Great post by Mitchell Plitnick on the birth and growth of the special relationship, which is rooted in U.S. “domestic” politics, i.e., the lobby. The post echoes what David J. Green says in Taking Sides (1984): that everything changed with Johnson. Nuclear policy changed overnight. (And so I wonder: Does Robert Caro say anything about this in his new bio of Johnson? I bet not.) Boldface is mine.
Today, Israelis’ greatest fear is not Iran, international isolation, the Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions Movement, or the Palestinians. Their greatest fear is loss of US support. Nothing else comes close.
That is a level of dependence that is unhealthy for any country. But it is also why Israelis have confidence that it will meet other threats, including growing global anger over an occupation that is “celebrating” its 45th birthday today.
The US has shielded Israel from the consequences of its actions, even when those actions — such as settlement expansion, and intransigence on negotiations — contravene US policies or interests. It does this because Israel is a close ally, yes, but also because Israel is a domestic, rather than a foreign policy, issue in American politics.
The result is that Israel is in a unique position. It can act as it sees fit, and the world’s only superpower will make sure that the UN Security Council takes no action in response. The US will also work to ensure that Europe, which is the main trading partner for most Israeli industries, does nothing more than cluck its tongue.
There are many reasons why Israel has continued to be in conflict every day of its existence. And, because of the nature of the conversation about Israel, one is constrained to point out that many of those reasons are not rooted in Israel’s policies and actions, but in those of its enemies.
But the special relationship with the United States is perhaps the biggest reason.
I have argued often that resolution of Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians and the Arab world faces a major obstacle in that Israel does not have sufficient motivation to make concessions. Well, the reason that Israel has so little motivation is that the US, due to the special relationship, shields it from the consequences of its actions.
Has that been helpful for Israel? In 1967, Lyndon Johnson believed he was helping Israel by unilaterally shifting US policy from one that would have required Israel to withdraw from the land it conquered to one that conditioned that withdrawal on a comprehensive peace.
That seemed like a good idea at the time, but the result was a 45-year long occupation, and another war, in 1973. It resulted in Israel, which had finally lifted martial law over its own Arab citizens, now holding millions of Arabs without basic rights for decades. It put Israel on the road to becoming a global pariah.
“one is constrained to point out that many of those reasons are not rooted in Israel’s policies and actions, but in those of its enemies.”
Reading that here, I almost had a heart attack.
BTW, I find it interesting that almost as soon as Israel got rid of martial law for the Israeli Arabs, the Arab countries around it attacked.
“BTW, I find it interesting that almost as soon as Israel got rid of martial law for the Israeli Arabs, the Arab countries around it attacked.”
That’s a lie, Fredo. The Jews lifted martial law from the Palestinians (note the correct name, not the zio-slur you used) in 1966. The israelis attacked Egypt and Syria in a Pearl-Harbor style sneak attack in 1967. The Arab states did continue the fight in 1973, but that had nothing to do with the results of the israeli-started war in 1967.
The analogy to Pearl Harbor fails because on December 7, 1941 America wasn’t blockading a Japanese port. And didn’t have over 100,000 troops massed on the borders of Japan. And hadn’t declared its intentions to attack Japan. Well, I guess the analogy just fails completely.
‘Interestingly’, Miko Peled, the son of General Matti Peled, just published an op-ed in the LATimes about the 1967 War.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-peled-israel-palestine–six-day-war-20120606,0,3821348.story
Well, he comes by his anti-Israel propaganda honestly. His dad’s been spreading that bull around for years. By necessity, invading a country requires that you put your troops near its border. If the Arabs had won, it would have been hailed as a brilliant move. As it was, Nasser launched his plans before he was ready.
Miko Peled (Israeli General Matti Peled’s son) currently has an op-ed in the LA Times which – along with all the other statements by Israel’s leaders in 1967 – completely discredits any hasbara about 1967 being a defensive war by Israel.
Many believe now, as they believed then, that Israel was forced to initiate a preemptive strike in 1967 because it faced an existential threat from Arab armies that were ready — and intending — to destroy it. As it happens, my father, Gen. Matti Peled, who was the Israel Defense Forces’ chief of logistics at the time, was one of the few who knew that was not so. In an article published six years later in the Israeli newspaper Maariv, he wrote of Egypt’s president, who commanded the biggest of the Arab armies: “I was surprised that Nasser decided to place his troops so close to our border because this allowed us to strike and destroy them at any time we wished to do so, and there was not a single knowledgeable person who did not see that. From a military standpoint, it was not the IDF that was in danger when the Egyptian army amassed troops on the Israeli border, but the Egyptian army.” In interviews over the years, other generals who served at that time confirmed this, including Ariel Sharon and Ezer Weitzman.
In 1967, as today, the two power centers in Israel were the IDF high command and the Cabinet. On June 2, 1967, the two groups met at IDF headquarters. The military hosts greeted the generally cautious and dovish prime minister, Levi Eshkol, with such a level of belligerence that the meeting was later commonly called “the Generals’ Coup.”
The transcripts of that meeting, which I found in the Israeli army archives, reveal that the generals made it clear to Eshkol that the Egyptians would need 18 months to two years before they would be ready for a full-scale war, and therefore this was the time for a preemptive strike. My father told Eshkol: “Nasser is advancing an ill-prepared army because he is counting on the Cabinet being hesitant. Your hesitation is working in his advantage.” The prime minister parried this criticism, saying, “The Cabinet must also think of the wives and mothers who will become bereaved.”
Throughout the meeting, there was no mention of a threat but rather of an “opportunity” that was there, to be seized.
Are you disputing the meeting transcript Fredblogs?
h/t to Antony Loewenstein who picked up the LA Times article on his site.
Oh tree, snap!
Your comment on the LA Times piece was approved while I wrote mine.
No sweat, Sumud. Fred could use the repetition, being a slo-o-o-w learner and all. Did you see my link to Ilan Pappe’s research about the Shakham Plan?
link to levantinecenter.org
FREDBLOGS- “The analogy to Pearl Harbor fails….”
In a curious, perverse way, you are correct. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was in retaliation for the US/British embargo on oil and other strategic commodities for Japan, which was, in effect, economic warfare. The Israeli assault on the Arabs was a totally unjustified war of choice to acquire more territory for Eratz Yishrael. As an aside, “sneak attack” is a PR term for surprise attack which, in fact, was not much of a surprise under the circumstances. Like 911, it was a pretext for a war strongly supported by the elites.
His dad’s been spreading that bull around for years.
His Dad was a General in the IDF and in on the planning of the 1967 Israeli attack on Egypt. He had no reason to lie, and nor did any of the other Israeli politicians and generals who have said the same thing over the years. But somehow you know that they all must be lying because it doesn’t fit your little dream word.
By necessity, invading a country requires that you put your troops near its border.
Gee, I guess we didn’t invade Iraq then, since we didn’t put are troops near its border before we invaded. I even bet that Iraq put its troops on its border before we invaded. That must mean, in Fred bizarro land, that Iraq invaded us.
“advancing an ill prepared army, because he is counting on the cabinet being hesitant” sounds to me like they thought he was expecting to get in the first shot, not that they thought he wouldn’t attack.
I was originally going to say: “No, it was just freezing Japanese assets and embargoing oil and virtually all other important goods.”
But then I remembered something, spurred by your clumsy allusion to the closing of the Straits of Tiran: The US did, in fact, close the Panama canal to Japanese shipping.
The US had also moved military forces into a threatening position – what do you think Pearl Harbor was, a yacht club? Because your ignorance likely extends to military matters as well as to history, you probably don’t think of battleships and carriers as the equivalent of “troops”, I guess, and are fixated on land borders.
And finally, Roosevelt had made it clear by 1940 at the latest that he considered Japan, as well as Germany, an enemy and was already giving substantial material aid to China, which Japan was actively at war with at the time – this actually goes beyond the purely rhetorical threats against Israel pre-1967, which by the Israeli military’s own admission, were not backed up by an actual military strategy.
It’s funny. In your ignorance, you thought you could show the flaws of the analogy, but all you did was shine a giant spotlight on how apt it actually is.
The problem with the peace process paradigm is that outsiders believed it and bought into it. I have been doing media work in Ireland for over a decade on this and every time I am interviewed the questioner asks “What is the progress report vis a vis the Palestinian state” . I don’t think ordinary Irish people expected Israel to act in such bad faith. They expected something different. And I guess so do most Europeans as well as everyone outside the OECD. And they aren’t going to buy the BS about the Shoah justifying this.
“Well, he comes by his anti-Israel propaganda honestly. His dad’s been spreading that bull around for years.”
Yeah, and it just happens to coincide with pretty much everything that all of the top people, like Moise Dayan and Abba Eban said decades ago about the offensive nature of israel’s actions in 1967.
But let’s believe a koolaid-drinking hasbarist like you, who has a fantasy image of the Jewish wonderland in his head to defend, rather than the people who were actually there…
“By necessity, invading a country requires that you put your troops near its border.”
Jeez, Fredo, you failed logic I see. I understand this is elementary-school logic, so I’ll try to explain it with small words: Just because one can’t invade another country without moving troops to the border does not mean that moving troops to the border means that there is an intent to invade.
Again Fredblogs – are you disputing the meeting transcript which Miko Peled talks about?
There’s much more to this than just his father’s opinion (though Peled Sr. is quoted below):
Wikipedia / Origins of the Six-Day War / Removal of U.N. peacekeepers from Egypt
No tree I hadn’t seen it yet, thanks.
Pappe is in the zone!
That’s the first time I’ve actually heard of the Shakham Plan, sounds very believable. Haven’t watched it yet but Pappe’s talk referenced in the article (“The False Paradigm of Parity and Partition: Revisiting 1967″) is up on YT in two parts. Part 1:
link to youtube.com
Also I see he has a new book out soon, ‘The Bureaucracy of Evil: The History of the Israeli Occupation’:
link to amazon.com
He certainly doesn’t mince words with his titles! I wonder if Shakham Plan details will be in there…
koshiro, wrt ‘material aid’ to china, we had troops in china in a mercenary capacity before we formally entered the war. the flying tigers were already there.
Apologists for Hitler now argue that the fact that so many Soviet troops were at or near the border when Germany attacked on June 22, 1941 shows that a Soviet attack on Germany was imminent, and was only prevented by the German preemptive attack.
Same argument, no?
There certainly were a lot of Soviet military forces near the border. That’s how so many of them were captured or killed in the opening days of Operation Barbarossa.
Not just Pearl Harbor. FDR had also moved a lot of aircraft to the Philippines in the weeks before Pearl Harbor. (Historians still don’t understand why MacArthur allowed those planes to be destroyed on the ground by the Japanese hours after the Pearl Harbor attack.)
“America wasn’t blockading a Japanese port.”
No, but so what? Egypt was legally engaging in a blockade against a state which had invaded it a few years earlier. (Or is it only legal in your mind when Jews blockade Arabs?)
The Panama canal is not the sole waterway into a Japanese port. Pearl Harbor is 3000 miles from Japan. If the Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian armies had been 1/3rd that distance away, they would have been outside their own countries on the other side.
Hitler and Stalin were allies at the time. In contrast, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria had declared their intention to destroy Israel before the 6-day war.
Oops, 4000 miles.
The Philippines are 2000 miles from Japan. Not on the border.
Embargo, not blockade. We refused to sell to them. We didn’t stop others from selling to them. An embargo is not an act of war, a blockade is an act of war.
Dishonest quote. Since it wasn’t the 2 divisions in the Sinai on May 15th that was the indicator of war, but the 7 divisions he had there on June 5th. Rabin was probably saying that three weeks before the war, he didn’t think Nasser wanted war, and then he realized Nasser did once he moved basically his entire military to the border of Israel. “All was quiet in Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7th, 1941, until the Japanese bombed the place”. Then omit everything from “until” on and you have yourself a quote like your Rabin quote. Oh, as for the blockade, that is an act of war in and of itself.
“advancing an ill prepared army, because he is counting on the cabinet being hesitant” sounds to me like they thought he was expecting to get in the first shot, not that they thought he wouldn’t attack.
Only if you are ignorant of the history, ignore all the Israeli quotes, and are desperate to excuse everything Israel does. Now who does that sound like???
Nasser had done the same thing in 1960; put his troops on the Egyptian side of the border as a show of force after Israel threatened to attack Syria in the aftermath of Israeli-Syrian border skirmishes. Israel didn’t attack then. Neither did Egypt. End of the Rotem crisis. What was the difference? Ben-Gurion was in charge in 1960, and he didn’t want war. As General Peled noted, in 1967 Ben Gurion was no longer in charge, Eshkol was Prime Minister and he was bullied by the “Generals Coup” into attacking because it was an “opportunity” to gain territory it wanted.
link to en.wikipedia.org
link to jstor.org
Interestingly, Ben Gurion, who was against invading and occupying all of the West Bank, stepped down in 1963, which is the year that Israel began formulating the Shakham Plan for the total occupation of the West Bank.
“The Panama canal is not the sole waterway into a Japanese port. ”
So what? Let the Israeli shipping go around the horn and through the Med.
Fredblogs you are being ridiculous.
You don’t know better that Rabin, Begin, Peled and others quoted above.
Go and have a think about why a whole lot of your peers, countrymen & -women and co-religionists are lying to you about 1967. It’s called hasbara and you don’t seem to get that it is directed as much at those inside as outside Israel.
” a blockade is an act of war.”
And there was no blockade in 1967. There was a refusal to allow innocent passage through its territory to an enemy state.
When the israelis let the Palestinians free passage between the West Bank and Gaza, fully unimpeded in any way, then maybe we can reconsider whether the Egyptians had to let the enemy cross it’s territory.
“go around the horn”
N.B.: I used this term euphamistically, thinking of the baseball term. Upon reflection, I probably should not have, as the euphamism is a sailing reference and references sailing around Cape Horn, South America. That might cause confusion, as I meant it to indicate sailing around the southern tip of Africa.
Seems like a pretty good analogy to me: a criminally aggressive, militarist fascist nation Japan/Israel, pre-emptively attacks a militarily capable, disapproving neighbor state in an effort to neutralize that states ability to defend against and bring to justice the criminal aggressor state.
The truth, what a concept!
Since I see people are citing documents from the Israeli archives on this thread, might anyone have any links to the actual documents themselves? Has anyone here seen them? I assume they’re in Hebrew, but maybe someone has an English translation?
I ask because it’s the easiest thing to say “there’s a document that says…”, but it’s common practice, in such a case, to supply a footnote to the document itself so as to enable other people to evaluate if the document really says what’s being attributed to it.
We aren’t talking about the Suez, Woody, we are talking about the strait of Tiran. The only way to get to Eilat by sea. Blockading a port is an act of war under international law.
I found the context of the Begin quote. He was likening the attack on Egypt to the attack on Germany on March 7, 1936 by France and England. The attack they never made, the attack that would have wiped out the Nazis military power and ended WWII before it started. Similar circumstances. The Nazis had given Causus Belli that didn’t threaten the existence of Britain and France, but was sufficient justification for war. I guess Begin thought that the Egyptian armies were a threat to Israel, but not an existential threat _at the time_. In the same speech he made it clear that it was a war of self-defense, that he was only speculating about whether Egypt wouldn’t have attacked, and that Egypt started it by blockading Eilat.
link to books.google.com
Scroll down.
So that’s an out of context quote that conflates “the potential attack was not an existential threat” with “Israel started it”.
I don’t have a copy of Peled’s book Winnica but I’m sure someone here does.
link to amazon.com
I’d be very surprised if it wasn’t footnoted.
Peled is but one of many sources on Israel’s aggressive behaviour in 1967. But really, no source is required.
Israel attacked Egypt first. End. of. story.
Egypt attacked first by blockading Eilat. End. of. story.
You raise your guns at Israel, they aren’t going to wait for you to actually fire them before killing you in self-defense.
>>The only way to get to Eilat by sea. Blockading a port is an act of war under international law.
1. It affected only 5% of Isaeli shipping.
2.Nasser allowed Israeli ships to pass so long as they were not flying the Isaeli flag
3. As fas as international law goes, Nasser proposed that the World Court decide it’s legality. Israel refused.
4. No one agreed with Israel that it was act of war under international law.
5. The blockade as over 2 weeks before Israel attacked
No he wasn’t. He made no reference to Germany, France and England.
He said the three wars wihout alternative were the war of independence, the war of attrition and Yom Kippur.
He states that there were 2 wars not without alternative – 1956 and 1967.
You can’t even read your own sources.
I don’t know what Begin quote you’re looking at but I’ve got:
The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches did not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.
That is not ambiguous or out of context, at all.
Do it Fredblogs – be honest with yourself.
Rabin was probably saying that three weeks before the war, he didn’t think Nasser wanted war, and then he realized Nasser did once he moved basically his entire military to the border of Israel.
Stop being such an idiot Fred. Begin’s quote is from 1982 for a start, and secondly, his sentiments were echoed by Rabin, Peled and Herzog.
I expect we’ll seen hear Fred accusing Begin of being an anti Semite.
Fred, please cite the quote in context. Don’t tell us what you think it says, cite the text verbatim and let’s debate it.
You can’t even read your own sources.
You can say that again. The extended quote from Fred’s source:
So the further quote that Fred dug up only confirms what Begin said, that Israel decided to attack Egypt and “drive it back”. Since Egypt was not violating Israeli borders at the time, driving Egypt back can only be interpreted as invading and capturing Egyptian territory, just as Israel had done 11 years earlier in the Suez War.
BTW, the proper term is casus belli, not “causus belli” and it means a “case” or “justification” for going to war, not necessarily an act of war in itself, or even necessarily the “cause” of a war. I don’t know if Begin got the term wrong himself, or Fred’s source, and Fred, simply misspelled the term.
And, of course no mention of Nazi Germany or England or France here. Fred’s obviously been snorting too much of the ziocaine.
Fred’s gone from insisting that the quote was made up, to implicitly admitting the quote is genuine but the context is missing, to making up a totally bogus context of his own fantasy, while leading us all to the extended quote that only further proves that Israel did in fact attack Egypt. Great work, Fred!
Yep, Annie, and we equipped and trained the non-communist Chinese troops while the flying tigers were there too, again before we were at war with Japan, well before Pearl Harbor attack.
well before Pearl Harbor attack.
well before…
link to en.wikipedia.org
No Fredblogs, that’s not the end of story; here’s the end of story straight from the horses’ mouths:
General Yitzhak Rabin, Chief of Staff, Israeli Defence Forces:
“I do not believe that Nasser wanted war. The two divisions which he sent into Sinai on May 14 would not have been enough to unleash an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it.” (Le Monde, February 28, 1968 )
Menachem Begin, Minister without Portfoli:
“In June l967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.” (New York Times, August 21, 1982)
General Ezer Weizman, Chief of Operations, Israeli Defence Forces, General Staff:
The former Commander of the Air Force, General Ezer Weitzman stated that there was “no threat of destruction” but that the attack on Egypt, Jordan and Syria was nevertheless justified so that Israel could “exist according the scale, spirit, and quality she now embodies.”
“There was never a danger of extermination. This hypothesis had never been considered in any serious meeting.” (Ha’aretz, March 29, 1972)
Moshe Dayan, The Defense Minister in 1967:
Dayan who gave the order to conquer the Golan Heights, said, many of the firefights with the Syrians were deliberately provoked by Israel, and that the kibbutz residents who pressed the Government to take the Golan Heights did so less for security than for the farmland. Dayan stated “They didn’t even try to hide their greed for the land… We would send a tractor to plow some area where it wasn’t possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn’t shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance further, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that’s how it was… The Syrians, on the fourth day of the war, were not a threat to us.” (The New York Times, May 11, 1997)
General Mordechai Hod, Commanding General, Israeli Air Force:
“Sixteen years planning had gone into those initial eighty minutes. We lived with the plan, we slept on the plan, we ate the plan. Constantly we perfected it.” (Alfred M. Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection, New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1978, pp. 558-559)
General Mattitiahu Peled, Chief Quartermaster-General’s Branch, Israeli Defence Forces, General Staff:
“All those stories about the huge danger we were facing because of our small territorial size, an argument expounded once the war was over, had never been considered in our calculations prior to the unleashing of hostilities. While we proceeded towards the full mobilisation of our forces, no person in his right mind could believe that all this force was necessary to our defence against the Egyptian threat. To pretend that the Egyptian forces concentrated on our borders were capable of threatening Israel’s existence does not only insult the intelligence of any person capable of analysing this kind of situation, but is primarily an insult to the Israeli army.” (Le Monde, June 3, 1972)
General Yeshayahu Gavish, Commanding General Southern Command:
“The danger of Israel’s extermination was hardly present before the Six-day war.” (Alfred M. Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection , New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1978, p. 558)
General Haim Barlev, Chief of General Staff Branch, Israeli Defence Forces:
“We were not threatened with genocide on the eve of the six-day war, and we had never thought of such a possibility.” (Ma’ ariv, April 4, 1972)
General Chaim Herzog, Commanding General and first Military Govemor, Israeli Occupied West Bank:
“There was no danger of annihilation. Israeli headquarters never believed in this danger.” (Ma’ ariv, April 4, 1972)
Mordechai Bentov, Minister of Housing:
“The entire story of the danger of extermination was invented in every detail, and exaggerated a posteriori to justify the annexation of new Arab territory.” (Al-Hamishmar, April 14, 1971)
General Meir Amit, the former head of Military Intelligence who was head of Mossad in 1967:
“There is going to be a war. Our army is now fully mobilized. But we cannot remain in that condition for long. Because we have a civilian army our economy is shuddering to a stop. We don’t have the manpower right now even to bring in the crops. Sugar beets are rotting in the earth. We have to make quick decisions… If we can get the first blow in our casualties will be comparatively light…” ( Dennis Eisenberg, Uri Dan and Eli Landau, The Mossad: Israel’s Secret Intelligence Service , New York: New American Library, 1978)
Apart from the direct evidence (from the mouths of those involved) consider that if the Arabs had really desired to attack, then they certainly would not tell their enemy that they were about to do so… they would just attack, no warning, no buildup, just war, like in 1973.
What you are reading about is the third attack of the Arabs on poor little Israel. Read the above again, does it sound like the Arabs attacked the Jews or that the Jews attacked the Arabs. The lies that Israel has fed people are so outrageous, they are laughable, except for one thing… they have worked, most especially in the “free speech, democratic” USA has Israel’s BIG LIE, repeated over and over worked!
So you approve of rockets coming from Gaza?
Reading that here, I almost had a heart attack.
Which speaks volumes about your level of prejudice.
I find it interesting that almost as soon as Israel got rid of martial law for the Israeli Arabs, the Arab countries around it attacked.
I can’t see any connection between the two, but in any event be advised that we’re experts at refuting hasbara here, and we immediately identify your tired fallacies.
In this particular case, it’s simply not true that the Arab countries attacked Israel in 1967. Israel started that war.
Go read the books; they don’t bite.
great minds and all that —
the same sentence jumped out at me, too:
“And, because of the nature of the conversation about Israel, one is constrained to point out that many of those reasons are not rooted in Israel’s policies and actions, but in those of its enemies.”
The sentence is true to reality only if one puts heavy emphasis on “one is constrained . . . ,” meaning, Given the special relationship between U S & Israel and the double-think that relationship imposes on elected reps as well as electorate, “one is constrained” never to speak ill of Israel but to find the “reasons” for Israel’s actions — like killing Palestinians, etc. — on the uppity resistance attitude and actions of the people Israel has dispossessed — i.e. “Israel’s enemies.”
If we apply the wisdom of Cherry Garcia (Ben & Jerry) — “The best way to deal with an enemy is to make him a friend” — to Israel’s situation, we get: “The best way to deal with enemies is to STOP STEALING THEIR PROPERTY AND KILLING THEM!
Fred: Rather melodramatic but anywho:
For those journalists, lazy or not, who might still have doubts about who started the Six Days War, here’s a quote from what Prime Minister Begin said in an unguarded, public moment in 1982. “In June 1967 we had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches did not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us, We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”
link to veteranstoday.com
Fake quotes from Israeli prime ministers are a cottage industry. You’ll have to do better than that.
Pretending legitimate quotes from Israeli politicians and generals are the real cottage industry. “La-la-la, I can’t hear you” is another Zionist cottage industry.
Evidence?
Make that- “Pretending legitimate quotes from Israeli politicians and generals are fake is the real (Zionist) cottage industry.”
Hi Blake,
I don’t seem to understand why this one aspect is so argued. It seems to depend on who side one takes instead of factual information. It also seems as though anyone can find info to support his or her side. I enjoyed reading the link you provided. If the Arabs did start the war and lost then it do you think it is simply a matter of “you won, I lost”…but there seems to be such a deep animosity toward Israel, and the Jews. I read that when the UN came up with dividing the land the Jews accepted and the Arabs rejected…and out of anger the Arabic army chose to start the war in 67. I read that they told the Palestinians to leave to avoid crossfire and return once the war was won, but the opposite happened instead and the Jews won taking control over the land. So if this is true…wouldn’t the Arabic government be responsible for the displacement of the Palestinians and wouldn’t this be the real reason they are refugees now? I also read that some Arabic leaders use the Palestinian refugees as a political tool to keep animosity toward Israel. I am new at this issue, but I have heard that this animosity existed way before Israel became a state..am I correct? I am needind research for a paper on how peace can occur between them …do you think it is possible? I await your reply.. thank you
“Norman Finkelstein: In order to understand the build up to the war the best place to begin is November, 1966. There was an Israeli retaliatory, as they call it, attack on a Jordanian village called Samu. In the course of this
attack on Samu they blew up around 125 buildings and killed a large number of Jordanian soldiers.
When that attack happened the Jordanians and also the Syrians began to attack Nasser for not coming to their defense. Here was this Egyptian president claiming to be the leader of Arab nationalism and Pan-Arabism and he was doing nothing. Nasser was being taunted for his, as it were, impotence in the face of Israeli aggression.
And there were various incidents in the Syrian Golan Heights and also by Syrian-backed Palestinian commandos. Now there there’s a certain amount of confusion which is important to clarify. Moshe Dayan, who became the defense minister during the June ’67 war, gave an interview in 1976 in which he acknowledges, and now I’m more or less quoting him, that 80%, he said at least 80%, but I’ll say 80% of the incidents with the Syrians were instigated by us. That we were engaged, now I’m using my language, but it’s I think a correct paraphrase, we were engaged in a land grab in what were called the demilitarized zones between Syria and Israel. And in the course of this land grab there were conflicts arising with the Syrians. And it was only as a result of these conflicts that the Syrians then would fire artillery from the Golan Heights on the Israelis. So Moshe Dayan himself acknowledged that was instigated by the Israelis.
In April, just let me get right up to the point where the count down, as it were, begins. In April 1967 one of those incidents instigated by the Israelis then unfolded into an aerial battle with the Syrians. And the Israelis knocked down 6 Syrian planes, 6 Syrian Migs, including 1 over Damascus. And it was at this point again when Nasser is being taunted that “you’re not doing anything.”
Things then start deteriorating between Israel and the Syrians. Come the beginning of May Israel is making clear that it’s going to engage in a large scale strike against Syria and now the test is for Nasser. Are you going to do anything about it? The Israelis are announcing over and over again, the generals, the statesmen, that we’re going to give Syria now a serious blow. And it’s at that point that Nasser announces, or Nasser tells Secretary General [not "of State"] U Thant, that the peace keeping force which had been stationed between Israel and Egypt in the Sinai, that peace keeping force should be withdrawn. And that’s the beginning of the count down to the war.
JM: A lot of people seem to think that Arab nationalism was in part threatening the State of Israel. That really what was happening was Arab nationalism threatening the State of Israel, when basically, in the Straits of Tiran this was a situation where Egypt decided, well, this was something that we’re going to blockade there. Israel thought this was in our national interest, we’re being existentially threatened by these countries, this was the last straw, and then that was kind of the thrust of where it started.
NF: The problem with that is, here it’s the devil in the details. You have to know the facts in order to understand what actually happened.
It is correct that the Israelis always feared a kind of, what they called, Ataturk, a secular nationalist in Turkey who modernized the country. And they were fearful of the equivalent in the Arab world of an Ataturk. And they saw that equivalent being Nasser, a secular nationalist who was gonna mobilize the Arab world.
Now when Nasser came to power he wasn’t at all interested in Israel. He was interested in modernizing Egypt but the Israelis were fearful of a modern Egypt, especially a modern Egypt preaching Pan-Arab nationalism.
And so the record is very clear. 1953, 1954, Ben Gurion, the Prime Minister, and people like Moshe Dayan, they are determined, and here I don’t think there’s any controversy in the scholarly record, they are determined to provoke Nasser into a war so they can knock him out. And there was a famous raid in February 1955 in Gaza, many Egyptian soldiers are killed, they’re hoping, they’re hoping, they’re hoping to provoke Nasser into a war. It doesn’t work and in 1956 they simply launch an attack of their own with the Brittish and the French, the so called Sinai Campaign. What happens in ’67 is, through the concatenation of events, they see a new opportunity to knock out that threat which they always feared, namely Nasser or a modernizing force in the Arab world. And they used the opportunity of June ’67 to crush Nasser.
So in one sense it’s true they were fearful of an Arab nationalism but you have to understand what that fear was. They feared any modernization of the Arab world because they viewed themselves as a kind of alien entity in the Arab world which was was existentially in conflict with that world. And the only way to preserve their security, in their minds, is to keep taking out the club and breaking the skull of the Arabs.
The famous Israeli adages, “The Arabs only understand the language of force,” you have to keep hitting them for them to get the message to stay in line. When Israelis talk about their deterrence capacity, deterrence means, as they state themselves, they have to fear us because if they don’t fear us then at some point they’re going to attack us. That’s how the Israelis see it.
Just on the specific points, quickly.
Number one, the first dramatic moment is when Nasser removes the peace keeping force from the Sinai. That’s considered the first step towards the war. But there was an easy solution to that problem. All Israel had to say was, restation the UN forces on our side of the border. If they were effective on the Egyptian side, they would have to have been equally effective on the Israeli side.
U Thant in his memoir, the Secretary General, the main military figure there, a fellow named Odd Bull, from Norway, in his memoir, they all say the war could’ve been averted had Israel simply restationed those UN forces on its side of the border. And even Tom Segev in his new book 1967 he says, albeit, in a footnote, had they restationed the forces on their side, the Israeli side, the war could’ve been prevented.
The question of the Straits of Tiran. Ok. Number one, U Thant had made an offer, he said let’s do what happened in Cuba during the Missile Crisis. Let’s have a moratorium. The moratorium would be, Egypt promises not to fire on foreign vessels that go through the Straits of Tiran, Israel promises it won’t send through Israeli-flagged vessels. Egypt says, fine. Israel says, no.
Now, another unknown fact. Everybody refers to the blockade in the Straits of Tiran. There was no blockade. I know you’ll be surprised to learn that. It’s a little known fact. The first couple of days the Egyptians searched ships. By the end of the week they stopped searching the ships. The ships were going right through. We know that because the main figure there, he actually just passed away this week, Indar Jit Rikhye, he wrote a book called The Sinai Blunder, and he was in charge of the UN forces there. There was no blockade. He writes it in the book, I even asked, kind of surprised, I called him to check on it a couple of years ago and he laughed. He said there was no blockade.
Number three. Nasser said, you say you have the rights of passage in the Straits of Tiran, we say you don’t. If you want, go to the World Court. Let the World Court adjudicate it. Nasser said, yes. The Israelis said, no.
The important point is, if under international law you’re duty bound to exploit all diplomatic options before going to war, Israel didn’t exploit any diplomatic options for a very good reason. It wanted the war. Why? Because they were confident it would be a walkover, it would be won very quickly and very easily.
Now that may come as surprise to listners but the record is very clear on that. Let me just briefly, quickly, go through it.
May 1967, Israel’s big fear is not going to war. It’s big fear is a repetition of 1956. That is, we go in, we knock them out, but the Americans say, get out. They’re afraid not of the Arabs, they’re afraid of the American reaction. So throughout May they’re sending their people, many, to the United States, what will the US do? They’re asking Johnson, McNamara, the CIA, they’re asking everyone, James Angleton, what will the US do? The first 2 weeks the US is saying, you’re not going. The Israelis are saying, what do you mean we’re not going, they’re threatening us, they’re gonna attack us, they’re gonna destroy us, it’s gonna be another Holocaust. Each time they said that President Johnson asked another one of the intelligence agencies, there were at least a half dozen, he keeps asking them, what’s gonna happen if there’s a war? Over and over again the intelligence agencies keep saying 2 things. Number one, there’s not chance Nasser’s going to attack. None at all. And number two, if he does attack, to quote Lyndon Johnson, as he said to the Israeli Eban, “you’re gonna whip their ass.” In fact the CIA predicted the war would be 7 days long, 7 to 10 days.
Now, you may say, that’s the American intelligence, what about the Israeli? We know exactly what the Israeli intelligence was because June 3, 2 days before the war, the head of Israeli intelligence, Meir Amit, he comes to Washington. He’s trying to feel them out, how will they react? He meets with the Americans and the American say this is our intelligence. And you know what Amit says to them? We do not dispute any of your findings, any of your projections. That means June 3 he agrees no chance Nasser will attack and, if by some weird twist of fate he does, “you’ll whip their ass” to quote President Johnson.
Their only concenr was, what will the Americans say? And by the first week in June they were getting signals, through back channels, that the Americans were gonna let them do it, because the Americans didn’t like Nasser either, and they decide, let them do it. That was their concern. There was never concern about the Arabs. They knew exactly what would happen. It was the Americans, they didn’t want a repeat of ’56.
JM: You’re listening to Worldview from Chicago Public Radio. I’m Jerome McDonell and we’re talking about Israel’s 1967 war with Egypt, Jordan and Syria with Norman Finkelstein, Assistant Professor of Political Science at DePaul University.
One interpretation says that Israel took the Golan Heights, General Moshe Dayan went on an ego trip and decided on his own to take the Heights without consulting the Israeli leadership, I asked Norman Finkelstein what he thought about that.
NF: No, that’s not really what happened, it was actually the reverse. Dayan had no real interest in the Golan Heights. The one who did was the Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. Eshkol was an agricultural, his main concern was agriculture, he came from the, I think the Kibbutz movement, may be the Moshav, but I think the Kibbutz movement, and there were vital waters, the Baniyas, as they were called, in the Golan, the water, and there was also rich land. And it was the Kibbutzim in the North who were campaigning hard to attack the Golan. So they sent delegations to Dayan and others during the war, because the Golan, as you remember, was taken during the very last day. There was a ceasefire being imposed and just at the last minute they took the Golan. Dayan was fearful, basically they were all fearful, that if they attack Syria it was gonna mean a clash with the Soviet Union, because the main Syrian backer was the Russians at the time. So there was a tactical concern there and the push came from Eshkol and the Kibbutzim and the guy on the Northern front. All of them had coveted different parts of the area outside Israel. A lot of the generals coveted the West Bank. Others coveted the Sinai. Others coveted the Golan. And once again, an opportunity arose to broaden or deepen Israel’s borders and different generals on different fronts took different initiatives. I won’t say they planned to do it and that’s why they created this war. They saw it as an opportunity.
Now people forget how small the timespan is. From ’48 to ’67, it’s less than 20 years. And they were never satisfied with those ’48 borders. They called it the borders of lamentation because they didn’t get East Jerusalem, they didn’t get the Jewish Quarter, they considered the most sacred lands to be places like Hebron, you know, Rachel’s Tomb by Bethlehem. And so it’s only a 20 year period. It’s all the same actors. It’s all the same people. And it’s only 11 years after Sinai. In Sinai they conquered the Gaza and they wanted the West Bank. So it’s the same people, the same mentality, and here was a new opportunity and they took advantage, it wasn’t their first goal. The first goal was clear, and there I think Segev gets it right, the first goal, as he puts it — crush Nasser. Then the second goal is, if you can, reshape those borders.
00:18:22
JM: So is the interpretation that this was an accidental acquisition, does that fit with you? NF: No. JM: I mean some people look at it and say that Israel didn’t really want to conquer all these areas…
NF: Right, that’s what Michael Oren says, and I wrote a long examination of his book and I said it was an accident waiting to happen. All the pieces were in place and now you had the chance. But they all talked about it before the war. It’s all over their writings. They had all, and it’s something that Segev goes through, he goes through all of their plans. They all had thought about this for years and hey had all sorts of operational plans should the occassion arise. So there was no accident about it.
Let me just make another point that Segev makes. You could’ve just defeated Jordan without taking over the West Bank. You simply knock out it’s airforce and disable its army. You didn’t have to take over the West Bank to defeat Jordan. We know ourselves, in order to defeat an enemy you don’t have to always occupy its territory. You simply, as it were, defang it militarily. The decision to occupy the West Bank was a choice. It was, as I think Segev uses the expression, it was a land grab in the West Bank.
JM: It’s possible to interpret this differnt ways but after 1967 did Israel become a more religious country because they had so many of the sites in their possession you were just talking about, Rachel’s Tomb, … of Jerusalem. Did it kind of reconect Israel with its religious roots in a way that changed politicians and changed people in Israel and kind of brought fourth the Settler movement and things of that nature?
NF: I don’t, you know… People make a big deal out of that, being reconnected with the Wailing Wall and places like the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron and so fourth. I don’t think that’s really what it was. What it was was the Israelis, because they were told by their government that they were on the verge of a new Holocaust and because the Israeli people were genuinely fearful, as were American Jews, it did seem that what happened in ’67 was a miracle.
And so there was all of this kind of religious metaphore about the 6 Day War, the 6 days of creation, this miracle that had happened, and it proves there must be a god, and the Jews must be a chosen people, and all of that went to their head and was very intoxicating and it had a religious quality to it. But I don’t think it was the reconnection with the land and that sort of stuff. No, I think it was the headiness of the war which was largely responsible for what you could call the burst of irrationality and this belief that a miracle had happened, whereas, in fact, there was nothing miraculous about it at all. A perfectly rational assessment of the assembly of forces on both sides would tell you who was going to win.
JM: Do you think that Israel, after it acquired all of this territory, realized, well, this was going to be something that we could trade for peace, this is going to transform the region because before we couldn’t really get anywhere with our neighbouring countries but now we’ve got something to trade for peace and this is the thing that is going to eventually lead to peace with Egypt and may be the neighbours?
NF: Well, that question is predicated on the assumption that there wasn’t a diplomatic resolution possible before June 1967. I don’t think the record bears that out.
There were 2 issues before 1967 which prevented a diplomatic settlement between Israel and its Arab neighbours.
One issue was the borders. Israel was awarded 56% of Palestine under the UN Partition resolution. By the end of the first Arab-Israeli War in 1949 they had about 80% of Palestine. So there was an issue of it having to return to those Partition borders.
And the second big question was the refugees. The 750,000 Palestinians who’d been expelled in 1948 and the question of how to resolve that question. And Israel didn’t want to take back the Palestinian refugees.
And so now you have after ’67. What you can say with a certain amount of accuracy, I think it was very well put by Shlomo Ben-Ami, Israel’s former Foreign Minister, in his book Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, he said in June 1967 — and it’s your listners, I think it’s worth pondering — “in June ’67 we won the ’48 borders.” That is to say after June ’67 there was no longer any talk about returning to the Partition Plan, “we won the borders.”
And now the question was, you’ve won the borders, and now there’s a question of the refugees. It seems pretty clear after ’67 Arab states — I’m not saying whether it’s right or wrong, I’m just saying it as a fact — the Arab states were open to the resolution of the refugee question which would be compensation instead of return.
So if Israel had been willing to accept the ’67 borders and compensation — which would’ve been basically paid for internationally, not by Israel — and compensation for the refugees, they could’ve had peace since ’68.
No question about it.
But, like most States, they just had this big victory, they are intoxicated by it, the Arabs are humiliated and the famous line by Moshe Dayan, we’re standing by the telephone, waiting for your call, and if you don’t call, too bad, we’re not leaving. And that’s why I think The Economist, this past week, it had an article on the 40th anniversary, and the title was not bad, I didn’t really agree with the content, but the title was not bad, it was called “The Wasted Victory,” because they could’ve gotten the ’48 borders and the resolution of the refugee question. But they didn’t want it, they wanted more. They got greedy.
And the greediness, I think, history will show, destroyed the country. I don’t think pesonally any longer — and I don’t say it with any kind of satisfaction — I don’t think Israel has a future there anymore. It’s turned into a, you could call it, it’s turned into a crazy State because when you listen to the language of Israel, it’s totally out of sync with the rest of the world. You take the last war in Iraq. There’re only 2 countries in the world that supported the war, Kuwait, for reasons you can understand, and Israel — 70% of the population. Now, the war with Iran. There’s literally only 1 country in the world, you know, look at the polls — Israel. The population, the government pushing hard — war, war, war. Attacking Lebanon, attacking Gaza, it’s become a kind of crazy State and a lot of the craziness came out of this June ’67 war. It could’ve had a relatively, you know, you can’t say it’s gonna be perfect, it’s not gonna be Scandinavia, but they could’ve resolved the major problems 40 years ago.
Two things. They got intoxicated with their power and secondly, they got entangled in ways which I think were very detrimental to them in this relationship with the United States.
JM: Did the ’67 War cement the relationship with the United States?
NF: Yes, there’s no question. You know, Israel’s main arms supplier before 1967 was France. It was France that provided the Mist [spelling?] airplanes for the airforce. And also it was France that helped them build the Dimona, the nuclear reactor. They had ambivalent relations with the US, sometimes warm, sometimes cold. But after ’67, and the record’s very clear on this, ’67, the United States, I guess it’s a National Security advisor to Lyndon Johnson, he’s very thrilled — why? You knocked out Nasser. And they’re worried about this Arab nationalism spreading to places like Saudi Arabia, all those rickety regimes which have all of our oil that happens to be under their land, so they’re very happy that Israel has knocked out Nasser. And that’s the beginning of this relationship, which I think is really misunderstood here as Israel determining US foreign policy — it’s just not what’s happening.
There’s a common interest. Israel has always sought to dominate the Arab world and so has the United States. Now, for different reasons — the US for the oil, Israel, because it viewed itself being in a, as it were, intrinsically conflictual relationship with the Arab world, so it has to either dominate it or it’s gonna be destroyed, that’s how they see it.
In particular people like Ben Gurion, they never thought you could live at peace with the Arab world because they said we’re aliens, we forced ourselves on them, they’ll never accept us. And so they always felt that they’re gonna in conflict, as did the US because the US wanted their oil.
00:29:38
JM: I think a lot of listeners would say, well, there’s been Jews in the Middle East for all these years, why do they necessarily feel perpetually alien?
They were not always aliens, they’re people from the Middle East too.
NF: Yes, I think the reason is, well, part of it, I don’t want to say all of it, is a psychological dimension. You know, Jews coming from Eastern Europe and who see the world in terms of the Jews v. the Goyim, the Jews v. the Gentiles, that there’ll always be a conflict, so they’re transplanting that mentality to the Middle East and they’re saying the only reason Jews were acceptedin the Arab world before us is because they head what was called a dhimmi status, namely a second class status, that nobody will accept the Jews as being full equals, whether it’s in Europe or in the Arab world, and therefore we have to, you know, constantly remind them who’s in charge.
So part of it is a psychological dimension and part of it is a factual one. They realized we came from there and we imposed ourselves here and that it’s going to be resisted.
Of course there is the possibility that there will be animus but there will also be acquiescence over a period of time, as it were, acquiescing in the facts.
JM: Do you think the ’67 war has any larger legacy now, 40 years later? Obviously there’s lots of unresolved issues that were created, but are there other, larger legacies?
NF: Well, the main legacy is, how do you resolve the conflict. And you could already see, right after the June ’67 war, they are dealing with the same issues as they’re dealing with now. Number one, they have this big problem, this is ’67, they have absorbed 1 million Arabs and they want to be a Jewish State. What do you do? They’re afraid, they’re terrified of this Arab birth rate and now the 1 million more Arabs, how do you preserve a Jewish State? And right after the war they’re already thinking in terms of, well, may be we can transfer some, may be we can send a hundred or three hundred thousand to Iraq. The same problem — we got the land but we don’t want the people, and how do you resolve it?
Not an easy problem to resolve because in the great scheme of things there’re only 3 possible resolutions.
One, you can call it, so to speak, the American way — wipe out the indigenous population. That’s not really an option, at least in the second half of the 20th century and the 21st century.
A second option is to expel them. They tried that and they weren’t all together unsuccessful in ’67 — people forget they managed to expel about 250,000 Arabs from the West Bank in 6 days. The whole population was just 1,200,000. So for a 6 day period they got rid of quite a few but it didn’t work. They still were left with a million.
And then the third possibility is, if you can’t exterminate them and you can’t expell them, the third possibility is reduce them to second level people, namely an apartheid type resolution of the conflict, as it were, the South African way.
And that’s what Israel has been trying to do for the past number of years, to create a kind of apartheid solution in the Occupied Territories. Israel’s absorbing 10% of the West Bank with the Wall. It’s absorbing the Jordan valley, which is about a 1/3 of the West Bank. It’s criss crossing the Occupied Territories with settlements to break it up into what they call cantons and so they’re trying to create an apartheid type resolution.
Now, those are, as it were, the negative solutions to the problem: extermination, expulsion and apartheid.
And then there’s another option — the option which is embraced by the whole of human kind, apart from Israel and the United States. And that is return to the June 1967 borders, mutual recognition between an Israeli and Palestinian State and some sort of mutually acceptable resolution of the refugee question. That’s the option. Give them the ’67 border or a land swap of equal size and equal value, don’t give us the Negev. Equal size and equal value, it’s settled.
Those are the terms to resolve the conflict. They have endured for 40 years.
JM: What do you think would’ve happened if there wasn’t a ’67 war, that if it had just been Jordan sticking out there, in the West Bank, East Jerusalem? What happens without it?
00:35:15
NF: To tell you the truth, I think a war was inevitable. It was inevitable not because there was no diplomatic solution possible. The war was inevitable for a separate reason. Israel will not allow the Arab world to modernize. That’s the big problem.
The big problem is that whenever any kind of autonomous modernizing element emerges in the Middle East Israel sees it as, to use their favorite word, an existential threat. Because they don’t believe, if the Arab world modernizes, it will ever accept them and that I think is a very big problem. They will not allow an autonomous modernizing element to exist in the Middle East, apart from themselves.
JM: Wasn’t there a time during the Oslo Accords though when Shimon Peres and others really thought, well, what we’ve got to do is build up business relations NF: Right, a new JM: neighbouring relations, modernization, everything…
NF: They called it A New Middle East. A New Middle East that we control. And that’s how all the Arabs looked at Peres’ offer. [The way] they looked at it is as he wants to create a new Middle East in which we, with out technology, our Silicon Valley and our this and that, and we’ll be in charge. I’m not faulting them. I’m too old and too wise in these things to hold Israel to a different standard. I’m just saying, the racism is so deeply entrenched, they can’t conceive of dealing with Arabs as equals. They can’t. They not only can’t conceive it, they dread it. Because they see themselves as, which they are, they’re a very small little entity in this Arab world and they don’t think the’ll ever be accepted. And, frankly, you know, they want now admission into the EU, they don’t even see themselves as part of the EU — excuse me — as part of the Middle East. They themselves see themselves as Western, not Eastern. Modern, not backward. It’s in many ways a self-fulfilling prophecy — you will not be accepted in large part because you don’t see yourself as part of us, you see yourself as alien, you see yourself as superior, you see yourself as better. So how can you expect under those circumstances you’ll ever be accepted?
Palestinians, Arabs, give them a chance like everybody else. The Israelis can’t see that. The sense of superiority, the deeply entrenched racism. It was a racism that had to be. You have to understand that. It was like our racism with the Native Americans. If you don’t have that deeply entrenched racism, how could you justify in your own minds what you’re doing? You know? You’re throwing people out of their homes. You’re saying their connection with the land is not as important as our connection with the land. Well, how can you justify that unless there’s a very deeply entrenched racism? It’s a functional necessity.
But if you get to know them, talk to them, meet them — smart, nice, descent, like most people, on the whole, in general, you know? Then there’s hope.”
–radio transcript of interview of NF in Chicago, 2007
Norman Finkelstein: In order to understand the biuld up to the war the best place to begin is November, 1966. There was an Israeli retaliatory, as they call it, attack on a Jordanian village called Samu. In the course of this attack on Samu they blew up around 125 buildings and killed a large number of Jordanian soldiers.
When that attack happened the Jordanians and also the Syrians began to attack Nasser for not coming to their defense. Here was this Egyptian president claiming to be the leader of Arab nationalism and Pan-Arabism and he was doing nothing. Nasser was being taunted for his, as it were, impotence in the face of Israeli aggression.
And there were various incidents in the Syrian Golan Heights and also by Syrian-backed Palestinian commandos. Now there there’s a certain amount of confusion which is important to clarify. Moshe Dayan, who became the defense minister during the June ’67 war, gave an interview in 1976 in which he acknowledges, and now I’m more or less quoting him, that 80%, he said at least 80%, but I’ll say 80% of the incidents with the Syrians were instigated by us. That we were engaged, now I’m using my language, but it’s I think a correct paraphrase, we were engaged in a land grab in what were called the demilitarized zones between Syria and Israel. And in the course of this land grab there were conflicts arising with the Syrians. And it was only as a result of these conflicts that the Syrians then would fire artillery from the Golan Heights on the Israelis. So Moshe Dayan himself acknowledged that was instigated by the Israelis.
In April, just let me get right up to the point where the count down, as it were, begins. In April 1967 one of those incidents instigated by the Israelis then unfolded into an aerial battle with the Syrians. And the Israelis knocked down 6 Syrian planes, 6 Syrian Migs, including 1 over Damascus. And it was at this point again when Nasser is being taunted that “you’re not doing anything.”
Things then start deteriorating between Israel and the Syrians. Come the beginning of May Israel is making clear that it’s going to engage in a large scale strike against Syria and now the test is for Nasser. Are you going to do anything about it? The Israelis are announcing over and over again, the generals, the statesmen, that we’re going to give Syria now a serious blow. And it’s at that point that Nasser announces, or Nasser tells Secretary General [not "of State"] U Thant, that the peace keeping force which had been stationed between Israel and Egypt in the Sinai, that peace keeping force should be withdrawn. And that’s the beginning of the count down to the war.
JM: A lot of people seem to think that Arab nationalism was in part threatening the State of Israel. That really what was happening was Arab nationalism threatening the State of Israel, when basically, in the Straits of Tiran this was a situation where Egypt decided, well, this was something that we’re going to blockade there. Israel thought this was in our national interest, we’re being existentially threatened by these countries, this was the last straw, and then that was kind of the thrust of where it started.
NF: The problem with that is, here it’s the devil in the details. You have to know the facts in order to understand what actually happened.
It is correct that the Israelis always feared a kind of, what they called, Ataturk, a secular nationalist in Turkey who modernized the country. And they were fearful of the equivalent in the Arab world of an Ataturk. And they saw that equivalent being Nasser, a secular nationalist who was gonna mobilize the Arab world.
Now when Nasser came to power he wasn’t at all interested in Israel. He was interested in modernizing Egypt but the Israelis were fearful of a modern Egypt, especially a modern Egypt preaching Pan-Arab nationalism.
And so the record is very clear. 1953, 1954, Ben Gurion, the Prime Minister, and people like Moshe Dayan, they are determined, and here I don’t think there’s any controversy in the scholarly record, they are determined to provoke Nasser into a war so they can knock him out. And there was a famous raid in February 1955 in Gaza, many Egyptian soldiers are killed, they’re hoping, they’re hoping, they’re hoping to provoke Nasser into a war. It doesn’t work and in 1956 they simply launch an attack of their own with the Brittish and the French, the so called Sinai Campaign. What happens in ’67 is, through the concatenation of events, they see a new opportunity to knock out that threat which they always feared, namely Nasser or a modernizing force in the Arab world. And they used the opportunity of June ’67 to crush Nasser.
So in one sense it’s true they were fearful of an Arab nationalism but you have to understand what that fear was. They feared any modernization of the Arab world because they viewed themselves as a kind of alien entity in the Arab world which was was existentially in conflict with that world. And the only way to preserve their security, in their minds, is to keep taking out the club and breaking the skull of the Arabs.
The famous Israeli adages, “The Arabs only understand the language of force,” you have to keep hitting them for them to get the message to stay in line. When Israelis talk about their deterrence capacity, deterrence means, as they state themselves, they have to fear us because if they don’t fear us then at some point they’re going to attack us. That’s how the Israelis see it.
Just on the specific points, quickly.
Number one, the first dramatic moment is when Nasser removes the peace keeping force from the Sinai. That’s considered the first step towards the war. But there was an easy solution to that problem. All Israel had to say was, restation the UN forces on our side of the border. If they were effective on the Egyptian side, they would have to have been equally effective on the Israeli side.
U Thant in his memoir, the Secretary General, the main military figure there, a fellow named Odd Bull, from Norway, in his memoir, they all say the war could’ve been averted had Israel simply restationed those UN forces on its side of the border. And even Tom Segev in his new book 1967 he says, albeit, in a footnote, had they restationed the forces on their side, the Israeli side, the war could’ve been prevented.
The question of the Straits of Tiran. Ok. Number one, U Thant had made an offer, he said let’s do what happened in Cuba during the Missile Crisis. Let’s have a moratorium. The moratorium would be, Egypt promises not to fire on foreign vessels that go through the Straits of Tiran, Israel promises it won’t send through Israeli-flagged vessels. Egypt says, fine. Israel says, no.
Now, another unknown fact. Everybody refers to the blockade in the Straits of Tiran. There was no blockade. I know you’ll be surprised to learn that. It’s a little known fact. The first couple of days the Egyptians searched ships. By the end of the week they stopped searching the ships. The ships were going right through. We know that because the main figure there, he actually just passed away this week, Indar Jit Rikhye, he wrote a book called The Sinai Blunder, and he was in charge of the UN forces there. There was no blockade. He writes it in the book, I even asked, kind of surprised, I called him to check on it a couple of years ago and he laughed. He said there was no blockade.
Number three. Nasser said, you say you have the rights of passage in the Straits of Tiran, we say you don’t. If you want, go to the World Court. Let the World Court adjudicate it. Nasser said, yes. The Israelis said, no.
The important point is, if under international law you’re duty bound to exploit all diplomatic options before going to war, Israel didn’t exploit any diplomatic options for a very good reason. It wanted the war. Why? Because they were confident it would be a walkover, it would be won very quickly and very easily.
Now that may come as surprise to listners but the record is very clear on that. Let me just briefly, quickly, go through it.
May 1967, Israel’s big fear is not going to war. It’s big fear is a repetition of 1956. That is, we go in, we knock them out, but the Americans say, get out. They’re afraid not of the Arabs, they’re afraid of the American reaction. So throughout May they’re sending their people, many, to the United States, what will the US do? They’re asking Johnson, McNamara, the CIA, they’re asking everyone, James Angleton, what will the US do? The first 2 weeks the US is saying, you’re not going. The Israelis are saying, what do you mean we’re not going, they’re threatening us, they’re gonna attack us, they’re gonna destroy us, it’s gonna be another Holocaust. Each time they said that President Johnson asked another one of the intelligence agencies, there were at least a half dozen, he keeps asking them, what’s gonna happen if there’s a war? Over and over again the intelligence agencies keep saying 2 things. Number one, there’s not chance Nasser’s going to attack. None at all. And number two, if he does attack, to quote Lyndon Johnson, as he said to the Israeli Eban, “you’re gonna whip their ass.” In fact the CIA predicted the war would be 7 days long, 7 to 10 days.
Now, you may say, that’s the American intelligence, what about the Israeli? We know exactly what the Israeli intelligence was because June 3, 2 days before the war, the head of Israeli intelligence, Meir Amit, he comes to Washington. He’s trying to feel them out, how will they react? He meets with the Americans and the American say this is our intelligence. And you know what Amit says to them? We do not dispute any of your findings, any of your projections. That means June 3 he agrees no chance Nasser will attack and, if by some weird twist of fate he does, “you’ll whip their ass” to quote President Johnson.
Their only concenr was, what will the Americans say? And by the first week in June they were getting signals, through back channels, that the Americans were gonna let them do it, because the Americans didn’t like Nasser either, and they decide, let them do it. That was their concern. There was never concern about the Arabs. They knew exactly what would happen. It was the Americans, they didn’t want a repeat of ’56.
JM: You’re listening to Worldview from Chicago Public Radio. I’m Jerome McDonell and we’re talking about Israel’s 1967 war with Egypt, Jordan and Syria with Norman Finkelstein, Assistant Professor of Political Science at DePaul University.
One interpretation says that Israel took the Golan Heights, General Moshe Dayan went on an ego trip and decided on his own to take the Heights without consulting the Israeli leadership, I asked Norman Finkelstein what he thought about that.
NF: No, that’s not really what happened, it was actually the reverse. Dayan had no real interest in the Golan Heights. The one who did was the Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. Eshkol was an agricultural, his main concern was agriculture, he came from the, I think the Kibbutz movement, may be the Moshav, but I think the Kibbutz movement, and there were vital waters, the Baniyas, as they were called, in the Golan, the water, and there was also rich land. And it was the Kibbutzim in the North who were campaigning hard to attack the Golan. So they sent delegations to Dayan and others during the war, because the Golan, as you remember, was taken during the very last day. There was a ceasefire being imposed and just at the last minute they took the Golan. Dayan was fearful, basically they were all fearful, that if they attack Syria it was gonna mean a clash with the Soviet Union, because the main Syrian backer was the Russians at the time. So there was a tactical concern there and the push came from Eshkol and the Kibbutzim and the guy on the Northern front. All of them had coveted different parts of the area outside Israel. A lot of the generals coveted the West Bank. Others coveted the Sinai. Others coveted the Golan. And once again, an opportunity arose to broaden or deepen Israel’s borders and different generals on different fronts took different initiatives. I won’t say they planned to do it and that’s why they created this war. They saw it as an opportunity.
Now people forget how small the timespan is. From ’48 to ’67, it’s less than 20 years. And they were never satisfied with those ’48 borders. They called it the borders of lamentation because they didn’t get East Jerusalem, they didn’t get the Jewish Quarter, they considered the most sacred lands to be places like Hebron, you know, Rachel’s Tomb by Bethlehem. And so it’s only a 20 year period. It’s all the same actors. It’s all the same people. And it’s only 11 years after Sinai. In Sinai they conquered the Gaza and they wanted the West Bank. So it’s the same people, the same mentality, and here was a new opportunity and they took advantage, it wasn’t their first goal. The first goal was clear, and there I think Segev gets it right, the first goal, as he puts it — crush Nasser. Then the second goal is, if you can, reshape those borders.
00:18:22
JM: So is the interpretation that this was an accidental acquisition, does that fit with you? NF: No. JM: I mean some people look at it and say that Israel didn’t really want to conquer all these areas…
NF: Right, that’s what Michael Oren says, and I wrote a long examination of his book and I said it was an accident waiting to happen. All the pieces were in place and now you had the chance. But they all talked about it before the war. It’s all over their writings. They had all, and it’s something that Segev goes through, he goes through all of their plans. They all had thought about this for years and hey had all sorts of operational plans should the occassion arise. So there was no accident about it.
Let me just make another point that Segev makes. You could’ve just defeated Jordan without taking over the West Bank. You simply knock out it’s airforce and disable its army. You didn’t have to take over the West Bank to defeat Jordan. We know ourselves, in order to defeat an enemy you don’t have to always occupy its territory. You simply, as it were, defang it militarily. The decision to occupy the West Bank was a choice. It was, as I think Segev uses the expression, it was a land grab in the West Bank.
JM: It’s possible to interpret this differnt ways but after 1967 did Israel become a more religious country because they had so many of the sites in their possession you were just talking about, Rachel’s Tomb, … of Jerusalem. Did it kind of reconect Israel with its religious roots in a way that changed politicians and changed people in Israel and kind of brought fourth the Settler movement and things of that nature?
NF: I don’t, you know… People make a big deal out of that, being reconnected with the Wailing Wall and places like the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron and so fourth. I don’t think that’s really what it was. What it was was the Israelis, because they were told by their government that they were on the verge of a new Holocaust and because the Israeli people were genuinely fearful, as were American Jews, it did seem that what happened in ’67 was a miracle.
And so there was all of this kind of religious metaphore about the 6 Day War, the 6 days of creation, this miracle that had happened, and it proves there must be a god, and the Jews must be a chosen people, and all of that went to their head and was very intoxicating and it had a religious quality to it. But I don’t think it was the reconnection with the land and that sort of stuff. No, I think it was the headiness of the war which was largely responsible for what you could call the burst of irrationality and this belief that a miracle had happened, whereas, in fact, there was nothing miraculous about it at all. A perfectly rational assessment of the assembly of forces on both sides would tell you who was going to win.
JM: Do you think that Israel, after it acquired all of this territory, realized, well, this was going to be something that we could trade for peace, this is going to transform the region because before we couldn’t really get anywhere with our neighbouring countries but now we’ve got something to trade for peace and this is the thing that is going to eventually lead to peace with Egypt and may be the neighbours?
NF: Well, that question is predicated on the assumption that there wasn’t a diplomatic resolution possible before June 1967. I don’t think the record bears that out.
There were 2 issues before 1967 which prevented a diplomatic settlement between Israel and its Arab neighbours.
One issue was the borders. Israel was awarded 56% of Palestine under the UN Partition resolution. By the end of the first Arab-Israeli War in 1949 they had about 80% of Palestine. So there was an issue of it having to return to those Partition borders.
And the second big question was the refugees. The 750,000 Palestinians who’d been expelled in 1948 and the question of how to resolve that question. And Israel didn’t want to take back the Palestinian refugees.
And so now you have after ’67. What you can say with a certain amount of accuracy, I think it was very well put by Shlomo Ben-Ami, Israel’s former Foreign Minister, in his book Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, he said in June 1967 — and it’s your listners, I think it’s worth pondering — “in June ’67 we won the ’48 borders.” That is to say after June ’67 there was no longer any talk about returning to the Partition Plan, “we won the borders.”
And now the question was, you’ve won the borders, and now there’s a question of the refugees. It seems pretty clear after ’67 Arab states — I’m not saying whether it’s right or wrong, I’m just saying it as a fact — the Arab states were open to the resolution of the refugee question which would be compensation instead of return.
So if Israel had been willing to accept the ’67 borders and compensation — which would’ve been basically paid for internationally, not by Israel — and compensation for the refugees, they could’ve had peace since ’68.
No question about it.
But, like most States, they just had this big victory, they are intoxicated by it, the Arabs are humiliated and the famous line by Moshe Dayan, we’re standing by the telephone, waiting for your call, and if you don’t call, too bad, we’re not leaving. And that’s why I think The Economist, this past week, it had an article on the 40th anniversary, and the title was not bad, I didn’t really agree with the content, but the title was not bad, it was called “The Wasted Victory,” because they could’ve gotten the ’48 borders and the resolution of the refugee question. But they didn’t want it, they wanted more. They got greedy.
And the greediness, I think, history will show, destroyed the country. I don’t think pesonally any longer — and I don’t say it with any kind of satisfaction — I don’t think Israel has a future there anymore. It’s turned into a, you could call it, it’s turned into a crazy State because when you listen to the language of Israel, it’s totally out of sync with the rest of the world. You take the last war in Iraq. There’re only 2 countries in the world that supported the war, Kuwait, for reasons you can understand, and Israel — 70% of the population. Now, the war with Iran. There’s literally only 1 country in the world, you know, look at the polls — Israel. The population, the government pushing hard — war, war, war. Attacking Lebanon, attacking Gaza, it’s become a kind of crazy State and a lot of the craziness came out of this June ’67 war. It could’ve had a relatively, you know, you can’t say it’s gonna be perfect, it’s not gonna be Scandinavia, but they could’ve resolved the major problems 40 years ago.
Two things. They got intoxicated with their power and secondly, they got entangled in ways which I think were very detrimental to them in this relationship with the United States.
JM: Did the ’67 War cement the relationship with the United States?
NF: Yes, there’s no question. You know, Israel’s main arms supplier before 1967 was France. It was France that provided the Mist [spelling?] airplanes for the airforce. And also it was France that helped them build the Dimona, the nuclear reactor. They had ambivalent relations with the US, sometimes warm, sometimes cold. But after ’67, and the record’s very clear on this, ’67, the United States, I guess it’s a National Security advisor to Lyndon Johnson, he’s very thrilled — why? You knocked out Nasser. And they’re worried about this Arab nationalism spreading to places like Saudi Arabia, all those rickety regimes which have all of our oil that happens to be under their land, so they’re very happy that Israel has knocked out Nasser. And that’s the beginning of this relationship, which I think is really misunderstood here as Israel determining US foreign policy — it’s just not what’s happening.
There’s a common interest. Israel has always sought to dominate the Arab world and so has the United States. Now, for different reasons — the US for the oil, Israel, because it viewed itself being in a, as it were, intrinsically conflictual relationship with the Arab world, so it has to either dominate it or it’s gonna be destroyed, that’s how they see it.
In particular people like Ben Gurion, they never thought you could live at peace with the Arab world because they said we’re aliens, we forced ourselves on them, they’ll never accept us. And so they always felt that they’re gonna in conflict, as did the US because the US wanted their oil.
00:29:38
JM: I think a lot of listeners would say, well, there’s been Jews in the Middle East for all these years, why do they necessarily feel perpetually alien?
They were not always aliens, they’re people from the Middle East too.
NF: Yes, I think the reason is, well, part of it, I don’t want to say all of it, is a psychological dimension. You know, Jews coming from Eastern Europe and who see the world in terms of the Jews v. the Goyim, the Jews v. the Gentiles, that there’ll always be a conflict, so they’re transplanting that mentality to the Middle East and they’re saying the only reason Jews were acceptedin the Arab world before us is because they head what was called a dhimmi status, namely a second class status, that nobody will accept the Jews as being full equals, whether it’s in Europe or in the Arab world, and therefore we have to, you know, constantly remind them who’s in charge.
So part of it is a psychological dimension and part of it is a factual one. They realized we came from there and we imposed ourselves here and that it’s going to be resisted.
Of course there is the possibility that there will be animus but there will also be acquiescence over a period of time, as it were, acquiescing in the facts.
JM: Do you think the ’67 war has any larger legacy now, 40 years later? Obviously there’s lots of unresolved issues that were created, but are there other, larger legacies?
NF: Well, the main legacy is, how do you resolve the conflict. And you could already see, right after the June ’67 war, they are dealing with the same issues as they’re dealing with now. Number one, they have this big problem, this is ’67, they have absorbed 1 million Arabs and they want to be a Jewish State. What do you do? They’re afraid, they’re terrified of this Arab birth rate and now the 1 million more Arabs, how do you preserve a Jewish State? And right after the war they’re already thinking in terms of, well, may be we can transfer some, may be we can send a hundred or three hundred thousand to Iraq. The same problem — we got the land but we don’t want the people, and how do you resolve it?
Not an easy problem to resolve because in the great scheme of things there’re only 3 possible resolutions.
One, you can call it, so to speak, the American way — wipe out the indigenous population. That’s not really an option, at least in the second half of the 20th century and the 21st century.
A second option is to expel them. They tried that and they weren’t all together unsuccessful in ’67 — people forget they managed to expel about 250,000 Arabs from the West Bank in 6 days. The whole population was just 1,200,000. So for a 6 day period they got rid of quite a few but it didn’t work. They still were left with a million.
And then the third possibility is, if you can’t exterminate them and you can’t expell them, the third possibility is reduce them to second level people, namely an apartheid type resolution of the conflict, as it were, the South African way.
And that’s what Israel has been trying to do for the past number of years, to create a kind of apartheid solution in the Occupied Territories. Israel’s absorbing 10% of the West Bank with the Wall. It’s absorbing the Jordan valley, which is about a 1/3 of the West Bank. It’s criss crossing the Occupied Territories with settlements to break it up into what they call cantons and so they’re trying to create an apartheid type resolution.
Now, those are, as it were, the negative solutions to the problem: extermination, expulsion and apartheid.
And then there’s another option — the option which is embraced by the whole of human kind, apart from Israel and the United States. And that is return to the June 1967 borders, mutual recognition between an Israeli and Palestinian State and some sort of mutually acceptable resolution of the refugee question. That’s the option. Give them the ’67 border or a land swap of equal size and equal value, don’t give us the Negev. Equal size and equal value, it’s settled.
Those are the terms to resolve the conflict. They have endured for 40 years.
JM: What do you think would’ve happened if there wasn’t a ’67 war, that if it had just been Jordan sticking out there, in the West Bank, East Jerusalem? What happens without it?
00:35:15
NF: To tell you the truth, I think a war was inevitable. It was inevitable not because there was no diplomatic solution possible. The war was inevitable for a separate reason. Israel will not allow the Arab world to modernize. That’s the big problem.
The big problem is that whenever any kind of autonomous modernizing element emerges in the Middle East Israel sees it as, to use their favorite word, an existential threat. Because they don’t believe, if the Arab world modernizes, it will ever accept them and that I think is a very big problem. They will not allow an autonomous modernizing element to exist in the Middle East, apart from themselves.
JM: Wasn’t there a time during the Oslo Accords though when Shimon Peres and others really thought, well, what we’ve got to do is build up business relations NF: Right, a new JM: neighbouring relations, modernization, everything…
NF: They called it A New Middle East. A New Middle East that we control. And that’s how all the Arabs looked at Peres’ offer. [The way] they looked at it is as he wants to create a new Middle East in which we, with out technology, our Silicon Valley and our this and that, and we’ll be in charge. I’m not faulting them. I’m too old and too wise in these things to hold Israel to a different standard. I’m just saying, the racism is so deeply entrenched, they can’t conceive of dealing with Arabs as equals. They can’t. They not only can’t conceive it, they dread it. Because they see themselves as, which they are, they’re a very small little entity in this Arab world and they don’t think the’ll ever be accepted. And, frankly, you know, they want now admission into the EU, they don’t even see themselves as part of the EU — excuse me — as part of the Middle East. They themselves see themselves as Western, not Eastern. Modern, not backward. It’s in many ways a self-fulfilling prophecy — you will not be accepted in large part because you don’t see yourself as part of us, you see yourself as alien, you see yourself as superior, you see yourself as better. So how can you expect under those circumstances you’ll ever be accepted?
Palestinians, Arabs, give them a chance like everybody else. The Israelis can’t see that. The sense of superiority, the deeply entrenched racism. It was a racism that had to be. You have to understand that. It was like our racism with the Native Americans. If you don’t have that deeply entrenched racism, how could you justify in your own minds what you’re doing? You know? You’re throwing people out of their homes. You’re saying their connection with the land is not as important as our connection with the land. Well, how can you justify that unless there’s a very deeply entrenched racism? It’s a functional necessity.
But if you get to know them, talk to them, meet them — smart, nice, descent, like most people, on the whole, in general, you know? Then there’s hope.
There’s a lot to overcome, for sure, but there are possibilities for people to learn to respect each other and achieve, you know, no eternal peace, but a reasonable, practical living together.
That’s what you hope for. And work towards. That’s the most important [part] — you have to work for it.
unverified__104i17e2, the build up to the June 67 war is laid out here, very objectively and with many credible references:
link to normanfinkelstein.com
I urge readers to go to the link–you won’t be sorry. You will see that given the Jewish settler mindset from the start, nothing was going to stop Israel manipulating for war, and you will appreciate nothing has changed to this day in terms of options, given both US & Israel’s desire to control the oil regimes. Israel has always been against any “Arab Spring.” Now that one is on-going, it takes an awfully optimistic mind to see anything but at minimum a regional war on the horizon in the ME.
CITIZEN- Awesome post. Thanks.
unverified__104i17e2 (KingofKings?)
I hope you won’t object to me answering your questions posed to Blake.
It seems to depend on who side one takes instead of factual information. It also seems as though anyone can find info to support his or her side.
A problem with the internet, of course, is its sometimes hard to distinquish between reliable information and non-reliable. That’s why, over a decade ago, when my Israeli sister (I am American) started spouting some pretty reprehensibly bigoted ideas, I realized that I had to digest alot of information and the internet was just not a detailed enough source to understand what is real fact and what is merely disinformation. So I started reading scholarly books in addition, which further informed me and made it easier to tell which internet sources were reliable and which were not.
I read that when the UN came up with dividing the land the Jews accepted and the Arabs rejected…and out of anger the Arabic army chose to start the war in 67.
The UN Partition Plan was clear in stating that within both states, all residents of the territoies that would comprise those states were entitled to full citizenship within those states.
link to domino.un.org
While the Zionist learship accepted the promise of a Jewish State (It was after all what they were working for those past decades), they proved by their actions that they didn’t accept the rights of the non-Jewish citizens of the proposed state to live in peace in their own homes, and so didn’t not accept the Partition any more than the non-Jewish Palestinians did, who realized that they were being asked to give up quite a bit, whereas the Zionists were offered a limited gain by the Partition. The Zionists started ethnically cleansing non-Jewish Palestinians from their homes in December of 1947 and continued doing so though May of 1948 when they unilaterally declared independence and on through 1949 and even in some cases after the war was over, into the 1950′s. Over 350,000 Palestinians had fled their homes, (the vast majority of them fleeing from Zionist violence or threats of violence) BEFORE May 15th, when the Arab armies sought to prevent Israel from gaining further ground into the proposed Arab State. The Partition Plan had promised 55% of Mandate Palestine for a Jewish State (despite the fact that nearly 90% of the land was held by non-Jewish Palestinians, and Jews only owned around 7%), but Israel ended up claiming over 78% of Mandate Palestine instead. This was of course totally inconsistent with “acceptance” of the UN Partition Plan, as was its ethnic cleansing of non-Jews. from their land.
I read that they told the Palestinians to leave to avoid crossfire and return once the war was won, but the opposite happened instead and the Jews won taking control over the land. So if this is true…wouldn’t the Arabic government be responsible for the displacement of the Palestinians and wouldn’t this be the real reason they are refugees now?
What you read is incorrect, and has been debunked as far back as the 1960′s, when Erskine Childers did a search of all Arabic broadcasts and newpapers of the time in an article in the British “Spectator” magazine. You can find the reprint here:
link to users.cloud9.net
This has been verified by Israel researchers in the then newly declassified Israeli archives in the 1990′s. Benny Morris has noted that according to Israeli intelligence itself, most of the Palestinians who left did so either because of direct Zionist violence against them or out of fear of impending violence against them. And Israel has been steadfast in refusing to allow those Palestinians who, by rights even guaranteed by the UN Partition Plan, wanted to return to their homes. In many cases, Israel either purposely demolished those homes, or put Jewish immigrants into those homes immediately after they were abandoned, and ordered its forces to “shoot to kill” any Palestinian crossing its border, even though, as Israeli histoiran Benny Morris has pointed out, Israel was aware that 90% of those crossing the border were simply trying to return to their homes.
I am new at this issue, but I have heard that this animosity existed way before Israel became a state..am I correct?
As far as animosity towards the Jewish Zionists from Europe who were trying to set up a Jewish State in an area predominantly inhabited by non-Jews, yes. As far as animosity towards the indigenous Jews that already lived there, no.
The Zionists set up their own separate governing bodies and for the most part refused to enter in to governing bodies that included non-Jews. The JNF, which bought land in Palestine, had restrictive covenants against the land ever being sold to a non-Jew, and also had covenants against any non-Jew even working on the land. This dispossessed many Palestinian tenant farmers who had previously had rights to farm a small portion of land in return for work on the greater portion of land. The Zionists had over the years also constantly petitioned the British govenment of Mandate Palestine to preferentially hire Jews over Arabs, and to pay Jews more than Arabs for doing the same job. They were not interested in coexistence as equal partners, as has been shown over the decades by their treatment of both Israel’s smaller number of Palestinian citizens, who spent the first 19 years under martial law, had the majority of their land confiscated to build Jewish towns, and are still treated as second class citizens in Israel, and the larger numbers of Palestinians, who have no say in what inhumanities Israel chooses to commit against them. This is the basis for all the animosity Palestinians feel towards Israel. Any one in similar circumstance would feel the same animosity.
If you want to start reading more, I would suggest starting with Simha Flapan’s “The Birth of Israel:Myths and Realities”, written in 1987 when the Israel archives from 1948 first became available. Granted, more has been disclosed since then, none of it particularly flattering to Israel, but its a relatively easy read and available used through Amazon or elsewhere for a dollar or so:
link to amazon.com
I referred to it in earlier posts of mine:
link to mondoweiss.net
His book dispels these 7 myths by citing material available from Israeli archives.
Good luck and good reading.
CITIZEN- To add to what Finkelstein says about Jewish Israeli racism and existential fear, this fear has been consciously reinforced by the hard-line right in Israel. When Ariel Sharon came to power, the right pursued a return to the “spirit of 1948,” which entailed a “reeducation of Israeli society, which has acquired a taste for peace, security, prosperity, and the beginnings of normality during the last two decades.” To this end, Sharon gave the ministry of education to “Limor Livnat, one of the leaders of of Likud’s right wing.”
“In the space of a few months Livnat carried out a thorough housecleaning in the school system. Under the motto, ‘More Zionism, more Bible,’ she reorganized the curriculum and scrubbed all ‘defeatist’ odors out of the manuels for history and civics instruction. In particular she banned the history textbooks that the Rabin government had introduced a decade earlier, in which the ‘new historians’ influenced was detectable, and eliminated the courses on peace and democracy.” (“Towards an Open Tomb: the Crisis of Israeli Society,” Michel Warschawski, p59)
We must also keep in mind that this rapid shift to the right has been strongly supported by the American Jewish Zionist elites for their own purposes. Israel has been consciously transformed into a permanent warfare state, which, in many ways is but a more extreme version of the American endless war on terror.
Israel has been consciously transformed into a permanent warfare state
Ariel Sharon was elected Prime Minister in 2002. Israel was a “permanent warfare” state well before 2002.
1948 War, Qibya 1953, 1954 Gaza raid, 1956 Suez War, 1960Tawafiq Raid, 1967 War, Battle of Karameh 1968, War of Attrition 1967-1970, 1973 War, 1972 incursion into Lebanon, 1978 invasion of Lebanon, 1982 invasion of Lebanon, First Intifada 1987-1993. No doubt I’m missing a few.
It all followed Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall Doctrine. Its not a recent occurrence by any means.
TREE- “Ariel Sharon was elected Prime Minister in 2002. Israel was a “permanent warfare” state well before 2002.”
With all due respect, Michel Warshawski differs with you. He feels that Israel was moving towards some sort of accommodation to achieve peace, the people had grown weary of war and were seeking normalization. He cites a turning point. “By assassinating Rabin, the far right put an end not only to the possibility of Israeli-Palestinian rapprochemont, but also to two decades of normalization and liberalization of Israeli society.” Israel started as a warfare society, began to undergo change towards more normal conditions, but was re-indoctrinated in the fighting spirit of 1948 and turned into a permanent warfare state by leaders who believe that peace is a dangerous chimera.
“two decades of normalization and liberalization of Israeli society.”
C’mon Keith, two freaking decades of “normalization and liberalization” while the occupation continued and expanded?! Does Michel Warshawski give any fine examples of this “normalization and liberalization”? Cuz I sure as heck can’t think of a single normal or liberal act that Apartheid israel’s ever engaged in since it’s dubious inception.
I’d say those supposed “two decades” were more about the trendy drugs that the youthful israeli idf-ers were taking, more part of their hashish and LSD state of mind than about a ‘change of course’ away from war and towards peacemaking. Just because drugs make you feel a tad bohemian, that sure don’t make you a sober and pro-active peace-seeker. EVERYONE gets tired of war, yes, but it seems that NOT EVERYONE gets tired of the occupation – judging by it’s continuation some sixty four years later.
Can’t you see the swindle of the Oslo Accord? Like all the other landgrab swindles before AND after it?
And did peace in the middle east really rest solely in the hands of a single man, a known haganah terrorist, the late and not so great Yitzak Rabin?
It’s just astounding how deluded (not you Keith) some supposed mid east ‘experts’ are.
@ unverified____________: Who of sane mind would have accepted their country being partitioned? Let us be honest with ourselves here. It only suited the foreign ideology imposing themselves in Palestine. UN had no right to partition up Palestine, neither did the British or anybody else.
Keith, Rabin was murdered in 1995, two years after the Oslo Agreements. In the “two decades of normalization and liberalization of Israeli society” prior to 1995, Israel managed to invade Lebanon twice (the second instance encompassing the Sabra and Shatilla massacre) and was in the midst of a 20 year long and bloody occupation of Lebanon. It also was continually expanding its settlements in the West Bank, closing off Gaza behind a fence, instituting a permit and closure system on the West Bank starting in 1991, and “breaking the bones” of the occupied Palestinians per the liberal Rabin’s orders during the first Intifada from 1987-93.
I suspect what Warshawski is referring to is the “liberalization” of the educational system which was affected by the archival research of the New Historians in the early ’90s, and at a certain point the “liberal” government attempted to incorporate some of this material into Israeli textbooks. This really lasted for less than 5 years, was not a profound change, and even at that it was vehemently opposed and overturned within a small space of time, certainly not enough time to seriously effect the “liberalization” of the society.
TAXI- Perhaps I was unclear concerning the difference between a warfare state and a permanent warfare state. Israel has been a warfare state since its inception, however, the mass psychology of Israeli Jews viewed peace as both desirable and obtainable, Israeli militarism and racism notwithstanding. There was a certain euphoria surrounding Oslo I which reflected a liberalizing trend which people like Raphael Eitan and Ariel Sharon sought to counter. One example is the appearance of the “new historians” who demolished a lot of Israel’s founding myths. The right wing has been successful. Ilan Pappe has been forced to emigrate out and Benny Morris has turned into an apologist for war crimes. The public mood has changed. Now, the public mood seems to be that permanent war is normal and peace a dangerous illusion. This is significant.
From the book cover: “Michel Warschawski is director of the alternative Information Center in Jerusalem and a well known anti-Zionist activist.”
“A meticulously documented, yet intensely personal meditation by a leading dissident on the political psychosis currently gripping large segments of the Israeli population. Highly recommended.” (Norman Finkelstein)
Keith,
Real anti-zionist activists move away, simply pack their bags and abandon the whole goddam crime scene – they don’t hang around and set up shop with dull touristic names like the “Information Center”. Such a souless nondescript name, considering the degree of the soulfullness of the cause. I’m sure Michel is well meaning and all but his perception is just as effed as a zionist zealot. What most israelis, regardless of their political persuasions, don’t realize when they ponder matters of war and peace, is that true peace can only be achieved by giving every inch of Palestine back to the Palestinians. Instead of packing and going back to their original homelands, they hang around on occupied land and disagree merely on how much of Palestine to give back. So long as Mr. Warchawski lives in israel and refers to himself as ‘israeli’, he remains somewhat under the influence of the industry of zionism. Israeli lefty ‘rebels’ romanticize themselves a tad too much, drunk and hungover on a handful of wars and a holocaust.
And with all due respect, having a Norman Finklestein blurb on Michel Warchawski sure adds gravitas to Warchawski rebel status, but it’s packet and parcel of the industry of zionism too.
Point is, bohemian israelis ‘imagined’ they’d found an exit off the “permanent warfare state” highway, but that’s just delusion and denial – and the record speaks for itself.
Excellent info tree, I’m gonna order that book.
BTW, I find it interesting that almost as soon as Israel got rid of martial law for the Israeli Arabs, the Arab countries around it attacked.
Thanks to irishmoses on another thread, I just listened to Ilan Pappe, talking about his current research in the Israeli archives. Israel was already planning on the occupation of the West Bank in 1963. And, “interestingly”, as you said, they used the type of regulations and restrictions they were using on the Israeli citizens of Palestinians ethnicity during Israel’s internal martial law period. They only dropped the martial law on Israeli Palestinian citizens in 1966 because it was becoming inconvenient as they needed Israeli Palestinian labor and the restrictions were making employing that labor too difficult. Apparently, they couldn’t adjust to not having Palestinians under martial law, so they created new victims in 1967, per their earlier plans.
Irishmoses gave me an audio file but here’s the video of the lecture, for those of you who like to see pictures with your audio.
link to youtube.com
Go to about 14 minutes in, if you want to hear about the 1963 “Shakham Plan”.
Or listen here, with the plan discussion starting at about 22 minutes:
link to international.ucla.edu
I’m looking forward to Pappe’s newest book, “Bureaucracy of Evil”, which is scheduled to be published in October of this year.
Isn’t it interesting how researchers such as Pappe have access to Israeli archives? You’d think, if the country was as bad as it’s routinely made out to be here at MW, that they’d do something to keep their critics away from their documents. Democracies all open their archives, or at least the de-classified sections of them; non-democracies don’t. I guess Israel is in the first camp.
It shows that Pappe is still considered a reputable scholar in Israel. Otherwise, the archives would have been closed to him. But keep trying to get a positive spin out of the fact that Israel was making detailed plans to occupy the West Bank in 1963.
There are still 1 million documents which were supposed to be declassified locked up. Netenyahu said the release of them would pose a thrat to Israel’s national security.
There are still 1 million documents which were supposed to be declassified locked up. Netenyahu said the release of them would pose a thrat to Israel’s national security.
“Democracies all open their archives, or at least the de-classified sections of them; non-democracies don’t.”
Democracies don’t deny citizenship to long-term residents on a racial basis (Or for that matter use paramilitaries to expel said residents). In any case, do you really know anything about the openness of archives in other countries to make that comparison? In the early 90′s, Russia opened documents captured from Germany (Osobyi Arkhiv).
I have argued often that resolution of Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians and the Arab world faces a major obstacle in that Israel does not have sufficient motivation to make concessions. Well, the reason that Israel has so little motivation is that the US, due to the special relationship, shields it from the consequences of its actions.”
No s*** Sherlock……..we’ve said that here 1,000,000 times.
Israel will change (or disappear by hari kari) when the US no longer supports it.
And someday we will quit supporting it. Don’t know when, a few years, another decade, probably less than a decade ……but it will happen…the US Israel firsters are close to their peak…..after they hit it …..their fall will begin.
Live long enough and you realize everything is a cycle…particulary power.
The nuclear reactor at Dimona went critical on Dec. 26, 1963. Interesting date.
Yes Johnson is the key to the USA being taken over completely by the Israel Lobby; this was because (1) He looked at Israel as like (a) himself, as his Vietnam War policy drew more and more flack, leaving him isolated, and (b) even prior thereto, he looked at Israel’s stance as akin to his notion of little Texas fighting big Mexico–the Alamo. While Johnson was great at making donkey trades, his actual education and intelligence regarding the I-P conflict was at the level of a moron. His approach was: you rich and influential American Jews should quit criticizing me for my war in Vietnam, because I’m backing Israel to the hilt. He had keyed in on PEP before it was an acronym. Johnson left tons of recordings of his insider chats with world leaders, except for the time covering, e.g., the USS Liberty incident; nevertheless, anyone can read the print outs of his telephone and wire chatter leading up to and after the 1967 Israeli War. It’s clear from them that he was alone in his hopefully thinking Israel did not start that war, and that they reveal Israel has been on an expansionist policy forever: link to tau.ac.il
could we please stop calling Israel an ALLY of the US? We are not allies.
1. There’s no treaty of alliance and can’t be, as long as Israel has not declared borders and is not signatory to NPT;
2. Alliances are two-way streets; U.S. relationship with Israel is decidedly one-way.
____________
How U.S.-Iran relations are entangled in the U.S. – Israel relationship: Israel has and will continue to do everything in its power to drive wedges between any possibility of a U.S.- Iran rapprochement. In this, Israel displays all the sophistication of the ugly kid in junior hi who is not part of the in-group but sandbags anybody else who might seek to be part of the in-group. Grow up.
Just what I was thinking. Israel is no ally of the US. No ally would attack a US ship and kill its crew. Or spy on its ally, manipulate its internal politics and demand ever more subsidies in economically hard times, while also demanding that US forces are used for its wars. Israel is, in its own language, an infiltrator who has placed its agents in key positions in the political and media sphere.
Amen. Clearly, we are Israel’s ally. Clearly they are not ours — and it can be argued they are our enemy.
Israel has negotiated recognized borders with Egypt and Jordan.
The Arabs of gaza and Judea and Samaria, having been on the losing side of every war the Arabs waged against Israel to destroy Israel, want everything they want before they begin to negotiate.
By the way, the Arabs refuse to recognize Israel, and have stated that Israel’s borders would be determined by war. That was when the Arabs states attacked Israel and thought they would prevail.
heh
Begin was dragged kicking and screaming to Camp David, and only after Israel was nearly defeated (but for massive intervention from Nixon) in 1973.
Israel started every war with the Palestinians, and as far as negotiations go, Israrl have priced with Oslo and the Road Map, that they can’t even stick to agreements they do make.
By the way, the Arabs refuse to recognize Israel, and have stated that Israel’s borders would be determined by war.
Rubbish. In the 2002 Arab Peace plan, 22 Arab States offered peace, recognition and normalization of relations so long as Israel returned to the ’67 borders.
The only attacks on Israel were when the Arab forces came to the aid of the Palestinians in 1947 (after 5 months of ethnic cleansing) and in 1973 (which was payback for 1967).
You really need to lift your game Charleston. This B grade re cycled hasbra isn’t going to help you on this forum.
True, AllenBee, but a small caveat: The US has a number of MOU with Israel where in we specifically guarantee Israel’s oil supply, even at the expense of our own oil needs; we specifically guarantee Israel’s superiority of weaponry, so that no US company may sell, e.g., Saudi Arabia, fighter-bomber jets equal to Israel’s in quality/quantity unless US gives Israel higher quality fighter-bomber jets–that is, we insure Israel will always have the military edge–again, this promise may call for Israel getting those jets even if the US has not yet equipped, or equipped its own forces with them. The key in the MOU is we promise Israel’s security yet It is Israel who triggers our obligations by its sole decision if it’s security is threatened.
Anybody know the legal stature of an American MOU with one foreign country where all the benefits run to the foreign country and there’s no quid pro quo?
Anybody know the legal stature of an American MOU with one foreign country where all the benefits run to the foreign country and there’s no quid pro quo?
citizen, while it is not officially an MOU this recent legislation fulfills your description. HR 4133 RFS link to govtrack.us
House Stealthily Passes Extreme Pro-Israel Legislation Featured
Written by Philip Giraldi
link to councilforthenationalinterest.org
“It obligates the United States to veto resolutions critical of Israel, to provide such military support “as is necessary,” to pay for the building of an anti-missile system, to provide advanced “defense” equipment (including refueling tankers, which are offensive), to give Israel special munitions (i.e., bunker-busters, which are also offensive), to forward deploy more U.S. military equipment to Israel, to offer the Israeli air force more training and facilities in the U.S., to increase security- and advanced-technology-program cooperation, and to extend loan guarantees and expand intelligence-sharing (including highly sensitive satellite imagery).”
i also notice in the act ” Offer the Israeli Air Force additional training and exercise opportunities in the United States” which, i presume, allows them access to our airspace probably whenever they want it. which means they can spy on us from the air but we know they would never do that.
link to missilethreat.com
link to ibtimes.co.uk
and here is a funny video about it
link to youtube.com
also, you may want to check the issue memos at the base of this link
link to aipac.org
* The 1975 MOU on supplying Israel fuel they cite here wasn’t the first one…I beleive the first one was in 1973. But all of them have been renewed every 5 years by congress .
I have said often that even people who think they know something about how much Israel sucks from the US don’t know the half of it.
Israel is a f****** Mafia parasite entity…no other way to put it.
It needs to be destroyed along with the US congress.
link to salon.com
(excerpts)
What’s not well known is that since 2004, U.S. taxpayers have paid to supply over 500 million gallons of refined oil products — worth about $1.1 billion –- to the Israeli military.
According to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, between 2004 and 2007 the U.S. Defense Department gave $818 million worth of fuel to the Israeli military. The total amount was 479 million gallons, the equivalent of about 66 gallons per Israeli citizen. In 2008, an additional $280 million in fuel was given to the Israeli military, again at U.S. taxpayers’ expense. The U.S. has even paid the cost of shipping the fuel from U.S. refineries to ports in Israel.
In 2008, the fuel shipped to Israel from U.S. refineries accounted for 2 percent of Israel’s $13.3 billion defense budget. Publicly available data shows that about 2 percent of the U.S. Defense Department’s budget is also spent on oil. A senior analyst at the Pentagon, who requested anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the press, says the Israel Defense Force’s fuel use is most likely similar to that of the U.S. Defense Department. In other words, the Israeli military is spending about the same percentage of its defense budget on oil as the U.S. is. Therefore it’s possible that the U.S. is providing most, or perhaps even all, of the Israeli military’s fuel needs.
What’s more, Israel does not need the U.S. handout. Its own recently privatized refineries, located at Haifa and Ashdod, could supply all of the fuel needed by the Israeli military. Those same refineries are now producing and selling jet fuel and other refined products on the open market. But rather than purchase lower-cost jet fuel from its own refineries, the Israeli military is using U.S. taxpayer money to buy and ship large quantities of fuel from U.S. refineries.
The Israeli government obtains the fuel through the Defense Department’s Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program, and pays for the fuel and the shipping with funds granted to it through Foreign Military Financing (FMF), another Defense Department program. (In 2008, Congress earmarked $2.4 billion in FMF money for Israel, and $2.5 billion for 2009.) The dimensions of the FMS fuel program are virtually unknown among America’s top experts on Middle East policy. For his part, the Pentagon analyst was surprised to learn that FMS money was even being used to supply fuel to Israel. “That’s not the purpose of the program,” he says. “FMS was designed to allow U.S. weapons makers to sell their goods to foreign countries. The idea that fuel is being bought under FMS is very, very odd.”
The fuel program, in fact, raises a number of pressing questions. The shipments have occurred during times of record-high oil prices, when American consumers have been angered by motor fuel prices that in 2008 exceeded $4 per gallon. Given those high prices, it appears to make little sense for the U.S. government to be promoting policies that reduce the volume of — and potentially raise the price of — motor fuel available for sale to U.S. motorists.
The U.S. fuel shipments are part of a sustained policy that has widened the energy gap between Israel and its neighbors. Over the past few years, the Israel Defense Force has cut off fuel supplies and destroyed electricity infrastructure in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. Those embargoes and attacks on power plants have exacerbated a huge gap in per-capita energy consumption between Israelis and Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza. And that sharp disparity helps explain why the Palestinians have never been able to build a viable economy.
Edward S. Walker, former president of the Middle East Institute, a Washington-based think tank, says the fuel supply program is emblematic of U.S. military support for Israel. Walker, who has served as U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Israel, explains that the FMF money allows the Israelis to “do with it what they want. They can buy equipment or fuel. It’s their choice, not the government’s choice. It’s the only program where we give someone a blank check and they can use it any way that they choose.”
Given the recent spike in oil prices, which helped send the U.S. and the world economy into a tailspin, and Americans still smarting from paying $4 at the pump, says Walker, “Why are we supplying fuel to Israel when we are paying such high prices?”
Since 1948, oil has been a critically important commodity for both the Israel Defense Forces and the Israeli economy. And Israeli leaders have long worried about their energy security. In 1957, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion wrote in his diary, “The only sanctions which could defeat or break us are oil sanctions.”
In 1967, Egypt’s blockade of the Straits of Tiran precipitated the Six Day War. The Straits, writes Israeli historian Michael Oren in his book on the conflict, “Six Days of War,” were “a lifeline for the Jewish state, the conduit to its quiet import of Iranian oil.” In 1973, the Yom Kippur War (Arabs call it the Ramadan War) led to the Arab Oil Embargo, an event that still reverberates in the U.S., particularly in the fanciful political rhetoric about the desire for “energy independence.”
The U.S.-Israel oil relationship goes back to 1975. In September of that year, Henry Kissinger, who was then secretary of state, struck a deal with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin that led the Israelis to partially withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula. The agreement required Israel to pull out of the Giddi and Mitla passes and relinquish the Sinai oilfields the Israelis had captured during the 1967 war.
In return, Kissinger agreed that America would provide multibillion-dollar economic and military subsidies to Israel. He also agreed that the U.S. would supply Israel with oil in case of any emergency. That agreement was formalized in 1979 about the time of the Camp David peace talks. It says that the U.S. will “make every effort to help Israel secure the necessary means of transport” for the oil that it purchases. The agreement concludes by saying that the U.S. and Israel will “meet annually, or more frequently at the request of either party, to review Israel’s continuing oil requirement.”
Since 1979, the agreement has been quietly renewed every five years. (The most recent approval of the document was done by the U.S. State Department in November of 2005.) The U.S. does not provide any other country the same insurance.
Nor does any other country get anything close to the volume of fuel that Israel does under FMS. In 2004, more than 140 countries received FMS aid from the U.S. Of that group, only about 13 countries received fuel of any kind through the FMS program and the biggest recipient, after Israel, was Singapore, which got $7.3 million in fuel. That year, Israel received 17 times more FMS fuel than all of the other countries combined.
Why did the U.S. Defense Department begin providing oil to Israel in 1986? And why does the program persist, particularly given that Israel no longer sees its refineries as strategic assets? The Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which manages the FMS and FMF programs, referred questions about the program to the Israeli government. The press office of the Israeli Embassy in Washington did not respond to numerous requests about the program.
While the rationale for the oil transfers remains elusive, the facts behind Israel’s refinery privatization are freely available. In 2006, the government sold the Ashdod refinery to Israeli tycoon Zadik Bino for about $500 million. And in early 2007, it sold the larger refinery in Haifa to a group led by Israel Corp., the shipping and chemicals conglomerate, for $1.5 billion.
The sale of the refineries marked a major turning point in Israel’s attitude toward oil. In its earliest years as an independent nation, Israel’s survival was made possible by using crude from the Soviet Union and Venezuela. From the 1950s to the late 1970s, Iranian crude was the lifeblood of the Zionist state. Later still, the Israelis relied on the Kuwaitis. Today, the Russians are providing much of Israel’s crude needs. And the sale of the refineries is indicative of the Israeli government’s confidence in its ongoing ability to purchase the oil it needs on the international market.
Nevertheless, the FMS fuel shipments to Israel have continued. The most recent shipments for which records are readily available occurred in July and October 2008.
On July 7, 2008, the spot price for U.S. crude oil hit a near-record of $141. That same day, the San Antonio Business Journal reported that San Antonio-based refiner Valero Energy Corp. had been awarded a contract by the Defense Energy Support Center (DESC) worth $46 million to provide fuel to Israel. Valero has won a number of lucrative contracts from the DESC, the Defense Department agency that handles all of the Pentagon’s bulk fuel purchases. On Oct. 9, the Journal reported that Valero had been awarded a $235 million contract under FMS. Bill Day, a spokesman for Valero, says that the company “doesn’t talk publicly about its contracts.”
Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that U.S. taxpayers are paying the shipping costs to move the fuel from refineries — many of them on the Texas Gulf Coast — to Israeli ports at Haifa or Ashkelon. Shipping costs vary but one specific bid called for shipping costs of $.30 per gallon. Officials with the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, the arm of the Pentagon that manages programs that “strengthen America’s alliances and partnerships,” has confirmed that the costs to ship the fuel from U.S. refineries to Israel have been paid for with FMF money designated for Israel by Congress.
The huge FMS fuel shipments are puzzling to the Israelis. Amit Mor, CEO of Eco Energy, an Israeli consulting and investment firm, has worked on energy issues in his home country for about two decades. In a recent e-mail, Mor says that “there is a paradox” in the fuel shipments that Israel gets from the U.S. He said that the privately owned Israeli refineries export jet fuel in “FOB prices,” while the defense ministry imports jet fuel in “high CIF prices,” with the funds of U.S. military assistance.
FOB, short for “free on board,” means that customers must take possession of the fuel at the refinery and then pay for all shipping and related costs to get the fuel to its final destination. On the other hand, as Mor explains, the Israeli military is importing fuel from U.S. refineries located 7,000 miles away, while incurring the CIF, short for “cost, insurance and freight,” of moving the fuel that distance.
Mor says Israeli refiners have “complained about this issue” but have had no luck with the Israeli government. He goes on to say that “it is the U.S. government that insisted for some reason to continue with this historical, costly and inefficient arrangement.”
Energy analysts squabble about a myriad of issues. But if there is one truism that draws near-universal agreement, it’s this: As energy consumption increases, so does wealth. And while that truism holds for oil use, it is particularly apt for electricity. As Peter Huber and Mark Mills point out in their 2005 book, “The Bottomless Well,” “Economic growth marches hand in hand with increased consumption of electricity — always, everywhere, without significant exception in the annals of modern industrial history.”
That statement underscores the significance of the FMS fuel shipments to Israel, many of which have occurred at or near the time that the Israeli military has attacked the electric power plants of its neighbors.
In late June 2006, Israeli aircraft fired nine missiles at the transformers at the Gaza City Power Plant, the only electric power plant in the Occupied Territories. (One of the original partners in the project was Enron, but that’s another story.) The missiles caused damage estimated at $15 million to $20 million and, for a time, made Gaza wholly reliant on electricity flows from Israel. The 140-megawatt power plant, owned by the Palestine Electric Co., was insured by the Overseas Private Investment Corp., an arm of the U.S. government. Thus the U.S. was providing fuel and materiel to the Israeli military, which destroyed the plant, but it was also paying to fix the damage. Call it cradle-to-grave service.
The Israeli attack on the Gaza City Power Plant offers a stark example of how the FMS fuel helps assure that Israel stays energy rich while many of the citizens in neighboring regions live in energy poverty.
Two weeks after the attack on the Gaza City plant in 2006, during Israel’s monthlong war against Hezbollah forces in Lebanon, Israeli aircraft attacked the 346-megawatt Jiyyeh power plant, the oldest electric power plant in Lebanon. Those attacks resulted in the largest-ever oil spill in the eastern Mediterranean. About 100,000 barrels of fuel oil that was stored in tanks at the Jiyyeh site flowed into the sea, creating an oil slick that stretched for more than 150 kilometers.
The attacks on the Jiyyeh plant occurred on July 13 and July 15. Those dates are important because they underscore the timing of the U.S. fuel transfers to Israel.
On July 14, 2006, the U.S. military issued two press releases. In one of them, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency announced that it would be providing up to $210 million in JP-8 jet fuel to the Israeli government. The other release, put out at 5 p.m. Eastern time, came from the Defense Logistics Agency, which said that it had awarded a $36.7 million contract to Valero as part of another JP-8 supply deal for Israel.
The July 14 release contains this rather bland description of the fuel deal: “The proposed sale of the JP-8 aviation fuel will enable Israel to maintain the operational capability of its aircraft inventory. The jet fuel will be consumed while the aircraft is in use to keep peace and security in the region. Israel will have no difficulty absorbing this additional fuel into its armed forces.” The release goes on to claim that the “proposed sale of this JP-8 aviation fuel will not affect the basic military balance in the region.”
While the attacks on the Jiyyeh plant were important, Lebanese citizens could get electricity from other power plants in the country. That was not true in Gaza, a province in which electricity has always been in short supply. According to the CIA Fact Book, the Gaza Strip ranks dead last — 214th out of 214 countries and territories listed — in the amount of electricity consumed. According to the Palestinian Energy and Natural Resources Agency, in 2004, the average Gazan used about 654 kilowatt-hours of electricity. By contrast, the 7.1 million residents of Israel consume about 6,295 kilowatt-hours of electric power per person per year, nearly 10 times as much as the average Gazan.
Although more recent energy consumption data for Gaza is not available, there’s no question that the endemic poverty in the West Bank and particularly in Gaza, is due, largely, to a continuing lack of energy resources. And the Israelis have frequently cut off the flow of fuel and electricity, which has exacerbated the Palestinians’ energy poverty.
Over the past few years, the Israelis have cut off the flow of energy to Gaza as retribution for various transgressions. And those cutoffs have forced the Gaza City Power Plant to shut down for lack of the fuel oil it needs to operate. When the power plant is idled, most of the residents of Gaza City are left without power and overall power supplies in the Gaza Strip decline by about 25 percent.
In May 2006, Israel cut off the flow of oil into the Occupied Territories after the Islamic group Hamas won local elections. In January 2008, the Israelis closed the border crossings into Gaza, which resulted in a fuel shortage that closed the Gaza power plant. In April 2008, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency stopped distributing aid in Gaza after it ran out of fuel. The Israelis stopped the fuel flow as retribution for attacks that killed two Israeli civilians and three Israeli soldiers. In November 2008, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency was again forced to suspend work due to lack of fuel. The fuel shortage occurred after Israel closed the border into Gaza in response to rockets and mortar shells that had been fired into Israel from Gaza.
The disparity in energy consumption between the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza and their counterparts in Israel is just one element in the centuries-old story of tragedy and conflict in the region. But with the U.S. squarely on the side of the Israelis in the Gaza campaign, the potential for an angry backlash against the U.S. appears to be growing.
And that anger will likely only increase when Arabs begin to understand that much of the fuel that the U.S. is giving to Israel is being refined from Arab oil. The Valero refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas, which has won several of the FMS contracts for Israel, is a big buyer of Mideast crude. During the second quarter of 2006, according to data collected by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the refinery got about 40 percent of its crude oil from Kuwait or Saudi Arabia.
In short, U.S. taxpayers are paying for U.S. energy companies to buy Arab crude, ship it across the Atlantic to refineries in the U.S., refine it, and then ship it back across the Atlantic so that the Israel Defense Force can use it in its wars.
While the origination point of the crude may only matter to part of the Arab world, it is becoming apparent that bloodshed in Gaza is further complicating America’s efforts to gain credibility as an honest broker in the region. Anti-U.S. sentiment is not in America’s long-term interest, says former diplomat Chas Freeman, a man whose résumé in international affairs extends back nearly four decades.
Freeman is a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, as well as a former assistance secretary of defense. He served as Richard Nixon’s chief interpreter during Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. Now the president of the Middle East Policy Council, a Washington think tank, Freeman says the FMS fuel program for Israel runs counter to long-term goals of resolving the Palestinian conflict and America’s stated goal of protecting the flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf. The Defense Department has assumed “unilateral responsibility for the protection of the oil trade in the Persian Gulf, and yet it’s assuming responsibility for the delivery of aviation fuel for the Israeli military,” he says. “That’s confused and contradictory.” The program, he adds, is “one of many elements of our relationship with Israel that is very hard to explain.”
Freeman may be correct, but the House of Representatives has scant doubt about continued U.S. support for Israel. Nor has Congress shown much interest in the fuel shortages among Palestinians. On Jan. 9, the 14th day of the fighting in Gaza, the House passed a resolution sponsored by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, “recognizing Israel’s right to defend itself against attacks from Gaza.” The vote was 390 to 5.
Two days before the vote, UNICEF estimated that 800,000 Gazans did not have running water and 1 million were living without electricity.
Continue Reading
BTW,..some background from 1979 will also help you understand Israel’s interest in controlling Iran…how much Israel depended on Iran oil…follow the bread crumbs.
link to heritage.org
The Iranian Oil Crisis
‘’Israel’s oil supply arrangements are closely held due to fear that While details about 13 disclosure could result in public pr essure from Arab producers on the compan es that supply Israel, it is believed that Israel de pended on Iran for about 80,000 BD of its 125,000 BD oil imports.12 Permanently denied its access to Iranian oil by the new Islamic government, Israel has sought to replace Iranian oil with ship ments from Mexico, Venezuela, and Norway. If new supplies are not forthcoming in sufficient quantities, Tel Aviv could fall back on its nine-month supply of oil in commercial and strategic stock piles as well as a secret codicil to the 1975 Second Sinai with drawal agreement which commits the United States to make oil avail able for sale to the Israelis for up to five years in an emergency.
Not everything changed with Johnson. It wasn’t until Nixon in 1972 that the US started to use the UN SC veto to shield Israel.
After the athlete killings in Munich Israel launched air strikes on refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon and even sent ground troops into southern Lebanon. They killed as many as 300 Palestinian refugees, as revenge.
Not an ‘eye for an eye’, but ’30 eyes for an eye’.
The SC drew up a resolution which senior Bush (UN Ambassador at the time) vetoed for the first time.
I’m wondering if Green’s book covers those events in 1972, anyone know? I’m interested to know more about the behind the scenes manoeuvring around that first SC veto.
Sumud,
Taking Sides covers the time up to and including the 1967 war. Stephen Green’s second book, Living by the Sword, covers the period from 1968 to 1987. Both books are highly recommended, but a quick perusal by me doesn’t indicate any discussion in the second book of the events you are interested in.
Thanks tree.
It does this because Israel is a close ally, yes, but also because Israel is a domestic, rather than a foreign policy, issue in American politics.
All well and good to emphasise this point Phil but yesterday Mondoweiss prominently posted a piece by Richard Congress that essentially contradicts this idea. Rather he posited that the Israel Lobby has little impact on US foreign policy in the Middle East, which is instead driven by an inherent US imperialism.
Does this constant ping-ponging, now seemingly on a daily basis, achieve anything? Perhaps it is done under the editorial policy of “the War of Ideas in the Middle East”. But I think it is essentially a self-cancelling exercise in futility that creates paralysis rather than progress. If you wish this issue to be better debated and understood – which would be a worthy aim – then there must be more illuminating ways of doing it.
Every single POTUS starting with Truman has left print, tape, telephonic or other media records indicating that any decision affecting Israel was immediately also a domestic issue due to the Israel Lobby. Truman, Johnson, Nixon leap out most immediately for me at the moment. The Cold War was of course also a major factor until it ended. Since then, the Israel Lobby has pretty much been the deciding factor along with USA’s increased imperialism under the fight against “terrorism.”
Not every American is a friend of Apartheid israel.
Mindful here too of the changing majority demography here in the USA from white to brown.
Correction to your post, Phil. Its Stephen Green, not David J. Green, who wrote “Taking Sides”, as well as “Living By the Sword”, both well worth reading.
“The US and Israel, the terrible Siamese twins conjoined by their Jewish communities”
Only a genius could come up with this masterful visual metaphor which encapsulates in one sentence the entire nature of this “greatest anomaly of our times”. Guess who…
RE: “The US will also work to ensure that Europe, which is the main trading partner for most Israeli industries, does nothing more than cluck its tongue.” ~ Plitnick
FOR INSTANCE, SEE: US Rejected 2005 Iranian Offer Ensuring No Nuclear Weapons, by Gareth Porter, Antiwar.com, 6/06/12
ENTIRE ARTICLE – link to original.antiwar.com
Was Chirac still president of France then? Was Schröder still chancellor of Germany then?
Phil wins his bet.
In the index to Caro’s new book, there’s only one entry for “Israel”, to page 231. And the passage there has to do with Robert Kennedy, not LBJ. Still, the passage is revealing for what Lord Beaverbrook thought was the power of Jews in the U.S. in 1948:
So Robert Kennedy, living in Israel/Palestine right during the Nakba, and despite Lord Beaverbrook’s contrary words, was blind to the ethnic cleansing. For him to call what happened then the “birth of a nation” was really ironic.
And unfortunately, in his next paragraph, Caro goes on to express approval of Robert Kennedy’s stance, saying it shows how he always stood up for the underdog. It looks as if Caro as well has fallen for the Zionist propaganda about 1948. I’m afraid we’re not going to get an objective account of the attack on the USS Liberty in the next volume of Caro’s work.
And, if my memory of the excerpts of the current new volume that appeared in The New Yorker serves, it looks as if Caro accepts the lone-nut account of the JFK assassination. (I just read the first few pages of the new volume this morning, and in those few pages he flatly calls Oswald “the assassin” without any qualification.)
So, Caro never mentioned in his book that Robert Kennedy may have remembered Beaverbrook’s assessment later, after events like the Lavon false flag affair? For example as Grant Smith states: “On Nov. 11, 1962 the Justice Department’s FARA section, under then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, ordered the AZC to begin registering as an Israeli foreign agent.” AZC was a predecessor entity to AIPAC. If you want to see a detailed expose of the origins of AIPAC and how it has avoided being registered under FARA, as well as just when and how AIPAC and associate entities took over the mainstream press: link to wrmea.org
In November of 2009, Grant met with top US officials, pushing for renewed investigation of AIPAC under FARA. He was grilled by four officials and has not heard anything since on the matter as far as I know.
Apparently not, if Caro’s index is any guide.
I was disappointed to see this. I’m afraid it means we can’t expect an objective account from Caro’s next volume of the attack on the USS Liberty, any more than this current one gives us what I think is a reasonable account of the JFK assassination. Up to this current volume, I have been an admirer of Caro’s biography of LBJ.