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.
A Lost Peace Jackson, Galen
2023, 2023-04-15
eBook
In A Lost Peace , Galen Jackson rewrites an important chapter in the history of the middle period of the Cold War, changing how we think about the Arab-Israeli conflict. During the June 1967 Middle ...East war, Israeli forces seized the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan. This conflict was followed, in October 1973, by a joint Egyptian-Syrian attack on Israel, which threatened to drag the United States and the Soviet Union into a confrontation even though the superpowers had seemingly embraced the idea of détente. This conflict contributed significantly to the ensuing deterioration of US-Soviet relations. The standard explanation for why détente failed is that the Soviet Union, driven mainly by its Communist ideology, pursued a highly aggressive foreign policy during the 1970s. In the Middle East specifically, the conventional wisdom is that the Soviets played a destabilizing role by encouraging the Arabs in their conflict with Israel in an effort to undermine the US position in the region for Cold War gain. Jackson challenges standard accounts of this period, demonstrating that the United States sought to exploit the Soviet Union in the Middle East, despite repeated entreaties from USSR leaders that the superpowers cooperate to reach a comprehensive Arab-Israeli settlement. By leveraging the remarkable evidence now available to scholars, Jackson reveals that the United States and the Soviet Union may have missed an opportunity for Middle East peace during the 1970s.
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.
Central to CDR Youssef Aboul-Enein's career has been the mission to introduce America's military leaders to Arabic works of military significance. Just like American military leaders who had an ...obsession for all things Russian during the Cold War in order to understand the Soviets, the war on al-Qaida and the complex nuances of the Arab Spring demand a deeper comprehension of the Middle East from direct sources. The memoirs of General Mohamed Fawzi, Egyptian War Minister from 1967 to 1971, were first published in 1984, but his work has not ben translated and remains undiscovered by English speaking readers. Many in the United States Armed Services have yet to be introduced to his ideas, perspectives, and the seeds by which the 1973 Yom-Kippur War were laid. In this new contribution to his series of essays written for Infantry Journal, Aboul-Enein has determined to bring to life the military thoughts of this Arab War Minister. This book is a joint Infantry-Naval Institute Press project that has condensed the entire collection of essays on Fawzi to a single volume, to provide future generations of America's military leaders with access his ideas. Fawzi is unique among Arab generals for his scathing critique of his own armed forces, and from his critical examination of what went wrong in 1967, he was able to slowly resurrect the Egyptian Armed Forces to a level that enabled Sadat to consider an offensive in 1973. This Egyptian general will provide insights into the level of Soviet cooperation and military aid provided Egypt after the 1967 Six-Day War, known simply in Arabic by one word, al-Naksah (the setback), not to be confused with the 1948 Arab-Israeli War known by one word, al-Nakbah (the catastrophe). While Fawzi lapses into conspiracy, indulges in wishful thinking, and employs the language of pan-Arabism on occasion, much like Soviet military
theorists couched their ideas in Marxist-Leninist rhetoric, this will not stop serious American students of war from recognizing his brilliance about the lessons learned from the crushing defeat of Egyptian arms in the 1967 Six-Day War.
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.
In the late 1960s, during the War of Attrition, the supply of F4E Phantom jets embodied the emerging strategic ties between Israel and the United States. Israel developed great confidence in the ...Phantom's power to guarantee the country's survival. A campaign under the slogan “Your Part in the Phantom”, urged citizens to purchase special bonds to procure the aircraft. The foreign airplane became entangled with national loyalties and public feelings, and its domestication involved both material and symbolic dimensions. The article explores the Israeli encounter with American military hardware, airmen, and know-how. The seeming “Americanization” of the air force sometimes bred ambivalence and even resistance, but along with the state-of-the-art airplane new types of authority, knowledge, and sensibilities entered the force's daily practice.
Most of the literature related to Israeli intelligence on the eve of the 1973 Yom Kippur War refers to its failure, mainly because it did not provide an early warning. The flawed intelligence ...assessment rendered in Oct 1973 has been studied intensively and remains the subject of much public and professional debate. The discussion here considers the psychological forces affecting intelligence operations in predicting the initiation of hostile enemy activities, and describes possible avenues of dealing with psychological impediments to open-mindedness that may pervasively characterize such circumstances.
