The Liberty Incident: The 1967 Israeli Attack on the U.S. Navy Spy Ship (review)

mistaken identity persuasive. Sadly, we cannot expect it to persuade the powerful and persistent “Liberty Lobby” in the U.S., which brushes off every Israeli apology as readily as it embraces every conspiracy theory. Oren notes that after thirty-five years no plausible motive for such an attack has surfaced, and given the Israelis’ cautious and convoluted political-military decision making process (which he so ably documents), it is impossible to disagree with him. Oren somewhat surprisingly lapses into ambiguity at the end of his narrative. He asserts that “Even from the perspective of thirty-five years, the answer to the question ‘Did six days of war truly change the Middle East?’ remains equivocal.” But the record of the past three decades suggests that in occupying Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem the Israelis made a decisive break with the past. They got into colonialism, and opened the door to a settlement movement that has frustrated every attempt to bring peace to the region. The key counterfactual is how the Palestinian community on the West Bank might have evolved had Jordan showed the modicum of restraint that would have stayed the Israelis’ hand in 1967. Given the opportunity, would Palestinians have resigned themselves to becoming citizens of Jordan instead of collectively endorsing “PLO, Inc.?” The answer is beyond the scope of Oren’s book, but he might have posed the question.