Today is the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War. Some of you remember it; some of you don't. And some of you weren't even alive. I was a young adult when it occurred, and I felt the tremors hinting that the Jewish state might be destroyed. Or, as the war's hero, Moshe Dayan, put it: the Third Temple might be destroyed. Four decades later, most of the press is cynical. In a certain way, and predictably, the British press is worst. (I suspect that it is subconsciously trying to placate the local Muslims by hitting on Israel, according to the intuition that this would satisfy the jihadists. It won't.) Take the cover story--an editorial--in last week's Economist. Or the pretentious essay by Harvey Morris in this weekend's FT taking as its hero an orthodox Jewish philosopher, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who feared that the state would replace the faith as the core of Judaism. Frankly, I doubt that Morris has ever read more than a few sentences of Leibowitz--if that. But it helps Morris to make his own case, which is that the state has replaced the faith. I know that Morris is the FT's bureau chief. It seems to me, nonetheless, that he still doesn't grasp Israel and its historical willingness to risk everything for peace. And he doesn't grasp the inclination of many Israelis to accept the Palestinian "narrative," as the progressive professoriate now calls it, not as a truth but as a concession to the losers. I myself wouldn't risk everything for peace, and I won't spout a false narrative. And that's because I don't believe that the Palestinians really want peace. But it's not for me to decide. It's for Israel, and the country--its Left especially--is much more suspicious now than before. After all, if you risk everything and you are wrong you lose everything. In any case, I've linked you to the Time magazine cover story 40 years ago. When the peril was real and the anxiety traumatizing. Time makes it very clear: if the Israelis had lost the war, the Temple--here used metaphorically to calm the literalists--might well have been destroyed. That's what the Arabs promised, and that's what they intended. There was no alternative to war ... and no alternative to a smashing victory.