Israel’s lightning victory in the Six Day War may have captured vast tracts of land and the world’s attention, but it did nothing to assuage Israelis’ apocalyptic fear of destruction. Israelis have frequently believed both that their army is indomitable and that their nascent state is doomed to annihilation. It is a sentiment that then Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, on the eve of the war, called “Samson the nerd,” and one that, 25 years later, still dominates Jewish thinking about the state of Israel.
Michael B. Oren’s new book, Six Days of War: June 1967 and The Making of the Modern Middle East, observes that attitude and its import in the decision to strike first. Oren—a former Rabin administration official and a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem—analyzes the war and Eshkol’s “Samson the nerd” psychology in geopolitical terms, positioning the third Arab-Israeli war within the Cold War matrix of superpowers and client states. To that end, he draws exhaustively on American, Soviet, Arab, and Israeli sources. His unprecedented access to high-level Soviet sources makes this book particularly important, and enhances its strongest section—the account of diplomatic brinkmanship that led to the war.
When Oren gets down to the cause-and-effect dynamic leading to war, his work is superb. Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser—fooled by the Soviets into thinking Israel would attack Syria and goaded on by his psychotic, incompetent, and narcissistic field marshal—dug into Sinai in a show of force. Despite the inaccuracy of the Soviet claim, Nasser seized on the outpouring of public support and closed the Straits of Tiran, cutting off maritime access—and Iranian oil shipments—to Haifa.
Oren then uncovers a complex web of deception that led to the Arabs’ crushing loss. After losing nearly its entire air force, Egypt claimed dramatic—but bogus—victories in the march on Tel Aviv. Syrian officials claimed they were marching on Haifa, even as they abandoned their escarpments in the Golan. The official propaganda gave Jordan the confidence to enter the war and encouraged Arab members of the UN Security Council to defy international attempts to broker a cease-fire.
Six days after the war’s beginning, the Israelis had taken the entire Sinai peninsula, unified Jerusalem, seized the entire West Bank, and conquered, in a matter of hours, the Golan Heights.
Although the argument does not receive lengthy exposition, Oren posits a fresh insight. He says the war was not motivated by a land-grab mentality, as many historians have asserted, but that that Israelis still hoped to capture land. It’s a subtle distinction in which the Israelis wanted the land to cede for peace; they wanted land after all, but not to keep.
Yet for all his research, Oren finds the conflict’s causes so abundant that he claims an inability to pinpoint its genesis. Rather, he attributes the war’s origins to the endless Arab-Israeli give-and-take by using the metaphor of “the butterfly, which, with a mere flap of its wings, triggers a thunderstorm.”
Perhaps the greatest weakness of this book is how soon Oren brings his 330-page tome to a close. Despite the subtitle “the Making of the Modern Middle East,” there is little discussion of how the war incarnated today’s Middle East. Conspicuously absent is a discussion of the 200,000 Palestinians who left the West Bank during the war. Oren mentions the problem, but does not hash out its repercussions. Although the Palestinians had little reason to fear Israeli retaliation against their civilian institutions, Israel did little to halt their exodus, which only compounded an already intractable refugee problem. That scourge, which has haunted the entire peace process, should have found a central place in Oren’s epilogue, and must figure prominently into any conversation about the war’s legacy.
