Six days that shook the world

Did they understand at the time what a crisis the refugee problem would be?

Yes. Levi Eshkol [Israel's prime minister] said to the government, "What are we going to do with a million Arabs?"

But do you think they felt that they'd seized an opportunity and couldn't turn back?

If you were to say to the ministers of the Israeli government in 1967 that 35 years on, we'd still be dealing with the future of the West Bank and the future of the refugees, they'd say that you're out of your mind.

Why?

Here I have to be a little critical of them. They operated under a mythical assumption that if you bopped the Arabs hard on the nose once and then show magnanimity, then the Arab world will accept you. This has not been true. For example, you give back the Sinai, but the Egyptians still aren't going to make peace with you. They may sign a treaty with you, but they're not going to make peace with you. And even the Palestinian leadership, after the Camp David accords in 2001, made it clear that the settlements aren't the issue, territories aren't the issue, Jerusalem is not the issue. The issue is Israel, whether it's going to exist or not.

Obviously, I could argue with that -- whether or not that's the ultimate issue -- but I won't drag us down that road. But do you still believe that the Arab states want to eradicate Israel?

The people want to eradicate Israel. I don't necessarily know about the states. I think there's no acceptance of Israel in the Arab world. You have to distinguish between a desire to see Israel eradicated and a willingness to eradicate it -- two different things.

Which do you think is true?

There's an almost universal desire to see Israel eradicated. It's usually the intellectual, educated classes who are the most militant. Among Arab decision makers there's no desire for war; there's no desire to act on the impulse.

Do you think that the fear of that is one of the major reasons why the Israeli government hasn't been able to disable the settlements?

Look, I'm the Israeli John Doe. And I represent between 75 and 80 percent of Israeli public opinion. As a society, we're going to give up virtually everything, but only in return for real peace. If there isn't real peace, we're not going to give up anything. That's the John Doe position.

You don't believe that the state needs to come before that kind of peace?

This is the huge debate and I have very strong feelings about it. I think that the entire peace process has been backwards. The assumption of the Oslo peace treaty was that peace would trickle down: You would make it with leaders and it would find its way through the middle class and to the working class and the peasantry. We have found that not only is this not true, but the opposite is true. You can make peace with leaders, but the desire -- the incitement and the hatred -- actually grows at the grass-roots level.

Therefore, to really make a true peace, and not to impose a peace on a rotten core, you have to build from the bottom up. Peace has to come through a prolonged phase of democratization. Democracies very rarely go to war against one another. You have to have openness and free speech. Once there's a true basis for peace, Israelis will give up whatever it takes. I don't want my kids going out and getting killed because of some hilltop somewhere. But there's no use giving up the hilltop if they're only going to use it to shoot at us.

Barak said, and I'm not such a fan of Barak, but he said, "OK, take 97 percent of the West Bank, take half of Jerusalem, we'll take all these settlements, we'll wobble them together, we'll give you some of our land as compensation for what we're taking for the settlements." That's basically the deal, right? That's the deal. Everyone knows it's the deal. The Palestinians said, "Well, this is not the deal. What we want is all our refugees to go back to Israel." If they go back to Israel, there's no more Israel. It becomes an existential question.

There's no symmetry here. Now I sound like a spokesman for the government, but John Doe Israeli says, "I recognize the Palestinian people. I recognize that the Palestinians have legitimate rights and claims. I recognize that historic wrongs have been done to the Palestinians and I'm willing to do whatever I can to right those wrongs within reasonable limits." Show me the Palestinian who's saying what I'm saying.

Which makes the Six-Day War such a fascinating and frustrating time in history because it's when all of these problems originated. Right after the 1967 war when the Arab leaders met in Khartoum, and after Resolution 242, why didn't Israel return the settlements then?

To whom? That's the question. We were willing to return territories in return for peace. We made this offer to the Syrians, to the Egyptians. They came back with the Khartoum resolution: no negotiations, no peace, no recognition. Not much maneuverability in that, is there? They tried to find Palestinians to take over an autonomous entity. They couldn't find Palestinians to take over an autonomous entity. So we just had a status quo. These were our cards that we were going to play. We're still playing them all. We gave back the Sinai. It's not as if Israel has demonstrated that it's not willing to give back every little inch.

Someone might approach your book and expect it to be mostly about Israel and the Palestinians. But there aren't many Palestinian voices. Does that show how they are pawns in a game between Israel and the Arab states, or was that a result of your research?

Next Page: "The Saudis are scared shitless"

• View blog reactions