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Apr. 1st, 2009 12:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterbadger14/50: Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East
Wow. There's so much I could say about this book. It's actually been a couple of weeks since I finished listening to the (unabridged, yay!) audiobook and returned it to the libray, and I'm debating whether I need to go buy a printed copy for my shelf.
First of all, it's a reminder (as the book on Saudi was) how complicated the Middle East is and how much one can end up forgetting of things that actually happened in your lifetime. Though I give myself some leeway, since I was only three when the war took place. :-)
And of course there is always debate about what actually took place (a shocker to people who don't study history, I find "What? How can you not agree *what happened*? I can see arguing about why it happened or what it means, but no one disagrees about what actually took place, right?" Uh, wrong.) An example from this work being the Big Lie propagated by Nasser (and supported by other Arab leaders) that the reason Israel defeated the combat power of (essentially) all the Arab nations in less than a week was that the US and the UK actively participated by sending aircraft and ships to fight against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. People in the Arab world still believe this, despite the fact that it is untrue, that there was never any evidence for it being true, and recorded conversations between Nasser and others discussing it *as* a lie and how they would use it have been published.
Another example, on the other side, is the myth, often brought up by Israel and its supporters in the United States that at least until 1982, Israel never attacked anyone else, only fought to defend itself. While one could argue about the origins of the fighting in 1948 (what I've seen in some places aptly described at the First Palestinian Civil War), in 1967, Israel clearly attacked Egypt, launching a pre-emptive attack in order to gain surprise and tactical advantage. Yes, Egypt was clearly preparing for war, and there had been plenty of provocation on both sides, and one could make a case for casus belli in an old-fashioned great-powers sense, but Israel was the first party to start full-scale military hostilities.
Of course, debate about history being what it is, most of my comments here relate to the events as Oren recounts them. Others differ from him as to some of them, and to get a full picture of the war, one should probably read a larger swathe of histories. This one appears pretty comprehensive, though.
Another thing I find fascinating about both reading (hearing?) this book and others and watching world leader in my lifetime is how physically destructive the emotional and psychological stress of being involved in crucial decisionmaking can be. Nasser was almost crushed by the stress of the war, as Yitzhak Rabin, who was IDF chief of staff during the crisis that led up to the war and the war itself. He suffered a nervous breakdown during the planning of the campaign and was incapacitated for several days.
Oren's picture of the US here shows a nation very, very reluctantly drawn close to but not into a conflict it really wished to avoid. Given how spinelessly supine US administrations appear on the outside to have been to Israel's demands in recent years, it's quite unusual to see how fiercely Johnson resisted being entangled Israel and pulled into actively and openly supporting it, no matter how sympathetic he and his advisers were to Israel privately.
I'm also reinforced in my sympathy for King Hussein of Jordan, a man in an impossible position. To me, it seems as if he realised that fighting Israel was not only a bad idea but the wrong thing to do, and had his hand forced by popular sentiment and Egyptian and Syrian foolishness.
I can only imagine that Egypt and Syria either totally drank their own Kool-Aid in thinking that they could defeat Israel, or that they truly believed that the USSR would back them up and that the US would back down from supporting Israel in the face of direct Soviet involvement. Either way, it points up the danger of becoming a victim of your own propaganda.
And the USSR... it seems clear from Oren's account that the Soviets were the biggest drinkers on that account. Right at the front of causes of the war were intelligence reports that the Soviets provided to Syria and Egypt, "showing" that Israel was building up for an attack on them, well before any Israeli buildup took place. The Soviets lied to the Arabs to provoke them into creating a confrontation. Why? Did they really think the Arabs could force concessions from Israel? At no time was that even remotely likely, despite all the debates in Israel on how to react tot the crisis. Did Russia think the Arabs would really be able to steamroller Israel? That strikes me a possibility, although a bit remote. Clearly Israel had lost the support of France it had had in 1956, and the US and the UK were edging away from being its full-throated supporters. Truly thinking that the time for the Arabs to wipe out Israel is the only explanation I can see for their provocative role in touching off these events.
As a study of how complex and multi-dimensional a crisis can be (Egypt and Syria were verbally attacking Jordan as an ally of the West and a class-war enemy even up to the point that they started begging for its aid), for its detailed study of how the principal and supporting actors managed or attempted to manage events to achieve the best outcome for their faction, for the intense descriptions of the fighting itself, for the fascinating insights to the players and the war, I can *strongly* recommend this history of the Six-Day War. In so many ways, as the title suggests, the events of this conflict, as much as the machinations of the great powers at the ends of the world wars, created the complex geopolitical crises that we see today in the Middle East.
Wow. There's so much I could say about this book. It's actually been a couple of weeks since I finished listening to the (unabridged, yay!) audiobook and returned it to the libray, and I'm debating whether I need to go buy a printed copy for my shelf.
First of all, it's a reminder (as the book on Saudi was) how complicated the Middle East is and how much one can end up forgetting of things that actually happened in your lifetime. Though I give myself some leeway, since I was only three when the war took place. :-)
And of course there is always debate about what actually took place (a shocker to people who don't study history, I find "What? How can you not agree *what happened*? I can see arguing about why it happened or what it means, but no one disagrees about what actually took place, right?" Uh, wrong.) An example from this work being the Big Lie propagated by Nasser (and supported by other Arab leaders) that the reason Israel defeated the combat power of (essentially) all the Arab nations in less than a week was that the US and the UK actively participated by sending aircraft and ships to fight against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. People in the Arab world still believe this, despite the fact that it is untrue, that there was never any evidence for it being true, and recorded conversations between Nasser and others discussing it *as* a lie and how they would use it have been published.
Another example, on the other side, is the myth, often brought up by Israel and its supporters in the United States that at least until 1982, Israel never attacked anyone else, only fought to defend itself. While one could argue about the origins of the fighting in 1948 (what I've seen in some places aptly described at the First Palestinian Civil War), in 1967, Israel clearly attacked Egypt, launching a pre-emptive attack in order to gain surprise and tactical advantage. Yes, Egypt was clearly preparing for war, and there had been plenty of provocation on both sides, and one could make a case for casus belli in an old-fashioned great-powers sense, but Israel was the first party to start full-scale military hostilities.
Of course, debate about history being what it is, most of my comments here relate to the events as Oren recounts them. Others differ from him as to some of them, and to get a full picture of the war, one should probably read a larger swathe of histories. This one appears pretty comprehensive, though.
Another thing I find fascinating about both reading (hearing?) this book and others and watching world leader in my lifetime is how physically destructive the emotional and psychological stress of being involved in crucial decisionmaking can be. Nasser was almost crushed by the stress of the war, as Yitzhak Rabin, who was IDF chief of staff during the crisis that led up to the war and the war itself. He suffered a nervous breakdown during the planning of the campaign and was incapacitated for several days.
Oren's picture of the US here shows a nation very, very reluctantly drawn close to but not into a conflict it really wished to avoid. Given how spinelessly supine US administrations appear on the outside to have been to Israel's demands in recent years, it's quite unusual to see how fiercely Johnson resisted being entangled Israel and pulled into actively and openly supporting it, no matter how sympathetic he and his advisers were to Israel privately.
I'm also reinforced in my sympathy for King Hussein of Jordan, a man in an impossible position. To me, it seems as if he realised that fighting Israel was not only a bad idea but the wrong thing to do, and had his hand forced by popular sentiment and Egyptian and Syrian foolishness.
I can only imagine that Egypt and Syria either totally drank their own Kool-Aid in thinking that they could defeat Israel, or that they truly believed that the USSR would back them up and that the US would back down from supporting Israel in the face of direct Soviet involvement. Either way, it points up the danger of becoming a victim of your own propaganda.
And the USSR... it seems clear from Oren's account that the Soviets were the biggest drinkers on that account. Right at the front of causes of the war were intelligence reports that the Soviets provided to Syria and Egypt, "showing" that Israel was building up for an attack on them, well before any Israeli buildup took place. The Soviets lied to the Arabs to provoke them into creating a confrontation. Why? Did they really think the Arabs could force concessions from Israel? At no time was that even remotely likely, despite all the debates in Israel on how to react tot the crisis. Did Russia think the Arabs would really be able to steamroller Israel? That strikes me a possibility, although a bit remote. Clearly Israel had lost the support of France it had had in 1956, and the US and the UK were edging away from being its full-throated supporters. Truly thinking that the time for the Arabs to wipe out Israel is the only explanation I can see for their provocative role in touching off these events.
As a study of how complex and multi-dimensional a crisis can be (Egypt and Syria were verbally attacking Jordan as an ally of the West and a class-war enemy even up to the point that they started begging for its aid), for its detailed study of how the principal and supporting actors managed or attempted to manage events to achieve the best outcome for their faction, for the intense descriptions of the fighting itself, for the fascinating insights to the players and the war, I can *strongly* recommend this history of the Six-Day War. In so many ways, as the title suggests, the events of this conflict, as much as the machinations of the great powers at the ends of the world wars, created the complex geopolitical crises that we see today in the Middle East.
