7: From the Six Day War to the Lebanon War

The seventh of ten programmes exploring the origins and tracing the history of the Middle East conflict takes the story from the aftermath of the Six Day War in 1967 to its invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

Presenter Jonny Dymond, the BBC’s International Editor Jeremy Bowen, and Mark Tessler, Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, USA, begin by discussing the impact of Israel’s victory on both Israel itself and on Palestinians, many of whom now found themselves under Israeli occupation. They go on to look at the Palestinian struggle for nationhood in this period – and at terror attacks by some Palestinian groups, including the killing of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972.

They examine the beginning of Israeli settlement on the occupied West Bank, the electoral earthquake of 1977 in Israel which brought the right wing to power for the first time – and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem, which led in 1979 to the signing of an Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement, the first between the Jewish state and an Arab country. The episode finishes by asking why Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 – and what the consequences were for Palestinian refugees there, and for Israel itself.

'How Did We Get Here? Israel and the Palestinians' is a BBC News Long Form Audio production.
The presenter is Jonny Dymond and the editor is Penny Murphy.
The Radio 4 commissioners are Hugh Levinson and Dan Clarke.
The studio engineers are Neil Churchill, James Beard, Rod Farquhar, Mike Regaard and David Crackles.