Six days that shook the world

How does your book challenge some of the ideas that the new historians have put forth?

There's a new historian theory that's been floated by radical revisionists that the government wanted to detract attention from its failures economically in the 1967 war. I found no evidence of that. A big theory is that the 1948 generation of generals that didn't conquer the West Bank wanted to start a war to conquer the West Bank. I found evidence that they wanted to conquer the West Bank, but on the contrary, not only did they not act on that, they actually gave out orders not to attack Jordan. In the British archives, I came across the letter that [Israeli prime minister] Levi Eshkol sent to [King] Hussein on the morning of June 7, 1967. He says to Hussein: If you take control of your army, if you declare an unconditional cease-fire, if you agree to some type of peace talks between us, then we will not take the Old City of Jerusalem. Now, for a Jewish leader to be this close to the Western Wall and not take it is a huge gamble. A true new historian would not be happy with that revelation.

It seems that the momentum and the short time that it took Israel to conquer these regions had a lot to do with the decision making.

This is an important lesson for the Middle East today. Rather than being the result of rational decision making and a cogent analysis of the situation, most of the Six-Day War was a result of random events, vicissitudes, miscalculations, misunderstandings and very often just plain dumb luck. A lot of dumb luck, bad and good.

And you believe that at that time those Arab states wanted to eradicate Israel completely?

Yes. There's no question about that. The question is whether they were going to act on it or not.

And the evidence that you found was that they were going to act on it. Do you believe that they were trying to draw Israel to attack them first?

[Egyptian president Gamal Abdel] Nasser preferred that Israel attack first. The Syrians preferred to fight Israel to the last Egyptian. And the Jordanians didn't want war at all, but they had no choice because they were afraid.

That seemed to be one of the more important turning points -- the Jordanians' decision to join the war.

It was a tragedy because [King] Hussein had this terrible dilemma. If he didn't join the war and Nasser lost, then everybody would say he was a traitor and they'd kill him. If Nasser won the war, the Egyptian army would continue straight across Israel and conquer Amman and they would kill him. It was a lose-lose situation. He decided that the only way out of his dilemma was to absolve himself of any responsibility for the crisis and to put his army under Egyptian command. But it was precisely that move which was the last straw for the Israelis and convinced them to go to war.

What was the Six-Day War about besides wanting to eradicate Israel? Was it about access to water? Was it about this Israeli nuclear plant?

I take issue with that. What I did find was an erroneous assumption on the part of the Israelis that the Arabs were afraid of the nuclear reactor. [The Israelis] were convinced that the nuclear reactor was going to get blown up and therefore wanted to strike first before that happened. So the nuclear reactor did have a role in the war but not in the way that you would think.

What is the legacy of the fact that Israel made the first strike? It seems like that left a huge scar on the Arab psyche.

To this day, it's a trauma they haven't gotten over. It was the first major trial of arms of the post-colonial Arab world, and they failed at it. We're dealing in a society based on honor and shame. It was a tremendous shame.

And the Arabs were better equipped militarily?

Yes. They should have done better. But in the next war [in 1973] they did better.

Today, Israel is listed as one of the third or fourth military superpowers in the world. I'm an officer in this army and I'll tell you, this is quite an army.

Did the Arab states know what they were up against?

They had no intelligence. The Israeli army is unlike any other army. We don't salute one another, everyone's on a first-name basis, it's kind of hip and kind of fun to go off for two weeks and not change your underwear and bond and the whole thing. Very macho. And it's a true meritocracy. And with all of our sophistication, with all of our massive firepower, with all of our élan and esprit de corps, a couple hundred people with C-4 explosives attached to themselves is threatening the state of Israel and there's not a lot we can do about it. All of this is a buildup to show you, ultimately, that the army is as ineffective as can be.

Do you think it was Israel's intention -- at any point -- to reunite Jerusalem and to take the West Bank?

There was a feeling among many Israeli officers who had participated in the 1948 war, where Israel had begun to take Jerusalem and the West Bank and then backed off, that they had missed this historic opportunity. Many of them felt that Israel was not defensible without the West Bank. Israel at certain points is only 8 miles wide with its back to the sea. The West Bank is high and Israel is low.

Then there was this strong Jewish feeling about reuniting Jerusalem. They were able to separate this ideal from the real because the fact of the matter is, when the war started, this express order went out: No shooting at the Jordanians. And they were even willing to absorb a lot of Jordanian fire. The Jordanians fired thousands of shots into West Jerusalem, their planes strafed Israeli cities, they bombed the outskirts of Tel Aviv, and the Israelis still did nothing. The Israelis only reacted when Jordanian forces started moving in toward West Jerusalem. That freaked them out.

Did any of the Israeli leaders have a sense of how the world might come to criticize them for occupying the territories that they gained?

The whole debate about whether to go into Jerusalem was whether the Christian world would countenance Jewish control of the Old City. Many people thought it wouldn't. Moshe Dayan [Israel's defense minister] said, "We don't need the Vatican in here." Nobody thought that Israel would permanently occupy the West Bank at that time.

No?

[In the book,] I talk about the Israeli government's decision of June 19, 1967. In that decision they decided to give back all of the Golan Heights, all of the Sinai, in return for peace treaties and to offer the Palestinians autonomy in the West Bank leading possibly to independence and statehood. They secretly interviewed all of these Palestinian notables who said, "Listen, we'd love to do this, but if we do it, we're going to get a bullet in the head, so we can't do it." They were actually thinking of ways -- this is before any settlements were built -- of returning this land to somebody, but in a way that would break the cycle of warfare.

How soon did the settlements start after this?

Pretty soon. Within a year. The impulse for settlements is first of all strategic. It's to widen Israel. There's also a religious and ideological component to it and many of the people who were leading Israel at the time were of the generation of pioneers. They were used to making settlements. That's what they did. They got the state by making settlements. It was a continuation of a modus operandi that they understood.

Next Page: "The hatred grows at the grass-roots level"

• View blog reactions