Of the sixday war the breaking of the middle east by doctor guy laron. To my right, its a great pleasure to welcome him and welcome all of you to this event. Im christian and i direct the history and Public Policy program at the Woodrow Wilson center. Its a program that tries to provide to bring Historical Context to current Public Policy issues. The discussion of Public Policy issues in washington. Many of you are familiar with the subprojects of the history and Public Policy program, the program weve run here for 25 years almost more than 25 years. A project thats devoted to uncovering, collecting, disseminating, making accessible and discussing new evidence fror communist world archives but the mission has sort of crept to now include really all hard to access archives around the world. We are delighted to launch with this event today a series of activities, discussing on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the sixday war. We will have today the launch of perhaps the most important new publication in International History to come out on the war. I think youre all in for a treat and we are also doing what is called our sweet spot here in the historical universes where we will be publishing a number of new documents from archives around the world and along with some the first takes of these documents from our blog, new history and Public Policy entitled sources and methods. Theres a link on the blog from our west side from the history of public i invite you to check that over the next few weeks there will be a number of new publications and documents available to you by our digital archives and this blog. Let me also say we are delighted to host the session because its yet another step in the direction of of an area that in many ways is still a blank spo spot not entirely but still a blank spot are kindly speaking anyways. Recent and National Cultural history and the project, the program is planning over the coming years to spend a lot more time there in the archives, hopefully, Building Networks and facilitating access to material archival and historical material from recent International History. Before i introduce our keynote speaker, let me think our Sister Program here at the the middle Eastern Program that has kindly cosponsored this event here this afternoon. Let me think my dedicated staff that has been helping to put this event in place, these events happen not by themselves and a lot of work goes into this. I want to thank our lead on the middle east work, kian. With that, let me turn to die, professor guy, guy laron, at the Hebrew University in jerusalem and in the past has been a visiting scholar at the university of maryland and i see jeff in the audience at the university of oxford who is also a fellow at the Wilson Center with the Cannon Institute in 2008. Hes long been involved with the culture of Natural History project and another sister project. [inaudible] guys articles have appeared in journals like the third world quarterly, International Journal of middle east studies. Before the sixday war, the breaking of the middle east, guy explores the development of the crisis with the book aptly named to the origins of the us crisis which we were pleased to publish a number of years ago through the Wilson Center press. Guy will start us off with thoughts, some of the arguments of his book and then will help to open it up fairly quickly to all of you. We have the better part of an hour to do this. After an hour or so id like to invite all of you to a reception on the fourth floor. So, two floors down. There will be a reception to celebrate and to toast guy laron on this accomplishment. Let me ask you to, if you wouldnt mind, turn off your cell phones and other devices so we dont get interrupted and i think ive cleared it all out. You are on, guy. Welcome. Congratulations. Thank you, kristian for this lovely introduction. You will soon realize i need to think christian in more ways than one. What im going to do today is a basically tell you about the biography of the book. This means i will tell you about how i came to write it. I will talk a lot about myself and also a little bit about the book and the reason i am doing that is, not only because im an academic and an agnostic, the reason im doing that is because i want to show you that theres something analogous or the story of how the book was written what neared the story of how the sixday war came to be. The first chapter of the biography starts here in this very hall. I arrived to the Woodrow Wilson center in 2005 and it was my first time in washington, first time in america. I sent to christian and email, he was already the director of the cold war International History project, and i sent him an email with a draft of the paper attached which was based on check documents and i was really excited by the fact that he agreed to meet me. I knew i had to dress up this special occasion i still remember what i wore like i had black jeans and a white shirt and a sweater with a zipper in the middle. I looked at myself in the mirror and thought i was dressed to kill. Then i entered this building, the elevator stopped at 45 and i get out and see all the people with suits and the cufflinks and the ties and i immediately realized that i looked like an albanian sheepherder. No offense to albanian sheepherders. Theyre not known for their sense of fashion. Then i met christian and he brought the paper along. He was reading it and he said with a mixture of surprise and amazement, your reading czech and there was silence. I dont like silence. I cant deal with it. I immediately berlin it out but i need to open the dictionary everything second sentence. He was surprised and the first thing of selfpromotion, not selfdeprecation and he thought for a second and said you might want to improve your tech Language Skills because we might want to work with you in the future and i did try to improve my Language Skills and this is how i got attached to the cold war International History project. The next intervention of christian happen two years later when he invited me to an event in 2007 that then commemorated 40 years to the sixday war in this very hall and at first i wanted to say no. I was a student and i had difficult tunnel vision of graduate students and i thought im writing a dissertation about the crisis talking about an event that happened ten years later so i felt a responsible future already. Im going to participate in that and my wife politely remembered that i just applied to 12 postdoc programs in the us and got no from all of them. Maybe its not the right time to say no to a major think tank in washington. She was right, obviously. I had about twothree weeks to decide what im going to do and some documents in czech, russian and arabic and then i familiarized myself with the history or august the of the sixday war by printing out a few articles and reading them on the transatlantic flight and the event that took place here was a book launch of another book titled. [inaudible] the main claim, argument of the book was that the soviet union wanted a war to erupt in the middle east of 1967 and this is a known argument in literature and they took it a step further and argue that the soviet union wanted to destroy the Nuclear Reactor in dimona and thus prevent israel from acquiring nuclear weapons. From the documents i read before i came here, i thought they were wrong what i saw was that the soviets were as surprised by the rapid turn of events in the middle east the end of may of 1967 as all outside observers were and this event and the fact that some people approach me and thought this was a very interesting documents, can you translate them for us and send them christmas i thought, hey, those documents are so interesting i will write an article about them. So, this is how i started my project about the sixday war and for me it was a mystery wrapped inside an enigma the riddle was the certain event that happened on the 13th of may, 1967. The soviets of the kgb and other channels delivered an intelligence memo to the egyptians in which the alleged that israel will attack syria in the second half of may. Now, at that point in time egypt has a military pact with syria so they were like the three musketeers. One for all and all for one. If syria is intact you must intervene. Indeed, after receiving the intelligence memo nasser the egyptian president mobilize the Egyptian Army and send it into sinai which was demilitarized and the attacks started flowing towards the border of israel. Thus, started the mad chain of events that led on the fifth of june, 1967 to the interruption of the sixday war. Its all about the soviets. Now, either the soviets lied or someone lied to them and i didnt think that syria light on purpose and i was trying to lied to them. The main suspect was the Syrian Regime and when i was doing the research i read a book in hebrew with a not so patterned with struggles in the kremlin and their influence in our region. From the footnotes i gathered that he was able to see us and assigned publication of the syrian party and that looks like a very promising avenue. So, 40 years after he wrote the book, the book was published in 1970, i called the telephone company. He lived in a small settlement near galilee and his name was. [inaudible] they located his number, i called him and 40 years after he wrote this book he picks up the telephone. Said hello, im. [inaudible] and im doing research on the sixday war. I want to see what was wrote. He was a German Jewish in his accented hebrew he told me that he thought they gave them to the Justice Center. I said thank you and hung up. I called the Justice Center and they said they dont know what were talking about. We dont have archives or paper. You know what one of the worst places to be in the world is between me and the formation i need for my research. I didnt think twice. I called him again and the man is 80 what else does he have to do in this world other than answer my phone calls. Hello . Its not the Justice Center. Where is it . Let me think. I think it was in 1948 im pulling my hair at the other end because he doesnt remember, theres no chance in the world that will help me locate these papers. Then another voice, more mature personality says wait. Try to make him talk about that time. Maybe he will recall. I start asking him how those documents came to be in his possession in the first place. Then he told me a story i can relate to because it turns out he was as upset about the research as i was. The story is that in 1965, two years before the sixday war, he wrote a book about arab socialism, found a lot of material about egyptian socialism but not so much about syrian socialism. Syria, wasnt he,. [inaudible] on the 11th of june when israel is rejoicing because he wanted the decisive victory against the Arab Military coalition he thanks about one thing. If you go up the Golan Heights which up to then was part of syria and he reached the regional capital maybe he can locate and there he can find related publications. He hitchhiked his way along the Golan Heights, smoldering tanks and all. He meets some local and they point him out to the local and he tells me i arrived too late because their soldiers are stopping to use the paper as a toilet paper. Someone left and he jammed it into a sack everything he could find and he went back to. [inaudible] there, rummaging through the materials, he saw a headline that interested him. A secret report about the village of our delegation, the syrian delegation to the soviet union in april of 1966. There he found the syrians were telling that there were rival factions in the kremlin. Informal settings, the syrians were told not to provoke israel into more but in oral conversations and corridor conversations they were told to actually it was okay to conduct hawkish foreign policies toward israel. Then he recalled whom he gave the papers. They were at the Tel Aviv University in the archive center. I arrived there a few days later and all those papers have waited there for 3035 years without anyone looking at them. When i finished taking photos with my digital camera, i was looking like a coal miner i was covered in the dust of documents. You want nothing more. After i had those documents i started reading around and i was really surprised at what i discovered about syria at the time. When i was doing the Research Syria was a very boring place, closed society held by the iron grip of the and it turns out in the 50s60s they experience the slowmotion civil war toward society torn my really strong tensions between Rural Farmers from minority and they were extremely poor and they were fighting yes, the rich sunni land owners and industrials living in the big cities and i didnt know all that. Fairly, its a good background to whats happening in syria right now. There were articles that said the syrians. [inaudible] and the other said egypt was no pawn of the soviet union and then headed to own interests in may of 1967. Then i left it at that. A couple of years later i got a tenuretrack position at the Hebrew University which is like the holy grail, some find it in many dont. From day one i was told grants, grants, grants. If you dont get a grant, you wont get tenure. Not getting tenure is almost as bad as death for academics. So, i applied. I applied to two funds and i didnt expect to receive either but i did, i received both. Now, i had to do something with the money so i hired a few Research Assistants which is a true tower of babel polish and german, another translator documents and so forth. I had what social site is called a dataset. I still wasnt sure what i wanted to do with it. Three years later i get the news that ill have a fellowship in one year without you. I love my students but one year without teaching . Thats fantastic. You can get a lot done so i wrote a history of the developing world. I had a year off and then it was june 2014 and i dont know if it happened to you but you wake up from a night sleep and you have this whole complete thought in your head like you thought about it the whole night. My thoughts was that in three years it will be exactly the 50 Year Anniversary to the sixday war. If i start working fast and use the fellowship here to write the book i might make a buck out of it. That looks really promising. So, then the race started. Basically, the race to write the book on time. Then while researching the book, i realized that i wanted to write Something Different from the kind of articles i had produced a couple of years beforehand. Then just after my dissertation and i call it writing from the trenches basically, the Main Driving Force of the essays i wrote then was like this is an interesting document and its interesting because i found this interesting document and the next paragraph is another interesting document. You get the view of the infantry fighting in the trenches. I wanted a book that would give a wider view, the one of a general standing on the hill looking at the battlefield. Yeah, thats the point im starting to tell you about the book, actually wrote in the book. What i figured out after reading a few books written about the war is that all of them focus on the war themselves and those six actionpacked days on the battlefield on the un and moscow and washington and theres not enough that explain why the war happened in the first place. Being in israel, you should be surprised im trying to understand how wars happen but they disrupted my life. In fact, one more is responsible for the fact that i exist. My generation in israel is known as the winter of 1973 generation. What happened in 1973 the war. Lots of young husbands went back from the front and they wanted to deal with the fact that they almost died by creating new life and then when i was eightnine there was the first lebanon war. My stepfather was recruited and he was serving at the front and i remember how we would watch the news every night because the last segment was when they would read was killed in action. Like the vietnam war each day brought a new list of people that died at the front. Then in 1991 there was the first gulf war and this unrelated regional crisis in the gulf and certainly, missiles started raining on israel and i had to see my holocaust surviving grandfather with a gas mask on his head so, im obsessed with question of how war starts. And how wars in general start. Talking specifically about the sixday war and i came to the understanding at least this is my argument, that you should see the war in a global context because even before were starting to deal with what happened on the 13th of may and why he acted the way he did when he received that memo we should think of all the facts that the whole developing world was experiencing a severe economic crisis at the time and all the countries that fought the sixday war were developing countries, some more developed than others. Israel, more than egypt but they were all developing countries. What happens in the mid 60s is basically, the business takes a decade beforehand in the mid 50s everybody lets say in places like the us, in washington, new york, even in moscow, they looked at the developing world like people looked at china until the two years ago or before hand the way that people looked at japan and thought it would rule the world they sought rapid growth and they extrapolated into the future. But what happened was the devel