Arab-Israeli War Research Articles

Israeli nuclear capabilities in mid-1967: what Washington knew (and didn’t know)

ABSTRACTAt the time of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, top US policy makers did not believe that Israel had produced nuclear weapons. Since the discovery of the Dimona reactor complex in 1960, senior US officials and intelligence experts took it for granted that the Israelis sought a nuclear-weapon capability, but a wall of secrecy surrounded the reactor. Even inspection visits by US nuclear experts left important questions unanswered. A central problem was whether Israel had acquired or would acquire the reprocessing plant needed to produce plutonium. While the original plans for Dimona included an underground reprocessing plant, it was deeply secret. A few months before the war, State Department intelligence experts suspected that the Israelis had begun reprocessing and could even have stockpiled a few devices, but this perception was not shared at the top. The Lyndon B. Johnson administration would have been profoundly shocked if US intelligence had discovered the secret assembly of nuclear devices in May 1967. Strict secrecy in Israel may have averted a crisis in US–Israeli relations.

Missing the mark: Dimona and Egypt's slide into the 1967 Arab-Israeli War

ABSTRACTDid nuclear considerations play an important role in the outbreak of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War? This research article seeks to answer this question by examining Egyptian decisions and conduct during the crisis preceding the war. The article argues that, despite long-standing Egyptian concerns over Israeli nuclear ambitions, the issue played only a marginal role in Egypt’s path to war. Egypt’s slide into war was a result of miscalculation rather than a deliberate plan to destroy Dimona. During the pre-war crisis, the nuclear dimension played only a minor role in Egyptian military planning. While a contingency plan to target Dimona was studied, it was never implemented. The article predominantly draws on Arabic-language sources, including first-hand accounts of Egyptian decision making during the pre-war crisis.

Studying an Occupied Society: Social Research, Modernization Theory and the Early Israeli Occupation, 1967–8

In the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip from Jordan and Egypt, and established a long-lasting military regime over their Palestinian population. In this article, recently declassified sources and published reports were used to demonstrate how the Israeli government initiated and funded academic research on Palestinian society to gain reliable, useful knowledge to inform its policies. The Israeli leadership was most specifically concerned with pacification of the occupied population, the Arab/Jewish demographic balance, and the status of the 1948 Palestinian refugees. By early 1968, the research team had produced a series of policy-oriented reports on Palestinian society, covering such subjects as employment, education, nationalism, migration, and general values. The team used surveys, questionnaires, and observations, with modernization theory providing the theoretical framework for analyzing their empirical findings and formulating policy recommendations. As the Israeli team had studied a population under military occupation, their recommendations differed from those reached by their US peers who studied traditional populations in the context of the Cold War. Israeli civil and military officials had great interest in this new knowledge, rendering social research an ongoing practice for the Israeli occupation regime in the years to come.

If ‘The World Was Ruled by Artists’: The 1967 International Theatre Institute World Congress and Cold War Leadership

The Twelfth International Theatre Institute (ITI) World Congress met in New York City over 4–10 June 1967 at the same time as the Arab–Israeli War was taking place. This context very much framed the delegates’ debates over the idea of artists as national leaders. One panel in particular, The Responsibility of Theatre to the Progress of Society, on Friday 8 June, offered an opportunity for the delegates to wrestle with the concept. The participants focused on three key questions: how audiences were witnesses to national reinvention, how theatre could serve as a pedagogical form, and how the intersection of these two allowed audiences to see themselves as citizens. This article focuses first on ITI's place in the geopolitical moment and then on the contributions during the conference and after by a specific set of artists from diverse countries, including the US, India, France, Morocco and Nigeria. The conversations represented a profound articulation of how theatre was influencing the complex ways in which nations were identifying and defining themselves and their citizens.

In the Shadow of Back-Channels: Britain and the Berlin Four Power Talks, 1968–1971

In May 1967, Abba Eban, Israel’s foreign minister, visited Washington. Israel was on the brink of the Third Arab–Israeli War, and Eban’s mission was to secure U.S. support for Israel in the coming war. Before coming to Washington, he had met with President Charles de Gaulle in Paris, who, fearing that the conflict might start World War III, proposed to Eban the idea of convening talks among “the four great powers” to prevent the war. When Eban explained de Gaulle’s proposal, President Lyndon B. Johnson irritably retorted, “What did he mean by ‘the four great powers’? Who the hell are the other two?”1 Britain was one of “the other two” both in this episode and in the Four Power system (with the United States, France, and the Soviet Union) established for Germany and Berlin after World War II. In the historiography of Ostpolitik and the birth of the Berlin Quadripartite Agreement of 1971, however, historians have treated Britain much like Johnson did. In 2009, Carole Fink and Bernd Schaefer published a collection of essays on European and global responses to Ostpolitik, and the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office released an official volume of Cold War-era British documents on Berlin. In the former, Britain was the only Four Power state that was not featured in the essays. In the latter, there was no chapter on the 1970–1971 Four Power talks.2

The theater of memory: Direct speech in Palestinian oral history

A striking feature of Palestinian oral history projects is the extensive use that interviewees make of direct speech to communicate their memories—especially those born before the 1948 Arab–Israeli war. They do so irrespective of whether or not they participated in or actually heard the dialogues they wish to convey. This article seeks to characterize and explain this phenomenon. In the interviews conducted by the author—an Arabic-speaking Jew—as well as in other projects, this mode of speech is marked by ease of transition from character to character and between different points in time. It clearly gives pleasure to those engaged in the act of remembering, and it grades readily into a theatrical performance in which tone of speech and the quality of the acting become the main thing. This form of discourse sprang up from the soil of a rural oral culture and still flourishes as a prop for supporting memory, a vessel for collecting and disseminating stories, and a technique for expressing identification with significant figures from the past.

Ethan B. Katz. The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France.

Ethan B. Katz’s excellent, meticulously researched monograph The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France traces the political, social, and cultural relationships between Jews and Muslims in France—as a trans-Mediterranean space—from World War I through the early decades of the twenty-first century. It is an intricate analysis of the way the ebb and flow of these relationships shaped the contradictions and lost and attained potential of ethnic harmony and national allegiance. Katz eschews the binary analyses of Muslim versus Jew, racist versus nonracist, colonial versus anticolonial, dear to some scholars, to demonstrate that at any given moment in the chronological trajectory, equating the political, cultural, and social complexity of Jewish-Muslim relations to such binaries is not just reductionist, it is analytically unsophisticated. The book is divided into seven chapters, arranged more or less chronologically, each dealing with a defining moment in the Muslim-Jewish relationship. Katz’s innovation is to examine the lived interactions of ordinary Jews and Muslims, which, he argues, have been lost in the currents of contemporary events. The overarching disruptions that have shaped the lives of these ordinary players and reset their relationships were largely the result of four wars: the two world wars, the Algerian War of Independence, and the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. As Katz points out, French history has inscribed Jews into the republic and Muslims into the empire, but by examining the intricate associations of Jews with (and in) the colonies, Katz suggests that imperial projects were as important in shaping the identities of French Jews as was the republic (8). By examining separate urban spaces, namely Paris, Marseille, and Strasbourg, he shows that the local politics and demographic and geographic differences have created disparities in the Jewish-Muslim relations of each city.

The Conduct of Operations: Glubb Pasha, the Arab Legion, and the First Arab–Israeli War, 1948–49

The recent accession by St Antony’s College Oxford of papers from British army officer John Bagot Glubb, commander of Transjordan’s Arab Legion, affords a remarkable opportunity to test and reimagine significant debates surrounding the first Arab–Israeli war. Glubb’s papers establish two points. First, that military operational necessity best explains the actions of the Arab Legion in 1948 and that this was more important than the political objective by Transjordan and Israel to collude to divide Palestine. Second, the papers offer a new, augmented military history of the war taking into account daunting command and logistical challenges faced by the Legion.

Hero of the crossing: how Anwar Sadat and the 1973 War changed the world

Its various names—the Yom Kippur War, the October War, the Ramadan War and the 1973 War—reveal that the Arab–Israeli war of October 1973 had and continues to have different meaning and symbolism for the belligerent sides. For the Israelis, the war represents a national trauma that will be forever ingrained in the collective psyche, but for the Arabs, and particularly the Egyptians, the war represented a victory. The myth of total Israeli military superiority, largely reinforced by the Six-Day War, was smashed and the Arab forces managed to penetrate Israel's territory, both in the north and south of the country. For the Egyptians, the war would also lead to both a return of the Sinai and a certain restoration of Arab military, political and national pride. Thomas W. Lippman very ably reveals the contours of President Anwar Sadat, a central character to this period of Middle Eastern statecraft, who took on the Arab world in his quest for peace with Israel and challenged the superpowers' assumptions about policy-making, both domestically and on the world stage. Lippman asserts that by 1975 Sadat's aims were becoming clear: restore Egyptian national pride, sign a peace deal with Israel and forge an alliance with the United States after the failure of former President Gamal Abdel Nasser's Soviet alignment. With these three aims, Sadat was to carve himself a political niche surpassing regional boundaries, which would, in due course, release the extremist forces that killed him.

When Will States Strike First? Battlefield Advantages and Rationalist War

Previous research suggests that first-strike advantages can create commitment problems that lead rational leaders to opt for war, even when both sides are perfectly informed. In this article, we develop a formal model that extends upon this work. We include a more detailed account of war processes in order to determine what factors are most likely to cause first-strike advantages that lead to war. In particular, we decompose first-strike advantages into three underlying dimensions: tactical offensive advantages, mobilization advantages, and the destructiveness of an initial attack. Our model also allows states to counterattack, rather than, as typical in the literature, assume a single-stage conflict. By studying the interaction of these factors, we uncover surprising results about wars produced by first-strike advantages. First, offensive advantages can lead to war in the absence of mobilization advantages. However, they only do so when successful attacks can destroy an extremely large proportion of the enemy's military power. In contrast, mobilization advantages always increase the likelihood of war. Surprisingly, mobilization advantages are particularly likely to lead to war when combined with defensive advantages. We demonstrate that these mechanisms can explain war initiation through an examination of the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli Wars.

Allies at arm’s length: Redefining Egyptian–Soviet relations in the 1967 Arab–Israeli war

ABSTRACTThis article examines Egyptian–Soviet relations in the run up to the 1967 Arab–Israeli war. It argues that Egypt and the Soviet Union stumbled into brinkmanship with little coordination and no agreement on common objectives or goals. The article demonstrates how frustration and mutual disappointment were recurring features of the interactions between the two allies during the critical weeks prior to the war. In doing so, the article exposes new aspects of how Cairo and Moscow managed their alliance and assesses what that means to our understanding of the origins of this transformative war. These conclusions challenge revisionist accounts that attribute the start of the war to Egyptian–Soviet collusion and some traditional narratives that present the Soviet Union as an enterprising risk-taker invested in regional brinkmanship. The article draws heavily on Egyptian and Arabic language sources to examine Egyptian–Soviet interactions during this key period of Middle Eastern history.

The use of former British military bases during and after the 1948 war

Mandatory Palestine’s military landscape was shaped during World War II in accordance with British imperial interests. After the 1948 Arab‒Israeli war, military spatial patterns and landscapes were transformed to conform to Israel’s national interests and needs. This article deals with the transformation of the British military spatial heritage following the takeover of former British bases by the Israeli armed forces and civil institutions and its impact on the organisation and building of both the Israeli military system and the spatial, social and cultural structures of the evolving Israeli society during the 1950s.

Locating religion in victory-making: the 1973 war discourse in Egypt

Most of the literature on the Arab–Israeli war in 1973 takes material gains and military advances as measurements that indicate victory or defeat. Accordingly, based on the magnitude of weaponry used and the associated tactics employed, scholarly works declare Egypt or Israel the winner. This article moves away from such ‘materialistic’ accounts of the war’s conclusion by exploring a similarly significant victory-maker: the use of the discourse of religion. By looking at previously untapped official and semi-official texts from the war’s onset through the eight years of President Anwar Sadat’s rule, the article finds this discourse to be composed of three thematic structures. These structures cohere into patterns that facilitated an account of the war as a massive and unquestionable Egyptian ‘victory’. The study also addresses how the interplay of language and religion was so closely attuned to the broader context that included the use of authoritarianism in politics and in the media as well as a so-called Islamic revival. Rather than supposing that the religious references in this discourse may have been in some way truthful, I show that it relied on a set of intentional falsehoods.

Tuqan and Dayan: Palestinian and Israeli Women between Romance and Tragedy

ABSTRACTThis article examines the status of women before and after the Arab–Israeli wars, particularly the 1967 War, in the works of the Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan (1917–2003) and Israeli novelist and peace activist Yaël Dayan (1939–). In the history of Arab–Jewish struggle, the years 1967 and 1973 represent major national events that registered not only the changing political topographies of both Israel and Palestine but also the transformation of women’s roles and voices within Israeli and Palestinian societies. Prior to the outbreak of these wars, and particularly during the 1950s and 60s, Tuqan’s and Dayan’s writings demonstrated a bold expression of women’s sexual identities and social presence that emerged in response to a deliberate suppression by Palestinian and Israeli patriarchal voices and controlling milieu. The dénouements of both wars, however, transformed the authors’ representation of women’s romantic and social spaces into a nationalistic discourse that emphasised the language of war, suffering and homeland.

From 1967 to Operation Boulder: The Erosion of Arab Americans' Civil Liberties in the 1970s

This article examines the US government's targeting of Arab Americans for surveillance and harassment in the wake of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and the Palestinian terrorist group Black September's murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. In the late 1960s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) included Arabs as targets of its COINTELPRO surveillance program, and in 1972 the Nixon administration created the Cabinet Committee to Combat Terrorism and the visa check system Operation Boulder to monitor Arab residents and Arab Americans. The federal government overstepped its constitutional boundaries and used its powers to repress Arab American activism on behalf of Palestine. The article explores Arab Americans' responses and resistance to government violations of their civil liberties. Ironically, the government's attempt to divide and intimidate Arab Americans actually served to heighten their unity and advance their activism.

1967: An Elegy of Conquest

1967: An Elegy of Conquest Seth Anziska Shortly after Israel's lightning victory in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the leading Jewish philosopher and Israeli public intellectual Yeshayahu Leibowitz published his reflections on the territorial conquests that had brought the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights under the state's control. Our real problem is not the territory but rather the population of about a million and a half Arabs who live in it and over whom we must rule. Inclusion of these Arabs (in addition to the half a million who are citizens of the state) in the area under our rule will effect the liquidation of the state of Israel as the state of the Jewish people and bring about a catastrophe for the Jewish people as a whole; it will undermine the social structure that we have created in the state and cause the corruption of individuals, both Jew and Arab … In a short time the spiritual and emotional links between it and world Jewry would be severed, as well as the cultural and sentimental ties to the historical tradition of the Jewish people and to Judaism. The only concern of the monstrosity called "the undivided land of Israel" would be the maintenance of its system of rule and administration.1 Leibowitz was attacked at the time for his scathing indictment, which was written in Hebrew and directed at an Israeli public that the philosopher felt had not reckoned with the consequences of the war. His sentiments did not fit well with the explosion of nationalist fervor, from the redemptive messianism of the religious right to more earthly outpourings of support for expanded state lines among secular kibbutz members and Labor party stalwarts of the left. Whether in the name of security or [End Page 536] national rights, God or Bible, a large swath of Israeli society and Jewish supporters abroad embraced Israel's expansion. Prophets of doom and their dissenting voices were unwelcome guests at this celebratory gathering.2 More than fifty years have passed, and Leibowitz sounds less like a gadfly or crank and more a diagnostician of the present reality. Revisiting his writings on the anniversary of 1967 raises the question of that fateful year's impact on Israel, on Palestinians and the wider Arab world, and finally on modern Jewish politics. Unlike the 1948 war, which enabled Israel to achieve internationally recognized borders along the armistice lines, the 1967 victory set in motion the slow erosion of state boundaries.3 In the wake of the war, a fierce debate broke out in the Israeli cabinet about the future of the newly occupied territories and how to manage the Palestinian population under direct state control. As meticulous historical research reveals, the government of Levi Eshkol made a "decision not to decide" on the fate of the territories, preferring indefinite control over the land without conferring rights on the inhabitants who lived there.4 This "temporary" state of indecision became a model for permanence, leading to one of the longest military occupations of the twentieth century.5 An entirely new legal and bureaucratic apparatus was set in place [End Page 537] to sustain this occupation, deferring any reckoning with the political rights of the captive population.6 Alongside the deprivation of rights came the extension of Jewish sovereignty through the building of settlements in the occupied territories, a project that began under the Labor government of Eshkol and expanded dramatically under the Likud-led coalitions of Menachem Begin and his chief builder, Ariel Sharon.7 The accompanying transformation of Israeli society, from the birth of Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) to the influx of American Jewish settlers, led to the normalization of settlement life and the accompanying evisceration of the contiguous Palestinian territory itself.8 Beyond the daily indignities of life under such occupation, Palestinians have had to confront the deeper existential consequences of prolonged statelessness. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which was founded in 1964, was given new life in the aftermath of the war, as nationalist Palestinian leaders seized the struggle away from regional power brokers.9 A gradual abandonment of armed...

Disaffiliating From the Cult of the Fallen

This article is an autoethnographic exploration of how my family lives with the memory of my uncle, who was killed in service as an enlisted soldier of the Israeli Defense Force during the Yom Kippur War (also known as the 1973 Arab–Israeli War). This article considers how the memory of my uncle has been constructed through the yearly national cycle of military and family ceremonies. Participation in military ceremonies of this nature is a way for my family to deal with the intolerable pain of my uncle’s death. Yet, I argue, this yearly cycle of commemoration is part of “the cult of the fallen” at the heart of contemporary Israeli society; a cult which places the death of my uncle as part of the narrative of inevitable, ongoing national conflict, connecting the past and the present and justifying further militarism in the future.

Re-Marginalisierung der palästinensischen Flüchtlinge? Transformation von Wir-Bildern in der palästinensischen Gesellschaft im Westjordanland seit den 1970er Jahren

Abstract: This article explores concepts of belonging for Palestinian refugees and asks how they shape patterns of interpretation, we-images and life histories. The article discusses the results of a research project in Israel and the West Bank conducted in the period 2010 to 2015 on descendants of Palestinians who fled or were expelled in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. The findings display a generational divide. For members of the second generation of Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, the sense of belonging to the historical generation of the first Intifada is the main factor influencing their experiences and we-images. For the third generation of refugees, however, their refugee background tends to be increasingly important. These generational differences are intertwined with the formation of a new urban middle class in the West Bank a%er the Oslo Accords and the creation of the Palestinian Authority in the 1990s. This group formation connects to a (new) marginalisation of Palestinian refugees, especially those living in camp areas. Generational differences regarding we-images are thus connected to shfting processes of established-outsider relations in the Palestinian society of the West Bank.

PEMETAAN KONFLIK DI TIMUR TENGAH

“Middle East in all its complexity, has always been an area of ​​concern to humanity from time to time. So much history is engraved in this area, began its cultural golden stretches in the valley of the Nile, Euphrates and Tigris, until the major political forces of Iran with the birth of Islam were able to change the form of government of the Islamic Republic, until the blood battle in a variety of domestic political interests, regional and international level in various conflict situations; Arab-Israeli war, the US-invasion of Iraq until the political revolution "Arab Spring" in some Arab countries. Not only that, The Middle East is also a spiritual direction with the birth of the great religions of the world, whose influence was felt hundreds of millions of human beings until today. But ironically, The strategic location of the region with all the wonders that should make this a more stable, but otherwise This area is known as "Hot area" with conflicts of interest. From this condition, I am interested to analyze why the frequent conflicts in the Middle East and the factors that cause these conflicts.”

Review on biothermoydnamics applications: timeline, challenges, and opportunities

Research on biothermodynamics dates back to the publication of the manuscript What Is Life? by Schrödinger in the 1940s, which encouraged the use of the fundamental principles of thermodynamics for the analysis of biological processes. In the 1960s and 1970s, development of the early genetic engineering techniques, difficulties in the sugar imports to the USA due to the trade embargo imposed on Cuba, and the oil price hike after the Arab–Israeli wars created a positive environment in the USA to foster the merger of biology with engineering. The synergy established between biology and engineering in the 1960s created an irreversible stimulus for scientific and technological development in the USA and elsewhere. Advances in biothermodynamics have roots deep in the positive environment of the 1960s and 1970s. Exergy analyses were initially used to evaluate efficiency of the fuel-utilizing and energy-utilizing processes. In the early 2010s, exergy analyses found application in development of the industrial production processes of the biological origin and later directly in the cellular processes in the body. Assessing the comfort of the body in terms of entropy generation and exergy destruction, exergy efficiency of the metabolic pathways in the brain, exergy efficiency of the muscle work, and life span entropy generation and understanding and finding ways to postpone the symptoms of aging were among these studies. Application of the biothermodynamics in the medical fields will provide opportunities in the health sciences and medical technology and improve the quality of life of humans and animals. Comparing the exergetic efficiency of the competing theories on the brain energy metabolism, offering some help to prevent heart attacks in the amputees, and finding the causes of the difference in the crop yields of the plants are among the outcomes of the current biothermodynamics research. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.