If Israel Lost the War

If Israel Lost the War is a 1969 alternate history /political controversy book written jointly by Robert Littell , Richard Z.¹ Chesnoff and Edward Klein . The book's Point of divergence is the assumption that it is the Arab air forces which on June 5, 1967 launch a surprise attack and destroy the Israeli Air Force , rather than the other way around as it happened in actual history. Afterwards the Arab armies launch a lighting ground attack and - in an exact mirror image of the actual Six Day War - conquer the entire territory of Israel by June 10, 1967. The US, embroiled in the Vietnam War, takes no action to save Israel, nor does any other country (except for a valiant but futile sending of some planes from the Netherlands). The book is written in a semi-documentary way, with multiple and constantly shifting points of view characters, detailed maps and numerous fictional quotations from the international media. The three writers had the openly proclaimed aim of helping Israel's case in international public opinion, and justifying its act in having been in actual history the one to attack first. This aim is evident in the book's numerous depictions of atrocities committed by the victorious Arab armies, including detailed depictions of the mass rape of Israeli women, the public execution of Moshe Dayan by the Egyptian occupiers of Tel Aviv and the appointment of Nazi war criminals to run the Arab occupiers' secret police. As depicted in the book, the Palestinians get no benefit from the Arab victory and are as a far away as ever from having a state of their own, with Israeli territory being partitioned between Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Nor are the Palestinian refugees allowed to return to their pre-1948 homes despite these being under Arab rule. The book in Hebrew translation was at the time a best seller in Israel itself, and was used for propaganda by its government agencies as well as in the political debate between Right and Left. Journalist and peace activist Uri Avnery at the time published in HaOlam HaZeh weekly an editorial strongly criticising the book, as well as a review in Life magazine . Avnery stated that its starting point was implausible, since even with its air force destroyed Israel would not have been so quickly and totally overwhelmed. Avnery pointed out that in a considerable part of the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, in which Avnery himself participated, it was the Arab side that dominated the air - and still the newly-created Israel won the war. Avnery also criticised the three American writers, stating: "Though their intention is to help Israel's propaganda case, their book might help foster intrasigence and dangrous illusions on the Arab side". Varda Klein wrote: "Such a devastating attack does not come out of the blue. The Israeli Air Force laid meticulous plans years befroe 1967, and its pilots regularly held rigorous exercises to prepare. The Arabs would have had to do the same, to achieve like results.(...) A detailed joint strategic planning by Egypt, Syria and Jordan would have been highly unlikely, given that these regimes were virtually as suspicious and hostile to each other as they were to Israel. It would have been extremely difficult to hide from Israel joint large scale exercises of the Arab air forces. A strategic rapprochement between Egypt and Joerdan would have been impossible to hide, it would have greatly alarmed Israel, and the entire Middle East configuaration would have been different long before June 1967; indeed, such a situation might have impelled Israel into a preemptive strike already in 1966" . Though well-known and often debated in both the US and Israel, the book is by now largely forgotten. In May 2010 Israeli extreme right columnist Haggai Segal published a two-page summary of it in the Makor Rishon newspaper, proposing to his fellow-rightists to get a new edition published as part of their efforts to mobilise Israeli public opinion against the Obama Administration 's Middle East peace plans.²