Six Days of War
June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East
BY MICHAEL B. OREN
Copyright
Six Days of War
Copyright © 2002 by Michael B. Oren
Cover art and eForeword to the electronic edition copyright © 2004 by RosettaBooks, LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
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First electronic edition published 2004 by RosettaBooks LLC, New York.
ISBN 0-7953-2686-6
eForeword
A Senior Fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, Michael Oren has published numerous articles and essays on the subject of Middle Eastern history. He is an officer and war veteran of the Israel Defense Forces and former advisor to the government of Yitzhak Rabin and to Israel’s delegation to the United Nations.
Six Days of War was a New York Times Bestseller and Washington Post Best Book Award Winner in 2002. The book has been widely recognized as the definitive telling of the Six Day War in a context which is relevant today.
The book received stellar reviews:
“A richly detailed and lucid account… thrilling…. What makes this book important is the breadth and depth of the research. Oren draws on archives, newly declassified documents, memoirs and interviews from Israel, America, Britain and what was then the Soviet Union…he uses many Arab memoirs and accounts, giving the book a balanced tone and offerig fascinating new details…A powerful rendering of what has turned out to be a world–historical event.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A bad set of circumstances leading up to war. Mr. Oren brings a novelist's flair to recounting them and to the events of the war. His meticulous research cuts through the propagandized histories on all sides.”—Wall Street Journal
“Michael Oren has written what is surely the definitive history of the Six Day War…. His narrative is precise but written with great literary flair…. In no one else's study is there more understanding or more surprise.”— Martin Peretz, editor and publisher, The New Republic
“The finest book ever on this topic…. Spare, direct, and gripping.”—Daniel Pipes, The Jerusalem Post
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Contents
eForeword
Acknowledgments
A Note on Sources and Spellings
Foreword
The Context: Arabs, Israelis, and the Great Powers, 1948 to 1966
The Catalysts: Samu’ to Sinai
The Crisis: Two Weeks in May
Countdown: May 31 to June 4
The War: Day One, June 5
Day Two, June 6
Day Three, June 7
Day Four, June 8
Day Five, June 9
Day Six, June 10
Aftershocks: Tallies, Postmortems, and the Old/New Middle East
Afterword
A Conversation with Michael B. Oren
About this Title
LIST OF MAPS
The Middle East and North Africa, 1967
UNEF Deployment in Sinai and the Gaza Strip, May 1967
The Air War, June 5, 1967
The Ground War in Sinai
The Battle for the West Bank
The Battle for Jerusalem, June 5-June 7
The Golan Campaign
Territories Captured by Israel, June 11, 1967
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Though my name appears as the author of this book, and I take sole responsibility for its contents, Six Days of War represents the efforts, the expertise, and the dedication of many esteemed individuals.
I wish to thank, firstly, those archivists and archival assistants who facilitated my research at various libraries around the world: Regina Greenwell at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Archive; Patrick Hussey in Washington, D.C.; Michael Helfand at the UN Archive in New York; Alexey Kornilov and Masha Yegorova in Moscow; Gilad Livne and Eliahu Shlomo at the Israel National Archives; Michael Tzur at the IDF Archives, Col. Yoram Buskila and Capt. Michal Yizraeli at the Israel Air Force Historical Wing.
Throughout the research and writing of the book, I received invaluable input from fellow scholars. Thanks are due to Ambassador Richard B. Parker, scholar-in-residence at the Middle East Institute, Yigal Carmon, President of MEMRI, Dr. Abdel Monem Said Aly, Director of the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, Zaki Shalom of Ben-Gurion University, Eyal Sisser of the Dayan Center of Tel Aviv University, and Dan Schueftan, Arie Morgenstern, and Rabbi Isaac Lifshitz, all of the Shalem Center. Thanks to Eran Lerman for his critical reading of the text. I wish to express special gratitude to two colleagues whose advice and support have seen me through the many vicissitudes of this project—to Hebrew University Professor Avraham Sela and to Mor Altschuler, also of the Shalem Center.
For feedback on my writing, suggestions on phrasing and sources, and the occasional morale boost, I was able to turn to a number of knowledgeable friends, among them Yossi Klein Halevi, Jeremy Herman, Sharon Friedman, Matthew Miller, Jonathan Karp, John Krivine, Joseph Rothenberg, Danny Grossman, Isabella Ginor, Kenneth Weinstein, Zion Suliman, the Hon. A. Jay Cristol and, as always, Jonathan Price and Naomi Schacter-Price. I warmly thank them all.
I have been blessed—it is the only word for it—with a team of committed and talented research assistants without whom this book could not have come to life. My deepest appreciation goes to Moshe Fuchsman, Yemima Kitron, Elisheva Machlis, and Alexander Pevzner. Thanks are also due to editorial assistants Aloma Halter and Michael Rose, and to graphic artist Batsheva Kohay. I am particularly indebted to Noa Bismuth, whose devotion, energy, and skills proved utterly indispensable.
I want to warmly thank my editor, Peter Ginna, for his unswerving commitment to this book, and to the others at Oxford University Press—Tim Bartlett, Helen Mules, Sara Leopold, Furaha Norton, Kathleen Lynch, and Ruth Mannes—who patiently saw it through publication. Thank you, too, Glenn Hartley, head of Writers Representatives, my excellent agent.
The book is dedicated to my family, my wife and children, for whom no mere acknowledgement can suffice. The same holds for my parents, Marilyn and Lester Bornstein, and my sisters, Aura Kuperberg and Karen Angrist, and their husbands.
I wish also to thank my “family” at the Shalem Center, the educational and research institute where I am a Senior Fellow, and under whose auspices this book was researched and written. To those staff members who aided me in myriad ways, to Marina Pilipodi, Rachel Cavits, Naomi Arbel, Carol Dahan, Dina Blank, Yehudit Adest, Biana Herzog, Laura Cohen, Dan Blique, Michal Shaty, Anat Tobenhouse, Einat Shichor, Ina Tabak—thank you all. My appreciation goes to David Hazony and Josh Weinstein, on whose sage advice I have often relied, and to Yishai Haetzni and Shaul Golan, the executives who shared with me the vision of this book and so often made the impossible happen. Special gratitude is reserved for Daniel Polisar, the Academic Director of Shalem, who stood behind this project from inception to publication,
and to our indefatigable publicist, Deena Rosenfeld-Friedman. The members of the Shalem Board of Trustees—and especially Allen H. Roth and William Kristol are thanked for their unflagging support and advice. Finally and most ardently, my thanks go to Yoram Hazony, President of Shalem, and to the head of its Board, Roger Hertog, for their generosity, their inspiration, and leadership.
The 1967 war is, at base, a saga not of books and documents, but of people, many of whom I have had the pleasure and honor to meet. To exceptional individuals such as Abba Eban and Miriam Eshkol, Indar Jit Rikhye, Muhammad al-Farra and Suliman Marzuq, Joseph Sisco, the Rostow brothers, Eugene and Walter, Eric Rouleau and Vadim Kirpitchenko, I can only say that I owe you a great deal, and so does history.
A NOTE ON SOURCES AND SPELLINGS
Many and diverse sources were employed in the writing of this book. The bulk of the research is based on diplomatic papers from archives in North America, Britain, and Israel, observing the thirty-year declassification rule. The protocols of Israeli Cabinet meetings remain for the most part classified, however, as do all but a segment of Israel Defense Forces papers. Archives in the Arab world are closed to researchers, though several private collections—Cairo’s Dar al-Khayyal, for example—are accessible. Also, a significant number of Arabic documents fell into Israeli hands during the war, and can be viewed at the Israel Intelligence Library. Russian language documents are, in theory, available at archives in Moscow, though these are poorly maintained and highly limited in their holdings. The French files from 1967 have not yet been released to the public.
In the notes, names of archives are abbreviated as follows:
BGA
Ben-Gurion Archives
FRUS
Foreign Relations of the United States
IDF
Israel Defense Forces Archives
ISA
Israel State Archives
LBJ
Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library
MPA
Mapai Party Archives
NAC
National Archives of Canada
PRO
Public Record Office (FO="Foreign" Office, CAB="Cabinet" Papers, PREM="Prime" Minister’s Office)
SFM
Soviet Foreign Ministry Archives
UN
United Nations Archives
USNA
United States National Archives
YAD
Yad Tabenkin Archive
Oral history interviews represent another important source for the book. The majority of these were conducted by the author, though in several highly sensitive cases, the author provided written questions to a research assistant who, for reasons of personal security, wished to remain anonymous. I have attempted to interview as many of the war’s principal figures as possible. Several, such as Gideon Rafael and Kings Hussein and Hassan, passed away during the course of my research; others—Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat, for example—declined to be interviewed.
Transliteration, particularly in Arabic, presents a formidable challenge, as names often have both popular and literary spellings. For clarity’s sake, preference is given to the former. Thus: Sharm al-Sheikh rather than Sharm al-Shaykh, Abu ‘Ageila and not Abu ‘Ujayla. Personal names are also formally transliterated except in cases in which the individual was accustomed to a specific spelling of his or her name in English. Some examples are Gamal Abdel Nasser (instead of Jamal ‘Abd al-Nasir), Yasser Arafat (Yasir ‘Arafat), and Mohammad El Kony (Muhammad al-Kuni). Many place names—Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus—have been preserved in their English equivalents, rather than in the original Arabic or Hebrew.
FOREWORD
The War of Attrition, the Yom Kippur War, the Munich massacre and Black September, the Lebanon War, the controversy over Jewish settlements and the future of Jerusalem, the Camp David Accords, the Oslo Accords, the Intifada—all were the result of six intense days in the Middle East in June 1967. Rarely in modern times has so short and localized a conflict had such prolonged, global consequences. Seldom has the world’s attention been gripped, and remained seized, by a single event and its ramifications. In a very real sense, for statesmen and diplomats and soldiers, the war has never ended. For historians, it has only just begun.
Many books have been written about what most of the world calls the Six-Day War, or as the Arabs prefer, the June 1967 War. The literature is broad because the subject was thrilling—the lightning pace of the action, the stellar international cast, the battlefield held holy by millions. There were heroes and villains, behind-the-scenes machinations and daring tactical moves. There was the danger of nuclear war. No sooner had the shooting stopped than the first accounts—eyewitness, mostly—began appearing. Hundreds more would follow.
Some of these books were meant for a scholarly audience, while others addressed the general public. All, however, were based on similar sources: previously issued books, articles, and newspapers, together with a spattering of interviews, largely in English. Most of the books focused on the military phase of the war—examples include Trevor N. Dupuy’s Elusive Victory, and Swift Sword, by S.L.A. Marshall—and dealt only superficially with its political and strategic facets. The authors, moreover, tended to be biased in favor of one of the combatants, either the Arabs or the Israelis. There was no one book that drew on all the sources, public as well as classified, and in all the relevant languages—Arabic, Hebrew, Russian. No single study of the war examined both its political and military aspects in a manner that strove for balance.
A change began to occur in the 1990s with the release of secret diplomatic documents, first in American archives and later in Great Britain and Israel. The fall of the Soviet Union and the easing of press restrictions in Egypt and Jordan also yielded some important texts that could not have been published earlier. Many of these new sources were incorporated into two superb academic works, Richard B. Parker’s The Politics of Miscalculation in the Middle East and William B. Quandt’s Peace Process. Readers were for the first time afforded a glimpse of the complex diplomacy surrounding the war and insights into international crisis management. Parker and Quandt also achieved a degree of neutrality and scholarly detachment unprecedented in the study of the 1967 war, a refreshing departure from the previous partisanship.
Still missing, however, was the comprehensive book about the war: a book that would draw on the thousands of documents declassified since Quandt and Parker wrote, on the wealth of foreign language materials now available, and on interviews in all the countries involved. Needed was the balanced study of the military and political facets of the war, the interplay between its international, regional, and domestic dimensions, a book intended for scholars but also accessible to a wider readership. This is the book I have set out to write.
The task would prove formidable, due not only to the vastness of the research involved, but also to the radically controversial nature of Arab-Israeli politics. Great wars in history invariably become great wars of history, and the Arab-Israeli wars are no exception. For decades now, historians have been battling over the interpretation of those wars, beginning with the War of Independence, or the Palestine War of 1948 and progressing to the 1956 Suez crisis. Most recently, a wave of revisionist writers, Israelis mostly, have sought to amplify Israel’s guilt for those clashes and evince it in the debate over the borders, or even the legitimacy, of the Jewish state. That debate is now sharpening as historians begin to focus on 1967 and the conquest of Arab territories by Israel, some of which—the Golan, the West Bank—it still holds, and whose final disposition will affect the lives of millions.
I, too, have been part of the debate, and have my opinions. Yet, in writing history, I view these preconceptions as obstacles to be overcome rather than as convictions to confirm and indulge. Even if the truth can never fully be ascertained, I believe every effort must nevertheless be exerted in seeking it. And though the distance of over three decades affords invaluable historical perspectives, such viewpoints should never cl
oud our understanding of how the world appeared to the people of those tumultuous times. Employ hindsight but humbly, remembering that life and death decisions are made by leaders in real-time, and not by historians in retrospect.
My purpose is not to prove the justness of one party or another in the war, or to assign culpability for starting it. I want, simply, to understand how an event as immensely influential as this war came about—to show the context from which it sprang and the catalysts that precipitated it. I aspire to explore, using the 1967 example, the nature of international crises in general, and the manner in which human interaction can produce totally unforeseen, unintended, results. Mostly, I want to recreate the Middle East of the 1960s, to animate the extraordinary personalities that fashioned it, and to relive a period of history that profoundly impacts our own. Whether it is called the Six-Day or the June War, my goal is that it never be seen the same way again.
Jerusalem, 2002
THE CONTEXT
Arabs, Israelis, and the Great Powers, 1948 to 1966
Nighttime, December 31, 1964—A squad of Palestinian guerrillas crosses from Lebanon into northern Israel. Armed with Soviet-made explosives, their uniforms supplied by the Syrians, they advance toward their target: a pump for conveying Galilee water to the Negev desert. A modest objective, seemingly, yet the Palestinians’ purpose is immense. Members of the militant al-Fatah (meaning, “The Conquest,” also a reverse acronym for the Movement for the Liberation of Palestine), they want to bring about the decisive showdown in the Middle East. Their action, they hope, will provoke an Israeli retaliation against one of its neighboring countries—Lebanon itself, or Jordan—igniting an all-Arab offensive to destroy the Zionist state.
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