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• Amazon Sales Rank: #1124132 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-29
• Released on: 2007-05-29
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 688 pages

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Michael Oren

The scenes flashed across the TV screens: tens of thousands of Arab troops massing on Israel's borders, frenzied demonstrations in every Arab capital demanding the demise of the Jewish state, the leaders of the Soviet bloc proclaiming unqualified support for Arab war aims while the French -- Israel's only ally -- abruptly changed sides. "Our objective is the freeing of Palestine and the liquidation of the Zionist existence," declared the Syrian chief of staff, while the Iraqi president proclaimed, "Our goal is clear -- to wipe Israel off the face of the map." Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, who ousted U.N. peacekeepers from the Egypt-Israel border and blockaded Israeli shipping through the Straits of Tiran, foresaw a "total war . . . aimed at Israel's destruction." Bracing themselves for the onslaught, Israelis called up their army reserve, hoarded gas masks, and dug trenches and thousands of graves. Yet even these preparations seemed insufficient. "We shall destroy Israel and prepare boats to deport the survivors," the Palestine Liberation Organization pledged, "if there are any."

Israel did not wait to see if Arab leaders would fulfill their promises. On June 5, 1967 -- 40 years ago last week -- the Israelis struck. In an attack lasting a little over an hour, the Israeli air force destroyed more than 250 Egyptian planes, and Israeli ground forces broke through Egyptian lines in Sinai. Israel had urged Jordan to stay out of the war, but Jordanian artillery began shelling West Jerusalem and suburban Tel Aviv, and Jordanian warplanes struck Israeli coastal cities. From atop the Golan Heights, Syrian gunners rained thousands of shells onto Israeli farms in Galilee. Though faced with a multi-front war, the Israelis fought vigorously, first driving the Egyptians out of Sinai and Gaza and the Jordanians out of the West Bank and Jerusalem. They then silenced the Syrian guns and captured the Golan Heights. In six extraordinary days, Israel's citizen soldiers had defeated three major Arab armies and captured territories four times the size of pre-1967 Israel.

Hundreds of books have been written about the Six-Day War, as it is known in the West -- the Arabs prefer "the June War" or simply "the Setback" -- and more are appearing still. The newest and lengthiest of these is Tom Segev's 1967. A columnist for Israel's leftwing Ha'aretz newspaper, and a self-styled New Historian who has labored to debunk what he regards as Israel's founding myths, Segev has previously set out to demonstrate Zionist culpability for the deterioration of Arab-Jewish-British relations in the period before Israel's creation and, thereafter, Israel's indifference to the survivors of the Holocaust. 1967, however, aims at overturning what Segev deems the most hallowed of Israeli myths -- namely, that the Six-Day War was a just and existential struggle that Israel, isolated and outgunned, had no choice but to wage.

Though it is never explicitly stated, Segev's thesis is clear. Israeli fears of an Arab attack "had no basis in reality," he argues; "there was indeed no justification for the panic that preceded the war, nor for the euphoria that took hold after it." Rather than responding to an imminent Arab threat, Israelis were reacting out of a deep-seated trauma born of years of Jewish suffering. Referring to the digging of graves in anticipation of mass Israeli casualties, for example, he writes, "Only a society drenched in the memory of the Holocaust could have prepared so meticulously for the next one." Segev also faults the economic crisis of 1966 that sensitized Israelis to perceived perils, and castigates Prime Minister Levi Eshkol for failing to stand up to his warmongering generals. Indeed, the belligerence of military leaders such as Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Rabin was, for Segev, the primary cause of the war: "They clung to the Israeli culture of youth; they were like adolescent boys or bulls in rut. They believed in force and they wanted war. War was their destiny."

Substantiating these claims requires Segev to engage in rhetorical acrobatics. Fortifying his contention that Israeli malaise created an atmosphere for war, he writes, "Beginning in 1966, more and more Israelis had started to lose faith in themselves and sink into depression." A few pages later, however, to show how an excess of Israeli bravado heightened the war-fever, he asserts, "At the beginning of 1966 . . . Israelis expressed satisfaction and a fundamental faith in their future . . . generating hope and pride." To reconcile these inconsistencies, Segev is forced to divide the war into separate conflicts, each with its own Israel-based cause. "While war with Egypt was the outcome of Israel's demoralization and a sense of helplessness, the fighting with Jordan and Syria expressed a surge of power and messianic passion."

Laboring to prove his point forces Segev not only to contradict himself but also to commit glaring oversights. The book repeatedly asserts that war might have been averted if Israel had accepted an American plan to break the Egyptian blockade by sending an international convoy through the Straits of Tiran. But the American plan, code-named Regatta, was rejected by Congress, as well as by 24 of the 26 nations invited to contribute to the convoy. Segev knows this fact but throughout the book pretends that a diplomatic option remained. Similarly, his need to demonstrate Israel's strength before the war compels him to overlook Soviet support for the Arab war effort and France's last-minute decision to back the Arabs. The French move is mentioned only at the end of the book and then -- bizarrely -- as one of the reasons that Israelis clung to their newly conquered territory.

But the most telling omission relates not to the Israelis or to any foreign power but rather to the Arabs. Segev's book is all but devoid of Arab calls for Israel's destruction and the slaughter of its citizens. There is no mention of pro-war demonstrations, of Egypt's willingness to use poison gas against its enemies, or of the detailed Arab plans for conquering Israel. Segev even ignores the Khartoum resolution after the war, in which the Arab states refused to negotiate with Israel and to grant it peace and recognition. These omissions inflict an injustice on the Arabs by treating them as two-dimensional props in a solipsistic Israeli drama.

1967 presents some engaging portraits of Israel in the mid-1960s, from the high cost of apartments to the subservience of young Israeli wives. Segev has scoured the Israeli and American archives and has shed light on the post-1967 period. But by disregarding the Arab dynamic and twisting his text to meet a revisionist agenda, he undermines his attempt to reach a deeper understanding of the war. Such an understanding is vital if Arabs and Israelis are to avoid similar clashes in the future and peacefully co-exist.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
It is now 40 years since the Six Days' War, in which Israel routed the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan and transformed the geography and political landscape of the Middle East. Segev is a columnist for Ha'aretz, Israel's leading left-of-center daily newspaper, and he clearly views the events leading to the war as well as the aftermath of the conflict with a predictable bias. Still, many of his revelations are both startling and credible. A substantial portion of the book is devoted to an analysis of Israeli society on the eve of the war. Segev portrays a nation plagued by disillusionment, communal tensions, and anxiety about national survival. The idealism that inspired the early Zionist pioneers had waned, and the Ashkenazi and Sephardic communities seemed increasingly resentful of each other. An increased awareness of the Holocaust by the younger generation combined with the extreme rhetoric of Arab leaders contributed to a sense of impending doom. Segev asserts that the outbreak of war was hardly inevitable and was precipitated by gross miscalculations by both sides. Freeman, Jay
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

Customer Reviews

Quite Good But One Sided
This good book is a combined political and social history of Israel before, during, and after the Six Day War. Segev presents a detailed portrait of Israeli society and politics as being in the throes of a major transition. In 1966, Israel was in something of a funk. A major recession caused considerable distress, immigration had slowed, Israeli society was having difficulty assimilating Middle Eastern immigrants, and the Ashkenazi political elite was aging.

Against this background, Segev describes the crisis with the Arab states primarily in terms of internal Israeli politics and the difficut decision to take preemptive action. Segev does well in describing the complex political dynamics of politics leading up to the war and the decision to go to war. Segev sees internal Israeli politics as the major driver of the decision to go to war. He asserts that the war was avoidable and clearly sees the Israelis as the major decision makers. These views, however, are only assertions. Segev presents no real discussion of this contentious issue. A major problem with his assertion is that there is no discussion of the war from the Arab point of view or any documentation about Arab decision making. The issue of whether or not the war was avoidable, however, is not really the focus of the book.

Segev's recurrent theme, which runs throughout the whole book and emerges most strongly in the final sections, is the internal contradictions of the Zionist ideal. The Zionists exhibited a quasi-mystical desire to possess Palestine but also wished to establish a European style democratic state. This second goal, however, conflicted with the reality that fulfillment of the Zionist project meant the involuntary displacement of Palestinian Arabs.

The best parts of the book are the later parts dealing with aftermath of the war and the initial occupation. Segev rebuts the myth that the Israeli government offered to restore the conquests in exchange for peace. His description of the beginnings of the occupation is useful for explaining the genesis of the present disastrous situation.

As a social history and description of Israeli politics, this book is very good. In terms of the genesis of the war, Segev is unconvincing because he doesn't present any real data. I recommend reading this book in conjunction with Michael Oren's Six Days in June. Oren's book is a more conventional diplomatic and political history of the war. Unlike Segev, Oren did make an effort to examine Arab sources and his conclusion is that the state of Israel faced an 'existential' threat.

Bringing Back Memories
Segev, Tom. "1967: Israel, War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East", Metropolitan Books, 2007.



Bringing Back Memories



Amos Lassen and Literary Pride



I moved to Israel in 1967, three days before the famous and legendary "Six Day War" began. Reading Tom Segev's monumental 671 page "1967", I realized how both I and the country changed as a result of that war. Israel and I were young back then; I had my newly granted Master of Arts degree in my hands and Israel (created in 1948) was beginning to find her place among

the nations of the world. When the war began, Israel was naïve but militarily strong and I had been the "cockeyed optimist" who had emigrated because of idealistic notions of helping to build the Jewish state. We both got slapped across the face and there was no turning back. Both of our naivetes were tested. Israel now knew that her place in the world was insecure and I knew that I had finally found the place I wanted to call home (and home it was for me for the following 30 years). The war made both of us become adults very quickly.

Segev gives us an intimate look at Israel because as a sabra (native born Israeli) he had access to the files and letters about the war and he presents a vivid picture of the country in the years before the war. He examines what led to the war ad spends pages recounting all of the miscalculations that caused the war to break out. The book is not really about the nation of Israel in its entirety. Segev instead writes about the eastern-European settlers who fled war-torn Germany, Austria and Poland and settled on the kibbutzim (communal farms).

Being from eastern European family ties myself, you can see and havig settled on a kibbutz in the north of Israel, you can guess where my sympathies lie. The problem here is that those settlers only represent a tenth of the population of Israel--those nationalistic Jews who ate, drank and dreamt idealism and socialism and virtually ignores the other 90% of the population which comprise a group of a dozen or so languages and who came from over 50 various countries. Nevertheless this is an intense and readable look at the country biased as it may be. It is an examination of almost every aspect of life and deals with the culture and lifestyles of the citizens of the new country who face war just as we face peace.

The Arab nations who went to war with Israel in 1967 had been begging for a war to break out--their hatred of the Jewish state was that intense. They were sure, without a shadow of a doubt, that they could defeat the tiny country. Segev maintains that the war was not inevitable (the view held by most is that the war had to happen to secure Israel's place in the world). He states, quite empathically, that if the Ashkenazi Jews (those Eastern European settlers) had just ignored the Egyptian military build-up in the Sinai Peninsula, the blockade and the exit of the United Nations, the war could have been prevented. Looking back now, that is an easy assumption to make. If we look at the time when the war was on the verge of breaking, that does not seem to be the case at all. Segev's thesis is one-sided and with that said let's look at what the book is really about.

Segev carefully looks at the way the war changed the cultural ethos of Israel. Many of the taboos of the new nation came into being as a result of the war. The Israeli felt as if he had matured with the end of the war and the brilliant victory brought the country a false sense of security. Israel felt that now she was unbeatable militarily and society began the process of maturation from adolescent to adulthood. New venues opened all over and the people of Israel developed a new cultural awakening and all those aspects of modern life came into being. Some of these included the advent of an automobile industry, the flourishing of coffee houses and the creations of new industries and ways of life. The gay movement began to become visible, music and the other arts flourished and Israel began to develop an entire culture which included the sexual revolution and pornography and prostitution. It was a new age for Israel and all those aspects of life began to emerge, even those that were not particularly wanted.

For this reason the book is a delight. We read about the life of a nation that is a cosmopolitan nation living in an area where other nations rely on religious tradition to develop the culture of their countries. The founder of the concept of Zionism (the nationalistic movement that brought about the creation of the state of Israel) stated once that we would know that Israel was indeed a nation when the mailmen, plumbers, bus drivers and prostitutes were Jewish and could take their places next to the intelligentsia of the nation. Israel indeed came of age in 1967 and although the war brought a lot of pain to the country, it also created a pride that has yet to be duplicated.

One of the Best Books of 2007
Rated by the Economist Magazine as one of the best books of 2007, 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East provides exactly what it tries to provide, an insight into how the "Six Day War" affected Israel. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to gain a greater understanding of Israel and their view of the Middle East. This book also provides an inside look into Israeli politics now and then.