The Israeli Revisionist Historians and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: Part Two: From the 1967 War to the Present

The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. By Avi Shlaim. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. ISBN 0-3933-2112-6. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. 670. $32.50.

Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881- 2001. By Benny Morris. New York: Vintage, 2001. ISBN 0-6797-4475-4. Maps. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. Pp. 784. $18.00.

THE 1967 and 1973 Wars, as well as the War of Attrition that fell between them, are well covered in military histories and Morris and Shlaim address these only briefly in contrast to other topics. Shlaim contends that neither the Arabs nor Israel wanted the 1967 War and suggests that Prime Minister Levi Eshkol and Foreign Minister Abba Eban might have avoided it and come to some accommodation with the Arab states if they had had a stronger political base. He states that Eshkol had no developed political or strategic war plan while the IDF had well-developed operational plans to take on the Arabs in 1967, plans which Shlaim believes Defense Minister Moshe Dayan often enlarged without higher political approval. Shlaim contends that such plans created a momentum of their own during the war. The 1967 War changed Israel more than any other conflict, since it led to the acquisition of the Sinai, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Palestinian population that came with them, territory Israel was reluctant to annex and a population to whom it could not afford to grant citizenship, as it had done with respect to the Arabs who had remained after the War of Independence.

In 1969, Golda Meir replaced Eshkol as Prime Minister, and in Shlaim's view "ruled her party [Mapai] and her country with an iron rod for the next five years." He quotes the following from her biographer, Meron Medzini, in The Proud Jewess: Golda Meir and the Vision of Israel (Tel Aviv: Ednim, 1990 in Hebrew): "She could not come to terms with the thought that maybe the Arabs felt that an injustice had been committed against them. She also rejected absolutely the possibility that some of the Arab demands might be justified." Shlaim is particularly critical of Meir's "preposterous position [of] denying that a Palestinian people existed at all." Upon becoming Prime Minister "she adopted two principles that formed the bedrock of Israeli policy after 1967: no return to the prewar borders and no withdrawal without direct negotiation and peace treaties with the Arab states."

Even within those principles, there was room to trade land for peace and the conquered territory provided Israel with the kind of leverage that greatly enhanced its negotiating position with the Arabs. But according to Shlaim, Israeli political leaders were heavily influenced by their generals, who wanted to retain the territories, and thus failed to exploit the opportunities offered for peace. Not until the aftermath of the 1973 War were the dynamics sufficiently altered with Egypt to allow for a peace treaty tied to the return of the Sinai. The irony was that this did not occur during the era of Yitzhak Rabin, who succeeded Meir, but came about during the tenure in office of Menachem Begin, far more intransigent and right-wing than any previous Israeli prime minister. But if Begin was prepared to exchange the Sinai for peace with Egypt, that was as far as he would go. In Shlaim's view, his reluctance to do so was more a function of Begin's ideology of the biblical lands Israel was entitled to by history and religion than of the quest for security that drove other political instincts in Israel.

The emergence of Begin as prime minister in 1977 and Yitzhak Shamir as his foreign minister and later his successor (1988-92), enables Shlaim to further develop his...