Determined to present a comprehensive yet readable study of Israel's Six-Day War, Dr. Michael Oren struck a chord with the American public with his surprising best-seller on the subject. Jonathan Yavin caught up with Oren between his international promotional forays
Dr. Michael Oren told the guy from Miramax studios that in order to find someone to play Moshe Dayan properly, "you'll have to dig up Yul Brynner from the grave." What does he mean by "play"? He meant acting in the film, of course - the one that will be based on Oren's best-selling book, "Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East."
Published three months ago - to coincide with the 35th anniversary of the Six-Day War - by Oxford University Press (OUP) in the United States, the book has gone through six editions and sold about a 100,000 copies. The fact is that OUP has already declared Oren its candidate for the Pulitzer Prize, that former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger and former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak have heaped praise on the book; and that even Vice President Dick Cheney is said to be staying up nights to plow through the 446-page tome.
The book has been on the hardcover fiction best-seller list of The New York Times and The Washington Post since its publication, and as a result, entered the list of Barnes and Noble's recommended books and is in third place on the list of top-selling books of Amazon.com. It has received rave reviews from The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, The Boston Globe and USA Today, as well as the Times and the Post. All these facts are played up in a festive release issued by the Jerusalem-based Shalem Center - and on its Web site (www.shalem.org.il, which also contains a list of "suggested questions" for reporters interviewing Oren) - a conservative "research institute for Jewish and Israeli social thought and public policy," where Oren is a senior fellow and head of the Middle East project.
"Oxford does its own ranking and anyone who gets to first place, like me, gets to go on a book tour," the author laughs, reliving with more than a little anxiety the "national publicity campaign" for his book, which robbed him of this past June and took him to Washington, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Miami, Detroit, San Francisco, Chicago and Toronto. "I barely got back and I'm off again for another two weeks, come back and go for another six weeks. It's terrible."
Is this touring as exhausting as it sounds?
Oren: "I am totally punch-drunk. I don't know what day it is and what the date is. What's good about it is that there are `literary escorts.' That may sound perverse, but they are Jewish old ladies who take you wherever you have to go. I was on a train to Washington to appear on a television program and I didn't have a blue shirt with buttons, so I called the local literary escort and gave her my measurements. A shirt was waiting for me when I arrived."
Do the tours help with sales of the book?
"Totally. I appear on a morning television show in Atlanta, and the next day, you can't get the book in the stores. You also wrack up a lot of fascinating experiences. I gave an interview in Philadelphia and Matt Damon was the next person to be interviewed. [Damon starred in Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan."] I told him that my father had landed on the beach at Normandy and he took my hands and told me emotionally, `Tell him thank you for me.' He gave me an autograph for my daughter, who finally thinks I'm `Awesome.'"
Thanks to Bin Laden
The first question is why Oren is so Awesome, with a capital "A," how he made it so big. The first thing is that he really has written a fine, comprehensive study. Second, the timing: 35 years after one of the most brilliant military victories in history. Third, the period: less than a year has passed since the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the new American trend is for the public to be more knowledgeable about the roots of the Arab-Western conflict than Secretary of State Colin Powell. And fourth, current events: Every second newscast in America carries a report that originated in the Six-Day War. When a cafe in Tel Aviv is blown up, it's from the Six-Day War; when children are buried alive in a "targeted assassination," its from the Six-Day War.
"In a very real sense," as Oren writes in the foreward to his book, "for statesmen and diplomats and soldiers, the war has never ended. For historians, it has only just begun."
Isn't it the case that September 11th and its aftershock helped your sales?
"I was in panic on September 11th, because my son was in Manhattan. Then there was a very selfish moment in which I turned to my wife and said, `Who will read the book now?' Because, who am I - from the viewpoint of the Americans, I am a nobody. They like American history best, and even if my book is good, there are a lot like it. But today, the Americans are obsessed with knowing what is going on here, because the United States is tied so closely to the Middle East. Just about every article on the Middle East mentions the 1967 war. Jewish leaders are asking me where exactly the Palestinian state we conquered in 1967 was located."
Oren, who has written a screenplay about Orde Wingate, has published two novellas about life in the Negev desert and maintains that his dramatic writing helped him preserve the tension he sought to create in "Six Days of War": "I asked myself whether I was keeping the reader on the edge of his chair on every page," he says.
But wouldn't you agree that you also were lucky because you wrote the right book at the right time?
"I don't want to glorify myself, but a person who can write in a way that will speak to the American audience, with a background in the study of the Middle East and a knowledge of languages, and also a lot of luck and good timing, is the right person at the right time. By chance, I started to do my research a year late because of foot-dragging, and if the book had come out a year ago, I doubt that anyone would have read it."
What made Oren choose the Six-Day War as his point of departure. After all, he could have chosen the Israeli War of Independence, the periods of mass immigration, the Holocaust, or even the purchase of the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron as the point of the "start of the conflict."
Oren counts off the reply on his fingers: "One: 1967 was the end of the era of the Israeli-Arab conflict and the onset of the Jewish-Palestinian conflict. Two: 1967 was the end of the era of Arab nationalism in the distinctive embodiment of Nasserism, and the start of the rise of the Islamic idea. Three: the territories. Without the conquest of Sinai, there would not have been a settlement with Egypt. However grotesque it may sound, without the Six-Day War, there would not have been a process with the Palestinians, because before the war there was a total rupture. There was also a shift in the Palestinian national identity: The Arabs of Gaza, the West Bank and Israel united. Four: Israel became a great deal more Jewish with Bethlehem, Jericho and Hebron. Five: the creation of the strategic alliance with the United States."
Balanced study
Why read Oren's book rather than the works of his competitors? Because the others, he writes in the Foreword, are intended for scholars or the broad public, and are based on earlier publications, articles and interviews. They focus on the military aspect of the war and their authors almost always come favoritism toward one side or the other. There was no balanced work that drew on all the sources, public as well as classified, and in all the relevant languages, including Hebrew, Arabic and Russian. What was needed was a balanced study of the military and political aspects of the war, of the balance of forces between the international, regional and local forces - a book that was aimed at scholars but would also be accessible to a broader circle of readers.
The book is divided into three sections. The first part deals with the processes and events that led to the war, told in four chapters: "The Context," "The Catalysts," "The Crisis" and "Countdown: May 31-June 4." The second section is a description of the war, with each of the six days getting a chapter to itself. The third section consists of just one chapter, "Aftershocks," in which Oren provides his postmortem analysis of the events and takes stock of the still ongoing occupation.
Dynamically, Oren argues, the war was the product of a quartet of forces - the Americans, the Russians, the Arabs and the Israelis - and its events were the direct result of the interaction among them. The author's docu-plot follows central events chronologically (Egypt's blocking of the Straits of Tiran, the mistaken Israeli bombing of the U.S. Navy ship "Liberty," etc.) and presents each of them from the operational point of view and from the viewpoint of each of the four powers involved. The descriptions of the meetings in the Oval Office and the Kremlin, in the presidential palace in Cairo and in the Defense Ministry "bunker" in Tel Aviv are related in a film noir-type narrative, and almost seem like eye-witness accounts. The reader falls into a trance from tracing the purple smoke rings of then chief of staff Yitzhak Rabin's cigars, and shivers with the cold outside the office of the Soviet foreign minister, Alexei Kosygin.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the Eastern Bloc, the gradual Westernizing of Egypt and Jordan and the end of a 30-year-period in which Western archives were sealed meant that Oren had tens of thousands of documents available to him. He collected the necessary information from the Russians, the Americans, the Egyptians, the Jordanians and the Syrians. The research and writing took three years, "and I don't even know what percentage of the material went into the book," he says. "There were some very internal documents, such as Israel Defense Forces battle debriefings. I discovered official history alongside history in documents that revealed the whole truth. It's hard to hide things in this country, it's full of holes. In the end, you compile the whole archive mass into a story, and the challenge is in putting it all together."
After you put everything together, were there still some black holes?
"Of course. What the `Liberty' was doing in the area is a black hole. We know that it carried interpreters from Arabic and from Russian - in other words, that they weren't spying on Israel, but there was a spy plane above the region with Hebrew speakers on it. And also about the death of Amer [the commander of the Egyptian armed forces, Field Marshal Abd al-Hakim Amer, who was fond of drugs and alcohol, and who, shortly after the war, was found dead, with a large quantity of poison in his body.] I don't know if he committed suicide or was executed. What is certain is that Amer is responsible for his death and for the outbreak of the war. He was the one who sent the MiGs to Dimona [on May 5 and May 24, 1967, Egyptian MiGs photographed the nuclear reactor at Dimona, an operation that led directly to the Israeli attack]. It was just a provocation, and it angered [Egyptian President Gamal Abdel] Nasser, but this is the story of the war, the relations between Nasser and Amer, rivals but also soul mates, absolutely in love with each other."
Heroes and antiheroes
Oren is a formulaic writer. A typical paragraph in the book consists of a sentence that sets forth a thesis, let's say, of Nasser and Amer being closely associated, which is followed by a main body of text of three to five sentences that prove the thesis - in this case, stating that they both had vacation homes in Alexandria - and ending with a statement or quotation that reinforces the thesis or possibly qualifies it, as a springboard for the next paragraph, about Amer's ruthless ambition.
In this way, the story covers 327 pages (the other 119 pages are bibliographical sources and notes) and is generally interesting, though sometimes the formula falls prey to the sheer volume of the material. The result is a vast amount of specific detail, which is not always necessary for understanding the overall picture or to move the plot ahead.
"This is a book that is written in the American style," he explains, "and, in fact, I have received a lot of compliments precisely about the details. I was expansive about what went on in the internal channels of Washington and the Kremlin, because that prevented a wider flare-up. This may sound like a retired CIA agent [speaking], but I miss the Cold War, the polarity that also ensured a certain balance. These days, Bush can't work things out with bin Laden over the phone."
The Shalem Center's promo promises revelations, such as the secret discussions between the Russians and the Americans, the operational plans of the Israelis and the Arabs, a detailed description of the complex relations between Nasser and Amer, the story of the Dimona nuclear reactor, the full story of the Israeli attack on the "Liberty," and testimonies about a secret attempt to find a permanent solution for the region immediately after the war. However, according to a senior Israeli Arabist: "There are no scoops in the book. The book is written nicely, but I didn't see anything new in it that wasn't known before. It's a pleasant book, a good read, comprehensive and well written, but to say that it reveals anything new? It's as though he is coming from a distance of many years and providing the definitive story, but everything has already been published, including the material about the `Liberty.' The air force has only now conducted another inquiry into that event."
One of the more interesting "revelations" in the book concerns an incident on the Jordanian border in November 1966, in which an Israeli "paramilitary police vehicle" hit a mine, killing three policemen. Jordan's King Hussein "penned a personal condolence letter to [Prime Minister Levi] Eshkol, along with a reaffirmation of his commitment to border security." He had the note taken immediately to the American embassy in Amman, which cabled it to the embassy in Tel Aviv. It was a Friday, and the ambassador, Walworth Barbour, "a lifelong bachelor with an unabashed affection for Israel, an affection fully reciprocated" - belied his reputation as a highly efficient diplomat by thinking that he could wait over the weekend before passing on the note to the Israelis. But fate played its hand over the weekend: On Sunday, Israel launched a wide-scale retaliatory operation involving tanks and air cover. This was a crucial factor in Nasser's decision to remilitarize Sinai, setting in motion the events that culminated in war seven months later.
Oren wonders whether Eshkol would have made the same decision if he had received Hussein's apology in time, "whether all subsequent events might have been averted had not Barbour so tragically procrastinated." However, he concludes, "the developments of the next six months cannot be traced to any individual person or incident. They arose, rather, from a context that by the end of 1966, had been fully forged ... In such an atmosphere, it would not take much - a terrorist attack, a reprisal raid - to unleash a process of unbridled escalation, a chain reaction of dare and counter-dare, gamble and miscalculation, all leading inexorably to war."
The Syrian angle
What actually happened to Egypt in the war, after the Israeli attack on June 5?
"Something very critical. For a whole day, no one dared tell Nasser that his air force had been destroyed on the ground in two hours. There was no reason for the army not to dig in and defend itself without the air force, as the Germans did in World War II. Instead, the Egyptians fled, which was a huge, fatal mistake. Their flight took the Israeli officers by surprise - they had intended only to destroy Egypt's first line of defense, but the turn of events drew in the IDF well beyond what it had planned. I think that the developments show an internal weakness throughout the Egyptian society. Today, the whole Arab world regrets what happened, apart from Syria, where not one book about the war has been published."
Weren't the Syrians in a state of total denial?
"There is something strange in Syria to this day. I feel disdain for the Syrians; it's hard to take them seriously. They dragged the whole region into a war and afterward didn't take part in it. [The Syrian president, Hafez Assad, lied that the IDF and the United States were threatening Damascus, with the aim of inducing Egypt to invade Sinai and getting Russia involved. The lie was exposed. Later, when Egypt was attacked, Syria refrained from coming to its aid on various odd pretexts.] The Syrians were ready to fight until the last Egyptian soldier. One of the methods used by the research assistants in Damascus was to tell people they were interviewing that the whole Arab world says that Syria didn't fight. Right away, they would open up."
And what about Jordan?
"Jordan is very proud of its fighting, and rightly so. They fought with great daring against larger forces. But their officer corps did not excel at either the tactical or the strategic level. But at the individual level, the Jordanian soldier fought until the last bullet."
Who of all the figures in the story touched you the most?
"Eshkol. I fell in love with him. As a researcher, you get to know them, you read their mail. The deeper I went, the more I was impressed. He wasn't a classic leader, he wasn't charismatic, he didn't have any special military background, he wasn't a great speaker, he spoke in a shtetl accent, used Yiddishisms and wasn't cut in the sabra image. He stood his ground in the face of the General Staff, where every general told him he was putting the country at risk. [Eshkol delayed going to war in the hope that the Great Powers would broker a diplomatic solution.] Mothers whose sons had been called up demonstrated outside his office, demanding his head. He had no support from anyone except for Miriam [his wife and secretary]. My last interview was with `Gandhi' [Rehavam Ze'evi, who in 1967 was deputy chief of the General Staff's Operations Branch], a week before he was assassinated. He told me straight out: `We were all wrong, Eshkol was right.'"
If Eshkol, the antihero, is your hero, who is your antihero?
"Amer. I also have reservations about Dayan [who was named defense minister on the eve of the war under public pressure; until then, Eshkol held the post in addition to being prime minister.] I can recognize his greatness, but as a leader, he bothers me. How can I explain it? He is impenetrable. And it is rare in history to research someone and not penetrate his heart. I even got to know Nasser. Dayan remains a mystery. I am no psychologist, but on the last day of the war, Dayan expressed six different opinions, and what he told the press in the 1970s - that he opposed the capture of the Golan Heights - was a lie. The poor guy who takes it on himself to write a comprehensive biography of Dayan will face an impossible mission."
So Dayan, of all people, the epitome of Israeli macho, is an antihero?
"The macho was long before that. Israel was declared to be invincible back in the [1956] Sinai Campaign. The omnipotence was one aspect, the other side was that we are on the brink of destruction. We are always playing between those two poles. Eshkol spoke about Israel as `Shimshon de nebecher' [`poor Samson'] and Dayan took it to a peak in Washington when he said in one and the same breath that Israel was on the verge of annihilation, but would be in Damascus within six days."
Oren doesn't know if the Israel of 1967 was better than today's version, "but I see a lot of resemblance. Ezer Weizman [then chief of Operations Branch] was insulted that Haim Bar-Lev was appointed deputy chief of staff instead of him and was ready to resign in the midst of the crisis. That's not so far from what's going on today. In 1967, reservists left their tractors and went to fight in a war for existence, and today they are leaving their computers to repulse a danger to Israel's existence, which may be even more of a threat, because its implication is the dismantling of the Israeli society by means of terrorism. I find more similarity than difference between 1967 and today."
But wasn't Israel more collective then, less a society of killer sharks?
"It was also a lot less integrated and multicultural. There were no Sephardim in key positions; new immigrants didn't make it into the cabinet. There was corruption then, too, it just wasn't reported in the press. Dayan is a prime example, with his theft of historical sites and his sexual harassments. Look at things like rights of women, new immigrants, Arabs, Sephardim. The Arabs in Israel were still living under a military government."
Oren sighs and then laughs when asked if he sees a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict: "A solution to the conflict ... It took a lot longer to resolve the European conflict. Less than 200 years ago, the standard situation between two states was one of war, and until 60 years ago, the Europeans slaughtered one another. But I am optimistic that democracy can lay down roots in the Middle East. The society in Syria is closed and undeveloped, and that is such an unnatural situation that it will not be able to last forever. The Arab world, in general, is a failed region that produces nothing except oil, and even that with the aid of the West. There is no reason why a talented and capable nation should be stuck because of failed social organization."
So we have something to look forward to?
"We are not talking about hundreds of years for a solution," Oren says reassuringly, "a lot less."
Loss of control
Michael Oren was born in New York in 1955 and grew up in New Jersey, was in the left-wing Hashomer Hatza'ir youth movement and, at the age of 15, spent a brief period in Israel on two kibbutzim, Gonen and Gan Shmuel. A few years later, back in the United States, he was trying to decide whether to immigrate to Israel or continue his work in Hollywood as an assistant to the legendary Orson Welles - "meaning that I mainly cut his cigars."
He settled in Israel in 1977, at the age of 22, and served in the Paratroop Brigade. "I fought in Lebanon and I was in one of the first vehicles that entered Beirut," he recalls. "Suddenly, we got into an ambush and people were wounded, my platoon commander was killed, and the unit effectively fell apart. I joined a unit of paratroopers that was moving into Sidon, and already then I felt that some sort of control had been lost, that we were going to be seriously embroiled and that we would not get out of there for a long time."
In the course of the Lebanon War, Oren married a new immigrant named Sally from the United States. They have three children, Yoav, Lia and Noam. After the war, he returned to Princeton University, where he did his Ph.D. in the history of the Middle East. He went back "during the period of Sabra and Chatila [the Beirut refugee camps where Christian forces perpetrated a massacre in September 1982, for which Israeli leaders were indirectly blamed], when it wasn't easy to be a student" in the Middle East studies department at Princeton.
"I did my doctorate in order to become a policy adviser, but when I returned to Israel, I decided not to join the Foreign Ministry. I wanted to get into the government, but they didn't accept me," he says. He worked on his post-doctorate at Sde Boker, the kibbutz to which David Ben-Gurion retired, and where Oren still has an apartment, where he goes to write. "In 1992, I came back to Jerusalem as an adviser to Yitzhak Rabin, who I got to through Shimon Shetreet [a law professor and a cabinet minister in the Rabin government]. I also managed a high-tech company for a time."
How did you get to the Shalem Center?
"I discovered it four years ago: a young, developing Zionist institute consisting of Princeton graduates. I liked the place, and they were looking for someone to take charge of their Middle East project. They made me a senior fellow and made numerous resources available to me, including research all over the world. Without their support, I would never have produced a book of this scope within three years."
You came from America, were a volunteer on kibbutzim and fought in Lebanon as an officer, so how can your study be objective?
"In fact, one of the Jewish critiques I received was that I am too sympathetic to Nasser. I am not complimentary to the IDF on a lot of subjects. We are talking about people who were thrust into a crisis and experienced many moments of anxiety and uncertainty. British researchers were amazed to discover that Dayan, who managed a well-planned war, was constantly changing his mind. The reactions to the book from Egyptian researchers were all positive, and that is the most flattering of all."
So maybe you are "too objective" - maybe you were so careful trying to strike a balance that you ended up being in their favor?
"There is a problem here. There is an historical affair that I want to understand, and what gets in the way are my views and opinions, the fact that I am a Zionist. If I want to reach understanding that is deep and balanced, I have to leap over those opinions. On every page, I stopped and asked myself whether I was writing in the most balanced way, and relatively speaking, I think I succeeded. There were also other things - people who are still alive, and my inclination was not to hurt them. But sometimes I had to write bad things."
Are you a patriot?
"I am a Zionist. My son is a patriot; he is serving in an elite army unit ... I have no regrets. I was able to do my first degree and then settle in Israel and be in the career army, I was a liaison with the Jewish underground in the Soviet Union; the state has given me a very interesting life. But sometimes I get up in the morning and ask myself what I am doing in the Middle East. There have been many difficult periods. The terrorism has also affected me personally: a close relation was killed. People of my age in the United States look a lot younger than I do."
From that point of view, Oren doesn't really have anything to complain about. He not only knows how to talk to an audience and hypnotize a listener - he is one of those people who can conduct a light conversation about history for three hours that will go by like 40 minutes. He is also tall and impressive, with an obviously well-kept athletic frame. He is handsome, bearing a striking resemblance to the actor Ted Danson. "Everyone tells me that," he signs. "When I'm in New York people ask for my autograph. And I give it to them."
Haaretz.com, the online edition of Haaretz Newspaper in Israel, offers real-time breaking news, opinions and analysis from Israel and the Middle East. Haaretz.com provides extensive and in-depth coverage of Israel, the Jewish World and the Middle East, including defense, diplomacy, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the peace process, Israeli politics, Jerusalem affairs, international relations, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Israeli business world and Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora.
