Tom Segev Interview (2007): Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Tom, welcome back to Berkeley.
Thank you.
What led you to write this book, and at this time?
All my books form part of a collective biography of Israel. 1967 is obviously a very, very important and formative, and also very dramatic, year. And so, sooner or later I would do that.
And it's the fortieth anniversary.
And it's the fortieth anniversary, '67, 2007. Yes.
How long did it take you to write the book, and what was going on in Israel as you were writing it?
It took about five years to do the research and the writing, which is a very long time, and as I was sitting at my desk overlooking the hills of Jerusalem, the ugly concrete wall, so-called "security fence," came up on the hills dividing Jerusalem, actually, for the first time since 1967. And there was more terrorism. Once in a while I would hear the ambulances, and so I got the feeling that I'm really writing about the year that started all this, and it wasn't easy to do.
Your subtitle is "The War and the Year that Transformed the Middle East," and this war truly did that.
It's not about the war. We may go into that later -- I actually think that there were three different wars. It's mostly about Israel, because 1967 and the Six Day War is really an Israeli story to me. It's about the society before the war, the people who lived in Israel before the war and after the war. It's not a military history. The year obviously started everything which we experience since. I think that 1967 is the longest year in Israel's history, and it has been lasting, and until today it's not over. Everything which we experienced since has its roots in that year.
You are known as one of the best, if not the best, New Historian, [of] the group called the New Historians of Israel. How does a New Historian approach this problem that you set for yourself?
The New Historians were new in the eighties. We have all become elderly gentlemen by now.
[laughs]
So, it's not really new anymore, but what it consists of is an attempt to get to the documentation which, in many cases, is still closed. In this case, for 1967, much of it is still closed. Israel has a relatively liberal policy of opening archives, not liberal enough for my taste, but more liberal than other countries. But still, for 1967, you need to go up the attics and down the basements of private people. Fortunately, Israeli officials have a very commendable habit which really should be encouraged. They take home secret documents.
[laughs]
And so, Israeli historians are very often measured by their ability to locate the relevant widows. And so, you go to Mrs. Eshkol, who is the prime minister's widow, you go to other widows, and they sometimes have unbelievably important material. This book is based primarily [on] a full record of the government meetings, never before published, the secret conversations between Israel and King Hussein, never before published on the basis or records, conversations between Israelis and Palestinians after the war, and various other things which you can't find in any archive.
The other thing which I did, and which turned out to be really important, was to go to former Israelis, mostly living in this country, and telling them, "Go and look for letters which you got from friends and relatives in 1966, 1967, in Israel." I was able to collect 500 such letters, and they really tell you how Israelis felt, how they lived, what was important to them, and most importantly, how they felt prior to the war. There you can really see the panic and the fears, and I think that they explained a lot. So, this is a source which I am kind of proud of, that I was able to collect that.
I've had the privilege to read the book before this interview. It's a very powerful narrative, and its power lies not just in the official documents and the documents that you described of the people who made the decisions, these letters, but also diaries of the soldiers. There is a narrative of one soldier's diary. Tell us a little about that, because it extends through the whole book, and it is powerful because you're getting the sense of how this soldier and his family felt about this emerging war.
This is a guy called Yoshua Baldin. He comes from a small town called Rishon Letzion, which is really the "Wahoo, Nebraska" of Israel. You know, the real Israel is in Rishon Letzion. He was called up for reserves in the end of May of 1967, when the war was approaching. He was a driver, and so he gets to drive some car, and in the glove compartment of the car (the car was enlisted from somebody else) he finds a little notebook and he starts to write a diary. Fortunately for him, he is at no time in a real fighting front, he's always behind the soldiers. He drives very slowly and he has a lot of time, and he records minute by minute, which is his way of overcoming fear. And some of the official documents match his diary, like he would say, "It's now 7:45 in the morning. I have just seen Israeli planes flying overhead, towards Egypt," and this is when the war began. We know exactly the time, and he writes it down. So, he really writes minute for minute the experiences of a soldier.
The nice thing about this diary is that having so much time, he also records his own reactions and the reactions of his friends to events, both in politics and also in the other fronts as they listen to it on the radio. So, it's really a very, very valuable diary. After the Six Day War, he published this diary but in a very different version. He told me that when he brought it to the publisher in 1967, the publisher told him, "Soldiers don't cry. We can't publish that." And so, he had to do all kinds of changes. But he gave me the original, tiny little notebook, and yes, they do cry. Soldiers do cry.
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