It’s fitting that Six Days in June—the documentary film reexamining the 1967 war that was a crucible for today’s Arab-Israeli conflict—should receive clashing reviews from its critics. Some raved about the film’s narrative tension and rhetorical balance; others berated it for what they saw as historical revisionism.

These reviews are based, for the most part, on Six Days’s director’s cut, released to mark the war’s fortieth anniversary this June. Most Americans, however, saw a different Six Days—a version co-produced by PBS affiliate WGBH and aired as a television documentary on PBS stations. The American edition is so distinct from the original that Ilan Ziv, Six Days’s director, tried to remove his name from its credits before the film’s U.S. release.

The original film is “an attempt, in a journalistically responsible way, to explore the stereotypes of the war and give them more nuance,” Ziv says. But in the PBS version, he says, the “revisionist aspect has been eliminated.”

In general, the American edition is more sympathetic to Israel than the other versions of the film. (There are five versions in all: four “international versions”—co-produced by French, Canadian, and Israeli companies, and distributed in those countries and elsewhere—and the U.S. version, co-produced by WGBH and distributed in the U.S. and parts of Canada.) The American version frames Israel as the war’s underdog, a scrappy David reluctantly defending itself against pan-Arabism’s hulking Goliath. The international editions, meanwhile, generally paint a more critical picture of Israel’s role in the war, depicting the nascent country’s attacks on Egypt and Jordan as strategic attempts to win political validation through an exposition of military might.

The American Six Days emphasizes the threat that a Soviet Union-backed Syria posed to Israel; the international versions play down that detail. The international versions’ hard-number reference to...

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