David Ben-Gurion

In Tuesday's New York Sun, editor Seth Lipsky refers to the Six-Day war of 1967 in typical fashion, saying that Ariel Sharon "saved the Jewish state" by enveloping the Egyptians in the Sinai. Lipsky's view of the war is unreconstructed chauvinism; it shows no familiarity with Israel's new historians, who have described the '67 war as a terrible accident brought on by saber-rattling militarists on both sides. Neither side really wanted war. The Israelis were more powerful than the Arab forces, and though Israel justly feared for its existence in the face of Arab rhetoric, Israel over-reacted to threats out of a "psychosis of annihilation," writes former foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami.

"Yitzhak Rabin intentionally led Israel into a war with Syria... Egypt was definitely not ready for war and Nasser did not want a war... In Israel the road to war was paved by a genuine existential fear, a legacy of the Ben-Gurion years, which always led to perceiving crises in apocalyptic terms and reacting only according to worst-case scenarios." (From Ben-Ami's book, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace.)

The result of this war was a disaster: the Occupied Territories, which have destroyed Israel's idealism.

That brings me to the bomb. If you read the history of this disastrous war, a natural question is whether Nasser massed his forces on the Sinai border, thereby provoking the Israelis, because he feared Israel's nuclear ambitions. Why, just three years before, Nasser had told the U.S. that Israel's developing the bomb "would be a cause for war, no matter how suicidal."  read more »