southern frontier, but also from the much closer and more exposed Jordanian border. (I can see the Jordanian frontier easily with the naked eye from the window of my apartment on the seashore of Tel Aviv. It is within easy artillery range.) The news that King Hussein had allied himself with his arch-enemy Nasser, putting his army under Egyptian command and agreeing to allow other Arab armies to join his on the Israeli front, meant only one thing to the Israelis: that they must hit immediately and destroy the Egyptian army before anyone had time to move into Jordan.
The next day, under immense public pressure, General Moshe Dayan was brought into the government and appointed Minister of Defense. The government was enlarged to include all major parties. Only 12 out of 120 members of the Knesset, including myself, were left out of the government coalition. Bringing in Dayan, a man identified with the most extreme anti-Arab attitude, meant of course that the government had decided the attack must be started immediately. While Nasser sat back under the illusion that his latest maneuvers had relieved the tension, final adjustments in the Israeli war plan were made. The army was ready to strike.
On assuming his new post, Dayan said, alluding to the enmity between him and Eshkol, "It took 80,000 Egyptian soldiers to put me here." It was literally true. Nasser, by a series of miscalculations, had succeeded in pushing Israel into a war he did not want, and which he could not win.
Yet, reviewing Nasser's actions during this crisis, one is struck by the inevitability of everything he did, as well as the inevitability of the Israeli reaction-because all of this had happened before, time and again, since the beginning of the century. Viewed as a story by itself, the events leading up to this war, in which tens of thousands of Arabs and seven hundred Israelis perished, may sound ludicrous. But viewed as just another chapter in the his¬