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History Lesson
6/27/2002 (13:10) |
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A synthesis of what led to Middle East war in 1967
By Scott Bernard Nelson, Globe Staff, 6/26/2002
s Israeli troops surrounded the Palestinian Authority's headquarters this week in the latest round of tit-for-tat violence in the Middle East, Michael Oren's account of the June 1967 war in the region seems particularly timely. The disputes, the demagoguery, and even some of the central characters are the same, despite the passage of 35 years and untold thousands of ruined Arab and Israeli lives.
The brilliance of Oren's work, though, is not in the analysis of how the lightning-quick Israeli victory over Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in 1967 established the foundation for current events. That ground has been well covered by others. Where the American-born historian excels in ''Six Days of War'' is mining dozens of interviews with Arab battlefield leaders and recently released documents from governments in Israel and Russia to provide what might be the most complete synthesis yet of what preceded all the shooting.
The war itself, like many things in the Middle East, is viewed very differently by Arabs and Israelis. The Arabs call it ''the setback'' or ''the disaster,'' avoiding direct references to what they see as a particularly painful case of a Western-supported regime taking their land and their lives by force. Israelis - and Americans - tend to refer to it as ''the Six Day War,'' and place the fighting in the context of a small and vulnerable Jewish state defending itself from massed Muslim armies on three borders.
Within that paradigm of different realities for different sides, it's fair to ask whether a former government official for one side can be impartial about the historical record. Oren is director of the Middle East history project at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem these days, but he is also a Princeton University graduate who once served as an adviser to the Yitzhak Rabin administration in Israel. (Interestingly, then-chief-of-staff Rabin comes under fire from Oren for having a nervous breakdown on the eve of the 1967 hostilities and being sedated during crucial hours of planning and debate.)
As much as possible, though, Oren plays it right down the middle. He doesn't give much credence to conspiracy theorists or get caught up in stories of battlefield heroism. Instead, his is a more or less dispassionate accounting of the fighting and its precipitating events. It's the precipitating events, in any case, that get star billing.
Looming over the book is Oren's belief that a slippery slope of accidents, misunderstandings, and misinformation led to a war nobody really wanted to fight. Oren equates the series of smallish incidents leading to the fighting with ''the well-known image of [a] butterfly, which, with a mere flap of its wings, triggers a thunderstorm. Starting in November 1966, the Middle East would witness many such `flaps.'''
Conspicuous among them was the November 1966 decision by US ambassador Wally Barbour not to deliver a condolence message from Jordan's King Hussein to Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol over a terrorist bombing until after a weekend had passed, by which time the Israelis had launched a retaliatory raid and stumbled into direct combat with Jordanian troops. Soviet gaffes also played a role, as the Cold War superpower attempted to strengthen its hand with Arab states by spreading bogus intelligence reports claiming that Israel was shifting troops into position on its northern border to menace Syria.
But Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser did more to precipitate the fighting than anybody, kicking a United Nations peacekeeping force out of the Sinai Peninsula and replacing it with armored legions of his own, blockading the Red Sea's Straits of Tiran, and initiating a series of reconnaissance flights by his air force over Israel.
Each of the eventual Arab combatants also had an incentive to keep the heat on Israel in order to divert attention from the home front, Oren writes. Egypt was in the midst of an economic recession, was stuck in a military quagmire in Yemen, and was beset by political turmoil caused by a rivalry between Nasser and his military chief, General Muhammad Abd al-Hakim Amer. Syria's new Baathist military leaders, having taken power only a year before, needed to quell lingering unrest at home by picking fights abroad. And in Jordan, King Hussein worried that his largely Palestinian population would revolt against his non-Palestinian monarchy if he allowed other Arab leaders to take the lead in the stand against Israel.
It's in establishing the context, including in Israel, the United States, and the Soviet Union, that Oren's account of the 1967 war stands apart. Tragically, it's a context that is not relegated exclusively to history books such as ''Six Days of War,'' but continues to play out on the front pages of the world's newspapers even today.
Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East
By Michael Oren
Oxford University, 446 pp., illustrated, $30
This story ran on page F6 of the Boston Globe on 6/26/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.
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