A comprehensive examination of the year in which everything changed in the Middle East. Segev, one of Israel's most acclaimed historians, examines a wide range of new materials-letters and diaries, memos and military records-to render, in minute detail, the atmosphere, the leading players, the political alignments and considerations-in short, the full spectrum of that fateful time. Could war have been averted? Was Israel's lightning conquest a Pyrrhic vistory? Segev raises provocative questions, and challenges his readers at every turn to imagine a different state of affairs.