For the rest of it, I'll rely on Norman Finkelstein's debunking of Michael Oren's account of what happened. Oren's account is pretty consistant with the account favored by the government of Israel. (Take note, Teribus - Finkelstein actually documents his work.) Here's some of it...


http://www.ussliberty.org/orenbook.htm

Abba Eban with Footnotes
Michael Oren's Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East
Reviewed by Norman Finkelstein

1.

Michael Oren's new study of the June 1967 war has enjoyed unusual success in the United States. Although weighed down with nearly a hundred pages of endnotes and bibliography, this "most comprehensive history ever published" (book blurb) of the June war immediately leapt to the top of best-seller lists. The New York Times lavished unstinting praise on the book ("gripping," "fascinating," "staggering," "masterly," "engrossing," "fabulous," "thrilling," "powerful") in several reviews, while Newsweek reported that even President Bush had been greatly influenced by it.

In his introduction Oren, an American-born Israeli historian, professes that his account of the June war is uncommonly detached (SDW: pp. xiv-xv). Were this the case it would surely be an achievement, especially in light of the author's own pronounced right-wing political biases. In fact, Oren basically reiterates the official Israeli version of the June war. Notwithstanding his claim that the book's conclusions are based on massive new research findings culled from multiple, recently opened state and United Nations archives, it happens that all the Arab and most of the crucial Israeli (and Soviet) archives remain closed, while the U.N. archives have been accessible for many years. The only substantially new documentation Oren brings to bear comes from U.S. archives, yet none of his cited findings significantly alter the known picture of American policy during these fateful months while, on the most controversial questions - e.g., Did the U.S. give Israel a "green light" on the eve of its preemptive strike? - no new light is shed.

It would seem that Oren's main achievement is lending a scholarly veneer to, as it were, the Abba Eban version of the June war. To reconcile the historical record with this apologetic narrative he resorts to several distinct, if overlapping, procedures:

attaching equal weight to a public statement (or memoir) and the hard evidence of an internal document contradicting it

burying in an avalanche of dubious evidence a crucial counter-finding

minimizing, misrepresenting, or suppressing a crucial piece of evidence

In the ensuing pages, I will illustrate how Oren skews the historical record of the June war by deploying these techniques.

2.

Reaching back to the Zionist movement's struggle for statehood, Oren begins with the broader historical context of the June war. This partisan account sets the book's tone. He reports that the Zionist movement reacted with "restraint" to Palestinian guerrilla attacks in the months following UN approval of the 1947 Partition Resolution (SDW: p. 4), whereas senior Haganah intelligence officers on the ground pinned responsibility for the escalation of hostilities on the "ill-conceived Jewish military actions and over-reactions" (I&R: pp. 82-3). In one place he rightly suggests that Israel stopped short of conquering the West Bank and Gaza due to fears of incorporating densely populated Arab areas and triggering a war with Great Britain. Yet, just two pages later he contrives the fanciful explanation that Israeli leaders refrained from further conquest because they "had been duped" (he never says by whom) into believing that in exchange "they could retain the territories they had conquered beyond the Partition borders, and keep the refugees out" (SDW: pp. 5, 7). He recalls Ariel Sharon's murderous assault on Qibya in October1953 (the wrong year is given), which left 69 Arab civilians dead, but then enters the apologetic caveat "inadvertently, he claimed," and sanitizes the covert Israeli firebombing of public institutions in Egypt to thwart Nasser's rapprochement with the West as "vandalizing" (SDW: p. 9). Crediting Israeli public statements and representations during arms talks with Western powers, Oren maintains that successive Israeli leaders "panicked" at Israel's imminent destruction by Arab states - even when the Western and Israel intelligence estimates he himself cites belied these alleged threats (SDW: pp. 16-17, 25-6).