Ireland's foreign minister Frank Aiken played a key role in the diplomacy that unfolded in June 1967, writes Rory Miller
At 3.30am on June 5th, 1967, the president of the United Nations Security Council, Ambassador Hans Tabor of Denmark, was informed by Egypt's UN ambassador of an Israeli military strike by land and air against his country. With this the June 1967 Arab-Israeli Six Day War - a defining event in the history of the modern Middle East - had begun.
Within a week, Israel's comprehensive military victories had left her in control of territory that had previously been in Arab hands (Sinai and Gaza in the case of Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem in the case of Jordan and the Golan Heights in the case of Syria).
The political, diplomatic and humanitarian repercussions of those six days in June are still very much with us today, but what is long forgotten is the remarkable role that Frank Aiken, Ireland's foreign minister since the late 1950s, played in the flurry of UN diplomatic activity in the weeks that followed the fighting.
Aiken had been in New York on a pre-arranged visit in late May when Mid-East tensions began to reach boiling point and he became immediately embroiled in the diplomatic whirlpool.
This is hardly surprising given his stature as a wily operator who punched well above his weight in the UN corridors of power.
Or as US secretary of state Dean Rusk put it during a stopover in Shannon on June 15th, 1967, Aiken was a leading statesman at the UN "for many years", and he looked to him for "counsel and wisdom" at this time of crisis.
Aiken did not disappoint.
Following his meeting with Rusk, he headed back to New York to attend a specially convened UN session on the war.
Though his June 27th speech to this meeting was only one of dozens made by statesmen from across the world, it was (in the words of India's former UN ambassador Arthur Lall) "perhaps the most far-reaching of all those made in the Assembly's debate" and immediately gained international press coverage.
What made it so special?
Aiken's speech addressed various issues - notably the fate of the Palestinian refugees, the holy places in Jerusalem and the threat of nuclear proliferation. Yet its main focus was on what was needed for a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace at this time: Israeli military withdrawal from captured land in exchange for a peace treaty that was "firmly and legally guaranteed" by the UN.
In other words, in the wake of the Six Day War, Aiken did not favour a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the territories it had just occupied except in the context of a permanent and guaranteed peace settlement.
As he told Con Cremin, Ireland's UN ambassador, withdrawal alone "if not accompanied by other measures, will not solve the problems", leading Cremin to report back to Dublin that Aiken had "qualified" his view of withdrawal with the word "orderly and controlled", and that in the event that a resolution emerged at the UN calling for an unconditional Israeli withdrawal the foreign minister was "inclined not to support it and might even vote against it".
In the subsequent weeks of numerous meetings and interminable drafting and redrafting of potential resolutions, Aiken played a key role among western leaders.
At one point Lord Caradon, the British ambassador, in the company of Security Council president Tabor of Denmark and the Dutch and Canadian UN representatives, asked Aiken if Ireland would go it alone as the sole sponsor of a draft resolution on behalf of the western nations. Aiken declined the offer but he did become a chief architect of the draft resolution that eventually gained western backing - the Latin American draft.
For example, the wording adopted in this draft calling for Israel to withdraw its forces from "all the territories occupied by it as a result of the recent conflict" had been devised by Aiken, though his suggestion that this be accompanied by a call for "a just and durable treaty of peace and non-aggression" was rejected by the US and British ambassadors as a non-starter that would have the Soviet Union, its satellites and the Arab world up in arms.
Nevertheless, during an intense summer of diplomacy Aiken never wavered in his belief that the Six Day War provided a brief window of opportunity for lasting peace if there were mutual concessions by the parties to the conflict, as well as international support for Israel's dual objective of recognition and acceptance in the region.
This was both eminently sensible and fair, and as we remember those six days in June 40 years ago we must ask how much of the stalemate, conflict and misery in the four decades since would have been avoided if Aiken's visionary and statesmanlike approach had been adopted at the time.
Dr Rory Miller is editor of a new book of essays, Ireland and the Middle East: Trade, Society and Peace, published this month by Irish Academic Press