Six Days of War June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East [Hardcover]

In Israel and the West it is called the Six Day War. In the Arab world, it is known as the June War, or simply as the Setback. Never has a conflict so short, unforeseen and largely unwanted by both sides so transformed the world. The Yom Kippur War, the war in Lebanon, the Camp David accords, the controversy over Jerusalem and Jewish settlements in West Bank, theintifadaand the rise of Palestinian terror: all are part of the outcome of those six days of intense Arab-Israeli fighting in the summer of 1967.
Michael B. Oren'sSix Days of Waris the most comprehensive history ever published of this dramatic and pivotal event, the first to explore it both as a military struggle and as a critical episode in the global Cold War. Oren spotlights all the participants--Arab, Israeli, Soviet, and American--telling the story of how the war broke out and of the shocking ways it unfolded.
Drawing on thousands of top-secret documents, on rare papers in Russian and Arabic, and on exclusive personal interviews,Six Days of Warrecreates the regional and international context which, by the late 1960s, virtually assured an Arab-Israeli conflagration. Also examined are the domestic crises in each of the battling states, and the extraordinary personalities--Moshe Dayan and Gamal Abdul Nasser, Hafez al-Assad and Yitzhak Rabin, Lyndon Johnson and Alexei Kosygin--that precipitated this earthshaking clash.

An excellent new history of the 1967 war. --David Remnick,The New Yorker

In Michael Oren's richly detailed and lucid account, the familiar story is thrilling once again....What makes this book important is the breadth and depth of the research...[H]e uses many Arab memoirs and accounts, giving the book a balanced tone and offering fascinating new details. 'Six Days of War,' coming soon after Israel--on a 30 year declassification rule--opened its archies on 1967, is a powerful rendering of what has turned out to be a world-historiclÓ,