This June, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip enters its forty-eighth year. It’s the longest military occupation in modern times. For most of its life as a state, Israel has been ruling over millions of Palestinians, depriving them of civil, political, and human rights.

Yet we can date the history of conquest earlier — to 1948, giving us an even longer period to consider: not only of the foundational expulsion and dispossession of most of the local Palestinian population, but also the subjugation of the small remainder who stayed behind by a historical fluke (and even fought to gain citizenship rights in Israel) and faced nineteen years of military administration, from 1948 to 1966.

Even if we wanted to be overly generous about the nature of the Israeli state, ignoring its illiberal ethno-national self-definition and the violent early days of settlement before 1948, we would have to conclude that the only time that Israel wasn’t ruling over a Palestinian population whose political and human rights were denied was from 1966 to 1967. This was the brief period — from November 8, 1966 to June 5, 1967, to be more precise — when the military administration of Palestinian citizens had ended and the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip had not yet been occupied.