation and this one paragraph just stands out to me that I want to copy here. It is in an article by Stephen Glain: The Flight of Millions From Iraq Threatens the Entire Region in the June 11, 2007, The Nation edition:

Dispossession accounts for much of the Middle East's colonial inheritance, from the Ottoman Turks' genocidal eviction of Armenians to the Palestinian exodus that followed the creation of Israel with British complicity. If history is any guide--and it usually is in the Middle East--where refugees go, trouble follows. The Iraqi exodus could do more to reshape the geography and geopolitics of the region than anything gamed out in neoconservative think tanks, which tend to see the matter as an abstraction. For Jordan and Syria, themselves the bastard progeny of imperial coupling, the problem is very real--and deadly serious.

Think about it: Forty Years from NOW???