09-30-2023, 04:53 PM
(09-30-2023, 04:40 PM)Dill Wrote: I mention three historians there. And I originally included the Oren book too, along with some others, but thought my post was getting too long. How would you know whether it was more "balanced" than the other books?
Here's why I would include Oren in the CONSENSUS I mentioned above that none of the major belligerents wanted war.
The Revelations of 1967: New Research on the Six Day War and Its Lessons for the Contemporary Middle East (jhu.edu) In this article from Israel Studies, Volume 10, Number 2, Summer 2005, pp. 1-14, for example, he traces the causes of the war to missed exchanges between Israel and Jordan which lead to an unnecessary patrol into Jordan and the deaths of 14 Jordanian soldiers on Jordanian soil, who happened upon the patrol. From that follow other miscues and hardening positions and disinformation from the Soviet Union. He never describes the causes of the war in your black/white Israel good guys/Arabs bad guys terms.
I know about this consensus because I do bother ever searching for and reading other views. And I understand how scholarly consensus works in these matters, rather like it does for scientists. As some questions are considered settled, historians move on to new debates, which often open up with access to new information--as occurred in the case of Middle East scholarship when, after 30 years, scholars were granted access to previous closed files in Russia, the US, GB, Egypt and Israel. Also the late '90s saw a surge of memoirs and published interviews of participants. Like this interview with Moshe Dayan, who ordered the assault on the Golan Heights in 1967. He describes how they would illegally send farming equipment into the de-militarized zone to provoke Syrian "aggression," to which they could then respond with disproportionate force.
It went this way: We would send a tractor to plow some area where it wasn't possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn't shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance farther, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that's how it was.'' General's Words Shed a New Light on the Golan - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
So it is not accurate to impute to me what you are actually doing: find a book you think confirms your "opinion," and then DONE. Perhaps without actually reading the book. Call all the rest "lies" as if the calling alone were proof. My goal is rather to read a wide range of views on topics like this and compare them to develop the most accurate view possible of the historical events in question. You seem to be starting from what you "know" to be true and then arranging your reading and argument around that--dismissing all challenges as "lies," regardless of evidence. If you are unwilling to review this history, then it seems like you don't want an open discussion of the Golan annexation at all, but to shut down such discussion as risky to a preferred ideological consensus on the right.
Classic Dill logic. Incidents in which "farming equipment" was used to provoke an armed response completely cancels out all the other blatant acts of aggression by non-standard forces against Israel. Where were these forces based out of? Who was supplying and aiding them? Nah, that's not important, what is important is that farming equipment is a provocation that literally anyone would be compelled to shoot at. And that negates absolutely everything else.
Sorry, Dill, your bias is extreme on this issue. But this isn't new information.
