Ginor Remez

Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez

Foxbats over Dimona: The Soviets' Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War
An interactive discussion series "Memory and History"

Thursday, October 29, 6:30 PM

This groundbreaking history of the Six-Day War in 1967 radically changes our understanding of that conflict, casting it as a crucial arena of Cold War intrigue that has shaped the Middle East to this day. The authors, award-winning Israeli journalists and historians, are research fellows of the Truman Institute at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. They investigated newly available sources from the former Soviet Union, cross-checked them against Israeli and Western sources, and arrived at fresh and startling conclusions. 

Contrary to previous interpretations, Ginor and Remez's book shows that the war was the result of a joint Soviet-Arab gambit to provoke Israel into a preemptive attack. The authors reveal how the Soviets received a secret Israeli message indicating that Israel, despite its official ambiguity, was about to acquire nuclear weapons. Determined to destroy Israel's nuclear program before it could produce an atomic bomb, the Soviets began preparing for war - well before Moscow accused Israel of offensive intent, the overt trigger of the crisis.

Ginor and Remez's startling account details how the Soviet-Arab onslaught was to be unleashed once Israel had been drawn into action and was branded as the aggressor. The Soviets had submarine-based nuclear missiles poised for use against Israel in case it already possessed and tried to use an atomic device, and the USSR prepared and actually began a marine landing on Israel's shores backed by strategic bombers and fighter squadrons. They sent their most advanced, still-secret aircraft, the MiG-25 Foxbat, on provocative sorties over Israel's Dimona nuclear complex to prepare the planned attack on it, and to scare Israel into making the first strike. It was only the unpredicted devastation of Israel's response that narrowly thwarted the Soviet design.

Published by Yale University Press, 2007
Winner of the Silver Medal,Washington Institute for Near East Policy Book Prize, 2008