In June 1967, Israel and neighboring Arab countries fought a six-day war. Won by Israel, this war had far-reaching consequences for the Middle East and the world down to the present day. Dr. Michael Oren, who has served as Director of Israel’s Department of Inter-Religious Affairs in the government of the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and as an advisor to the Israeli delegation to the United Nations, has just published a new and authoritative history of both the war and the events leading up to it, entitled Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East. It is based upon heretofore unavailable or unresearched archives in Israel, the former Soviet Union and the U.S. and interviews with participants in the events of 1967 from Jordan, Egypt, Russia, Israel, and the U.S. By careful research, Oren has managed to reconstruct an accurate account of just how this war came about and resolve many long standing questions: in particular, why a war which all the parties, including their superpower allies, wanted to avoid nonetheless came about. The Six-Day War thus provides an especially interesting case of the application of ethics to war and peace: the tension between justice and interest in the calculations of the parties as well as the impact of political and moral rhetoric as a cause of the war and its outcomes.

Such factors and their complicated and tangled dynamics are with us today at a time when we are at war. We invite you to a discussion on Thursday, June 20, from 12-2:30pm, at EPPC, with Michael Oren about the Six-Day War and the light it may shed on the present day problem of war and peace.