“There was no such thing as Palestinians,” Golda Meir, the then Labour Prime Minister of Israel, told The Sunday Times on June 15, 1969, on the second anniversary of the Six-Day War. It was during the 1967 war, Israel brought the whole of historical Palestine under its control. In the 1948-49 first Arab-Israeli war, Israel had captured 23% more territories, including West Jerusalem, than what the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine had proposed.
In 1967, it seized the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan and the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria. Ever since, Palestinian territories have remained under Israel’s military occupation and control (it pulled back both troops and Jewish settlers from Gaza in 2005 after the second intifada, but has laid siege to the enclave since 2007).
