Israel's victory in the June 1967 Six Day War provided a unique opportunity for resolving the decades-old Arab-Zionist conflict. Having seized the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, and ...the Golan Heights, Israel for the first time in its history had something concrete to offer its Arab neighbors: it could trade land for peace. Yet the political deadlock persisted after the guns fell silent. This book sets out to find out why.
Avi Raz places Israel's conduct under an uncompromising lens. He meticulously examines the critical two years following the June war and substantially revises our understanding of how and why Israeli-Arab secret contacts came to naught. Mining newly declassified records in Israeli, American, British, and UN archives, as well as private papers of individual participants, Raz dispels the myth of overall Arab intransigence and arrives at new and unexpected conclusions. In short, he concludes that Israel's postwar diplomacy was deliberately ineffective because its leaders preferred land over peace with its neighbors. The book throws a great deal of light not only on the post-1967 period but also on the problems and pitfalls of peacemaking in the Middle East today.
The phenomenon of the secret bilateral negotiations that took place between Israel and Jordan over routine security measures was unique in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Israel had exhorted Jordan to ...suppress the Palestinian organizations' Fidaʾī activity, and the expectation was high that the combination of political pressure and military retaliation would force King Hussein to quell the Fida'iyyun. The Israelis tried to differentiate between the Fida'iyyun and the political situation while the Hashemite regime sought to restrain Israel's responses by laying out its efforts to suppress Fidaʾī activity. King Hussein's strategy hinged on progress in the political arena and a corresponding ability or intention to suppress the Fida'iyyun without destabilizing his regime. Although the IDF ousted the guerrillas from the West Bank and blocked them from the Jordan Valley and the eastern border, it failed to eliminate them, and the mortar fire and rocket barrages on Beit She'an and the Jordan Valley settlements persisted until the eruption of civil war in Jordan in September 1970. In this regard, Israel's policy of retaliation was unsuccessful, and the guerrilla bases were ultimately eradicated by and large due to the threat they posed as "a state within a state" to the Hashemite regime. The talks between Israel and Jordan are examined here via the diaries of Yaakov Herzog who was Director of the Prime Minister's Office.
Since entering office, William Rogers had undertaken to advance the peace process between Israel and the Arab states, particularly Egypt. He believed an agreement would serve the American interests ...at a time when extremism was spreading in the Arab world, and Soviet influence had grown. However, his actions on the political front went unsupported by President Nixon. Moreover, the National Security Advisor had embraced a different policy vis à vis Israel and the Arab world. Rogers' failure to secure an interim agreement and his previous failure to persuade Israel and Egypt to accept his plan, led the entire region back to stagnation, from which it emerged only after the October 1973 Yom Kippur War.
This edited volume re-assesses the relationship between the United States, the Soviet Union and key regional players in waging and halting conflict in the Middle East between 1967 and 1973. These ...were pivotal years in the Arab-Israeli conflict, with the effects still very much in evidence today.
In addition to addressing established debates, the book opens up new areas of controversy, in particular concerning the inter-war years and the so-called ‘War of Attrition’, and underlines the risks both Moscow and Washington were prepared to run in supporting their regional clients. The engagement of Soviet forces in the air defence of Egypt heightened the danger of escalation and made this one of the hottest regional conflicts of the Cold War era. Against this Cold War backdrop, the motives of both Israel and the Arab states in waging full-scale and lower-intensity conflict are illuminated. The overall goal of this work is to re-assess the relationship between the Cold War and regional conflict in shaping the events of this pivotal period in the Middle East.
The Cold War in the Middle East will be of much interest to students of Cold War studies, Middle Eastern history, strategic studies and international history.
1. Introduction: The Cold War and Conflict in the Middle East, 1967-73 Nigel J. Ashton 2. The Soviet Attitude toward Resolution of Conflict 1967-1973 Galia Golan 3. How US and Israeli Intelligence Failed to Estimate the Soviet Intervention in the Arab-Israeli War of Attrition Dima Adamsky 4. The "Expulsion" of the Soviet "Advisers" from Egypt, 1972 Isabella Ginor 5. The Cold War and the Six Day War: U.S. Policy toward the Arab-Israeli Crisis of June 1967 Peter Hahn 6. The Nixon Administration’s Policy towards the Arab-Israeli Conflict from 1969 to 1973 Salim Yaqub 7. Egyptian Decision-Making during the War of Attrition Laura James 8. The Big Lie and the Great Betrayal: The Impact of the June 1967 War in Arabia Spencer Mawby 9. Cold War, Hot War and Civil War: Jordan, 1967-73 Nigel Ashton 10. Syria’s Hot Wars 1967 and 1973. In the Cold War Najib Ghadbian 11. Israel’s Traumatic Pre-1967 War Experience and its Implications for its Foreign Policy Decision-Making in the Post-War Era Zaki Shalom 12. Conclusion
'...a fine volume for serious students and scholars.' William B. Quandt, University of Virginia, USA
Nigel J. Ashton is senior lecturer in International History at LSE. He is the author of Eisenhower, Macmillan and the Problem of Nasser: Anglo-American Relations and Arab Nationalism, 1955-59 (1996) and Kennedy, Macmillan and the Cold War: The Irony of Interdependence (2002).
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Ozacky-Lazar uncovers the critical changes that took place in Israel from 1967 to 1973. Over the next five days, ecstasy unraveled into euphoria with the victory in the Six-day war in 1967. Deep ...pessimism gave way to high spirits. The tiny state assumed the semblance of an empire; the IDF and its officers became idolized; Jews and gentiles arrived here from all over the world, a world which now admired the young state for its astonishing victory. The economy made a rapid recovery. It was the beginning of a new era.
The UN General Assembly's 1975 “Zionism is Racism” resolution culminated a decades-long shift in global power dynamics. The Israeli Foreign Ministry's internal debates about how forcefully to oppose ...the resolution shows to what extent Soviet propagandists had stirred Holocaust-related fears by infusing anti-Zionism with allegations of racism. The diplomatic dustup, especially among African countries, reveals the multi-dimensionality of the Cold War and the Arab-Israeli conflict. In boosting the New Anti-Semitism, the UN fell in American esteem. This illuminating episode demonstrates the power of going public: how the General Assembly could cause disproportionate harm and two individuals could do much good.
This book examines information reported within the media regarding the interaction between the Black Panther Party and government agents in the Bay Area of California (1967–1973). Christian Davenport ...argues that the geographic locale and political orientation of the newspaper influences how specific details are reported, including who starts and ends the conflict, who the Black Panthers target (government or non-government actors), and which part of the government responds (the police or court). Specifically, proximate and government-oriented sources provide one assessment of events, whereas proximate and dissident-oriented sources have another; both converge on specific aspects of the conflict. The methodological implications of the study are clear; Davenport's findings prove that in order to understand contentious events, it is crucial to understand who collects or distributes the information in order to comprehend who reportedly does what to whom as well as why.
