More on the Six Day War

Doubtless there'll be many retrospecitves this week on the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War , so I'll post links to some of the better ones here.

Lets begin with the articles by David Remnick in the New Yorker and Sandy Tolan in Salon.

Tolan points out that "from the war of 1948 to the 2007 conflict in Gaza, Israel is often miscast as the vulnerable David in a hostile sea of Arab Goliaths". The reality has frequently, if not mostly, been the very reverse of this picture. As Tolan demonstrates, "the archives for the 1967 war, as with the documentary evidence from other Arab-Israeli wars, ... reveal a history far more complex, and far more interesting, than the inflated portrayal of Arabs poised to crush Israel."

Lots of useful information in these two articles, but perhaps most striking of all is this chilling quote in Renwick's piece, from Israel's iconic military and political figure Moshe Dayan. Speaking to Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan, Dayan said of Israel's military expansionism:

"The situation between us is like the complex relationship between a Bedouin man and the young girl he has taken against her wishes. But when their children are born, they will see the man as their father and the woman as their mother. The initial act will mean nothing to them. You, the Palestinians, as a nation, do not want us today, but we will change your attitude by imposing our presence upon you."

Save for Dov Weisglass' interview with Ha'retz on the fraudulant Gaza withdrawal of 2005, I can think of few franker expressions of the Israeli colonial project's ugly, racist malevolance than this from Dayan.