Forty-seven years ago this spring, the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser ordered United Nations peacekeepers out of Sinai. His decision set off the chain of events leading to Israel’s pre-emptive strike on Cairo’s air force and its lightning victory over Egypt, Syria and Jordan in the Six-Day War.
Back in those anxious weeks of 1967, however, the mood in Israel was anything but assured. The prevailing mindset, as the historian and diplomat Michael Oren has written, was one torn between faith in the nation’s military preparation and despair at the multitude of enemies. That duality took the form of an imaginary character, “Shimshon ha-nebbish,” Samson the nebbish, strongman and weakling all at once.
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