The Six-Day War: A Retrospective.

"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On the other hand, the book not only contains a wealth of previously unpublished anecdotal detail, but also significant testimony and evidence bearing on still controversial aspects of the June war, such as a possible motivation for the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."

The Israeli panelists preferred to date the start of the June war to a 7 April incident that began with the Syrian shelling of an Israeli tractor below the Golan heights, and ended in a massive air battle in which six Syrian planes were shot down between the outskirts of Damascus and northern Jordan. While the Israeli participants in the seminar charged the Syrians with initiating the incident, and the Arab participants responded that it began, as did many previous incidents, with the incursion of an Israeli armored tractor into a demilitarized zone between Israeli and Syrian forces, an authoritative Israeli voice from the grave has come down on the side of the Syrians.

Since the conference was held and the book published, an Israeli journalist has released notes from an interview with the late Gen. Moshe Dayan, who was appointed Minister of Defense after the April incident but before the 5 June Israeli "preemptive" attack that launched the war. Dayan confirmed the estimate of U.N. truce observers at the time that "9 out of 10" of the incidents of Syrian shelling along the Israeli-Syrian border were prompted by incursions into the demilitarized zones of Israeli tractors that every year plowed deeper into the "no man's land" between the armies in an attempt to establish a kind of Israeli squatters' rights on land whose ownership had remained contested since the 1949 armistice agreement.

The Russian participant and observers sharply challenged the assumption of other participants that the next major steps were strong (and seemingly false) warnings by Soviet officials to both Syria and Egypt that Israeli armored forces were massing on the Syrian border. Other participants differed not over whether the warnings had been delivered, but whether the Syrians actually believed them or only went along with the alarm in hopes of involving Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in a direct confrontation with Israel.

Not sufficiently explored in the discussion, in the reviewer's opinion, was whether the Israeli armed forces themselves were involved in deceiving, by electronic means, the Russians, Syrians and Egyptians, or whether the Russians for reasons of their own made up the "warnings." Much discussion then centered on responsibility for the chain of events that led Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser to order U.N. forces to leave their observation posts along the Egyptian-Israeli border in Sinai; U.N. Secretary General U Thant's decision to withdraw U.N. observers from Sharm al-Sheikh as well; and Nasser's order to his forces to occupy the abandoned U.N. positions and close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, an action that Israel considered a casus belli. Little new ground was covered here, and the mysteries of whether these were intentional and, therefore, inevitable steps toward war, or unplanned and largely spontaneous moves, remain unsolved.

Of special interest to American panelists and observers, who were sharply divided in their comments, were the events that took place in Washington after Nasser closed the Strait of Tiran. President Johnson had made it clear from the outset of his administration that he was the best friend Israel had ever had in the White House. The Israelis therefore made searching inquiries through visits to Washington by Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban and panelist Meir Amit, who in 1967 was Mossad chief in Israel, and through many discussions with Johnson and others by Efraim Evron, then listed as Israeli embassy minister counselor but considered to be an extraordinarily influential Israeli intelligence director in Washington. The Israelis wanted to know the likely effect of an Israeli "preemptive" attack on their U.S. political, military and economic support.

These conversations led most Israelis to conclude that an Israeli attack would have little long-range effect on U.S. support. Israeli officials nevertheless were divided as to whether they should first test Egyptian resolve with an attempt to sail an Israeli ship through the Straits, and then attack the moment Egyptian batteries opened fire, or whether they should simply make a false report of an Egyptian attack and then launch a devastating surprise attack of their own.

Newly appointed Defense Minister Moshe Dayan ended the debate by launching the carefully coordinated and long-planned attack only days after he took office. At the bureaucratic level, Israeli officials nevertheless made a false report to the U.N. and the world media that the Egyptians had fired the first shots, but made no serious attempt to maintain this pretext after Israeli surprise attacks wiped out both the Egyptian and Syrian air forces on the first day of the war.

While the Israelis were making their final preparations, however, there was great activity in Washington. The first task was to verify that the Eisenhower administration had made a commitment in 1957 (in return for Israeli withdrawal from Sinai) to keep the Strait of Tiran open, as the Israelis correctly claimed. The second task was to organize an international flotilla of naval vessels to escort Israeli vessels through the Strait of Tiran and thereby lift the Egyptian blockade in response to the U.S. commitment to Israel.

Also planned to negotiate an end to the crisis was a visit to Cairo by Vice President Hubert Humphrey. This plan subsequently was replaced by a 7 June visit to Washington by Egyptian vice president Zakariya Muhieddin, which was preempted by the 5 June Israeli attack.

In discussing this controversial period, some of the American panelists and observers clearly were rewriting history. Partisans of Israel, instead of deploring the precipitous Israeli attack that halted President Johnson's efforts to avoid a shooting war, implied strongly that the international flotilla idea already had broken down. They also failed to address the likelihood that Israeli officials attacked when they did because they feared that a peaceful settlement would be worked out during the Muhieddin visit. Readers can make their own judgments as to why the Israelis would not wait for 48 more hours to let Muhieddin's negotiations run their course in Washington.

Led by William Quandt, who carefully researched what was occurring in the White House throughout the period, panelists raised two very interesting questions and, for careful readers, suggested answers to both of them. The first question was why did President Johnson suddenly seem to give up efforts to keep the Israelis from attacking, and who convinced him to do so? The answer suggested by telephone logs and visitors' registers both from the White House and his Texas ranch is that the advice that the Israelis were going to preempt, and that the U.S. could and should do nothing to stop it, very likely was offered to him by Mathilde Krim, a professor at Israel's Weizmann Institute who, with her husband, a prominent financier of Israeli causes, was a frequent visitor to the LBJ ranch, who spent part of the May Memorial day weekend before the attack there with Johnson, and who also accompanied him at a Democratic Party rally in New York just before the Israeli attack.

At that time both Mrs. Krim and Supreme Court justice Abe Fortas, Johnson's long-time lawyer, were widely believed to be private conduits between Israeli officials and Johnson. Telephone logs showed that in the final days before the war Johnson spoke almost as often with Mrs. Krim as with National security adviser Walt Rostow, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Defense Secretary Robert McNamera, all of whom were dealing with many other problems at the time, including the Vietnam war.

Confirmation in the panel sessions that Johnson almost certainly knew that the Israelis were about to attack prompted a bitter comment by Egyptian panelist Bassiouny. He pointed out that despite Johnson's knowledge of Israeli intentions, American emissaries continued to enjoin Nasser not to attack first, a clear case of duplicity by American "honest brokers".

The other question raised and seemingly answered by panelists was where and when the policy originated that the U.S. would not pressure Israel to withdraw from Arab lands it occupied in 1967, except in the context of a final peace settlement. The answer supplied by some of the participants was that the policy first was enunciated on the second day of the war in a hand-written note from Abba Eban to Johnson. Apparently, Johnson never discussed the policy with White House aides but simply adopted it without debate.

This U.S. policy change seems to have exempted the Israeli government from any serious U.S. pressure over the subsequent 30 years to withdraw from East Jerusalem, the West Bank or Gaza - in complete contravention of the U.N. Charter, which bans the acquisition of territory by war. It also underlies Israeli unwillingness to enter into meaningful land-for-peace negotiations based upon U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, which calls upon Israel to "withdraw from lands seized in the recent (1967) conflict" in return for Arab acknowledgment of Israel's "right to exist within secure and recognized borders."

The pernicious effect of this Johnson decision to allow Israel to remain in violation of the Charter is best described in an excerpt quoted by Parker from As I Saw It, Dean Rusk's memoirs: "Following the Six-Day War, Israel decided to keep the Golan Heights, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Sinai, despite the fact that Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol on the first day of the war went on Israeli radio and said that Israel had no territorial ambitions. Later in the summer I reminded Abba Eban of this, and he simply shrugged his shoulders and said, 'We've changed our minds.'"

The book is neither the shortest nor the simplest recitation available of the known facts concerning the outbreak of the Six-Day war of June, 1967. But it will prove fascinating and useful to scholars and specialists, not only for the many new opinions entered into the historical record for the first time, but also for its illustration of how differently "men of affairs" who actually participate in making events happen, and scholars and historians who assess them, may interpret the same sets of facts.

Panelist Carl Brown entered into the record of the conference a quotation from Nineteenth Century French traveler and political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville that deftly summarizes both the weaknesses of the individual presentations and the strength of their totality in this elaborate and unique contribution to the historical record:

"I have come across men of letters who have written history without taking a part in public affairs, and politicians who have concerned themselves with producing events without thinking about them. I have observed that the first are always inclined to find general causes, whereas the second, living in the midst of disconnected daily facts, are prone to imagine that everything is attributable to particular incidents, and that the wires they pull are the same as those that move the world. It is to be presumed that both are equally deceived."

Richard H. Curtiss is Editor of The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.