This page will be continuously updated with all the latest news items appearing in the media in the run-up to the Six-Day War anniversary.
ANALYSIS
Still Stuck Between May and June of 1967, Yossi Klein Halevi, New York Times, 7 June, 2017
The abrupt transition from trauma to triumph has shaped Israel’s political choices for the past 50 years.
Israel’s defeat in 1967 would have been a disaster for the region and the world.
Israel’s 1967 Victory Is Something to Be Celebrated, Michael Oren, New York Times, 4 June, 2017
The conflict is not about territory captured in the Six-Day War, but about whether Palestinians accept the existence of a Jewish state.
The Lessons and Consequences of the Six-Day War, David Harris, The Algemeiner, 2 June, 2017
Without an understanding of what happened in the past, it’s impossible to grasp where we are today; and where we are has profound relevance for the region and the world.
Few wars in history have proved as contentious as the Six-Day War. And never have the disputes surrounding the Six-Day War been bitterer than now, on its 50th anniversary.
An Inevitable Conflict, Ephraim Karsh, Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2017
May 13, 2017: Fifty years ago today, a false Soviet warning of large-scale Israeli troop concentrations along the border with Syria touched off a chain of events leading to the 1967 Six-Day War. However, as Middle East Quarterly editor Efraim Karsh explains, another all-out Arab-Israeli war was already “a foregone conclusion.”
When International Guarantees Utterly Failed, David Makovsky, Jerusalem Post, 04 May, 2017
As we approach next month’s 50th anniversary of the 1967 war, we should not forget one of the enduring lessons learned from the run-up to the conflict. Namely, that agreements need to stand on their own merits and cannot be based on abstract international guarantees about the future.
‘Like Dreamers’ author on the Six Day War’s true impact, Jerusalem Post, 02 May, 2017
The Wisdom of Resolution 242, Toby Greene, Fathom Journal, Spring 2017
The logic of UN Resolution 242 – that this is a conflict of two sides with rights and responsibilities, and that Israel’s withdrawal requirements have to be tied to reinforcing Israel’s legitimacy and security – remains sound, claims Fathom Associate Editor Toby Greene. International actors should use this moment to reaffirm the principles set down in November 1967. The pursuit of approaches that seek to avoid that logic, only push a resolution further away.
Remembering the Six-Day War, Michael Walzer, Fathom Journal, Spring 2017
One of America’s foremost political thinkers, Michael Walzer wrote his seminal book Just and Unjust Wars in 1977. The book was born a decade earlier when, as an anti-Vietnam war activist, Walzer found himself defending Israel’s pre-emptive strike against Egypt. ‘I had to explain the politics of distinction’ he recalls, and make clear that ‘wars are just and unjust’.
Yossi Klein Halevi is the author of the acclaimed book Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation. In this in-depth interview with Fathom Deputy Editor Calev Ben-Dor, Halevi argues that the Six-Day War in 1967 signalled the beginning of the end of one utopian movement, the Kibbutz, and the beginning of another, focused on settlements. Ranging over the transformations Israeli society has undergone in the last 50 years, Halevi claims that it is an increasingly post-utopian society and that at its heart is an ‘Israeli Centre’ that is unpersuaded by either the vision of the ‘Greater Land of Israel’ nor of ‘Peace Now’.
Nasser’s Antisemitic War Against Israel, Matthias Kuntzel, Fathom Journal, Spring 2017
Matthias Kuntzel is the author of the award-winning book Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11. In this essay in intellectual history he argues that the main cause of both Nasser’s decision to threaten to destroy Israel in 1967, and the subsequent enthusiasm of his followers, was an ‘antisemitic impulse as it was carried over from the Nazi period to the post-war period and then to the next generation.’ It was not Israel or Zionism that provoked the 1967 war but ‘the latent anti-Zionism and antisemitism in the Arab world’ and the fact that ‘Nasser was gripped by the same destructive sentiments that he whipped up in the masses.’
The Global Left and the Six-Day War, Jeffrey Herf, Fathom Journal, Spring 2017
Jeffrey Herf is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of History at the University of Maryland, College Park, US. He published Undeclared Wars with Israel: East Germany and the West German Far Left, 1967-1989 (Cambridge University Press) in 2016. In this 1967 special issue, he examines the responses to Israel’s victory in 1967 from the West German Left and the Communist regime in East Germany. Both displayed ‘a kind of obliviousness to the similarities between older antisemitic stereotypes of evil and powerful Jews and the attacks on Zionism and Israel as inherently aggressive, racist and even exterminatory’.
The War Nobody Wanted, Michael Bar-Zohar, inFocus Quarterly, Jewish Policy Center, Spring 2017
The Six Day War was the product of misconception, misunderstanding, mismanagement and mistakes by almost all the parties involved. The first major misstep was the Soviet warning to Egypt in early May 1967 that Israel had massed several brigades on its northern border and was prepared to attack Syria. The information was false, and the assumption of the Soviet leaders that they could win points with their Arab clients without unleashing the highly explosive emotions in the Middle East proved their total misunderstanding of the Arabs.
“Close Settlement on the Land”, Eugene Rostow, inFocus Quarterly, Jewish Policy Center, Spring 2017
Understanding the role of the United Nations in the restoration of Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East in 1948 is essential to understanding the legality of Israel’s post-1967 control of the land it acquired in a war of self-defense. The following is excerpted from “Palestinian Self-Determination: Possible Futures for the Unallocated Parts of the British Mandate,” a 1980 work by the late Professor Eugene V. Rostow, published in the Yale International Law Journal. Make the mental switch between Soviet Union/Russia and PLO/Palestinian Authority and it remains remarkably contemporary.
HISTORY
Fifty years after the Six-Day War, the IDF Archive releases pictures taken during and after the battles, as well as segments from the Central Command chief’s journal and aerial shots of the battle zones before the war.
6 things you didn’t know about the Six Day War, Times of Israel, 6 June, 2017
50 years later, small anomalies that, if not forgotten, have faded into the recesses of memory.
Arab leaders did plan to eliminate Israel in Six-Day War, Ben-Dror Yemini, YNet, 29 May, 2017
During the 1967 war, Israel seized Egyptian and Jordanian operational documents with clear orders to annihilate the civil population. Nevertheless, different academics are distorting the facts in a bid to turn the Arabs into victims and Israel into an aggressor. Here’s the real story.
The International Media and the Six-Day-War, Meron Medzini, Fathom Journal, Spring 2017
Professor Meron Medzini served as the Director of Israel’s Government Press Office (GPO) in Jerusalem during the Six-Day War. In this fascinating memoir, he recalls the atmosphere of the time and the GPO strategy for briefing foreign journalists.
The Secret Transcripts of the Six-Day War, Part I, Tablet, 17 May 2017
Newly unsealed classified documents reveal: Jerusalem conquered almost by accident; Israel’s National Religious Party, forerunner to the settler movement, lobbied for military de-escalation at every turn; and nobody in Israel’s security cabinet seems to have seen the country’s most momentous war coming.
Six-Day War: The Israeli Navy’s commandos ‘suicide missions’, YNet, 15 April 2017
The commandos of Shayetet 13, the Israeli Navy’s special operations unit, were sent deep into enemy territory 50 years ago during the Six-Day War—without maps, intel or sufficient time to safely return; the missions failed, and some were taken into captivity; half a century after the failed operation, the commandos recount the brazen and mishandled missions.
The story of the Laskov squad in the Six Day War, YNet, 12 April 2017
During the Six Day War, the fighting on the Jordanian fortifications, along the border line between residential buildings inside the city, was imposed by the IDF on a small team of engineers and soldiers who later became responsible for the development of weapons; 50 years later, Laskov’s deputy reveals some of the squad’s secrets.
How the Six-Day War became the Soviet-Israeli War, Gideon Remez, History News Network, 9 April 2017
Egypt’s 1973 offensive was the culmination of a systematic joint effort with the USSR to elaborate strategy and implement preparations on the ground. This Soviet-Egyptian drive for revanche began within hours of the loss of Sinai to Israel in June 1967.
Written in the dry language of government, this short, official document contains several revelations, including the double-dealing of King Hussein of Jordan.
Causes and consequences of the Six-Day War (1967), BICOM Briefing, March 2017
To mark the 50th anniversary of the Six-Day War in June this year, BICOM’s research team has produced a briefing analyzing the causes and consequences of the conflict. The first part of the paper examines the origins of the Six-Day War by assessing the build up to hostilities between Israel and Egypt, Jordan and Syria. The second part analyses the impact of the war on Israeli society, Palestinian nationalism and Pan-Arabism.
Reflections on the Six Day War, Herbert London, inFocus Quarterly, Jewish Policy Center, Spring 2017
I was listening to a radio broadcast in my dormitory room at the Australian National University in Canberra. The on-air analyst said Arab troops were mobilizing for a full-scale attack. Approximately 465,000 troops, more than 2800 tanks, and 800 aircraft ringed Israel. This was half a century ago, on June 3, 1967 – two days before the war finally broke out, but it seems like yesterday to me. It was the beginning of the Six Day War. At the outset, it appeared as if the very existence of Israel was imperiled.
NEWS ITEMS
Was the Six Day War fought in part over Israel’s nuclear program?, Jerusalem Post, 6 June, 2017
IDF’s Six-Day War ending proclamation: ‘We have crushed the enemy’, YNet, 4 June, 2017
Half a decade after the Six-Day War, the military spokesperson publishes a photocopy of the original order at the end of the war by the then-chief of staff and former prime minister, the late Yitzhak Rabin.
As the Six-Day War’s 50th anniversary nears, declassified documents outlining the post-war debate in Israel reflect that very little about the discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has changed.
New Six Day War artifacts hint at a battle on the Temple Mount, Times of Israel, 24 May, 2017
Bullets, shell casings discovered in rubble and examined by the Temple Mount Sifting Project raise questions about fight for Judaism’s holiest site during the 1967 war
REVEALED AFTER 50 YEARS: What Elie Wiesel Wrote About The Six Day War, The Forward, 01 May, 2017
Excerpts of a column by a former Forverts staff writer, the late Elie Wiesel, published Monday, June 12, 1967 — a heady time following Israel’s shocking Six Day War victory.
Confessions Of A Once-Distant Zionist, Gary Rosenblatt, New York Jewish Week, 01 May, 2017
The 1967 Israeli-Arab war broke out on the eve of finals week, in early June, when I was a student at Yeshiva University. I admit that one of my first responses to the dramatic radio bulletins I listened to in my dorm room was a fleeting prayer — that exams be canceled.
Picture of paratroopers Zion Karasenti, Haim Oshri, and Itzik Yifat has become defining image of Israel regaining Western Wall; they’re still friends and they still argue.
How The Forverts Covered The Six Day War, Naomi Zeveloff, The Forward, 27 April, 2017
Fifty years ago, the Six Day War was front page news on the Yiddish Forverts, which kept its readers abreast of developments mainly by reprinting wire service reports from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, declaring Israel’s “huge victories” as the war progressed. With limited resources on the ground in Israel, the newspaper relied on its correspondent, Leib Rochman, to produce feature stories to augment the breaking news.
In 1967, Hadassah Hospital in Ein Kerem, Israel found itself at the front line of the Six-Day War, treating swells of wounded soldiers and civilians. The July 1967 edition of Hadassah Magazine included a harrowing account, excerpted here, of the first 60 “desperate and magnificent” hours at the burdened medical center.
Michael Oren: Palestinians were Six Day War’s ‘biggest winners’, Times of Israel, 15 April 2017
Marking 50 years since ’67 conflict, deputy minister says it shaped Palestinian identity ‘as we know it’; Israel working on ‘diplomatic solution.’
