The Six-Day War: A Retrospective. - book reviews

Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ), Fall, 1997 by Richard H. Curtiss

"History has a hard time being made correctly. Time does not help." Former CIA director Richard Helms, The Six-Day War, p. 258.

This book grew out of a conference held in 1992 at the U.S. State Department's Foreign Service Institute (FSI). Funding for the conference came from both U.S. governmental (the United States Institute for Peace and FSI) and non-governmental sources. The latter included both the pro-Israel Samuel Bronfman Foundation and such advocates of a balanced U.S. Middle East policy as Dr. Timothy Childs and the late Merle Thorpe. Much of the editorial support, including transcription of all proceedings of the three-day conference, was provided by the Middle East Institute (MEI) of Washington DC, a determinedly neutral private foundation.

Former U.S. Ambassador (to Lebanon and Morocco) Richard Parker, author of a number of Middle East-oriented books and a former editor of the MEI's quarterly Middle East Journal, organized the conference and then edited the book, writing two of its nine sections himself, and co-authoring the book's introduction with Dr. Carl Brown of Princeton University.

The book's preface promises that "readers will find much that is new here." This is not strictly true for the reason expressed during the conference by former CIA director and U.S. Ambassador to Iran Richard Helms and quoted above.

This reviewer observed the June 1967 war from Damascus (three days), Beirut (two days) and Rome (one day) and wrote two chapters on the subject in a 1982 book of his own. He found no major new facts to alter his understanding of how events unfolded in those chaotic six days and in the crucial seven months leading to them.

On the other hand, the book not only contains a wealth of previously unpublished anecdotal detail, but also significant testimony and evidence bearing on still controversial aspects of the June war, such as a possible motivation for the attack by Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats on the USS Liberty in which 34 U.S. Naval and National Security Agency personnel were killed and 171 wounded. (The motivation suggested was to conceal from the United States Israeli preparations to seize Syria's Golan Heights on the fifth day of the war after Syria had accepted a U.N. cease-fire proposal.) It might therefore have been more accurate to say that potential readers, the vast majority of whom probably were not old enough to pay attention to those events as they unfolded, can learn much from this book. And those already familiar with the story will find many new opinions to buttress their own conclusions - whatever they are.

The reason is that Ambassador Parker made a good faith and largely successful effort to bring together on the conference's six panels participants from the highest levels of diplomacy representing the international civil servants of the United Nations (Sir Brian Uruquart and F.T. Liu), the United States (Lucius Battle, Donald Bergus, McGeorge Bundy, Eugene Rostow and Parker himself), the former Soviet Union (academic Dr. Vitaly Naumkin), Egypt (diplomats Tahsin Basheer and Salah Bassiouny), Israel (Meir Amit, Ephraim Evron, Shimon Shamir), Jordan (Samir Mutawi) and Syria (Dr. George Tomeh). U.S. academics on the panels were Drs. Brown of Princeton University; Karen Dawisha, University of Maryland; C. Ernest Dawn, University of Illinois; and Bernard Reich, George Washington University. The other panelists were British-American journalist Andrew Cockburn and Dr. Janice Stein of the University of Toronto.

Another 50 persons from different fields were invited as observers and some of them, notably former U.S. ambassadors Alfred Atherton, Dennis Kux, Samuel Lewis and Talcott Seelye, former Soviet ambassadors Georgiy Kornienko and Victor Israelyan, and former Israeli ambassador Gideon Rafael, made valuable contributions to the sessions.

The discussions themselves followed largely predictable lines. For the Jordanian participant, and his Arab brethren, the opening shots of the June War were fired in the massive Israeli raid of 13 November 1966 on the West Bank village of al-Samu in which 18 Palestinian villagers and Jordanian soldiers were killed and 134 wounded.

For their part, the Israeli panelists agreed that the raid was in retaliation for repeated al-Fatah incursions, mounted in Syria, into Israel. However, the same Israelis were unable to answer the question posed by various participants as to why, if the culprit was Syria, the raid was directed against Jordanian citizens in Jordanian-occupied territory.

For Jordanian panelist Mutawi, however, the answer was self-evident: "The view that Israel was anxious to capture the West Bank and was only waiting for the opportune moment was central in Jordanian calculations all the time," the Jerusalem-born writer said. "King Hussein confirmed this to me, saying, 'Always in our minds, and in my mind in particular, was the fact that the West Bank was the most important target as far as Israel was concerned.' If the Israelis were to implement their plans to settle comfortably and extend beyond the area of Palestine, then obviously the first objective would be Palestine itself."