1967

Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East.

By Tom Segev. Translated by Jessica Cohen.

Illustrated. 673 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. $35.

During the 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War last month, an Israeli friend invited me to hear Tom Segev, the Israeli commentator and historian, discuss his new book on the subject. Once, the occasion might have been a celebration. But no more. My friend, in fact, described it sardonically as a yahrzeit — that is, in Jewish tradition, the date marking the death of a loved one.

Four decades after their smashing military victory over Egypt, Jordan and Syria, Israelis generally concede that in many ways the war was a disaster. The continued occupation of the West Bank, and control over the Palestinians who live there, has sapped Israel financially, politically, militarily and morally. By now, how it all came to be is only barely understood, or even addressed; with crises in that part of the world occurring almost daily, history seems almost a luxury, and ancient history especially.

Ancient history? 1967? If you don’t think so, picture a time before suicide bombings and settlements; when American support for Israel was not a given; when a majority of the Knesset spoke — and thought — in Yiddish; when Israelis still had no television programs, and Jerusalemites assumed explosions must be earthquakes; when terms like intifada, Hamas and even Palestinian were either unfamiliar or not yet coined; when Israelis argued — with straight faces — that Jews everywhere were safer thanks to them. That’s beyond ancient; it’s prehistoric.

But as Segev writes in “1967,” his illuminating, if exhausting, book on Israel’s most fateful year, even at the time there were Israelis who foresaw what ultimately came to pass. True, conquering East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights helped fulfill the Zionist dream and gave the country more defensible borders. But as various Israeli officials warned, it would also radicalize the Palestinians, intensify Palestinian nationalism and force Israel to act with a brutality and intolerance that, as one put it, “we, as a people and as Jews, abhor.” Besides, King Hussein was doing a fine job neutering the Palestinians, either making them Jordanians or prodding them to emigrate.

It all happened in what Segev depicts as a two-act drama of irrationality between June 5 and 10, 1967. The first act came when, in the throes of a national depression and existential angst, Israel invaded Egypt, destroying its air force and seizing both Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula. The second came a few days later when, in the irrational exuberance of that victory, Israel turned to the north and east, to Jordan and Syria, extending its realm in both directions.

In the spring of 1967, Segev writes, Israel was a profoundly demoralized place. Its economy was tanking. Its European-born elite felt threatened by the influx of poor Jews from Arabic-speaking countries, who had ample troubles of their own. For the first time, more Jews may have been leaving the country than coming in. Among the young, materialism and Americanism were eroding the Zionist ideal. Terrorism — while almost quaint by today’s brutal standards — was increasing. And presiding over all this was Levi Eshkol, the prime minister with the bad fortune to follow David Ben-Gurion.

Tensions throughout the region rose in May 1967, after months of terrorist attacks were launched from Syria and Jordan. The Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who’d already fought one war with Israel, closed the Straits of Tiran, kicked United Nations peacekeepers out of the Sinai and massed his troops along the Israeli border. Cautious by nature and fearing American disapproval, Eshkol vacillated.

But his generals — notably Moshe Dayan, the former chief of staff who’d been forced down Eshkol’s throat as defense minister — urged a pre-emptive strike against Egypt, and the Israeli public, haunted by fears of a second Holocaust, backed them. Eshkol, Segev contends, was too impotent to resist. Next came Jordan. Israel had long had clandestine relations with King Hussein. But compelled to show public solidarity with Egypt, Hussein fired upon Jewish West Jerusalem. The Israelis struck back, marching into the Old City and then the entire West Bank.

One can debate whether Nasser was planning to attack Israel. Beyond debate, though, is the fact that there were a million Palestinians living in the territories, and Israel marched in with shocking casualness. That was apparent from the helter-skelter, improvisatory way in which crucial decisions had to be made — Would the land be annexed? What would be the legal status of residents? — and from some of the cockamamie schemes bruited about. (The army’s chief rabbi, Gen. Shlomo Goren, suggested blowing up the Dome of the Rock.)

Hopes that Palestinians would flee en masse, as they had in 1948 (the Israelis even had buses conveniently available to them in East Jerusalem), never materialized. Menachem Begin proposed dumping the Gazan refugees in Egypt. Other schemes had them going to Iraq (just what the Iraqis needed: another faction) or Latin America. More realistic was a plan to move 250,000 refugees from Gaza to the West Bank. But it never happened; the settlements soon popping up throughout the West Bank housed Jews instead.

However oxymoronic, the Israelis thought they could run an “enlightened occupation,” and there were signs, at least at first, that they did: when they opened a post office in Hebron, the mayor threw them a fruit and cucumber reception. But any occupation on those terms was doomed to fail, especially given the harshness with which Israel dealt with those not catching the spirit. Then, whether for economic or religious or nationalistic or military reasons, or because they had no one trustworthy to whom they could give back the land, the Israelis settled in.

Segev’s look into the origins of the occupation is invaluable. His research is prodigious, his intelligence obvious, his ability to reconstruct complex chains of events impressive. He writes clearly and confidently and has an eye for the telling, and often witty, detail. But he is the victim of his own eminence — his previous books, on the British Mandate and on the impact of the Holocaust on the Jews of Palestine, among others, have been justly praised — and, surprisingly, of his own parochialism.

The book is way too long, a temptation to which respected writers can sometimes succumb. A timid American editor hasn’t helped. Non-Israelis, even those who read Haaretz daily online, will find “1967” slow going. Indeed, if ever a book reflected the widening chasm between Israel and the Diaspora, it is this one. At times — describing day-to-day life in Israel or the political machinations there — it is far too detailed; do we really need to know that Israelis forsook fresh for frozen meat during the recession of 1967? Similarly, repeated quotations from the war diary of a soldier named Yehoshua Bar-Dayan — and how much he misses his wife, Gila, and young son, Yariv — undoubtedly resonate with Israelis, but will surely be exceedingly tiresome to most everyone else.

At other times, there’s not enough context — as if, as one Israeli writing for others, Segev feels he can cut corners. With only a few exceptions — usually old-world types like Eshkol and Mayor Teddy Kollek of Jerusalem, but Dayan, too — Segev seems uninterested in his characters, and never dwells very long or lovingly on them. Good luck keeping political parties like Maarah, Mapai and Mafdal straight, or differentiating among all those generals, who after a while become a blur of Zvi’s and Uzi’s and Uri’s.

By the time he gets to the Israeli occupation, which is what really matters now, even the indefatigable Segev has run out of gas. Crucial questions, like how the Six-Day War emboldened the messianic religious right and Ariel Sharon to build settlements, are all but overlooked. Nor is there anything about the electrifying effect the war had on Jews throughout the world, particularly in the Soviet Union and the United States. And there’s no kind of summation or distillation at the end, describing the Israeli character then and now — something that persevering readers deserve and that Segev, more than just about anyone else, is eminently qualified to give.

So we are left with the dilemma of the occupation, and whether Israel can ever extricate itself from it. It all reminds one of the story of the early Zionist leader who, in the middle of an endless speech, was quietly told he had to wrap things up. “I know,” he replied. “But how?”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company