Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Melanie Phillips (I like these kinds of after action reports): The legacy of the Six-Day War
In the most poignant and indeed tragic analysis of all, Yossi Klein Halevi suggested that the Six-Day War had brought to light a continuing ambivalence in the attitude to power of the Jewish people themselves. The weeks before that war, when attacks upon Israel and the threat of war were mounting – the ‘waiting period’—reawakened the primal Jewish fear both of a second holocaust and that the Jews would once again be isolated as the world stood by and watched it happen. The principle established by the Six Day War would trigger pre-emptive action by Israel. The consequence of its victory, however, was that Jews felt able for the first time to confront the Holocaust and from that date it became central to the identity of Jews in the diaspora. The other side of the coin was that the same victory enabled the non-Jewish world to slough off its own responsibility for the Holocaust and in turn for the survival of the Jewish people. While Jews saw the Six Day War as a narrow escape from genocide, the non-Jewish world only saw the Jews victorious over another people...
[h/t: AndrewAdam (oops) Holland]
Daniel Pipes relates a wrinkle in the growing consensus among historians concerning the Soviet Union's pivotal roll in instigating the war -- in this case namely that the USSR hoped to knock out Israel's nascent nuclear aspirations: The Soviets' Six-Day War
Sounds a bit "pat," but who knows?
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thanks seymouronia,
andrew holland
If you followed the saga of JeffB versus other commenters on Augean Stables then it is interesting to see what Melanie wrote:
De-classified documents have shown that Egypt, Jordan and Syria were planning to cut Israel in half; Jordan was planning to take out whole populations from Israeli towns and shoot them. Plans for the destruction of Israel had been laid to the smallest detail.
Now if only those declassified documents
were on the net.