Israel annihilated Arab enemies in the Six-Day War that began today (Sunday) 44 years ago, but the Arab world calls the loss a “setback” (Naksa, in Arabic) and tries to turn it into victory.

The war was one of the shortest in history, lasting only a little more than 133 hours, with the Arab enemies suffering 20 more times casualties as Israel, recalling the Biblical promise in Leviticus 26:8, that if Jews obey the Torah: “Five of you will chase a hundred, and a hundred of you will chase ten thousand -your enemies will fall before your sword.”

News coverage of the debate in the United Nations at the time and films of the war note facts that often are omitted today – that Jordan had denied Jews the right to pray at the Western Wall since it occupied Jerusalem and that the holy site is the outside wall of the courtyard of the Holy Temple that King Solomon originally built.

Palestinian Authority clerics and several officials increasingly have denied any Jewish connection to the Temple and Western Wall, which they claim are ”ancient” Muslim places.

The war restored to Israel all of Jerusalem as well as the Golan Heights, Judea and Samaria. In addition to the Arabs who fled Israel in the War for Independence in 1948, an additional 200,000 fled during the 1967 Six-Day War, assured by Arab military leaders that they would return after an expected destruction of the Jewish state.

Most of them fled to Jordan, which many Israeli nationalists have stated is the true home of the Palestinian Authority. Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and other countries host former Arabs from Israel and their descendants. These countries have refused to give them citizenship or equal rights.

The Arab world has pinned its hopes for destroying Israel as a Jewish state by demanding that a peace treaty with Israel include the immigration of those Arabs – now numbering approximately 5 million. Flooding Israel with foreign Arabs would in effect reduce Jews to a small minority.

Still trying to turn defeat into victory, the Egyptian Al-Ahram newspaper published an article Saturday under the headline "From Naksa to Freedom,” using the Arabic term for “setback.”

"Celebrating Naksa Day, the Arab world is able to convert their defeat into a victory and a launch of a political, economic and social cooperations [sic], in light of the severe changes being lived in the meantime," the article stated.