Few armed conflicts in history have be shorter, more decisive, or more consequential than the Six Day War of June 1967. Over the course of just 132 hours the tiny upstart state of Israel conquered 42,000 square miles, including the Old City of Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. The massive pan Arab army that just days before had appeared on the verge of wiping Israel off the map was left a smoldering ruin. What had happened? And why did it happen? That’s what Israeli historian Michael Oren seeks to address here in his 2002 national bestseller, “Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East.”
First a couple of words about the author. Oren is a skilled and objective historian, but certainly not a neutral party. In fact, in his interview with Fouad Ajami included in the paperback edition he concedes that the Six Day War was a pivotal event in his life, occurring when he was a 12-year-old boy in Brooklyn and inspiring him to move to Israel, where he has lived since the 1980s. His narrative of the conflict is told mainly from the Israeli perspective, albeit with some notable exceptions in the weeks leading up to the war that include detailed accounts of Egyptian national security decision making. While Oren’s heart may lie irrepressibly with Israel, his mind and judgments are admirably unbiased, not to mention keen and penetrating. So for those concerned about reading an Israeli historian’s take on the greatest of all Israeli national military victories, I wouldn’t fret about it.
“Six Days of War” is loosely broken up into three unequal parts. The first deals with the lead up to the conflict with special emphasis on events in April and May of 1967. Early on Oren pronounces “More than any other individual factor, the war would revolve around water” and quotes Israeli prime minister and defense minister Levi Eshkol as saying “Water is the basis for Jewish existence in the Land of Israel,” yet he never discusses how access to or control of fresh water sources figured into Israeli war plans and decision-making. Rather, he focuses mainly on the vulnerability of kibbutzes to Syrian artillery bombardment in northern Israel and the infiltration of Palestinian terrorists into Israel through the Jordanian-controlled West Bank. Not to mention the Arab leaders’ frequent and unabashed calls for Israel’s physical destruction.
In early spring, Israel and Syria clashed along the Golan Heights, which included an Israeli Air Force raid over Damascus, while Israeli ground forces engaged the Jordanian army in a separate incident in the West Bank. Egypt did nothing. By May, Soviet intelligence was reporting that Israeli forces were concentrating in the north in preparation for an invasion of Syria. It was a false report that would have dire consequences. Egyptian leader Gamel Abdel Nasser, the unofficial leader of the Arab world, had appeared weak and diffident during the previous flare-ups. His honor and prestige wouldn’t allow him to do so in the face of naked Israeli aggression against another Arab power. Israel, meanwhile, was oblivious to the pending crisis, according to Oren, as the country had no plans to threaten Syria and was confident that its relationships with France and the United States would ensure peace for the foreseeable future. In the author’s view, the war was the result of misperceptions and miscommunication at a time when the region was even more unstable than usual. “The conflict between the Arab countries and the Israelis, between Arab countries themselves and between the US and the USSR – exacerbated by domestic tensions in each – had created an atmosphere of extreme flammability.”
The final two weeks of May were marked by excruciating uncertainty and anxiety, particularly in Israel. Nasser expelled the United Nations peacekeeping force in the Sinai and replaced them with Egyptian forces, including at Sharm Al-Sheik, the strategic site on the Straits of Tiran controlling access to the Gulf of Aqaba and the Israeli port city of Eilat. From Nasser’s misinformed perspective, “The Sinai buildup was necessitated by Israeli designs on Syria, and by the requisites of Arab dignity and honor.” These provocative moves stunned the world. According to Oren, “Rarely in the annals of American foreign policy had an international crisis caught an entire administration entirely off-guard.” The Jewish state’s long established and well rehearsed war plans called for a preemptive strike on Egypt’s Air Force, but leaders in Washington were adamant that Israel not strike first and put all effort toward a diplomatic solution. In a May 26th meeting at the Oval Office, President Johnson emphatically warned Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban that “Israel will not be alone unless it decides to go it alone.”
Oren describes Israeli leaders as paralyzed by fear and indecision. The septuagenarian Eshkol stumbled through the early phases of the crisis, demoralizing the entire country, especially the soldiers at the front. Israel’s frumpy founding father, David Ben-Gurion, scribbled angrily in his diary: “As long as Eshkol is in office we will plummet into the abyss.” Meanwhile, IDF chief of staff General Yitzhak Rabin literally suffered a nervous breakdown. The fate of the 19-year-old Jewish state seemed to hang in the balance. Into this chaotic and perilous maelstrom swept one of Israel’s greatest war heroes, Moshe Dayan, who replaced Eshkol as defense minister on June 1st. “Within two days of joining the government,” Oren writes, “Dayan had seized control over much of Israel’s decision-making, guiding it ineluctably toward war.”
The second part of the book is a blow-by-blow account of the war, again told mainly from the Israeli perspective. Both sides entered the hostilities brimming with confidence. As US secretary of state Dean Rusk observantly quipped: “Someone is making a major miscalculation.” On paper, the United Arab Armies held a distinct advantage – possessing a combined force of over 500,000 soldiers, 5,000 tanks, and 900 aircraft against Israel’s 275,000 men, 1,100 tanks and 200 planes – but the quantitative order of battle was highly misleading. The IDF possessed an overwhelming advantage in critical qualitative factors such as planning, training, and military leaders promoted on the basis of skill and merit rather than political loyalty. If the Israelis could also land the first punch in the conflict, the Arab armies would be doomed.
Oren devotes a full chapter to each day of the war and includes details of engagements down to the battalion level. Israel preemptively attacked Egypt’s Air Force on the morning of June 5th. The air assault, code-named Focus, was “labyrinthine in complexity, and exceedingly hazardous,” according to Oren, but ultimately staggering in its effectiveness. Nearly the entire Israeli Air Force took part in the raid. Within 30 minutes half of the Egyptian Air Force – some 200 planes – were destroyed, nearly all of them on the ground. Another 100 were destroyed in the next hour. In less than two hours and at the cost of just 20 Israeli planes the Egyptian Air Force had been liquidated. In the words of the British air attaché to Tel Aviv: “Never in the history of military aviation has the exercise of airpower played so speedy and decisive a part in modern warfare.”
How the Egyptian forces, for weeks pounding the drums of war and rattling their sabers in the Sinai, could have been caught so unprepared nearly defies belief. Humiliated Arab leaders would quickly hide behind the lie – what Oren calls “The Big Lie” – that Israel was aided substantially in the attack by British and American airpower. The truth was more prosaic and best captured by the sardonic remark of Tashin Zaki, one of Egypt’s more self-aware general officers: “Israel spent years preparing for war, whereas we prepared for parades.”
Israel’s initial war objectives were rather limited, according to Oren. After securing air superiority, the IDF would control the Sinai, open the Straits of Tiran, and defend Israeli settlements in the north. Capturing the Old City of Jerusalem and reclaiming access to the Wailing Wall or occupying the Palestinian settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip never figured into anyone’s calculations in Tel Aviv. It was the rapid pace of events combined with the capricious mindset of defense minister Dayan that led to these far more sweeping gains. According to General Rehavam Ze’evi, Israel’s deputy chief of operations: “Only after the war did the government draw circles around our accomplishments and declare that these were its original goals.”
The third and final part of the book discusses the immediate aftermath of the war and highlights the Arab world’s continually fierce anti-Zionist worldview in the face of catastrophic, indeed unprecedented, defeat. What Oren does not discuss is the long-term political implications of that embarrassing defeat. Not only were Arab fighter jets and tanks left smoldering by the IDF. So too was the power and appeal of secular pan Arab socialism. Increasingly, young Arab men, humiliated by the lopsided defeat their western-suit-and-tie-wearing leaders had led them in, would turn to a new set of leaders, those wearing beards and skull caps and promising victory through religious piety and sacrifice. I would argue that a direct line can been drawn from the Six Days War to Osama bin Laden.
It has been half-a-century since the Six Days War and yet its consequences are still very much with us today, from Israeli troops in the Occupied Territories to Washington’s “Land for Peace” policy stance in the Arab-Israeli conflict. And, as Oren makes abundantly clear, the war was eminently avoidable. “Among the causes of the 1967 war,” he said in his interview with Ajami, “ignorance was perhaps the most prominent.” After reading Oren’s narrative it is hard to argue otherwise.
For anyone looking to better understand the modern Middle East, I’d highly recommend “Six Days of War,” along with Ilan Ziv’s fantastic 2007 documentary “Six Days in June: The War that Redefined the Middle East.”
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