John Quigley is deeply disturbed by the conventional perspective on the cause of the 1967 Arab–Israeli War. Using archival documents, memoirs, and previous historical scholarship, he systematically debunks the notion that an Egyptian attack on Israel was imminent or that Israel's immediate survival was in doubt. Instead, Israel chose to launch the war.

The Six-Day War and Israeli Self-Defense is not the first book to successfully push back against the official Israeli explanation for what happened in 1967, but Quigley's aim is to bring this revisionist history in conversation with legal scholars who have judged the international legal context and implications of Egypt's buildup and Israel's attack. With a thorough command of the material, he explains that in myriad ways international law does not support Israeli positions. Quigley's account is recommended reading not only for legal scholars but also for historians and all those interested in the politics of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Legal scholars' treatment of 1967 demonstrates Quigley's point that legal studies are usually focused on high theory at the expense of facts, a critique he notes has on occasion been offered from inside the legal world (p. 127). Such an imbalance could create problems in any situation, but especially one like the 1967 war where the facts we have at our disposal have changed significantly. Quigley details how over time, additional factual information undermines several key official Israeli claims about the war, for example, that Israel responded to an actual or even imminent Egyptian attack. For example, Yitzhak Rabin, Israel's military chief of staff in 1967 and later twice prime minister, said, “I do not believe that Nasser wanted war.” The Egyptian military mobilization in Sinai, Rabin explained, “would not have been enough to unleash an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it” (p. 128; also p. 65). Theory may be disconnected from reality from the start—and that in and of itself is a problem for legal scholars—but much more so here where even the minimal reality that the theorists thought they knew is no longer historians' reality.

However, the marriage of the 1967 war and a legal perspective also raises two unintended tensions in the book. First, Egypt and Israel—if not additional parties as well—are responsible for what happened. There is a lot of blame to go around. To the extent that legal scholars want a definitive judgment about blame or fault, the 1967 war does not lend itself to that kind of clarity, as I will suggest below with regard to designating the starting point of the war.

Second, Quigley pins the notion of anticipatory self-defense, preventive war, and preemptive war squarely on Israel's shoulders. In his eyes, Israel's actions in 1967 are the foundation of the doctrine (p. 149ff). I am left wondering about an earlier example, the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Moreover, stepping out of a legal framework, I have to think states would have created the anticipatory self-defense doctrine to match their perceived national security needs (such as launching wars) even if the 1967 war had never happened. Implying that the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 was contingent upon Israel's attack in 1967 overstates the importance of Israel's public rationales for 1967. The 1967 war was an important development, but the idea of anticipatory self-defense is not uniquely Israeli and could exist in the absence of Israeli innovation.

Although the book is not organized around presenting the best explanation for the Israeli attack (as opposed to rejecting the conventional Israeli explanation), Quigley presents much evidence that does explain why Israel attacked: Egypt had undone the military-strategic status quo by asking UN peacekeepers to leave Sinai, mobilizing additional military units in Sinai, and calling for limiting shipping to Israel's southern port, Eilat, through the Straits of Tiran. As a result, Israel saw war as the best means to return to the status quo that it had established with the 1956 Suez War and that had been in place for a decade. Moreover, Israel wanted to make sure that Egypt and other Arab actors did not come away viewing the 1967 crisis as a victory and therefore a recipe for continued pressure on Israel. Israel wanted to reestablish Israeli deterrence, the Arab fear that pressing Israel for concessions would be so costly that it was not even worth trying. Israel worried that letting Nasir get away with a cheap victory in May–June 1967 would spur Egypt or other Arabs to demand more and more (pp. 23, 29, 129–30).

The Israeli belief that initiating war was better than a slippery descent toward further and deeper concessions ultimately challenging Israeli survival was reinforced by bellicose Arab rhetoric, something Quigley mentions but, I think, gives insufficient weight. Quigley, quoting Dean Rusk among others, suggests aggressive Arab rhetoric did not match Egypt's defensive military posture in Sinai (p. 60). A fair point, but those words did affect the Israeli psyche and were often mentioned by participants and later scholars such as Abba Eban. They buttressed the notion that even if Egypt was in a defensive crouch now, it had made gains, it knew it (p. 45), and it would ask for more in the coming months or years. Egyptian, Syrian, and Palestinian words were aggressive and should not, Israel argued, be easily dismissed based on current Arab actions in the field.

The idea of competing narratives is quite powerful in Quigley's work. It is not my claim that he intended to highlight multiple narratives but rather that in reviewing all the events, it becomes clear that many stories can be told about 1967, some better than others. The single most important decision, I think, lies with when to date the start of the 1967 war: with the establishment of the state of Israel (p. 64)? With the Palestinian raids or Israel's attack on Samu (p. 124)? With the new regime in Syria in 1966? With the April 1967 Israeli–Syrian dogfight (pp. 86, 124)? With Israel's bellicose rhetoric towards Syria in May 1967? With the Soviet Union's false warning of an Israeli troop concentration in the north along its border with Syria? Or with Egypt's mobilization, mishandling of the UN peacekeepers, or closure of the Straits of Tiran? None of these possibilities are wrong per se. Each one allows the user to frame the cause of the war—to assign blame—in a different way. Is Egypt, Israel, the Palestinian movements, the Soviet Union, the United States, or Syria to blame? You can pick a starting point that gives you a foundation on which to make that case.

In strategic, not legal, terms, Israel caught Egypt overplaying its hand. Nasir may have thought he could push back against the post-Suez War status quo without incurring losses. It was, as Quigley notes, a high-risk strategy (p. 28). At one point, in late May and early June 1967, as all the major powers were pushing for negotiated deescalation, Egypt may have thought it would emerge unscathed. But precisely because Israeli leaders would not accept Egyptian gains in the Arab–Israeli balance, Egypt ended up paying a steep price.