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  • The 1967 Arab-Israeli War: Origins and Consequences ed. by William Roger Louis and Avi Shlaim
  • William B. Quandt
William Roger Louis and Avi Shlaim, eds., The 1967 Arab-Israeli War: Origins and Consequences. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 325 pp.

The 1967 Arab-Israeli war is rightly seen by most scholars as a turning point in the history of the Middle East. Its consequences are still with us, and, like most important historical moments, it has given rise to an abundant literature and a plethora of conspiratorial [End Page 165] explanations of its causes. A big event, so it seems, must have a big cause. But as most of the authors of this fine volume would argue, none of the players in the 1967 game worked from a master script or a grand strategy that entailed war. The simpler, but truer explanation, now backed up with materials from the archives in several key capitals, makes clear that the war was the product of fears, misperceptions, and imprudent calculations of risk, but was not the outcome of a master plan made in Moscow, Washington, Cairo, or Jerusalem. Those who most recklessly fanned the embers of war—the hawks in Damascus and the Palestinian guerrillas—talked enthusiastically about war but were too weak to undertake it on their own. Nonetheless, their rhetoric and actions did add to the tensions that led to the May 1967 crisis and then, in a classic example of escalation, from crisis to actual war.

The editors of this volume have done what too rarely is found in collections of this sort. They have chosen a superb group of scholars and have urged them to dig deep into the available sources and engage with prevailing interpretations. The result is a uniformly excellent set of essays. Where archival material has been released— Israel, the United States, and Great Britain—the results are up-to-date accounts that help settle some old arguments. In other cases—the Arab countries and the former Soviet Union—the authors have interviewed participants and have dug through memoirs and secondary accounts to come up with convincing interpretations.

Avi Shlaim starts off with an excellent chapter on Israel. As a frequent critic of Israel, he might have been expected to point the finger of blame at the hawks in Tel Aviv for starting an unnecessary war. But he finds no evidence that such was the case before May 1967. This was not a war that Israel had planned long in advance, although some of its more reckless actions—the attack on the Jordanian village of Samu' in November 1966 and some of the comments of its generals in the early weeks of May 1967—did have adverse consequences in spurring Arab leaders to believe that Israel had plans to launch some sort of offensive, most likely against Syria.

Laura James, without the benefit of access to the Egyptian archives, nonetheless does a noteworthy job of putting the pieces together from memoirs and interviews. She gives a reasonably convincing picture of the confusion that was Egyptian policy. Egypt was bogged down in Yemen, as one of the other chapters reminds us, and Gamal Abdel Nasser was hardly ready for war. Some of his generals, however, were more aggressive, and James provides an important reminder that authoritarian leaders such as Nasser were not always fully in control of policy. By the beginning of June, Nasser seemed resigned to war, but was not confident that he could prevail. Indeed, as he told the U.S. presidential envoy, Robert Anderson, on 2 June (a conversation for which the U.S. record is available but is curiously overlooked in this volume), Egypt would not start a war but Israel probably would. This time, however, he was confident that it would not be a debacle as in 1956, and when the war was over, he told Anderson, Egypt would want help from the two superpowers to end the conflict once and for all. For the moment, he just wanted the United States to stay out of the fray and let the parties go at it.

In recent years, Soviet policy in the crisis has come under scrutiny...

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