In looking at any book about the Israel-Palestine or Israeli-Arab conflict, the immediate question is: who's talking? In the multiplicity of voices, versions, narratives and spin, how can we arrive at anything approximating verifiable truths? Jeremy Bowen, the veteran BBC newsman, has opted, inevitably, for the journalist's approach: the attempt to tease out fact from fiction by examining as precisely as possible what happened where, when, and why.
In the Middle East, of course, nothing is uncontested, and what happened is as hot a potato as why, not to speak of who, and even where. In the heat of propaganda during the Lebanon war of 1982, I recall listening to the Voice of Israel radio in Jerusalem, the announcer relaying government denials that Israeli forces had entered Beirut and then continuing: "Our correspondent with the Israel Defence Forces inside Beirut says . . ."
Does Bowen succeed in navigating these storms? The quick answer is yes. In May and June of 1967 I was doing my Israeli national service in one of the two-man army spokesman film units formed in order to film internal army matters. In much haste, we were scrambled to raid Tel Aviv's camera equipment shops to requisition as many Bolexes and ancient Bell & Howells as possible to supply reserve cameramen, mostly from the newsreel companies - Israel did not have a television service until 1969. (These shenanigans might have supplied Bowen with some comic relief, but, alas, even his fine research has limits.)
So I witnessed some of the events Bowen covers - on the Israeli side - and on these he is impeccably accurate. The generals' arguments, the moment when war, rather than diplomacy, became an option, and the intense reluctance of prime minister Levi Eshkol to go to war, are captured vitally. Sitting opposite Eshkol in army helicopters, I remember him, in his light khaki shirt, taking off the blue beret he often wore on these army trips and striking it over his knee, shaking his head. The broadcast in which he fumbled his words while a nation waited for his guidance was indeed the turning point, and when I was shipped next into the southern command centre in Beersheba, there was a smiling Moshe Dayan, brought out of retirement, to lead the generals in their blitz.
Bowen is right to highlight the six-day war as the basis upon which the present impasse rests. Oddly enough, what was then considered Israel's strategic problem - the capacity and willingness for war of Arab states, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq - has now blown away with the wind. What is now Israel's supposed existential threat is the issue that was pushed into the background at that time - the Palestinians. In 1967, the Palestinians were spectators in their own story, as related in one of Bowen's best sources, a Jewish convert to Islam, Abdullah Schleifer, who described the surreal atmosphere in Arab Jerusalem: cafs filled with people calmly quaffing their drinks while waiting for news of the Israeli enemy's defeat to emanate by magic out of mendacious Cairo broadcasts.
Piece by piece, and hour by hour, Bowen follows the events, and the players - Dayan, Eshkol, Rabin on one side, Nasser, King Hussein and the Syrian Ba'athist officers on the other - as well as drawing on a vox populi of soldiers and civilians caught up in the bloodbath. For while the six-day war was seen as a miraculous deliverance by Israeli propagandists, it was, on the grounds upon which it was fought, as horrific as any war. In fact, the footage our film cameramen shot, filled with corpses and burning cars and buildings, was so unacceptable to our masters that they commissioned a reconstructed shoot of the war (a documentary entitled Follow Me) whose footage to this day contaminates the newsreel record. There is no authentic footage of the armoured cars entering the Old City Gates. Bowen's meticulous recording of the killing of prisoners, the curfews during which hundreds of Palestinian civilians were shot, and other abominations, is sure to bring upon him the wrath deployed in bulk whenever the integrity of the Israeli forces is challenged. On the other side, I am sure many Arabs will feel uncomfortable at the record of military stupidity and consistent self-deception that allowed Israeli forces the time they needed to conquer Arab lands before a US/Soviet-imposed ceasefire took hold. Nobody reading about the PLO "leader" Ahmed Shukeiry can respond with anything but disgust.
Israel fought a war with Arab nations and could therefore cease fire, and later make peace treaties, with their governments. It could have been Israel's salvation to have found a new Palestinian leadership, under Yasser Arafat, that could represent the Palestinians as a nation; a leadership with which a later Israeli government, heeding Eshkol's plea of "Will we live forever by the sword?", might make peace. But we can all see how far from this we now stand, courtesy of the enormous folly of Israeli settlements in the occupied lands.
The massed tanks, warplanes and vast infantry forces of the Arab states no longer menace an Israel whose military is several times more powerful than it was in 1967, and armed with enough WMD, and US support, to see off any conceivable threat. And yet it stands, with Ariel Sharon's government, pleading to the world its imminent extinction by a battered, ragged irregular militia of an occupied, curfewed and bombarded people, riven by crippling political splits, wielding the last-resort weapon of terrorist attacks and suicide bombings by men and women driven mad by their despair.
Jeremy Bowen has performed a service by reminding us how we got here. In the true traditions of journalism, he has done his best to tell us exactly how it happened. It is not up to the reporters to dig a country, any country, out of the pit its own leaders have zealously and idiotically dug.
