The Six Days War revisited

Six Days: How the 1967 War Shaped the Middle East. Jeremy Bowen. Simon & Schuster. [pounds sterling]16.99. ix + 420 pages. ISBN 0-7432-3095-7.

The Israeli battle orders for the Six-Day War read as if they have come from the Book of Joshua, not from a grimy concrete block in Tel Aviv. 'Swoop on the enemy of Israel', they scream. 'Pursue him to ruination; draw his fangs; Scatter him in the wilderness'. And that, more or less, is what the Israel Defence Forces did. It seemed miraculous. Here was a tiny, ragged nation, pulled choking from the flames of Auschwitz, fighting yet again for its survival against terrible odds. Here was a true David pitted against the Goliath of the Arab world. That was how the poetical Israeli propaganda machine, and also the swaggering, boastful Arab states liked to see it. This, said the Arabs, will be the final war. The cancer of Zionism will finally be cut out of the Arab body. The Jews will be driven into the sea.

This was all nonsense, of course. Arab bluster was never going to be any match for the cool planning of Israel's military men. Arab presumption and internal discord made the Arabs themselves Israel's greatest secret weapon. But both sides believed the 'spin', and when Israel's fresh-faced paratroopers were photographed at the newly liberated Western Wall, the myth became eternal. The most cynical, secularist kibbutznik was religious for a day, and talked for a while about the redemption of the Land. The redemption seemed real. The great biblical sites were under Israeli control; Jerusalem was re-united. Although the Magen David (Star of David) did not yet flutter over everything between the Euphrates and the Nile, every state between the rivers had been vanquished by the rag-bag army of former slaves. The gains of the War could not be relinquished. If one were religious, to surrender them would be blasphemy. If one were not, it would be madness to surrender a buffer zone separating the thin sliver of Israel from hostile Arabs still pledged to Israel's destruction.

Not everyone was dewy-eyed. Moshe Dayan had only one eye, and that was never dewy. The Palestinians will fight, he said and he was right. Others noted some other disturbing demographic facts. Israel was conceived as a Jewish state. But overnight it had become lord of a colossal population of reluctant Arabs. If they were to be citizens of a democratic Israeli state then, eventually, Israel would cease to be Jewish. The womb of the Palestinian mother, Palestinian activists became fond of saying, was the weapon which will ultimately defeat Israel. The alternatives were to stop being a truly democratic state, and deny Arabs the rights possessed by Jews, or to refuse to assimilate them properly into the Israeli state. Israel adopted this latter course, and with it a host of other problems. It immediately created an immense, stateless people, who, together with the refugees in surrounding lands, could be compared uncomfortably well with the Jews themselves in the years before the birth of Israel.

So Israel became an occupier of territory which had to be policed. Policing does nasty things to individuals and nations, and Israel has not escaped. Israeli liberals talk about the spiritual damage done to their sons by knocking Palestinian teenagers about, and they are right. Israeli militarists talk about the damage done to the much-vaunted fighting spirit of the Israeli army by making the army an army of check-point minders rather than cross-border night-raiders. They are right too. It is easy to be too romantic about the ideals which brought Israel into being. The men who were the midwives of the Jewish state were hard-nosed realists. But Israel was always supposed to be more about universities and symphony orchestras than police dogs and baton charges.

The veteran BBC reporter, Jeremy Bowen, sees the 1967 War as the main factor determining the tensions of the modern Middle East. This is an over-simplification, but as a working premise it is better than most other simply-stated propositions. Start your analysis from this premise and you will get only the odd nuance wrong. He rightly identifies as crucial to the psychology of Middle-Eastern conflict the laughable perpetuation of the David and Goliath myth, and the damage to Arab pride inflicted by the War (and barely mitigated by the Yom Kippur War of 1973). But above all his is a splendidly woven story book. Story and scholarship are not incompatible. Indeed they are inseparable. Although he is an admirably dispassionate and meticulous historian, he is an even better story teller. Each hour and day of the War is an hour and a day in the life of a central player. The life of the War is his life, and vice versa. This gives humanity and accessibility to his account. It keeps him from the common heresy of anthropomorphism: of talking about the War as if it were some sort of sensate dialectical organism.

Mr Bowen will no doubt be pilloried from all sides: by those who believe in the incorruptibility of the IDF for telling the tale of prisoner executions, and by those who believe in the nobility of the Arab struggle by exposing the pomposity and plain stupidity of many of the Arab commanders. Both sides will be wrong. This is a piece of humane and honest writing which should be on the shelves of anyone with a serious interest in the conflict, and on the bedside table of anyone who wants a great, fast read.

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