Following the Hebrew calendar, the June 1967 conflict began 50 years ago yesterday. Israel has, for the occasion, made public the transcripts of the deliberations of its security cabinet—an inner circle convened to make crucial military and security decisions—during the year of the war. For the first four months of 1967, the key concern was how to respond to sporadic artillery and rifle fire from Syria, much of it directed at demilitarized zones and farmlands; only a few weeks before war broke out did the threat from Egypt, which precipitated the war, become clear. Yaacov Lozowick summarizes the deliberations:
The security cabinet of 1967 appears in these . . . transcripts as a group of serious, professional, and responsible decision-makers. While the ministers brought their worldviews to the table, they often didn’t vote on party lines, often did listen to one another, and generally managed to make decisions, albeit slowly and through compromises. These characteristics were not helpful in the maelstrom of the Six-Day War, when the cabinet receded in the face of its two most enigmatic members: [then-Prime Minister] Levi Eshkol, who can be read either as a weak figure or as a master manipulator; and Moshe Dayan, [who had left politics but returned as defense minister on the first day of the war], who comes across as an arrogant but talented prima donna.
In support of his contention that Israel should respond to Syria’s provocations not by relinquishing but by deliberately cultivating Israeli lands near the border, Eshkol told his colleagues:
We were in exile 2,000 years, and then there was struggle and a war. I can’t forget the outcry when we had to relinquish 2.5 dunams (less than an acre) near Jerusalem. How will we justify relinquishing 600 dunams [about 150 acres] here? And why not refrain from insisting on cultivating all the other fields where the Syrians shoot at us? What if we’d brought that question to this table? Would you have said we should wait, the Syrians have been humiliated, we need to give them time? If not now, when? If we don’t act now, we’ll regret it for generations.
Read more on Tablet: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/234352/secret-transcripts-six-day-war-1