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Battlefield Detectives: The Six-Day War

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If you want to know how Israel transformed itself from a tiny nation on the knife-edge of survival into a regional superpower, this is a DVD you must add to your collection.

The Six Day War is one of the most well known conflicts to take place in the Middle East and for good reason. The Israeli surprise attack against its Arab neighbors in June of 1967 was the largest since Operation Barbarossa(Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in WWII) and was far more successful. Israeli warplanes annihilated most of the Arab air forces aircraft on the ground in a series of well coordinated strikes against the Arab airbases; starting with Egypt and then moving on to Jordan and Syria, and even a long-range strike against H-3 airfield in Iraq. With their air cover gone, the Arab armies became sitting ducks for the Israeli blitzkrieg tactics that hit them. The Israelis captured the Sinai peninsula, the West Bank of the Jordan River, the Golan Heights, and the Gaza Strip; an area five times the size of their own country.

The resounding Israeli victory in the Six Day War tends to be marred by far-left propaganda that portrays it as an unprovoked act of Zionist aggression, despite the Arab brinkmanship that led up to the war and Egyptian President Nasser's hateful rhetoric, all of which is mentioned in this film. Whether the Arabs intended to invade Israel in 1967 can be opened to debate, after all, the Egyptian armed forces were bogged down in a nasty civil war in Yemen at the time(a fact not mentioned in the film). If not though, why the provocations? and if not in '67 they would have eventually. What is clear is that the Arab forces were woefully unprepared for war; the Egyptian Air Force, the largest Arab air arm and the main Israeli target, had more Soviet-built warplanes than it had qualified pilots to fly them, another fact not mentioned in the film; which seems to deal more with the nuts and bolts of Israel's victory rather than the Arabs' catastrophic blunders. The film should have also mentioned more about the contributions Defense Minister Moshe Dayan made to the Israeli victory, which were immense.