Abstract
Nine days after the victory in the Six Day War the Israeli cabinet adopted a resolution which seemingly offered Egypt and Syria the territories they had just lost in exchange for contractual peace. In public and academic discourse the resolution has been presented as a ‘generous peace offer’ which was transmitted to Cairo and Damascus through the United States and was immediately rejected. The article demonstrates that the ‘generous peace offer’ was never offered to the Arabs. The cabinet resolution was mainly a diplomatic manoeuver whose aim was to gain American political support against a Soviet move at the United Nations for immediate and unconditional Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied in the war. The article argues that Abba Eban, Israel’s foreign minister at the time, created the myth of the ‘generous peace offer’ and that it has been turned into an accepted wisdom by dozens of writers and scholars who have recycled Eban’s story unchallenged.
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