How The Mideast's Map Was Remade, And Why: Six Days of War

Wall Street Journal book review | June 5, 2002 | Robert L. Pollock

[Stand Watch Listen]

How The Mideast's Map Was Remade, And Why

Six Days of War, By Michael B. Oren, Oxford, 446 pages, $30

By Robert L. Pollock

Thirty-five years ago today, Israeli jets attacked Egyptian airfields, destroying several hundred planes in less than two hours. Within six days the map of the Middle East had been remade. From Egypt, Israel had taken Gaza and the Sinai; from Jordan, old Jerusalem and the West Bank; from Syria, the Golan Heights.

"Beyond the goals of eliminating the Egyptian threat and destroying Nasser's army, no other stage of the conflict was planned or even contemplated," writes historian Michael B. Oren in "Six Days of War" (Oxford, 446 pages, $30). Yet at its end Israel was 3 1/2 times its original size.

Israel's territorial gains were more than matched, in importance, by the war's other consequences, a virtual chronology of Mideast turmoil. "The War of Attrition," writes Mr. Oren, "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."

The proximate cause of the fighting is beyond dispute. In the spring of that year Egypt evicted United Nations peacekeepers from the Sinai, blockaded Israel's Red Sea port and prepared to attack. Meanwhile Arab armies threatened from Jordan to the east and Syria to the north. Surrounded and outnumbered, Israel felt it could not afford to wait for the Arabs to strike first.

The more interesting question is why the decade of relative peace since Israel's 1956 Sinai campaign had come to an end. Mr. Oren paints a picture of a war that had as much to do with personal rivalries, political exigencies and a convergence of events as with any belief among Arab leaders that "the catastrophe" of Israel's founding in 1948 could actually be reversed.

One key player in what the Palestinians regard as their second "catastrophe" was none other than Yasser Arafat. On the night of Dec. 31, 1964, his Syrian-sponsored al-Fatah guerrillas launched their first raid on the Jewish state with the aim of provoking Israeli retaliation and in turn an Arab war against Israel. Though their explosives failed to detonate, Mr. Arafat issued a victorious communique, and subsequent attacks were more successful.

On Nov. 10, 1966, three Israeli military policemen were killed by a mine laid on the border near the West Bank town of Hebron. Jordan's King Hussein fired off a letter of condolence to Israel via the American embassy in Amman. But the American ambassador in Tel Aviv, receiving the letter just before the start of the Sabbath, decided it could wait over the weekend. And that weekend, Israel decided to retaliate -- not against Syria, the principal sponsor of Palestinian terrorism, but against the West Bank villagers who had presumably harbored the perpetrators.

The raid went disastrously wrong. Israeli troops ran into Jordanian soldiers in the town of Samu, with losses resulting on both sides. And instead of then appealing to King Hussein for protection, Palestinians rioted throughout the West Bank demanding his overthrow. The Arab Legion was eventually forced to open fire on them, killing at least four. The U.N. Security Council unanimously censured Israel for its actions, while the U.S. condemned Israel's supposedly reckless willingness to undermine the only Arab leader with whom it enjoyed some kind of relations.

Mr. Oren wonders what might have happened had King Hussein's letter reached Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol right away. Of course there is no certain answer, but it is easy to believe that things might have gone differently. The Samu raid, after all, was a key moment in the buildup of regional tension, occurring just as Arab leaders were seeking to outdo each other for leadership of the Palestinian cause.

In 1967, only Syria's radical Baathist regime actually seemed to be spoiling for war. But Jordan's King Hussein, who had watched his grandfather be killed by a Palestinian assassin, could not afford to appear weak on the question of Israel -- which then of course did not mean merely restoring earlier borders but challenging the existence of Israel itself.

Nor could Egypt's Gamel Abdel Nasser, who had ambitions to lead the Arab world, even though he had not long before wrecked both his army and economy by a disastrous misadventure in Yemen. Accused by King Hussein of hiding behind U.N. "skirts" in the Sinai, and misinformed by his Soviet sponsors of an Israeli buildup near the Syrian border, Nasser felt he had no choice but to respond to these provocations.

Meanwhile Israel, which sought security guarantees from the U.S. in order not to strike first, couldn't get them. The Johnson administration felt already overburdened by its military commitment in Vietnam.

Altogether a bad set of circumstances, leading to war. Mr. Oren brings a novelist's flair to recounting them and to the events of the war itself. His meticulous research cuts through the propagandized histories on all sides. Drawing on a wealth of newly available documentary evidence -- as well as interviews with surviving players -- he is unsparing toward all involved in this drama.

These include, lest we forget, the hapless U.N. Secretary General U Thant, who foolishly thought he had won "breathing space" in a late May meeting with Nasser. Of the very same meeting the just-evicted U.N. Sinai commander remarked: "I think we're going to have a major Middle East war and I think we will still be sorting it out 50 years from now."

Though in 1967 Israel hadn't yet become the avowed U.S. ally it is today, Mr. Oren reminds us, there was already extreme anti-Americanism in the region. "Millions of Arabs are . . . preparing to blow up all of America's interests, all of America's installations, and your entire existence, America," announced Cairo Radio shortly before the war. In retrospect, it's a wonder that Sept. 11 was so long in coming.

Mr. Pollock is an editorial writer for the Journal.