Jewish Literary Review

Posted on May 28, 2007 by Steve Pollak

As anniversary approaches, Six Day War being fought again

I start this week’s roundup with a link to an essay on the ‘new’ history of the Six Day War from New Yorker editor David Remnick. As the war’s 40th anniversary approaches you can expect to hear more and more on the subject and, as Remnick notes, Tom Segev has written a new book called “1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East.” Remnick calls him the “most journalistic of the New Historians” because his “style is drier and more distanced than some of his more overtly ideological colleagues.”

While there appears to be some apprehension over the New Historians’ take on the Six Day War, Remnick’s piece, for me, did nothing to change the accepted version of events leading up to the conflict. If anything, the New Historians seem to have removed some of the David and Goliath mystique of the war by deconstructing the moves and countermoves leading up to Israel’s preemptive strike and point out that the Egyptian military in particular committed a grave mistake by failing to prepare properly even while Nasser went around provoking Israel. But, it doesn’t feel like any less of a victory after reading Remnick’s evenhanded survey of Six Day War histories.

You can read the New Yorker article by clicking here.

On the other hand, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency last week ran a piece by Michael Oren that sounded the alarm bells over the coming battle for the history of Six Day War. Oren, a senior fellow at the Shalem Center who wrote “Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East,” couches the battle in terms of those who seek to discredit Israel and its right to exist and those who believe Israel had its hand forced and then fought to gain territory that would help her avoid another war.

In describing the former, he takes a shot at Segev by quoting from the new book:

Israeli “fear had no basis in reality,” Ha’aretz journalist Tom Segev writes in his newly translated book “1967.” “There was indeed no justification for the panic that preceded the war, nor for the euphoria that took hold after it.”

What’s puzzling is that this seems uncharacteristic of the Segev described by Remnick, who, in the New Yorker essay, writes that, “Both Segev and Oren [in their respective books] describe in alarming detail the state of anxiety and disarray in the Israeli leadership” in the days leading up to the war.

In the context of Oren’s essay, the Segev quote appears to be an attempt to undermine not only Israel’s victory but also its rationale for fighting. But when I look back on Remnick, I can see how Segev might have said it within a larger explanation of what was happening on the Arab side of the conflict, which Segev appears to have portrayed as a series of errors and miscommunications along a vain march to war. Remnick also noted that Oren’s account of the war acknowledges “the mistakes, miscommunications, random events, and lethal vanities on both sides.”

I would like to think that Remnick believes Segev and Oren actually agree on more than they would admit to. But, who am I to put words in David Remnick’s mouth? I guess I’ll have to read both books and find out for myself.

You can read Oren’s JTA article by clicking here (Registration required).

To find any new scholarship out there on the Six Day War, you may need to turn to “Foxbats over Dimona,” a new book by Israeli writers Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez, who theorize that the Soviets not only instigated the conflict by spreading disinformation among the Arabs about Israel’s intentions (that part is not new) but that the Soviets planned to use the war as an opportunity to bomb the nuclear reactor at Dimona.

The Jerusalem Post’s David Horovitz apparently did not put much stock in the idea, as evinced by his review. You may click here to read it.

On the fiction side of this week’s roundup, I pulled Jonathan Rosen’s review of “A Tranquil Star,” a collection of 17 previously untranslated Primo Levi short stories. Writing in the New York Times, Rosen says “Levi, in these ingenious and disquieting stories as in the rest of his writing, held up a mirror to his own mind, and in so doing performed a lasting service. After the barbarisms of the last century — which have followed us into this one — reading Levi remains an indispensable way of readapting ourselves to the complexity of being human.” You can read the review by clicking here.

Finally, I bring a bit of prognosticating from the Denver Post where David Milofsky writes that Michael Chabon “is the favorite in the clubhouse” to become a leader among the next generation of literary giants. I disagree but you’ll have to wait to read my review of Chabon’s latest book to find out why. You can read what Milofsky says about Chabon and several other young writers by clicking here.

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