Israel's lightning victory in the Six Day War saw the demographic and geographic face of greater Palestine change indefinitely. In addition to taking the Golan Heights from Syria and the Sinai from Egypt, Israel's forces had driven Jordan's Arab legion from the West Bank and the Egyptian Army from the Gaza Strip. However, re-percussions of the spring offensive of 1967 were to have their greatest influence on the non-sovereign state of Palestine. By uniting the territory under the old Palestine Mandate, Israel had brought the Palestinian people under her control. The Six Day War changed the approach of the Palestinian authority for their quest for autonomy, and the entire dynamics of the conflict. Israel pre-1967 targeted states for retaliation of challenges of their sovereignty, however with the re-emergence of the Palestinians dimension after the Six Day War the entire scope of the conflict had changed.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict drifted from its historical groundings into a new dimension for the Arabs and Jews post 1967. After the war of 1948, the conflict had seemed, for the main part, to develop into that of an international affair. The armistice agreements inflicted by the imperial powers, border tensions, the Suez War of 1956, had all seen sovereign states acting as the major players in the conflict. Israel appeared to be small and beleaguered, encased by much larger states bent on their illegitimacy of existence. However following the war of 1967, the focus drifted to that of a more general problem; two peoples - Jews and Palestinians - claiming the same piece of land. The change in the status quo of territory within the region after the Six Day War was a primary motivator toward the re-emergence of a new Palestinian dimension to the conflict. By extending her sphere of influence across the newly occupied territories, in particular the Gaza Strip and the West Bank; Israel had hundreds of thousands of Palestinians under her military control.
