Next Tuesday, June 5, marks the 40th anniversary of the start of the storied Six-Day War. To commemorate the occasion, PBS airs a remarkable — albeit occasionally disingenuous — two-hour documentary about the brief, yet bloody conflict.
Appropriately called “Six Days in June,” the documentary begins a two-day broadcast run on KQED on Friday, June 8. Using what is being billed as newly declassified materials (although it’s not certain whether they are Arab or Israeli documents), the film combines archival footage and interviews with participants from both sides — politicians, soldiers and generals — to provide an in-depth, visual history of the events leading up to the war and the war itself.
Much of the material was new to me — or I’d forgotten it over the years. Overall, the film was extremely well done.
The film shows that this was a war that could and should have been prevented. Egyptian President Gammal Abdel Nasser was ambitious. He envisioned a Pan-Arab nation with himself as its leader. Spurred on by others, including Syria’s military leadership, which argued that Israel could be defeated in six hours, Nasser mobilized his troops, moved them into the Sinai and blockaded the Straits of Tiran, effectively cutting off Israel’s access to the sea.
From there, matters escalated out of control. It was the middle of the Cold War and the Soviets sent mixed signals to the Arabs, first encouraging Nasser’s moves and then forbidding a first strike. But by then, Nasser had whipped the Arabs into such a frenzy, there was no turning back.
Israeli Prime Minister and Defense Minister Levi Eshkol wanted to avoid conflict and delayed the war as long as he could. He sent Abba Eban to Washington to urge President Johnson to intervene. But the president had his own problems in Vietnam. Had he sent a single American naval vessel to break the blockade, the clash might have been avoided. Eventually, Eshkol succumbed to the pressure from his generals, turned his Defense portfolio over to Moshe Dayan, and approved a first strike.
Within hours of its start in the early morning of June 5, the Israelis destroyed virtually every plane and airport the Arabs had. Without air support, the Arab cause was doomed.
Interestingly, Arab radios initially announced victories for its forces. By contrast, Israel maintained a radio silence. It didn’t want the extent of its win to get out so that outsiders would request a cease-fire.
When the extent of the debacle became evident to the Arab population, Nasser and Jordan’s King Hussein announced that the Israelis won because the United States and Britain provided troops. It might have worked, except the Israelis recorded the conversation where they concocted that story.
One of his assistants said that Nasser had later said that if he’d known how ineffectively his troops would perform, he never would have instigated the fight.
As much as I enjoyed the film, I quarrel with its principal conclusion: that Israel’s refusal to go back to its original borders led to the current explosive atmosphere in the region. According to the filmmakers, the action on Israel’s part “mired the country in years of occupation and violence.”
The Israelis occupy “one of the Muslim world’s holiest sites” — the Noble Sanctuary — a stance certain to “stoke the fires of conflict for generations to come,” they conclude.
But they say nothing about the Arab occupation of the former Jewish quarter in 1948, after which they destroyed and defiled every synagogue and limited access to the Western Wall. What about those fires?
In addition, they charge that the war “crushed the dream of Pan-Arab nationalism, undermined the Arab secular regimes and left the Arab world so traumatized that many turned to militant Islam.” That’s not what I see. I look around the Arab world and see the same kinds of regimes (frequently run by the same families) in power now in Egypt, Kuwait, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Syria that were in power then.
But more to the point, with the exception of Jerusalem, Israel did offer the land back. All it wanted was peace. After all, the Peace for Land initiative worked with Egypt and Jordan.
The filmmakers, who are Israeli, by the way, are entitled to their opinions. But they also have an obligation to prove their point. In actuality, they do just the opposite. They note how the Arab League met in Khartoum shortly after the war and vowed to destroy Israel.
Personally, I’m not sure how giving back land would have changed that — or history.
“Six Days in June” airs 8 a.m. and 11 a.m. Friday, June 8, and 9 p.m. Saturday, June 9 on KQED Channel 9.