The Six-Day War had many long term implications on the region. Jordan's decision to join the fighting exacerbated the refugee problem by prompting some inhabitants of the West Bank to cross the Jordan river to the "East Bank" of Jordan.
Some of these displaced people were able to return to Israeli-controlled West Bank and, along with their neighbors, witnessed unprecedented economic growth over the course of the next two decades. Israeli investment into the infrastructure of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, coupled with policies that allowed Arabs to move freely increased the standard of living of Palestinians, who were now able to work both in Israel and in the oil rich countries in the Middle East.
Despite this relative prosperity and years of quiet under Israeli occupation, many Palestinians — and especially their leadership abroad, the PLO — were interested neither in continued occupation nor a state of their own alongside Israel. (The PLO insisted that Palestine should relace, rather than co-exist with, Israel.) With growing unrest in the territories came greater restrictions. Violent uprisings, often targeting Israeli civilians, prompted increasing Israeli security measures. These in turn led to an increasingly burdensome occupation. Eventually, peace with Egypt allowed Israel give up the Sinai Peninsula. A subsequent Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip without a peace treaty failed to end violence against Israel from that territory.
The war also put a strain on Christian-Jewish relations in the U.S. as some Jewish leaders faulted Christian institutions for not speaking out against Arab enmity toward Israel in the weeks before the war. Christian publications initially acknowledged Arab responsibility for the war, but by 1968, Christian commentators and activists started using different lens — one of Arab innocence and Zionist culpability — to interpret the Arab-Israeli conflict.
