Professor Asher Susser, Ph.D., will return to the Arizona Center for Judaic Studies to give the first lecture of the 2017-18 season, “Fifty Years Since the Six Day War — How the Middle East Has Changed,” on Tuesday, Sept. 5.
The Six Day War of June 1967 was a watershed event in Middle Eastern history. The traumatic defeat of the Arabs by Israel ushered in the end of pan-Arabism and the first real readiness of some key Arab states to make their peace with Israel. Israel has not fought an Arab state since 1973 — over 40 years — and the Palestinians have been left to fend for themselves in their ongoing conflict with the Israelis. In the meantime, says Susser, the decline of the Arabs has been met with the rising regional influence of the non-Arab states of Iran and Turkey, creating an entirely new regional strategic architecture.
Susser is the former Stein Family Professor of Modern Israel Studies at the University of Arizona and a Senior Fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University. He was the director of the Moshe Dayan Center for 12 years and has taught for some 30 years in TAU’s department of Middle Eastern history. His most recent book is “Israel, Jordan and Palestine: The Two-State Imperative” (2012). He also wrote “On Both Banks of the Jordan: A Political Biography of Wasfi al-Tall” (1994) and is the author or editor of eight other books and a monograph on “The Rise of Hamas in Palestine and the Crisis of Secularism in the Arab World”(2010).
The lecture will begin at 4 p.m. at the University of Arizona Hillel Foundation, 1245 East 2nd Street. The event is free; parking will be available at the 2nd Street Garage.
For more information, visit judaic.arizona.edu/
50-years.
