http://mailchi.mp/meforum/this-time-the-loser-writes-history?e=bb334ea86b
May 23, 2017: Fifty years ago today, state-run media in Cairo announced that Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser had closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, cutting off the Jewish state’s access to the Red Sea. Then-President Lyndon Johnson later said of the Six-Day War, which erupted two weeks later, “If a single act of folly was more responsible for this explosion than any other, it was the arbitrary and dangerous announced decision that the Straits of Tiran would be closed. The right of innocent, maritime passage must be preserved for all nations.”
A half-century later, however, a “historiographical rewriting” of the Six-Day War has “effectively become the received dogma, echoed by some of the most widely used college textbooks about the Middle East,” as Gabriel Glickman explains in this advance-release article from the Summer 2017 issue of Middle East Quarterly.
A cartoon from 1967 shows Nasser kicking Israel over a cliff. Jerusalem’s attempt before the Six-Day War to prevent hostilities is completely ignored or dismissed while the Arab war preparations are framed as a show of force against an alleged, imminent Israeli attack on Syria.
It is a general law that every war is fought twice—first on the battlefield, then in the historiographical arena—and so it has been with the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war (or the Six-Day War as it is commonly known). No sooner had the dust settled on the battlefield than the Arabs and their Western partisans began rewriting the conflict’s narrative with aggressors turned into hapless victims and defenders turned into aggressors. Jerusalem’s weeks-long attempt to prevent the outbreak of hostilities in the face of a rapidly tightening Arab noose is completely ignored or dismissed as a disingenuous ploy; by contrast, the extensive Arab war preparations with the explicit aim of destroying the Jewish state is whitewashed as a demonstrative show of force to deter an imminent Israeli attack on Syria. It has even been suggested that Jerusalem lured the Arab states into war in order to expand its territory at their expense. So successful has this historiographical rewriting been that, fifty years after the war, these “alternative facts” have effectively become the received dogma, echoed by some of the most widely used college textbooks about the Middle East.[1]
Grandstanding Gone Wrong
The first step to absolving the Arab leaders of culpability for the conflict—especially Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, who set in motion the course of events that led to war—was to present them as victims of their fully understandable, if highly unfortunate, overreaction to a Soviet warning of an imminent Israeli attack on Syria. Taking at face value Nasser’s postwar denial of any intention to attack Israel, educated Westerners—intellectuals, Middle East experts, and journalists—excused his dogged drive to war as an inescapable grandstanding aimed at shoring up his position in the face of relentless criticism by the conservative Arab states and the more militant elements within his administration.
The remains of a Syrian fortification on the Golan Heights following the Six-Day War. Nasser realized that no Israeli attack on Syria was in the offing yet continued his reckless escalation toward war.