{"product_id":"six-days-of-war-june-1967-and-the-making-of-the-modern-middle-east","title":"Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eBook info:\u003c\/strong\u003e Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Paperback, 496 pages) – Presidio Press, 2003. Language: English.\u003c\/p\u003e\n NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The first comprehensive account of the epoch-making Six-Day War, from the author of Ally—now featuring a fiftieth-anniversary retrospective Though it lasted for only six tense days in June, the 1967 Arab-Israeli war never really ended. Every crisis that has ripped through this region in the ensuing decades, from the Yom Kippur War of 1973 to the ongoing intifada, is a direct consequence of those six days of fighting. Writing with a novelist’s command of narrative and a historian’s grasp of fact and motive, Michael B. Oren reconstructs both the lightning-fast action on the battlefields and the political shocks that electrified the world. Extraordinary personalities—Moshe Dayan and Gamal Abdul Nasser, Lyndon Johnson and Alexei Kosygin—rose and toppled from power as a result of this war; borders were redrawn; daring strategies brilliantly succeeded or disastrously failed in a matter of hours. And the balance of power changed—in the Middle East and in the world. A towering work of history and an enthralling human narrative, Six Days of War is the most important book on the Middle East conflict to appear in a generation.Praise for Six Days of War“Powerful . . . A highly readable, even gripping account of the 1967 conflict . . . [Oren] has woven a seamless narrative out of a staggering variety of diplomatic and military strands.”—The New York Times “With a remarkably assured style, Oren elucidates nearly every aspect of the conflict. . . . Oren’s [book] will remain the authoritative chronicle of the war. His achievement as a writer and a historian is awesome.”—The Atlantic Monthly “This is not only the best book so far written on the six-day war, it is likely to remain the best.”—The Washington Post Book World “Phenomenal . . . breathtaking history . . . a profoundly talented writer. . . .  This book is not only one of the best books on this critical episode in Middle East history; it’s one of the best-written books I’ve read this year, in any genre.”—The Jerusalem Post “[In] Michael Oren’s richly detailed and lucid account, the familiar story is thrilling once again. . . . What makes this book important is the breadth and depth of the research.”—The New York Times Book Review “A first-rate new account of the conflict.”—The Washington Post “The definitive history of the Six-Day War . . . [Oren’s] narrative is precise but written with great literary flair. In no one else’s study is there more understanding or more surprise.”—Martin Peretz, Publisher, The New Republic “Compelling, perhaps even vital, reading.”—San Jose Mercury News  \n        From the Back Cover   \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThough it lasted for only six tense days in June, the 1967 Arab-Israeli war never really ended. Every crisis that has ripped through this region in the ensuing decades, from the Yom Kippur War of 1973 to the ongoing intifada, is a direct consequence of those six days of fighting. Michael B. Oren’s magnificent Six Days of War, an internationally acclaimed bestseller, is the first comprehensive account of this epoch-making event. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWriting with a novelist’s command of narrative and a historian’s grasp of fact and motive, Oren reconstructs both the lightning-fast action on the battlefields and the political shocks that electrified the world. Extraordinary personalities—Moshe Dayan and Gamal Abdul Nasser, Lyndon Johnson and Alexei Kosygin—rose and toppled from power as a result of this war; borders were redrawn; daring strategies brilliantly succeeded or disastrously failed in a matter of hours. And the balance of power changed—in the Middle East and in the world. A towering work of history and an enthralling human narrative, Six Days of War is the most important book on the Middle East conflict to appear in a generation.           About the Author   Michael B. Oren is an American-born Israeli historian and author, and was Israel’s ambassador to the United States from 2009 to 2013. He has written three New York Times bestsellers—Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide; Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present; and Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for history and the National Jewish Book Award. Throughout his illustrious career as a Middle East scholar, Dr. Oren has been a distinguished fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, a contributing editor to The New Republic, and a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown. The Forward named Oren one of the five most influential American Jews, and The Jerusalem Post listed him as one of the world’s ten most influential Jews. He currently lives with his family in Tel Aviv. He is a member of the Knesset and the Deputy Minister for Diplomacy in the Prime Minister's Office.           Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.   Afterwood\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMORE THAN TWO YEARS HAVE PASSED since the outbreak of the latest Middle Eastern turmoil, and there is still no cease-fire in sight. Called by Palestinians the al-Aqsa Intifada, and by the Israelis the “disturbances,” the “events,” or, simply, the Palestinian terror, the violence that erupted in September 2000, and which has raged ever since, is in every sense a war. No less than in 1948 and 1967, Arabs and Israelis are today once again battling over the final disposition of the area known in Arabic as Filastin and in Hebrew as Eretz Yisrael—the Land of Israel. As in the processes leading up to previous Arab-Israeli confrontations, mounting violence between Palestinians and Israelis threatens to set the entire region ablaze.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn many respects, the current fighting resembles the civil war in Palestine\u003cbr\u003ethat broke out in November 1947, following the UN’s decision to partition the\u003cbr\u003ecountry into independent Jewish and Arab states. The Zionist leadership accepted\u003cbr\u003ethe notion of territorial compromise, but the Arabs of Palestine saw no\u003cbr\u003ereason to forfeit what they considered their exclusive national rights, and determined\u003cbr\u003eto block the partition with attacks against Jewish settlements, road\u003cbr\u003esystems, and neighborhoods. Other Arab forces, most prominently those associated\u003cbr\u003ewith the militant Muslim Brotherhood, aided the Palestinian Arabs from\u003cbr\u003eacross the border. The Jews, for their part, initially showed restraint, but in\u003cbr\u003eApril 1948, fearing annihilation, they too went to war. Subsequently, dozens of\u003cbr\u003eArab villages and towns were destroyed, their populations displaced, and their\u003cbr\u003eleaders either killed or rendered ineffective. But the Palestinians’ defeat generated\u003cbr\u003esympathy throughout the Arab world and intensified the pressure on Arab\u003cbr\u003eleaders to intervene against the Jews. The result came one month later with the\u003cbr\u003eadvent of the first Arab-Israeli war.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA remarkably similar process occurred more than fifty years later, in the\u003cbr\u003elatter half of 2000, when the Clinton Administration again proposed to partition\u003cbr\u003ethe land between the Palestinians and the Jews. Specifically, the United\u003cbr\u003eStates called for the creation of a Palestinian state in virtually all of the West\u003cbr\u003eBank and the entire Gaza Strip—Israeli settlements would either be removed\u003cbr\u003eor concentrated in blocks—with its capital in East Jerusalem. A small number\u003cbr\u003eof Palestinian refugees would be repatriated to Israel; the rest were to receive\u003cbr\u003ecompensation. The Palestinian state would live side by side with Israel in relations\u003cbr\u003eof full peace, but while Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak approved the\u003cbr\u003eformula, the Palestinian Authority under its president, Yasser Arafat, rejected\u003cbr\u003eit. Rather, Arafat demanded the return of all the refugees—a move that, if implemented,\u003cbr\u003ewould have created a Palestinian majority in Israel. As in 1947–48, the\u003cbr\u003eissue was not merely the borders of the Jewish state, but its very existence.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Palestinians consequently embarked on an armed offensive using tactics\u003cbr\u003ereminiscent of those employed in 1947–48—roadside ambushes, snipers,\u003cbr\u003eand car bombs—together with the innovation of suicide bombers. Militant Islamic\u003cbr\u003eelements once more played a prominent role in the campaign. At first,\u003cbr\u003eIsrael’s reaction was again restrained, but as casualties rapidly mounted, the\u003cbr\u003eIDF finally struck back. In April 2002, Israeli forces reoccupied much of the\u003cbr\u003eWest Bank, causing extensive damage to Palestinian cities and villages, and\u003cbr\u003ekilling or isolating many Palestinian leaders. As in 1948, the Palestinians’ plight\u003cbr\u003earoused sympathy in neighboring Arab countries and placed pressure on their\u003cbr\u003eleaders to intercede. Soon Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon were launching\u003cbr\u003erockets into northern Israel; the Syrian army went on high alert, as did units in\u003cbr\u003eJordan, Egypt, and Iraq. Israel mobilized its reserves. The region careered toward\u003cbr\u003eyet another Arab-Israeli war.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe fighting in 2000–2002 recalled not only the events of 1947–48 but,\u003cbr\u003eeven more poignantly, those of 1967. That war, this book asserts, was the result\u003cbr\u003eof a series of incidents triggered by Palestinian guerrilla raids and Israel’s\u003cbr\u003eretaliations against them. Today, more than three decades later, the Middle\u003cbr\u003eEast is still in the grips of a context of conflict in which a single spark can ignite\u003cbr\u003ea regional conflagration. Such a spark was kindled in September 2000, when\u003cbr\u003eAriel Sharon, then head of Israel’s parliamentary opposition, paid a visit to the\u003cbr\u003eHaram al-Sharif, or Temple Mount, in Jerusalem.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThough the visit had been cleared with the Palestinian Authority, many\u003cbr\u003ePalestinians viewed it as a provocation and protested against it violently. Firing\u003cbr\u003eon the rioters, Israeli forces provided the pretext for launching an intifada, or\u003cbr\u003epopular uprising, named after the Haram’s al-Aqsa mosque. Mass demonstrations\u003cbr\u003eof Palestinian youths soon escalated into armed attacks against Israeli\u003cbr\u003etargets, most of them civilian, and increasingly fierce countermeasures by Israel.\u003cbr\u003eIsraeli reprisals in turn instigated unrest in adjacent Arab countries. The\u003cbr\u003e “street” was once again agitating—a déjà vu of 1967—and Arab rulers had little\u003cbr\u003echoice but to act.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eUnlike in 1948 and 1967, however, war between Arabs and Israelis did not\u003cbr\u003eerupt in 2002. Though the region has remained in many ways unchanged, several\u003cbr\u003efundamental transformations nevertheless have combined to mitigate the\u003cbr\u003edangers of war.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere is, firstly, the existence of peace treaties between Israel and Egypt and\u003cbr\u003eIsrael and Jordan. In spite of their failure to bring about any true reconciliation\u003cbr\u003ebetween their signatories, these agreements have nonetheless provided the nations\u003cbr\u003ewith open channels of communication and venues for reducing tensions.\u003cbr\u003eAnother change is the emergence of the U.S.-Israeli alliance that not only guarantees\u003cbr\u003eIsrael a decisive military edge over its enemies, but also affords Washington\u003cbr\u003efar-reaching influence over Israeli actions. Finally, there is the nonconventional\u003cbr\u003eweaponry now in the arsenals of virtually every Middle Eastern state, which has\u003cbr\u003esharply elevated the stakes in any Arab-Israeli confrontation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYet for every change curtailing the chances of war, another could equally\u003cbr\u003econtribute to its outbreak. Absent today is the peculiar stability engendered by\u003cbr\u003ethe Cold War, of a rational counterpart whom the U.S. president might hotline\u003cbr\u003ein a crisis, and superpower constraints over key regional players such as Iraq,\u003cbr\u003eIran, and Syria. The once neat division between Arab radicals and Arab conservatives\u003cbr\u003ehas been replaced by internal fissures within each Arab country—between\u003cbr\u003eeach regime and its domestic, often Islamic, opposition—and even the\u003cbr\u003elines in the Arab-Israeli conflict have become obscured. Most destabilizing,\u003cbr\u003earguably, is the growth of terrorist organizations, global in outlook and adamant\u003cbr\u003ein their theology, transcending all borders and contemptuous of any attempt\u003cbr\u003eto restrain them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThese countervailing changes, coupled with the continuing friction surrounding\u003cbr\u003enondemocratic Middle Eastern regimes and Arab resistance to the\u003cbr\u003every idea of a Jewish state, might have set the stage for an Arab-Israeli war\u003cbr\u003ebigger and possibly more destructive than those of 1948 and 1967. Instead, war\u003cbr\u003ein 2002 was averted by the timely intervention of the United States. As tensions\u003cbr\u003ein the region spiraled toward an explosion, President George W. Bush\u003cbr\u003estrongly advised Syria to rein in its Hezbollah allies and told the Palestinian\u003cbr\u003eAuthority that its support of terror was totally unacceptable to Americans. At\u003cbr\u003ethe same time, Washington publicly recognized Israel’s right to defend itself\u003cbr\u003eand convinced Israelis that they did not stand alone. Bush’s actions—admonishing\u003cbr\u003ethe Arabs and reassuring the Israelis—were precisely those that Lyndon\u003cbr\u003eB. Johnson failed to take in 1967, and in 2002 they succeeded in containing, if\u003cbr\u003enot defusing, the crisis.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLike Johnson, Bush was engaged in an international struggle with an implacable\u003cbr\u003eenemy—no longer communism, of course, but Islamic extremism—\u003cbr\u003ebut rather than tie his hands as Vietnam once had Johnson’s, America’s new\u003cbr\u003econflict impelled George Bush to act. The events of September 11, 2001, spurred\u003cbr\u003ea radical departure from long-standing American policies toward the Middle East.\u003cbr\u003eHaving become the victim of large-scale Arab terror, the administration voiced\u003cbr\u003enewfound empathy for Israel and its struggle against suicide bombers and gunmen,\u003cbr\u003eand went so far as to identify Israel’s enemies—Hamas and Islamic Jihad—\u003cbr\u003eas America’s. Moreover, in declaring war against international terrorism, in\u003cbr\u003edispatching its soldiers thousands of miles to fight in Afghanistan and, avowedly,\u003cbr\u003ein Iraq, Washington could hardly deny Israel the ability to strike back in\u003cbr\u003ethe West Bank and Gaza, its own backyard. Concomitantly, American leaders\u003cbr\u003eexpressed severe reservations regarding the Arab states, even toward their traditional\u003cbr\u003eallies, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, citizens of which were heavily implicated\u003cbr\u003ein 9\/11. Relations between the U.S. and the Arab world were further\u003cbr\u003estrained by the Arabs’ reluctance to support a military effort to invade Iraq and\u003cbr\u003eoust its dictator, Saddam Hussein.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe success of Bush’s effort to rally an anti-Saddam coalition is not, as of\u003cbr\u003ethis writing, guaranteed. Numerous obstacles, domestic and foreign, stand in\u003cbr\u003ethe president’s way. Nor is it certain whether the toppling of Saddam will install\u003cbr\u003edemocracy or merely another dictatorship in Iraq, or whether war in the\u003cbr\u003egulf will ultimately enhance or further impair the area’s stability. One fact,\u003cbr\u003ealone, is incontestable: that the Middle East remains a flash point of multilateral\u003cbr\u003econfrontation, a source of seemingly intractable controversies, and a powder\u003cbr\u003ekeg that the slightest spark could ignite. A context of conflict continues to\u003cbr\u003eseize the region, demanding of its leaders almost constant displays of both courage\u003cbr\u003eand caution.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNovember 2002\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      ","brand":"Michael B. Oren","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46070368338154,"sku":"9780345461926","price":11.45,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0714\/5301\/6298\/files\/71l1KhiFzqL._SL1500.jpg?v=1781258615","url":"https:\/\/textbookme.store\/products\/six-days-of-war-june-1967-and-the-making-of-the-modern-middle-east","provider":"TextbookMe","version":"1.0","type":"link"}