1967 Myths : Pearl Harbour style attack!

clipped from www.washingtonpost.com 1967 Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East By Tom Segev On June 5, 1967 - 40 years ago last week -- the Israelis struck. In an attack lasting a little over an hour, the Israeli air force destroyed more than 250 Egyptian planes, and Israeli ground forces broke through Egyptian lines in Sinai. New Historian who has labored to debunk what he regards as Israel's founding myths, Segev has previously set out to demonstrate Zionist culpability for the deterioration of Arab-Jewish-British relations in the period before Israel's creation and, thereafter, Israel's indifference to the survivors of the Holocaust. 1967, however, aims at overturning what Segev deems the most hallowed of Israeli myths -- namely, that the Six-Day War was a just and existential struggle that Israel, isolated and outgunned, had no choice but to wage.