Six days that shook the world

An Israeli historian talks about the 1967 war that shaped the modern Middle East and still fuels the Arab-Israeli conflict.

By Suzy Hansen

Jun 12, 2002 | As the Middle East crisis becomes more and more desperate, historians and journalists -- beyond debating what Israelis and Palestinians should do next -- keep looking to the past to understand what went wrong. Invariably, thinkers on both the right and left end up at Camp David, 2000, when Yasser Arafat rejected Ehud Barak's historic peace plan -- a plan that included, among other things, returning almost all of the occupied territories to the Palestinians.

But there's also a tendency to go even further back in the troubled history between these two peoples; both sides continually point to past grievances to justify their present policies. One war, the so-called Six-Day War of June 1967, has had specific ramifications for the present. The causes of that war were complex and involved many military and diplomatic misunderstandings. Israel was locked in a tense encounter with Syria, from whose territory Arafat's new al-Fatah movement launched guerrilla attacks against Israel, and Jordan. It also felt threatened by the growing number of Egyptian troops in the Sinai Peninsula. On June 5, 1967, Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. Regarding this as a casus belli, Israel launched a preemptive strike that, in one of the great military triumphs of modern times, destroyed Egypt's air force in hours. After a few days of fierce fighting against Syrians, Jordanians and Egyptians, Israel had conquered the Golan Heights from Syria, the Sinai from Egypt, and East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan, beginning an occupation of Arab lands that has now lasted 35 years. To Arabs, the war is known as The Setback.

Michael B. Oren, who was born in the United States, served as director of Israel's Department of Inter-Religious Affairs under the late Yitzhak Rabin and is currently a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, has written what's being called the most comprehensive chronicle of this crucial turning point in contemporary Middle East history. His book, "Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East," is an elegantly detailed, often riveting account; Oren utilizes formerly top-secret documents to explore the military and diplomatic intricacies of all sides involved -- Israel, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, the Soviet Union and the United States. Oren has also set out to challenge some fundamental Israeli and Arab ideas about the war, including those put forth by Israeli "new historians" whom Oren suggests are led into bias by their belief that modern Israel "was created in sin."

Oren takes on many smaller issues in "Six Days of War" -- the controversial Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, the role of Israel's nuclear reactor in causing the war, the reuniting of Jerusalem, the creation of U.N. Resolution 242. But Oren's most important -- and convincing -- argument is that Israel was legitimately afraid it was about to be attacked and was thus justified in launching its preemptive strike. Against revisionists who claim that Israel's attack might have been motivated in part by the desire for territorial acquisition (some generals were unhappy that they had not seized all of the West Bank in 1948), he argues that Israel's acquisition of land previously controlled by Arabs was due to a confluence of small events and decision-making in the heat of war, rather than a concerted Israeli plan.

Oren spoke to Salon at Salon's New York office.

This is supposed to be the most comprehensive history of the war so far -- so what documents have you had access to that others have not?

Have you ever heard of the 30-year rule? It pertains to most Western democracies; after 30 years they'll declassify most formerly top-secret diplomatic correspondence. This book rode the crest of the 30-year rule. There are literally tens of thousands of documents that have been declassified in the United States and Canada and Great Britain and Israel. The U.N. archive also works under the 30-year rule. But there are no archives that are open in the Arab world. Everything's closed.

Will they ever be open?

The question is whether they exist. Nobody knows for certain. I don't know whether they take these documents and burn them.

Well, where are they?

I'm being a little facetious. There's a known Egyptian archive and a Jordanian archive. We really don't know about the Syrian archive. There's no freedom of information, no freedom of the press. But what you do have in the Arab world is a degree of transparency. You have a great number of former Arab decision makers who write their memoirs and you have independent archives that collect materials. One of the great sources for this [book] was an archive associated with Al-Ahram newspaper in Cairo. Among other documents, they had the testimony of Egyptian officers tried at the end of the war. Remember all those trials for incompetence and cowardice? Here's people telling their own stories. The stories are somewhat slanted, but if you put them all together, they get repeated. And that's when you know that something happened there.

You say in the introduction that you wanted to change the way that people looked at this war so it was never seen in the same way again. What do you mean by that? Were there certain commonly held beliefs that you wanted to challenge?

Yes, there are Israeli conventional wisdoms and Arab conventional wisdoms that I think have to be revised in light of the research. For example, the Arab wisdom was that the Egyptians never intended to attack Israel and that Israel was the first to shoot a gun. My book goes into great depth about Egyptian war plans and Jordanian war plans and Syrian war plans. They had war plans. They didn't work, but they had war plans.

On the Israeli side, one example is the myth of the liberation of Jerusalem as if it were planned, as if Israel intended to go to war against Jordan and always wanted to liberate Jerusalem. In fact, the Israeli government did just about everything not to liberate Jerusalem, which I think would come as a great shock to a lot of Israelis.

Did you set out to challenge post-Zionist, "new historian" views with your book?

Yes. There was a movement that began in the mid-'80s called the "new historians." It was championed by Avi Shlaim at Oxford and Benny Morris, who has since dropped out. [In his seminal work on the Palestinian refugee crisis and other works, Morris attacked many of the most cherished notions about Israel. But after Camp David, Morris lost faith in the good intentions of Arafat and has swung sharply to the right.)

And Tom Segev?

Well, Tom Segev is a journalist. He's not really a trained historian. Let's keep with Avi Shlaim. The new historians set out to debunk myths, to really show that Israel was responsible for everything, that Israel was created in sin. When I began to read a lot of the new historians, I found that a lot of their research was very slanted and, in some cases, distorted. If you read my book, I don't think you would find that I'm an apologist for Israel. But the time has come for us to strive for a more balanced type of scholarship.

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