3.

A massive Israeli "reprisal" against the Jordanian village of Samu in November 1966 marked the onset of the crisis culminating in the June war. Although Jordan was taking maximum steps to curb infiltration from its border (Oren seems to doubt this on p. 31, but cf. I&R: p. 125), the IDF methodically razed Samu and killed 18 Jordanian soldiers and civilians (one Israeli soldier died). Harshly condemned in the United Nations, including by the U.S delegate, the assault poisoned inter-Arab relations as Jordan denounced Egypt for sheltering behind the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) rather than coming to its assistance. In early April 1967, long-simmering tensions between Israel and Syria reached a head in a major aerial engagement in which six Syrian planes were shot down. In Oren's account, a prime "catalyst" of the June war was Syrian belligerence culminating in this dogfight: "The calculus of Syrian attacks, whether direct or through Palestinian guerrilla groups, had become overwhelming for the Israelis" (SDW: p. 49). His extensive discussion of these direct and indirect "Syrian attacks" merits close analysis.

The armistice agreement between Israel and Syria at the close of the 1948 war called for the creation of demilitarized zones (DZs) along their common border, and an Israeli-Syrian Mixed Armistice Commission (ISMAC). Oren initially states that the DZs constituted "areas of Israel evacuated by the Syrian army" but then quickly backpedals, designating them as areas "over which Israel claimed total sovereignty" (SDW: p. 23) - a claim lacking any international sanction. In his account of the unfolding conflict punctuated by armed clashes over the DZs, Oren occasionally implies that Israel acted the belligerent (SDW: pp. 9, 14) or that both sides were equally blameworthy (SDW: pp. 23, 48-9), but overwhelmingly he portrays Israel as the innocent victim of Syrian aggression: Israel "thwarted Syria's.attempts to dominate the DZs"; "Obstructing [ISMAC's] work was Syria's demand for control over the DZs [and] Israel's rejection of that demand"; "Israel was indeed preparing the groundwork for a reprisal against Syria.At the next Syrian provocation, Israel would send armored tractors deep into the DZs, wait for them to be fired on, and then strike back. The provocation was not long in coming"; and so forth (SDW: pp. 27, 44, 45-6; cf. pp. 29, 42, 64). In fact, all independent observers on the scene recalled that - in the words of Odd Bull, chief of staff of UN forces in the Middle East - "the status quo was all the time being altered by Israel in her favor" as Arab villagers were evicted, their dwellings demolished, and "all Arab villages disappeared" in wide swaths of the DZs. Oren frequently quotes from Bull's essential memoir but omits mention of these observations, and similar ones by numerous other eyewitnesses (I&R: pp. 131-2). Indeed, he suppresses what is surely the most revealing source on the root cause of these border clashes. In an interview that created a stir in Israel after its belated publication, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan declared:

I know how at least 80 percent of all of the incidents there started. In my opinion, more than 80 percent, but let's speak about 80 percent. It would go like this: we would send a tractor to plow.in the demilitarized area, and we would know ahead of time that the Syrians would start shooting. If they did not start shooting, we would inform the tractor to progress farther, until the Syrians, in the end, would get nervous and would shoot. And then we would use guns, and later, even the air force, and that is how it went..We thought.that we could change the lines of the cease-fire accords by military actions that were less than a war. That is, to seize some territory and hold it until the enemy despairs and gives it to us.

It was just such a staged provocation - an Israeli tractor plowing through a disputed field despite Syrian pleas for compromise - that sparked the April 1967 aerial battle. In Oren's reckoning, however, the battle ensued after a pattern of "Syrian provocation" (SDW: p. 46).

Denied the right to return home or compensation, Palestinian refugees organized commando raids against Israel and, after a February 1966 coup in Syria, the new "radical" regime escalated support for them. According to Oren, the "reasons for this upsurge [of Syrian support] were obscure, as inscrutable as the Syrian regime itself" (p. 42). Yet in a statement not quoted by Oren, head of Israeli military intelligence General Aharon Yariv bluntly acknowledged shortly before the June war that Syria backed these raids "because we are bent upon establishing.certain facts along the border" - i.e., in retaliation for Israel's land-grab in the DZs (I&R: p.133; Oren alludes to this explanation on pp. 24, 27). Oren's narrative is replete with references to these Syrian-backed Palestinian attacks supposedly causing Israel's "security situation" to deteriorate "from worse to insufferable": "Over the course of 1965.the armed wing of al-Fatah received Syria's support in carrying out thirty-five attacks according to Israel's reckoning, 110 by Palestinian accounts"; "Over the course of 1966, Israel recorded ninety-three border incidents - mines, shootings, sabotage - while the Syrians boasted seventy-five guerrilla attacks in the single month of February-March"; in late 1966 "eleven guerrilla attacks, most of them from Jordan, ensued in rapid succession - seven Israelis died and twelve were wounded..Then.a paramilitary police vehicle struck a mine. Three police were killed, one wounded"; "the first months of 1967 saw some 270 incidents - an increase, Israel acknowledged, of 100 percent.Al-Fatah issued a series of thirty-four communiques describing its actions in great detail and praising the courage of its martyrs"; during April-May 1967 "al-Fatah undertook no less than fourteen operations. Mines and explosives were planted not only on the Israeli side of the Syrian and Jordanian borders, but across from Lebanon as well"; and by late May "The IDF's hands were tied; al-Fatah could attack at will" (SDW: pp. 24, 27, 31, 45, 48, 63; cf. pp. 25, 28, 29, 42, 46, 53). After these cumulatively overwhelming statistics, it comes as something of a shock when Oren quotes Moshe Dayan from an October 1966 Knesset speech to the effect that "There is no major wave of infiltration today. Just because several dozen bandits from al-Fatah cross the border, Israel does not have to get caught up in a frenzy of escalation" (SDW: p. 81). In fact, a former head of Israeli military intelligence, Yehoshaphat Harkabi, concluded shortly after the war in a sober balance-sheet - not cited by Oren - that the "operational achievements" of the Palestinian commando raids "in the thirty months from [their] debut to the six-day war are not impressive by any standard" (italics in original). Emphasizing that the few successful sabotage operations and Israeli casualties in that period (a total of 14 civilians, police and soldiers) "did not endanger Israel's national life," he recalled that "to hide its mediocre results, Fatah inflated communiqu�s which bore no resemblance to what actually took place. Often, reported actions did not take place at all, and the Israeli authorities had difficulty identifying them" (I&R: p. 133). Inflating the threat posed to Israel, Oren cites as if credible these communiques bearing "no resemblance" to reality. Elsewhere Oren mockingly reports that after the June war "in a communique issued from Damascus, al-Fatah claimed credit for killing Prime Minister Levi Eshkol with a surface-to-surface missile" (SDW: p. 317). One wonders why Oren didn't credit this communique as well.