Bride and the Dowry

The untold story of Israel’s diplomatic maneuvering in the wake of the Six Day War, which frustrated a possible peace settlement Israel’s victory in the June 1967 Six Day War provided a unique opportunity for resolving the decades-old Arab-Zionist conflict. Having seized the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights, Israel for the first time in its history had something concrete to offer its Arab neighbors: it could trade land for peace. Yet the political deadlock persisted after the guns fell silent. This book asks why.Avi Raz places Israel’s conduct under an uncompromising lens. His penetrating book examines the critical two years following the June war and substantially revises our understanding of how and why Israeli-Arab secret contacts came to naught. Mining newly declassified records in Israeli, American, British, and United Nations archives, as well as private papers of individual participants, Raz dispels the myth of overall Arab intransigence and arrives at new and unexpected conclusions. In short, he concludes that Israel’s postwar diplomacy was deliberately ineffective because its leaders preferred land over peace with its neighbors. The book throws a great deal of light not only on the post-1967 period but also on the problems and pitfalls of peacemaking in the Middle East today.

"[Raz's] conclusions may be radical, but his case is set out with the utmost scruple, and in damning detail."—Michael Kerrigan, The Scotsman, "Avi Raz's excellent work is an essay on the politics of immobilism and faits accomplis of Israel's leaders in the wake of the 1967 war. This is an indispensable study for our understanding of how and why Israel got trapped in the tragic connundrum of a continuous occupation of Palestinian lands instead of using its military supremacy to change the nature of its relations with the Arab world." —Shlomo Ben-Ami, former foreign minister of Israel; Vice President, Toledo International Centre for Peace (CITpax), and author of Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy, "This book is a milestone in scholarship on Israel’s foreign policy. Avi Raz uses the full panoply of primary sources in all the relevant languages to brilliantly illuminating effect. He also succeeds in weaving together his wide-ranging archival trawling into a fascinating narrative. And he argues compellingly that in the aftermath of the June 1967 War, Israel’s leaders preferred territorial expansion to peace with their Arab neighbours."—Avi Shlaim, author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World and Lion of Jordan: King Hussein's Life in War and Peace

Avi Raz is a member of the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford, research associate at Oxford’s Centre of International Studies, and research fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, specializing in the Arab-Israeli conflict. He was formerly a journalist at a leading Israeli daily, where his assignments abroad included bureau chief in New York and Moscow. He lives in Oxford, UK.