If the point is who fired first on the first day of the 6 day war, it was indeed Israel - if the point is who did the first act of war, it is not Israel.
To use the term "strike first" implies the incorrect idea that Israel started the war - so I object to its use. But you are correct that Israel did literally fire first on the first day of the 6 day war.
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One of Carters weirder themes is that secular Jews - the ones that want a 2 state solution - are not good Jews, but religious Jews that want all the land of the Bible are grabbing land that while mentioned in the Bible as part of the land of the Jews is not really land that is part of the "Hebrew Scriptures" - someone must explain the reasoning to me someday....:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110009438A Religious Problem
Jimmy Carter's book: An Israeli view.
BY MICHAEL B. OREN
Tuesday, December 26, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
Several prominent scholars have taken issue with Jimmy Carter's book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," cataloging its historical inaccuracies and lamenting its lack of balance. The journalist Jeffrey Goldberg also critiqued the book's theological purpose, which, he asserted, was to "convince American Evangelicals to reconsider their support for Israel."
Mr. Carter indeed seems to have a religious problem with the Jewish state. His book bewails the fact that Israel is not the reincarnation of ancient Judea but a modern, largely temporal democracy. "I had long taught lessons from the Hebrew Scriptures," he recalls telling Prime Minister Golda Meir during his first tour through the country. "A common historical pattern was that Israel was punished whenever the leaders turned away from devout worship of God. I asked if she was concerned about the secular nature of the Labor government."
He complains about the fact that the kibbutz synagogue he enters is nearly empty on the Sabbath and that the Bibles presented to Israeli soldiers "was one of the few indications of a religious commitment that I observed during our visit." But he also reproves contemporary Israelis for allegedly mistreating the Samaritans--"the same complaint heard by Jesus almost two thousand years earlier"--and for pilfering water from the Jordan River, "where . . . Jesus had been baptized by John the Baptist."
Disturbed by secular Laborites, he is further unnerved by religiously minded Israelis who seek to fulfill the biblical injunction to settle the entire Land of Israel. There are "two Israels," Mr. Carter concludes, one which embodies the "the ancient culture of the Jewish people, defined by the Hebrew Scriptures," and the other in "the occupied Palestinian territories," which refuses to "respect the basic human rights of the citizens."
Whether in its secular and/or observant manifestations, Israel clearly discomfits Mr. Carter, a man who, even as president, considered himself in "full-time Christian service." Yet, in revealing his unease with the idea of Jewish statehood, Mr. Carter sets himself apart from many U.S. presidents before and after him, as well as from nearly 400 years of American Christian thought.
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here we discuss the Arab acts of war that forced the war - and indeed note that Israel hit first on the first day of the 6 day war.
http://www.amazon.com/Six-Days-War-Making-Middle/dp/0195151747Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Hardcover)
by Michael B. Oren
By contrast, Oren convincingly establishes in an often engrossing narrative the reactive, contingent nature of Israeli policy during both the crisis preceding the conflict and the war itself. As Prime Minister Levi Eshkol held the Israeli Defense Forces in check that May, Operation Dawn, an Egyptian plan for a preemptive strike against Israel, came within hours of implementation. It was canceled only because Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser feared it had been compromised. Israel's decision to seek its own security in arms was finally triggered, Oren shows, by Jordan's late accession to the hostile coalition dominated by Egypt and Syria. Geographically, the West Bank, then under Jordanian rule and occupation, cut Israel nearly in half.
While Oren also recounts some necessary historical context for understanding the war's catalysts and discussing its aftermath, he primarily focuses on the pivotal six days of conflict, dedicating a full chapter for each day. Predictably, the most controversial information is his new findings on an Egyptian top-secret plan that came very close to eradicating Israel's army and nuclear power plant.
Oren describes the agony of Eskhol and the Israeli government in deciding how to attack preemptively without alienating the United States. In the famous meeting between Abba Eban and President Johnson, Johnson practically urged Israel to absorb a first strike. The execrable Charles De Gaulle did overtly demand this.
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This is a further discussion of the above:
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w060717&s=oren071706by Michael B. Oren
Nasser exploited a spurious Soviet report of Israeli war plans to evict U.N. peacekeepers. He closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, concentrated 100,000 of his troops along the Israeli border, and forged anti-Israeli pacts with Syria and Jordan
And just as Israel's failure to punish the patron of terror in 1967 ultimately triggered a far greater crisis, so too today, by hesitating to retaliate against Syria, Israel risks turning what began as a border skirmish into a potentially more devastating confrontation. Israel may hammer Lebanon into submission and it may deal Hezbollah a crushing blow, but as long as Syria remains hors de combat there is no way that Israel can effect a permanent change in Lebanon's political labyrinth and ensure an enduring ceasefire in the north. On the contrary, convinced that Israel is unwilling to confront them, the Syrians may continue to escalate tensions,
Paradoxically, Israel has been attacked from the two territories from which it unilaterally withdrew with the approval of much of the international community. Since the pullout of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon in May 2000, Hezbollah terrorists have periodically fired rockets at civilian targets in Israel and ambushed soldiers across the U.N.-recognized border. Since the withdrawal from Gaza last year, Hamas and other Palestinian groups have fired more than 1,000 rockets into Israeli territory and have repeatedly attempted to conduct terrorist raids across the border.
Israel refrained from large-scale military reprisals for this aggression, confident of having won international goodwill through its withdrawals and fearful of being dragged back into the Lebanese and Gazan morasses. But Israelis have learned that unprovoked violence against them raises little outcry in the world and that failure to react to isolated acts of terror invites unremitting terror. Today a united Hezbollah-Hamas axis has emerged, financed and trained by Syria and Iran, with the goal of destabilizing Israel and frustrating its efforts to disengage from the conflict. In spite of the perils that this front poses to Israel, and the ethical dilemmas that fighting it raises, Israel can transform the situation into one that promotes both domestic and regional stability.
In countering Hamas and Hezbollah, Israel has little choice but to strike at those who authorize the attacks: the heads of those organizations. Both Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza and Hasan Nasrallah in Lebanon appear indifferent to their own people's safety. For propaganda purposes, they order rocket crews to operate in densely populated areas so that Israeli retaliation will inflict the maximum number of civilian casualties. But these leaders remain extremely reluctant to pay for terror with their own lives, a fact that Israel discovered when its policy of targeted assassinations compelled Hamas to agree to a cease-fire.
By contrast, punishing the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples collectively, as Israel has been doing, only strengthens their support for terror while creating painful ethical problems for Israelis. And negotiating with the terrorists for their hostages' release merely encourages them to kidnap more Israelis. Ultimately, Israel has no alternative other than convincing these leaders that terror incurs a personal cost.
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w060717&s=oren071706=============================================
And a fellow finds our source - who I find very truthful - to perhaps have a blind spot or two where he is asserting that which can both not be proven and which - per Mr Pasko - is not true.
http://web.israelinsider.com/views/4434.htmTell the truth, Michael Oren (as to Jews valuing Arafat as a reason to fight and take land and therefore they morned his death)
By Ariel Natan Pasko November 22, 2004
Every once in a while, I read an op-ed piece and say to myself, "Wait a second, that's not true." I just read such a piece in the Jerusalem Post; "Neither rejoice, nor lament" by Michael B. Oren, the best-selling author of "Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East," (OUP 2002). A longer version of this article ran on November 14, 2004, entitled "Arafat Without Tears," in the Washington Post.
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