Ben-Gurion's Diary for the 1967 Six-Day War: Introduction and Diary Excerpts

Abstract

THE FOLLOWING ENTRIES TO BEN-GURION'S 1967 Diary have been divided into three sections. The first part, 18 May to 4 June, deals with political maneuvering prior to the Six-Day War that led to the appointment of Moshe Dayan, a key member in an aggressive opposition party, as Defense Minister. The second part, 5 June to io June, provides Ben-Gurion's intimate and personal perspective of the war. The third, ii June to 17 June, contains Ben-Gurion's outlines for Israeli policy in radically new circumstances. In these Diary entries, one can observe how, in less than one month, Israel was transformed from a country that perceived its survival threatened, into a secure and confident state facing choices that would shape its own future and that of its neighbors. When the Six-Day War broke out, Ben-Gurion was almost eighty years old. Although he was no longer the Prime Minister, having resigned four years earlier in June 1963, he was still a Member of Knesset and the leader of Rafi (the List of Israel Workers and Non-Partisans), a new party he formed with devoted followers drawn largely from the ranks of Labor. Nevertheless, he possessed enormous authority within both the Israeli public and a large body of political insiders, including leading politicians of other parties., Indeed, he was at the center of the opposition to Levi Eshkol, who replaced him as Prime Minister. The issues that divided them derived from diverging ideas on how to handle "the Lavon Affair," an espionage fiasco carried out in Egypt by Israeli intelligence operators in the mid-I95os. For reasons still murky, plans went awry and the spy ring was captured; the Egyptians executed two members of the spy ring and imprisoned the remainder. Several committees attempted to locate responsibility for the fiasco, but failed to reach an explicit and unambiguous decision. In the mid-I950s, public attention to the scandal began to wane. But in the early I960s, Pinhas Lavon, the Minister of Defense at the time of the operation and the person who had borne the burden of blame for the