Six Days: How The 1967 War Shaped The Middle East, by Jeremy Bowen

So long as this book is talking about the action of the Six Days’ War (known as the June War by its Arab losers), the book is a solid one. Since The Six Days’ war was, as its name implies, rather short in duration, the author’s choice to examine this book in extreme detail, to the point where the fate of individual soldiers, officers, politicians, diplomats, and ordinary civilians can be traced throughout the narrative, is a reasonable one. I shudder to think how monumental a task would be to examine the American Civil War or World War II in such a fashion, where an hour-by-hour discussion of every aspect and every location within the war was discussed in detail, but it works for this particular conflict. What doesn’t work is that the author has a fundamentally mistaken view of the conflict in that he does not see it as decisive or reflecting a reasonably permanent state of affairs. Like many people, the author sees Israel as having occupied land fundamentally belonging to others in 1967 rather than, as in 1948, taking advantage of the hostility of its neighbors to demonstrate truths on the ground that reflect fundamental realities. Israel’s ownership of its 1967 conquests is legitimate, and it can do whatever it wants with those lands, including settling lands with those who are loyal and peaceful with regards to the regime and punishing criminals and rebels who are hostile to its legitimate rule. Had the author approached the end result of the war with a reasonable and accurate worldview, he would have less hand-wringing and folly at the end.

Overall, this book is between 350 and 400 pages in length and it is divided into 9 chapters. The author begins the book with maps and a short introduction to the subject matter. This is followed by a lengthy discussion of the prewar situation that set up the 1967 conflict, including the diplomatic crisis that was started by Egyptian efforts to blockade the Strait of Tiran that served as the chokepoint for trade in and out of Eliat, the only port of Israel on the Gulf of Aqaba, which takes about 90 pages or so. The next six chapters give an extremely detailed hour-by-hour account of the six days of the war, and it is interesting to note just how decisive the initial attacks by Israel were. By the third day of the war, Israel’s air force had so completely neutralized the air forces of its enemies that it was left free to strafe the ground forces of those enemy forces that sought to stand up against its reaching of natural and defensible borders like the Jordan River, the Suez Canal, and the area of the Golan Heights providing easy access, should it be necessary, to move towards Damascus. Indeed, the last three days of the war or so were conducted with a view towards speed in order to bringing as much land under Israeli control as possible before the inevitable cease-fire was declared. One of the aspects of that push which is neglected by the book, unfortunately, is the effort on the part of Israel to take as much of Mount Hermon as possible before the ceasefire. The last two chapters of the book, respectively, talk about the consequences (8) and legacy (9) of the war and largely feature the author in full appeasement mode, failing to consider the 1967 verdict of war, reaffirmed in the Yom Kippur War, as essentially permanent in nature, as it has proven to be over the last few decades. The book then closes with acknowledgements, notes, a bibliography, and an index.

It is interesting to note that the 1967 war was fought with massive contradictions. Egypt sought, by blockading the Gulf of Aqaba, to win a peaceful victory over Israel and ended up providing the causus belli for a war that shook his regime (as well as that of Jordan) to its core, and ended up leading to a massive loss of land in Judea and Samaria as well as Philistia. Jordan’s efforts to secure its own interests in joining with Egypt ended up leading to massive losses for its army as well as its prestige. The mad rush for Iraq and Kuwait to get some credibility in the war with their Arab neighbors ended up in their soldiers being strafed by Israeli planes and largely abandoned by their allies, who lacked the logistics to supply and feed their own troops, much less that of more distant nations. The total incompetence of Arab militaries, especially within their officer corps (and especially within Egypt’s forces), made Israel look so much more professional that it became complacent and vulnerable because of overconfidence, and made it harder to explain incidents like the high casualties suffered by Israeli paratroopers without artillery support in the initial reconquest of Eastern Jerusalem or the attack on the USS Liberty, a notorious spy ship, which made Israel look less than perfect in its own competence. Perhaps the most poignant moment in the book for this reader was the way that the liberation of the Western Wall, and its cleansing from Jordanian desecration, was such a unifying aspect of the war experience for Israelis, finally being able to pray at the temple mount after a long period of foreign domination of their capital.