I’m in the first part of this brand new book by Michael Oren that details with quiet rigor how Israel and its Arab neighbors became “involved” in the 1967 war. I felt like it was high time that I understand not only the prose and the poetry but the historical details of the events that shaped where we are today, with 7 Israelis killed, and yesterday, with 19 (or so). The lives that these young semi-scholars have taken is becoming extravangant. And while I’m continually sympathetic to the Palestinian need for statehood, I still do not see the historical precedent for suicide bombing as a path to peace. Is that what the black Africans did in South Africa? Is that what Indians did during British colonial rule? Is that what Soviet Jews did in the 1970s in the USSR? Is that what African-Americans did in the 1960s in the US? Where can this possibly lead? Where?
I strongly recommend picking up a copy of this book, which, while written by an Israeli, is as nonpartisan as one could probably get. He shows the travails and secret dealings that Egypt and Israel and Lebanon and Syria and the US and the USSR and England and France all had with one another in 1967 – no hands were clean. None.