Six Days
How the 1967 War Shaped the Middle East
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
The Six-Day War was an extraordinary human drama. It swept up a generation of Israelis and Arabs whose children still cannot live peacefully in the world the war created. Today, Israel is the superpower of the region. It has nuclear weapons but has never been able to digest the land it swallowed in 1967. However big its army, it will never be at peace or feel secure until the future of this land is settled.
Forty years after the end of the six days of fighting, after thousands more deaths and the failure of years of negotiation to try to reach a political settlement, Israelis and Palestinians are fighting once again on the streets in the West Bank and Gaza. It is still a low-level conflict, but if another full-blown Middle East war breaks out, its roots will lie in those six days in June 1967.
Drawing on his experiences as the BBC's former Middle East correspondent, and building on extensive original research and interviews with some of the key participants, Jeremy Bowen uses his vast array of contacts to weave together a completely convincing and compelling account, hour by hour, of the 1967 war between Israel and Egypt, Jordan and Syria. As insightful as the best modern history writing and as gripping as fiction, this is a deeply personal book.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This thoroughly sound and readable history of the Six-Day War that found Israel victorious over the armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria offers a valuable perspective on a conflict that is receding into history, though its consequences, in terms of the explosive situation in the Middle East, are still with us. The author, a seasoned BBC Middle East expert, will not please the militantly Zionist reader, but likewise holds little esteem for the posturing and military ineptness of Egypt's Gamal Abdul Nasser, whose actions both provoked the war and made its consequences so disastrous for the Arab world. At the same time, Bowen provides a good overview of the roots of the Israelis' case of "victory disease," which, he says, led them to their own set of political and military miscalculations, the Yom Kippur War and the ongoing aftermath. Ultimately, the book is an effort to strike a balance between the Egyptian diving out of his burning tank and the Israeli pilot who set it on fire in the first place, and the extensive interviewing on both sides is one of the author's major tools in striking that balance. With its strong focus on the political aspect of the war, rather than on the military side of things, this engaging account should appeal to anyone remotely interested in tracing the roots of the tensions in the Middle East.
