A mystery to be solved. When war broke out in the Middle East in June 1967, I was just finishing a year at the Faculty of Law of Moscow State University. US President Dwight Eisenhower had negotiated a cultural exchange treaty, and I was some of the culture being exchanged. My first source for news of the war was the Communist Party newspaper Pravda. Egypt was the victim of aggression. Israel had invaded for no good reason. Pravda translates as “truth.” Was this the truth? When I returned soon after to the United States, the “truth” was quite different. Egypt had threatened to invade, forcing Israel to protect itself. The disconnect between the Western and Soviet media accounts could not have been greater. After a year in Moscow, I was accustomed to black being white, and white being black, depending on which side of the Cold War was doing the talking. So I was not surprised at the disparity. Pravda was short on detail to back its view, but so too was the Western press. From the information available in the public sphere, there was little basis for choosing one version over the other.

The question of responsibility for the 1967 war remains as controversial today as it was in 1967. I first wrote about it, albeit briefly, in 1990, in a book titled Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice. I argued – in opposition to most expert opinion – that Israel's action in the war was not justifiable as self-defense. As of 1990, publicly available information about the genesis of the war was hardly greater than it had been in 1967. It was still too close to the event for governments to open their store of cable traffic and intelligence analyses.