Total number of comments: 360 (since 2011-04-04 12:37:23)
Robert Werdine
I am an Arab-American deeply concerned about the Middle East peace process. My ancestors came from Jdaide Lebanon early in this century and I still have relatives living there today.Like many Arab-Americans I grew up believing that Israel was the obstacle to peace in the Holy Land. This illusion was dispelled by the Oslo Peace Process,where I saw Israel making concessions, Arafat pocketing them, and making none in return. I have seen little that has changed with the behavior of his successors.
Phillip,
I wanted to commend you on that excellent piece on Shostakovich's Babi-Yar symphony that you wrote on your website. I have Bernard Haitink's excellent recording on the Decca/London label. If you don't already have this, I highly reccomend getting it. the first and final movements are particularly distinctive. I recently got the Heifetz/Barbirolli recording of the Glazunov concerto. also has the Sibelius and Tchaikovsky concertos.
I still cannot believe this. Shadid was irreplaceable. No one can fill his shoes.
A strange thing happened to me today. About a week ago I taped a documentary on the Military channel about the Doolittle raid, and sat down this afternoon to watch it. What I got instead was a documentary from Link tv on Norman Finklestein--someone had changed the channel I was taping, obviously. The documentary traced his long, lonely struggle to reveal The Truth about "the Holocaust industry." At one university somewhere, a young girl who was trembling and crying, gently, almost pleadingly, asked him if he realized how hurtful comparing Jews to Nazis was to some Jews.
Now, he might have calmly explained to the girl, who was crying and obviously very distressed, his point of view on the Israeli-Palestinian situation and why, and reassuring her that he could understand her feelings, and then, maybe explaining to her his (in my opinion, ridiculous and insulting) view of how he sees past Jewish suffering used as a warrant for certain objectionable actions committed against Palestinians in the past and present.
But no. Finklestein assailed his timid, trembling questioner with all the belligerence of a brawler sailing into a fistfight. He brutally mocked what he called the girl's "crocidile tears" and then exhaled a blast furnace of self-rightuous thundering about his Holocaust survivor parents and how Jews use the Holocaust to oppress Palestinians--his usual shtick to browbeat anyone who challenges his hysterical--and sometimes shockingly ad-hominum--assertions and attacks.
The young girl continued to weep all through the lively professor's three-minute aria of brutal and remorseless self-justification. When the number expired, he briefly left the podium and smiled to the camera--proud of his handiwork, no doubt, and of having throttled a timid young girl into intimidation. Served her right, I guess.
"Would you accept an Israel based on 78% of the land, move the settlers out of Palestine and acknowledge RoR in the form of compensation if that gave Israel peace?"
If I were an Israeli, I would. Since I am an American, I would urge them to do so. If the Palestinian leadership and the people, accepted a compensated resettlement inside the territories or elsewhere of their choosing, plus further compensation, and agreed to end the conflict, what would there be left to argue over? Any Israeli rejection of this Palestinian acceptance would be criminal.
Shingo,
“It is true that the AHC was, ostensibly, the recognized leadership”
Said you:
“On the contrary. As Hostage pointed out a while back, the Arab Higher Committee (AHC) and the Mufti were not the formal or elected representatives of the people of Palestine after WWII.”
I don’t disagree with this. I meant “recognized leadership” among Arab leaders, not the Palestinians. Not unlike Lebanon in some ways in the 1970’s and 1980’s, the problem for the Palestinians in the late 1940’s was not that they had no leadership, but that they had too much of it. Syrians, Jordanians, Iraqis, and Egyptians all had their own designs on the area, clashed often with the Mufti as well as with one another, and all attempted to emphasize and parlay their own influence there. Everyone wanted to be top dog in Palestine. The conflicting strategies, loyalties, and agendas would ultimately doom the Arab war effort.
“The reported agreement by five Arab states to wipe out the Zionist state meets with skepticism from the refugees.”
“This is rubbish.”
In the first place, I was merely quoting from a statement quoted by the NY Times article concerning the refugees’ anger and disillusionment with the actions of the surrounding Arab states and their militias. The entire thrust of my post, which you obviously missed, was to emphasize my agreement with Hostage’s assertion that the Palestinians themselves were not responsible for the outbreak of the war, and that they had no part in directing it. Your statement that the surrounding Arab states were not planning to invade Palestine after the Mandate ended is incorrect, though you are correct that the Jordanians decided at the last moment to confine their attacks to Arab apportioned areas. I have addressed this more substantively here:
link to mondoweiss.net
“I honestly do not know what percentage of the Palestinian people rejected the partition and/or peaceful co-existence with the Jews, but I believe the number did not exceed those who did not.”
“You believe according to what statistic? Your hasbaraometer? You have never provided any evidence that the Palestinian people rejected the principle of partition, much less that they supported or were represented by the Arab League and the Mufti.”
What are you talking about? Can you read? I said here that I believe that the number of Palestinians who accepted the partition and peaceful co-existence with the Jews outnumbered those who did not. You have a problem with this? I also said that you were right when you said
“You have never provided any evidence that the Palestinian people rejected the principle of partition, much less that they supported or were represented by the Arab League and the Mufti.”
Did you miss that too? You also missed where I quoted the Jewish Agency rep at the March 19 session at the UN Security Council where he said: “if left alone, considerable sections of Palestinian Arabs would be willing to cooperate or acquiesce (in the partition), but that armed intervention by neighboring (Arab) States completely changed that situation.”
You just wasted four paragraphs of Hostage-sourced material for nothing.
Said you:
“Not only was there no war of any consequence being waged inside Palestine against the Yishuv, but the Zionist militias initiated the war and were vastly more power and better armed.”
I have already addressed/refuted that here,
link to mondoweiss.net
Here,
link to mondoweiss.net
Here,
link to mondoweiss.net
And here,
link to mondoweiss.net
A NY Times article of January 29, 1948 noted,
“(N.Y, Times, Jan, 29) describes Jerusalem as virtually isolated behind a curtain of fear. The dangers of travel are cutting the city off from its normal markets: supplies are short, prices are fantastically high, and many shops, both Jewish and Arab, are closed. Within the walls of the Old City, the plight of 400 Jewish families, surrounded by Arabs, is becoming more desperate each day.”
An AP report on the same day noted,
“Cairo. Jan, 29 - According to an A.P. report quoted by the N.Y. Times, 'Assad Dagher, chief of the Arab League's press section, said today that Palestine may have an Arab government by the time the British leave. He said that an Arab regime might ask for the help of regular armies of the seven near-by Arab states to prevent creation of a Jewish nation. His statement modified a previous assertion that the Arab states would occupy all of Palestine with regular armies after British troops leave.”
link to domino.un.org
A January 17 editorial in the British New Statesman excoriates the United States for not lending a stronger hand toward implementing the partition with the taunt that the Mufti and the Arab High Committee were confident that “they have got the Americans where they want them, talking Zionism at home, and practicing in Palestine a non-intervention that works against the Jews.”
Here is a Manchester Guardian editorial of Jan. 31, 1948 excoriating the Atlee government for failing to support the Jews under assault, and which would make its present anti-Israel editors cringe:
“At present we are still treating Jews and Arabs on the same footing, though the Jews are fighting to defend a decision of the UN, and the Arabs are fighting to defeat it.”
A February 2 1948 London Times editorial excoriating the Atlee Government for its Palestine policy and urging on the activity of the UN Palestine Commission to implement the partition, noted that,
“the members of the UN responsible for the decision on partition have exposed the Jews in Palestine to difficulties and dangers and they cannot leave them in the lurch.”
link to domino.un.org
A March 17 NY Times article notes Arab military activity in the Nablus-Tulkharm-Jenin triangle, saying that “the army’s strength was reported to have reached close to 8000 men, with more arriving daily.”
It also records Abd al-Qader al-Husayni, the Mufti-appointed commander of the Jerusalem front of the Jaysh al-Jihad al-Muqaddas (“Army of the Holy War”) as saying he was “not willing to consider a truce under any circumstances.”
link to domino.un.org
Fawzi al-Qawuqji, commander of the Arab Liberation Army (ALA), told Al-Ahram on March 9, 1948 that the ALA was fighting for “the defeat of the partition and the annihilation of the Zionists.” (Benny Morris, “1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War,” 2008, p. 491)
The Mufti told the Jaffa daily Al Sarih on March 10, 1948 that preventing partition was not enough, and that they “would continue fighting until the Zionists were annihilated and the whole of Palestine became a purely Arab state.” (“1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War,” 2008, p. 409)
A March 28 NY Herald Tribune report has Hussein Khalidi, Secretary of the Arab Higher Executive Committee for Palestine pouring scorn on “what he termed ‘sudden Jewish efforts’ to obtain an international force to protect the Holy Land’s Shrines,” and that this was “due to a realization by the Jews that they could not protect their 100,000 people in Jerusalem.”
link to domino.un.org
The sentiments expressed above by al-Qawuqji on March 9, the Mufti on March 10, by Abd al-Qader al-Husayni on March 17, and Hussein Khalidi on March 29 all gave voice to the well founded confidence among the Arabs that they were winning the war against the Yishuv at this stage. As is indicated above, this was also the consensus view in the international community at the time; the editorials of the London Times, the Guardian, and the New Statesman, all pleaded with the Atlee government (and the U.S.) to intervene more decisively in the conflict to rescue the Yishuv from their desperate plight. A British report in late March similarly commented:
“The intensification of Arab attacks on communications and particularly the failure of the Kfar Etzion convoy (March 27-28), probably the Yishuv’s strongest transport unit, to force a return passage has brought home the precarious position of Jewish communities both great and small which depend on supply lines running through Arab controlled country. In particular, it is now realized that the position of Jewish Jerusalem, where a food scarcity already exists, is likely to be desperate after 16 May.”
Another British report in early April read:
“It is becoming increasingly apparent that the Yishuv and its leaders are deeply worried about the future. The 100,000 Jews of Jerusalem have been held to ransom and it is doubtful that the Arab economic blockade of the city can be broken by Jewish forces alone. If the Jewish leaders are not prepared to sacrifice the 100,000 Jews of Jerusalem, then they must concede, however unwillingly, that the Arabs have won the second round of the struggle which began with a Jewish victory in the first round on the 29th of November.”
This then was the dire situation facing the Yishuv in early April of 1948. After the successful ambush of the latest Jewish convoy to Jerusalem on March 31, it was precarious to say the least. The sabotage of the convoys was increasing, the strangulation of the roadways and all arteries of communication between the scattered communities of the Yishuv were sharpening, the attendant shortages of basic commodities and weapons inside Jerusalem were growing, and the siege around the city was tightening.
It would seem that either the consensus of international opinion expressed here at the time is wrong, or you are right.
Hostage,
Said you:
“The Mufti did not enjoy much popular support and all his efforts to organize a popular resistance to the Partition Resolution were unsuccessful. According to Ian Bickerton, Carla Klausner, “A Concise History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict”, 4th Edition, Prentice Hall, 2004, few Palestinians joined the Arab Liberation Army and many Palestinians favored partition and indicated a willingness to live alongside a Jewish state (page 88).”
For once, I agree with you.
On February 16, 1948, the United Nations Palestine Commission reported to the Security Council:
“Powerful Arab interests, both inside and outside Palestine, are defying the resolution of the General Assembly and are engaged in a deliberate effort to alter by force the settlement envisaged therein.
The main facts controlling the security situation in Palestine today are the following:
a. Organized effect by strong Arab elements inside and outside Palestine to prevent the implementation of the Assembly’s plan of partition and to thwart its objectives by threats and acts of violence, including armed incursions into Palestinian territory.
b. Certain elements of the Jewish community in Palestine continue to commit irresponsible acts of violence which worsen the security situation, although that Community is generally in support of the recommendations of the Assembly.”
The report also recounts, in detail, on the activities and attacks of the various Arab militias and the Arab Liberation Army that had been infiltrating from neighboring countries.
link to unispal.un.org
Shingo, in his reply to a previous post of mine,
link to mondoweiss.net
has pointed out that the UN Palestine Commission did not mention the Palestinians here, and that it referenced only the activities of the Mufti and the Arab High Committee and the Arab Liberation Army, and that I have “provided no evidence that the Palestinian people rejected the principle of partition, much less that they supported or were represented by the Arab League and the Mufti.”
Shingo was right. I have not, and the reason is because I cannot. This is because I draw a distinction between the activities of the Mufti and those of the Arab League and their proxy armies on the one hand, and that of the Palestinian people on the other.
The Mufti was widely hated and feared among the Palestinians, and, indeed, it should be pointed out that the victims of the Mufti since the 1920’s were overwhelmingly Arab, not Jewish. In the late 20’s and the early 30’s the Mufti set about murdering and intimidating opponents in order to consolidate his influence and power throughout Palestine (the same methods, essentially, that Al Capone was using to tighten his grip on Chicago’s underworld at that very time). The Mufti’s campaign of murder and intimidation focused most heavily on Arab moderates who engaged in or sought friendly co-existence with the Jews. By 1947 the Husaynis’ anti-opposition terrorism against the Nashashibis and others in the previous years had largely eliminated rivals for their power by this time. Though the Mufti left Palestine during the Revolt in the late 30’s, and he never had anything that could be called a constituency there, he always had agents and supporters all over Palestine that were directly answerable to him and his brother. For the British Mandatory government, the Mufti and his brother were the ones with whom Atlee and Cunningham dealt.
But the truth was that in late 1947, Arab Palestine was largely leaderless. It is true that the AHC was, ostensibly, the recognized leadership, such as it was, of Arab Palestine, but the truth is that the other Arab leaders simply overrode and marginalized the Mufti when it suited them, and this was often. There were thus many strings pulling and leveraging for power in Palestine from the outside, and by all accounts many Palestinians deeply resented the activities of the outside powers and their militias for dragging them into the conflict, and this intensified as the Arab forces began to lose the war.
This is reflected in a New York Times story dated May 2nd, 1948 titled
“Despair is Voiced by Arab Refugees: Evacuees from Palestine say Jews Crash Through Weak Resistance by Volunteers”:
“Talk of Arab governments rescuing Palestine sounds like another case of too little too late…The Arab Liberation Army of Yarmuk was described by the refugees as a hodgepodge collection of adventurers, ne’er-do-wells, and soap box orators who had never numbered more than 3000, and who had relied on Palestinian villagers for cannon fodder.
The reported agreement by five Arab states to wipe out the Zionist state meets with skepticism from the refugees. With an air of disillusionment, they point out that the so-called Arab War Council of five states that met last week in Amman, the capital of Trans-Jordan, had included no Palestinian Arab.”
link to thejerusalemfund.org
From the very beginning, they were never allowed any say in the activities of the Mufti’s militias or the ALA, which disrupted their lives and destroyed their livelihoods, and whatever objections were voiced by them would have carried little weight with either the Mufti or the members of the Arab League, both of whom simply rode roughshod over them. The states who never had the slightest intention of allowing an independent Palestine, and later annexed the West Bank, occupied Gaza, and sometimes violently suppressed any hint of independent Palestinian national aspirations, were unlikely to indulge such considerations.
I honestly do not know what percentage of the Palestinian people rejected the partition and/or peaceful co-existence with the Jews, but I believe the number did not exceed those who did not. As I point out below, the representative of the Jewish Agency told the UN Security Council on March 19 that “if left alone, considerable sections of Palestinian Arabs would be willing to cooperate or acquiesce (in the partition), but that armed intervention by neighboring (Arab) States completely changed that situation.”
The war effort was thus not being waged by a unified Palestinian people, but by outside interests who took not the slightest heed of their interests or desires, and who in fact openly coveted control of Palestine for themselves. This was reflected in the intense rivalry between the Mufti and the nations of the Arab League, who often sidelined and overrode the Mufti as often as they both did to the Palestinians. Each hated and distrusted the other, and both had their own designs on Palestine.
After the passing of the partition vote, there were contentious disputes between the Mufti and the Arab League about who would lead the Arab war effort. The Husaynis fought hard but failed to prevent the Arab Liberation Army from being commanded by one of the Mufti’s most bitter rivals, Fawzi al-Qawuqji. The Mufti accused Qawuqji of “spying for Britian, drinking wine, and running after women.” The Mufti further complained, correctly, that the ALA would deprive his forces of much needed arms and supplies, though he did manage to secure appointments of two of his protégés, Abd al-Qader al-Husayni, commander of the Jerusalem Front (and cousin of the Mufti), and Hasan Salame, commander of the Lydda Front into the Jaysh al-Jihad al-Muqaddas (“Army of the Holy War”). The Husaynis regarded the ALA (and its commander, Fawzi al-Qawuqji) as a rival to their own efforts, and the feeling was mutual: the Arab league had set up the ALA precisely to counter the designs and influence of the Mufti. ‘Abdullah of Jordan set up his own force (the Arab Legion) to thwart those of both the Mufti and the ALA, and Farouk of Egypt set himself against the Mufti, ‘Abdullah, and the ALA, saying: “The Arabs ought to get rid of all three of them: the Mufti, Abdullah, and Qawuqji.”
These conflicting egos and ambitions, which often had the Mufti and the nations of the League working at cross purposes, and did much to hamper the Arab war effort, made for a priceless gift to the Yishuv as the war went on.
What cannot be denied, in any event, is that the war effort being waged inside Palestine against the Yishuv, whatever its source, was considerable, and, up until early April 1948, was largely successful.
It’s becoming perfectly clear that this effort to snuff out “Nakba denial” is coming along pretty much as I thought it would. It is both a weapon and a catchall to smear anyone who fails to toe the party line here on just about anything to do with 1948. “Nakba denier” is about as definitionally adaptable as “Communist.” A good case in point is Annie’s smear of Shaktimaan’s statement here:
link to mondoweiss.net
And Hostage’s smear of Shakt here in answer to this statement:
“The same can be said of Israelis to Arabs. And yet massacres did still occur on both sides. To ignore the riots and pogroms committed against the indigenous Jews on the basis that most of the Palestinians didn’t participate makes as much sense as discounting the effects of Deir Yassin because the Haganah did not participate in the massacre. Nevertheless my point was that sweeping generalizations that Palestinian narratives are inherently correct while Jewish ones are false is itself an untrue generalization.”
To which Hostage replied,
“Who do you think you are kidding? Israel has carried out a full-blown multi-pronged pogrom against the Palestinian people ever since the day the State was established. You can be banned here at MW for comments that deny the Nakba.”
Any reasonable person reading both statements of Shakt might see an open minded attempt to acknowledge tolerance for different interpretations of history and points of view—once a customary staple of civil discourse. But no, the heretic must now be fingered and tarred and feathered for his heresy for all to see. This unfortunate turn of conversation is beginning to take on strains of the old odium theologicum which poisoned religious disputes about the Trinity in the 6th and 7th centuries, and the Eucharist in the 16th—i.e., the brutal refusal to countenance disagreement and to equate dissent on this or that issue with a kind of heresy, or worse.
How any fair minded person could read both of Shakt’s statements and conclude that anything is being denied, much less that the denial of anything is even being attempted, is simply beyond me. What, for example, does the statement that the Haganah did not participate in the Deir Yassin massacre, have to do with “Nakba denial?” Is Hostage kidding with this?
For the record, the initial purpose of the operation that led to the massacre was for the Stern/Irgun to secure Deir Yassin for the Haganah to occupy. Haganah machine gunners outside the village provided covering fire for the Stern and Irgun troopers only when they met strong resistance from the village’s defenders, and a platoon of Palmahniks arrived on the scene to provide cover fire to help evacuate the wounded (of the 120 Stern/Irgun attackers, some forty were wounded and four killed in the fighting). But the Palmahniks did not participate in the subsequent massacre of villagers and prisoners—that was done by the Stern/Irgun after the Palmahniks left the village.
The Stern/Irgun troops then moved about from house to house grenading and machine-gunning both civilians and militiamen indiscriminately, and they led a contingent of Arab prisoners out to a nearby quarry to be shot. Three days after the massacre, Yitzhak Levy, the town’s Haganah Intelligence Service (HIS) commander, commented in a report,
“The conquest of the village was carried out with great cruelty. Whole families—women, old people, children—were killed. Some of the prisoners moved to places of detention, including women and children, were murdered viciously by their captors.”
Shakt was thus right. The Haganah did not participate in the massacre—they participated only in the initial attack on the village, and even then only to give covering fire from outside the village when the Stern/Irgun troops were encountering heavy resistance . It was the Stern/Irgun inside Deir Yassin who conducted the massacre. With the exception of the Palmahniks inside the village evacuating wounded, the Haganah had no military presence inside Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948. As Benny Morris has said, "Ironically it was not a Haganah, but a joint IZL/LHI operation, undertaken with the reluctant, qualified consent of the Haganah commander in Jerusalem." ("The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem," 1987, p. 113).
Nobody is thus denying that an atrocity was committed here. Who would?! The only real denial here is Hostage’s cynical and dishonest attempt, albeit by omission, to conflate the initial attack and the subsequent massacre as being one and the same thing, as if the massacre of the entire village was planned and carried out by the Haganah in cahoots with the Stern/Irgun troopers who did the killing of prisoners and civilians. They did not, and nothing in Hostage’s link says that they did.
Thus Hostage not only made a false assertion but then went on to accuse Shakt of engaging in “Nakba denial” for making an assertion that is not even contradicted by the very source that Hostage cites to prove his point. The notion that Shakt engaged in “Nakba denial” here is baseless. Nothing is being denied here.
This episode well illustrates how someone can supposedly be seen to engage in Nakba denial without even knowing that they are doing so. In the same way that people ignorant of witchcraft or Communism could be seen to be guilty of being either a witch or a Communist through the eyes of their accusers, Nakba denial seems almost as malleable. It is clear that Nakba denial can be whatever Hostage or Annie say it is.
And how does a person deny the charge without further incriminating themselves of the offense in the eyes of the Nakba police? How are they to know if they make a wrong statement? Shakt further said that both sides committed massacres in the war. Is this also Nakba denial? That, for example, 129 Jewish prisoners at Kfar Etzion were murdered? This has nothing to do with whether refugees fled or were expelled. Does it count?
This is thus not a debate on a level playing field. It enables Hostage to not only smear Shakt as a Nakba denier, but also to make a statement like “Israel has carried out a full-blown multi-pronged pogrom against the Palestinian people ever since the day the State was established” and yet forbids anyone from rebutting this assertion lest they break the rules. This is Phil’s and Adam’s blog and they get to set the rules, but it is difficult to know how substantive dialogue on the origins of the I/P conflict can take place here when Annie and Hostage can play the Nakba denial card against whoever incurs their displeasure or has the temerity to disagree with them.
In any event, it is undeniable that the recording and writing of history is a peculiar and contentious craft in which debate, disagreement and denial are all inextricably linked . The greatest of all historians—in my view—is Thucydides, and his history of the Peloponesian War, the greatest ever written. It is one of my greatest regrets that I cannot read this history in the original Greek. Thucydides hoped his history “would be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future,” as opposed to Herodotus, who, in his history, sought only “to preserve the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory”—i.e., history as p.r. and propaganda. The Roman historian Livy, similarly spins like a press agent for the Augustan Age of the Roman Empire—“the establishment of which is now, in power, next only to the immortal Gods”—a shining city on a hill. The Rome described by Tacitus, in contrast, is a filthy brothel of debauchery and degeneration, and he spares no lurid, disgusting detail in order to, as he once said, “let no unworthy action go uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil words and deeds.”
History is thus a battle between the spinners and the truth seekers. On the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1948, I see historians like Benny Morris in the Thucydides/Tacitus mold, and see ideologues like Ilan Pappe, Chomsky and others like them carrying on in the spirit of Herodotus and Livy; others here obviously feel differently. History, in my view, must be about history as it happened and not about how politics and ideology view it and attempt to reconfigure it retrospectively. That is a corruption of truth and facts, whether it is antisemites employing their hatred of Jews to deny the Holocaust, or anything else.
Citizen,
I would actually argue that the greatest asset to the Soviet war effort from August 1941 to early 1943 was not lend-lease, but Adolf Hitler. Hitler's erratic interference in the operational details, which included direction of company and platoon scale tactical engagements from hundreds of miles away in his HQ at Rastenberg, was his greatest gift to his enemies, and the princpal cause of his demise. It was Hitler, after all, who split Army Group Center in two in August 1941 instaed of taking Moscow while the weather was good and the Russians were reeling. It was Hitler who ordered the Moscow offensive when the autumn rains were turning roads into quagmires, kept it going even when the snow and subzero temps were causing more casualties than the enemy, and refused a sensible withdrawal that could have saved tens of thousands of lives when the Soviets launched a massive counteroffensive on December 6, 1941.
It was Hitler, too, who launched the campaign of the summer, 1942 by attempting to capture both the Caucasus AND Stalingrad, withdrew the armor from von Paulus' 6th Army when Stalingrad could easily have been taken, engaged in an utterly futile urban battle of attrition in the city that totally negated the Germans' advantages of mobility and maneuver, watched the Soviets encircle the city, refused to withdraw 6th Army when it was still possible, and then presided over the worst defeat of German arms in history since Napoleon defeated Prussia at Jena and Auerstadt in 1806. In this unprecedented sweeping of an entire army off the map, only some 5000 of the original 300,000 soldiers eventually got back to Germany after the war. He was forced to withdraw from the Caucasus, too.
(The Israelis made a similar error to Stalingrad in 2006 when they allowed themselves to get bogged down in Hezbollah strongholds like Marou al Ras and Bint J'Bail)
I think lend-lease did two important things for the Soviet Union in WWII: it enabled them to concentrate the bulk of their industry on weaponry, and it enourmously aided their logistical apparatus in the great advances of 1943-1945. But, again, those westward advances would not have been as successful as they were had Hitler not aided Stalin by refusing to countenence timely withdrawals which consigned so many German units to be captured or cut to pieces when they might have lived to fight another day. General Manstein in Feb-March 1943 conducted a tactical retreat in the face of a Soviet advance, waited for them to over-extend themselves, then turned around and sliced through their flanks, pushing them back a few hundred miles and pushing them out of Kharkov, which they had just recaptured. This showed what the Germans could do when talented Generals like Manstein were left alone by hitler and given a free hand. Had Manstein and not Hitler directed the war effort in 1943-1944, at the very least the Soviets, I think, would have been much further to the east on June 6, 1944 when we invaded Normandy.
But who knows?
Actually lycias, the US delivered some 427,000 motor trucks, 10,000 tanks, 1900 locomotives, 11,000 railway flats, 98 freight ships, 105 sub chasers, 197 torpedo boats, 2.6 million tons of high octane petroleum blending agents, and 4.5 million tons of clothing and foodstuffs. The Red army was largely fed, clothed, and transported by way of the USA. (Albert and Joan Seaton, "The Soviet Army: 1918 to the Present," 1986, p.137)
Also, I think their weapons, most which they produced themselves, were probably superior to those of America and Britian; their PPSH-41 submachine gun and their T-34 tank put our Tommy gun and Sherman tank to shame. The Germans discovered this at the battle of Moscow in 1941 when T-34 tanks, which were immune to their anti-tank guns, put the fear of God into their infantry.
The Soviets undoubtedly "tore the guts" out of the Wehrmacht, as Churchill put it, but they had a lot of help in doing so, and the campaigns in Italy and NW Europe, as well as the bombing campaign over Germany, all directed considerable resources away from the Eastern Front against the Russians. Had Hitler coordinated the invasion of Russia with a Japanese attack in the far east, I think the Soviet Union would probably collapsed in 1941.
"i think robert knows phil and adam are on vacation."
I think Robert posted his comment on Febraury 7--a day before Phil and Adam announced their vacation. Nice try.
Annie,
I have asserted previously that many refugees were expelled but that most fled, depending on what stage of the 1948 war is being discussed, greater numbers being expelled as the conflict intensified. No one presented any evidence refuting my assertion that all but about 1500 of the 75-100,000 refugees who fled between November 30, 1947 to April 2, 1948 did so because of the increasing violence and chaos enveloping Palestine, and were not expelled by the Yishuv. After April 2 as the conflict widened and intensified there were more numerous acts of expulsion, but not as numerous as those who fled. I do not believe that any of this constitutes what is called Nakba denial and does not posit blame on the Palestinians for fleeing or being expelled.
But I am most curious to know: does it make me a "fleder?"
You know Kathleen, I think I have to agree with you on one thing: Chris Matthews almost never talks about the ME or I/P or Iran, though he has been talking about Iran more lately. I have been watching Hardball religiously ever since the Clinton-Lewisnky scandal. He's talked alot about Iraq and some about Afghanistan, but he almost never talks about I/P. Though I remember ridiculing your suggestion back on Hardblogger last year, I do now think Chris should invite pundits from both sides to debate the issues on ME, I/P, and Iran more often. I myself would love to see Michael Rubin or Michael Ledeen go head to head with Flynt Leverett, or Juan Cole. Now, THAT would be something far more worth watching than the same old schlock about Gingrich and Romney.
I recently got Dish TV, and with it, the LINK TV channel, which I didn't have before. I actually find myself watching "Democracy Now" and the like almost as much as I watch the Military and History International channels. It sure beats MSNBC.
"Expand and focus intelligence collections at Shi'a mosques."
This is chilling. Instead of targeting Shi'a houses of worship for surveillance, they would do better in stepping up protection from Islamophobic vandals. Our mosque in Michigan City, Indiana--one of the first mosques built on this continent--has been vandalized twice in the last five years.
Once in July 2006
link to theamericanmuslim.org
And again in August 2011
link to thenewsdispatch.com
link to thenewsdispatch.com
It's not clear if the latest one was just vandalism or hate-inspired, but I'm beginning to have my doubts that it was the former. Our mosque is in a rural area outside town, and there has long been tension between some of the Pakistani gas station owners in the area and the locals. Too many times over the years I have heard reference to "towel heads" and the like in passing among them.
Annie,
Said you:
“robert, imho your 9:10 post is another perfect example of nakba denial. you have used the term ‘fled’ to describe “about 75,000-100,000 refugees fled between November 1947 and early April 1948″ and “another 3-400,000 fled between early April and May 15–”
If you were expecting me to use the term “ethnically cleansed” to describe the exodus of ALL of the refugees, that is not going to happen. It is with deep regret that I must inform you that I cannot edit my thoughts, beliefs, and reading of history to satisfy the beliefs and opinions of others, including you. Sorry.
To clarify my views on the matter, I can only say what I have said many, many times before on this contentious and much argued issue.
The Arab and Palestinian militias had been attacking the UN apportioned areas of the Jewish state’s borders ever since December 1947. With the exception of Stern and Irgun terror attacks and a few isolated acts by the Haganah, the Yishuv was, in the main, on the defensive until early April 1948. This was the so-called “Civil War period” of the 1948 War, which was fought inside Palestine between the Yishuv and Arab and Palestinian militias between December 1947 until the Pan-Arab invasion on May 15, 1948. This period of the war developed in two stages: The first was between early December 1947 to April 6, 1948, when, following the rejection of the partition, numerous small unit military attacks were launched by Arab and Palestinian militias on Jewish settlements and roadways, and with the Yishuv, with the exception of Stern and Irgun terror attacks and a few isolated acts by the Haganah, were on the defensive. Some 75-100,000 refugees fled during this period, and most were not expelled. As Benny Morris has said,
“During this period, Jewish troops expelled the inhabitants of only one village—Qisariya, in the Coastal Plain, in mid-February (for reasons connected to Jewish illegal immigration rather than the ongoing civil war)—though other villages were harassed and a few specifically intimidated by the IZL, LHI, and Haganah actions (much as during this period Jewish settlements were being harassed and intimidated by Arab irregulars).” (“1948: The First Arab-Israeli War,” pp.94-95).
In the period between the passing of the partition Nov.29, 1947 and April 6, 1948, I am certainly aware of retaliatory attacks (actually, revenge killings) by the Haganah on Khisas in Galilee on December 19, Balad ash Sheik and Hawasa on Dec.31-Jan.1, and the Semiramis Hotel in west Jerusalem on January 5-6 (in which some 26 civilians died). There were also certainly a series of small counter-assaults on other small targets in this period, but the Haganah was, by and large, on the defensive in this period. But other than these mentioned, and, of course, terrorist attacks by the Stern and Irgun, I am not aware of any large scale Haganah attacks in this period, least of all any that could have expelled any Palestinians en masse.
Not including the tit for tat terrorist attacks occurring between the Arabs and the Stern and Irgun, between December and April, the Arab and Palestinian militias launched no fewer than 15 full scale company and battalion sized assaults on Jewish settlements. There was not one single attack, or counter-attack by the Yishuv on any Arab position in this period even close to this scale and frequency. Only after seeing Jewish Jerusalem surrounded and besieged, the roadways between the settlements being sabotaged and strangled, and after suffering some four months of unrelenting attacks, did the Yishuv take to the counter-offensive with Operation Nachshon on April 6, and drive back and defeat the Arab militias. This period saw the collapse of the Palestinian war effort, and the flight of some 3-400,000 refugees.
The UN correctly held the Arabs responsible for the outbreak of violence. On February 16, 1948, the Commission reported to the Security Council:
“Powerful Arab interests, both inside and outside Palestine, are defying the resolution of the General Assembly and are engaged in a deliberate effort to alter by force the settlement envisaged therein.
The main facts controlling the security situation in Palestine today are the following:
a. Organized effect by strong Arab elements inside and outside Palestine to prevent the implementation of the Assembly’s plan of partition and to thwart its objectives by threats and acts of violence, including armed incursions into Palestinian territory.
b. Certain elements of the Jewish community in Palestine continue to commit irresponsible acts of violence which worsen the security situation, although that Community is generally in support of the recommendations of the Assembly.”
link to unispal.un.org
The report leaves no doubt about the AHC’s utter rejection of the partition and their sworn and bitter determination to resist it’s implementation by force, which is, by the way, what they had been doing since the vote was taken. The report also recounts, in detail, on the activities and attacks of the various Arab militias and the Arab Liberation Army that had been infiltrating from neighboring countries. While the report duly notes the “irresponsible acts of violence” committed by “certain elements of the Jewish community” (i.e., the Stern-Irgun terrorists), the Commission acknowledges the Jews’ acceptance of the partition, and posits blame for the violence almost solely on the Arabs’ rejection of the partition, and their attempts to thwart it by force.
The Arabs, indeed, made no attempts to deny starting the war. Jamal Husseini told the Security Council on April 16, 1948:
“The representative of the Jewish Agency told us yesterday that they were not the attackers, that the Arabs had begun the fighting. We did not deny this. We told the whole world that we were going to fight.”
The second stage of this period of the war occurred from April 6 to May 15, when the Haganah, seeing Jewish Jerusalem surrounded and besieged, the roadways between the settlements being sabotaged and strangled, and after suffering some four months of unrelenting attacks, took to the counter-offensive with Operation Nachshon, and drove back and defeated the Arab militias. This period saw the collapse of the Palestinian war effort, and the flight of some 3-400,000 refugees.
As Benny Morris has written,
“It was the war that propelled most of those displaced out of their houses and into refugeedom. Most fled when their villages and towns came under Jewish attack or out of fear of future attack. They wished to move out of harms way. At first, during December 1947—March 1948, it was the middle- and upper-class families who fled, abandoning the towns; later, from April on, after the Yishuv shifted to the offensive, it was the urban and rural masses who fled, in a sense emulating their betters. Most of the displaced likely expected to return to their homes within weeks or months, on the coattails of victorious Arab armies, or on the back of a UN decision or great power intervention.” (“1948: The First Arab-Israeli War,” pp.410-411).
Morris also notes (p.p. 96-97) how the exodus in the first Civil War stage (Dec. 1947-March 1948) was propelled by the deteriorating economic conditions resulting from the fighting and growing instability, as well as the flight of the middle classes, which resulted in the closure of workshops and businesses, spiking inflation and unemployment. The conflict separated the economic intermingling of Jews and Arabs—Arabs from employment at Jewish workplaces, and Jewish marketplaces from Arab goods, notably agricultural products. By late December the agricultural produce in Beit Sahur was rotting and there was a severe shortage of animal feed. By early March flour and fuel were scarce in Jaffa, and commerce was dead. Morris notes that “all Arab banks had closed by the end of April.” The conflict also exacerbated supply problems between Arab villages, unemployment and robbery were rife, and Arab public transportation was stopped cold.
Adding to this deterioration in early April was two things: 1) a counter-offensive launched by the Haganah to beat back the Arab militias attacking settlements, strangling the roadways, and besieging Jewish Jerusalem, and 2) the Deir Yassin massacre. Word of the Deir Yassin massacre on April 9 (3 days after the the Haganah took to the offensive) spread like a prairie fire through Arab Palestine and beyond. Added to this, the violence of the intensified fighting in the towns and villages, the flight of so many high ranking Arab functionaries, and the near total breakdown in services all played a role in the increased exodus of the refugees throughout the 1948 War. This is not to deny that there were not some expulsions at Lydda and Ramle; there were, but the numbers of those expelled here and elsewhere were rather few compared to the overall total. In most cases, there did not need to be expulsions; people fled for their lives in anticipation of being killed, or for other reasons. All Palestine was a war zone in those days, and, in general, Palestinian Arab society had always been governed by a somewhat leaderless, fragile polity at that time, and it simply collapsed under the strain of the conflict, as did countless other societies in Europe during World War Two. When war comes to your village, it is only human to want to get out of the way until it is over.
One of the points I have repeatedly tried to emphasize here is that the first Arab-Israeli War was indeed a war, and not just an assault by one side against a helpless victim. To portray it as such ignores entirely the military dimension of the conflict, and the role that the fighting played, among other things, in the flight of the refugees, and the collapse of Palestinian society. That the Palestinian people were the ultimate victims of the war is beyond doubt, but the truth is they were never consulted about the conflict by either Arabs or Jews; the decisions to resist the partition by force, and abort the nascent Jewish state was not made by them but by the rulers in surrounding Arab states who took no heed of their wishes or aspirations. What resulted from this was a bitterly fought war between two antagonists, and not just one long, extended, well planned ethnic clearing operation that met negligible or meager resistance. The Palestinians were caught in the crossfire, as, in some ways, they still are.
You can ban these facts from a blog, but you cannot erase them from history. Epoch making historical events like the 1948 war rarely have simple causes. Now, if you consider my views to constitute “Nakba denial” I think it is incumbent upon you to demonstrate how this is so and why my assertions and citations are false. Let’s narrow it down to something simple. For example, I have asserted that between 75,000-100,000 Palestinian refugees fled between December 1947 and early April 1948. I have also emphasized that most of these fled, and were not expelled. If I am denying an established historical fact here, say, in the same way that one would be in denying that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz, how is this so? Where did these mass expulsions take place in this period? Who conducted them? What were the circumstances? Morris notes one case of about 1,500 at Qisariya in mid February 1948. Were there others?
Again: I am focusing here just on this period between early December 1947 and early April 1948, just before the Yishuv took to the offensive and the fighting escalated around Palestine considerably and more villages were caught up in it. If my assertion that that between 75,000-100,000 Palestinian refugees fled, and (with noted exception) were not expelled between December 1947 and early April 1948 constitutes the denial of an inarguable fact, then, at the very least someone should explain to me why this is as inarguable as the fact that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz, i.e., that this is something so entrenched in fact that renders it beyond serious dispute.
One thing needs to be said. Regardless of how the Palestinians fled or were dislocated and dispossessed, the fact remains that they were, and that in the process they suffered horribly. All I have ever argued is that the causes of that exodus and dislocation are more varied and complicated than a simple, unilateral act of ethnic cleansing by the Yishuv, and that this war between the Arab states and the Yishuv, waged since December 1947 by proxy, and directly after May 15, was the cause of the circumstances that led to the tragedy. You cannot separate the war from the refugee crisis. And you cannot separate it from the deteriorating conditions resulting from the war.
As Benny Morris, who has researched and written more thoroughly and indefatigably than just about anyone on this issue has written,
“My feeling is that the transfer thinking and near consensus that emerged in the 1930’s and the early 1940’s was not tantamount to pre-planning and did not issue in the production of a policy or master plan of expulsion; the Yishuv and its military forces did not enter the 1948 war, which was initiated by the Arab side, with a master plan for expulsion.” (“The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited,” p.60).
Annie,
Said you: "are you claiming no Palestinians were expelled from their homes or villages?"
No. I am not. I have never asserted that. I am saying that not all of the refugees were expelled; many fled fighting that was taking place in the their towns and villages, which is perfectly understandable. That there were acts of expulsion in Lydda and Ramle for example is beyond dispute; most Israeli historians don't bother denying that anymore, though they once did.
about 75,000-100,000 refugees fled between November 1947 and early April 1948 and most of them fled the violence that was enveloping Palestine. Most of these fled, along with most of the local Palestinian leadership. About another 3-400,000 fled between early April and May 15--that was when the fighting in fact intensified several-fold. The circumstances of these fleeing is bitterly contested. The rest fled after May 15, when the war again widened considerably. I'm thus not saying that there weren't isolated acts of expulsion, and atrocities committed by both sides. What cannot be denied is that there was a war waging and that most civilians tend to flee war zones generally.
That does not mean that I deny there were expulsions and atrocities committed by the Israelis/Yishuv. All I'm saying it was a complicated and often chaotic event that occured over many months. In short, I do not believe that ALL of the refugees were expelled as a matter of policy or pre planning.
where historians debate is whether there was a deliberate policy to expel/ ethnically cleanse the Palestinians or whether it resulted from the chaos of war. I believe the truth lies somewhere in between. But I do believe that the war resulted from the Arabs' (I don't want to say the Palestinians because they never had a say in the matter) rejection of the partition and the refugee crisis resulted from the war. I know you and others may disagree with that, but that's my view.
Kraus,
Said you:
"My thoughts on Holocaust/Nakba denial are mostly the same, both events were tragic(although I would say that the Holocaust was far worse in that it eliminated millions of innocents forever. Nakba was tragic, but it wasn’t fatal to millions- a key difference)."
I essentially agree with this statement. I don't think that acknowledging the the enormity of the slaughter that occured in the Holocaust in any way denigrates or trivializes the sufferings of the Palestinian people both during 1948 and after. The sufferings of the Palestinian people has been and is real enough. This is not a matter of competitive suffering, nor should it be.
That said, it is not entirely clear to me what, exactly, Nakba denial is. Holocaust denial denies many facets of the Holocaust: that 6 million died, that there were gas chambers, that there was ever a policy to exterminate all of European Jewry, or, as David Irving has argued, that Hitler even knew about it; Himmler, said Irving, did it behind his back. Irving has amended this view to include "evidence" that Hitler, in fact, helped the Jews against the efforts of his anti-Jewish underlings. Fred Leuchter and Arthur Butz have attempted pseudo-scientific forays into denial. The entire apparatus of Holocaust denial flies in the face of literally volumes of evidence and testimony corroborated by victims, bystanders, and perpetrators.
We thus know what Holocaust denial is. But what is Nakba denial? If what is meant by Nakba denial is that it denies that 7-800,000 Palestinians became refugees and unwillingly fled their homes, that would seem to be a point as unworthy of serious discussion as the fact that gas chambers killed Jews; it happened. If one was to argue that the refugees were to blame for their plight, that too would be nonsense; they were not.
The Israelis for many years did not always deal honestly and forthrightly with some of the events of 1948; many still do not. Many, for example still prefer the narrative that Arab broadcasts sounded the clarion call to flee, and thus the Nakba. This narrative frees the Israelis of any culpability for the event, and is thus untrue.
But in banning this Nakba denial, whatever, exactly, it is, is to declare that there is no room for debate on the events of 1948, if it bans even discussion on the documented events of this turbulent episode--that will be a rather sweeping act of denial in its own right. Many events of 1948 remain in contentious dispute among historians, just as they do in the Holocaust. But there is a difference: Holocaust historians do not debate whether the Holocaust happened; there is, however, plenty of debate among historians of the 1948 war about what, exactly, happened, how, and why. The points of contention in the discourse and debate on each issue among the relevant scholars--and I mean the REAL scholars who attempt to search for and uncover the truth and not political partisans on both sides--are entirely different.
I can't speak for anyone else, but for myself, I sure wish Phil or Adam or someone would clarify just what Nakba denial is. It would help.
Donald,
I find myself basically in agreement with most of the views you express here, though I’m still undecided about the ethics of excluding some comments over others, however repugnant they might be. On your third point for example, I have very, very mixed feelings. But before I address the issue, please bear with me while I briefly clarify my view of the issue behind the issue: I mean, of course, the Holocaust, and the Nazi persecution of the Jews in general.
It has, in fact, been recently asserted on this blog that the Jews of Germany, and Zionists, did contribute to the persecution by the Nazis. But the Nazis did not need Zionists, Zionist writers, or the specter of Zionism to persecute their Jews; Nazi persecution of Jews predated Hitler’s accession to power, as well as the advent of the depression. Antisemitism was one of the founding articles of the Nazi party, the cement that held it together. The conviction that the Jews were the principle corrupters and race poisoners of German racial purity, not to mention the ones most responsible for stabbing Germany in the back and losing them World War One, was sacrosanct to them. It was their bread and butter.
In the pre-war years, apart from outbursts of anti-Jewish violence in 1933, 1934, and 1938, the Nazis persecuted Jews principally by legal decree. Like the Spanish in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, individual acts of violence against Jews were occasionally promoted and encouraged, then used as pretexts to introduce legal measures against them. Jews were excluded from civil service, from practicing law and medicine, from posts in universities and schools, were denied German citizenship, and prohibited from committing “race pollution” i.e., having sexual relations with non-Jews among other indignities.
The truth of the matter is that the Nazis first persecuted, then, in late 1941 sought to murder all of the Jews on which they could lay hands, in whatever area they were to control. No rulers of an advanced, industrial nation had ever attempted anything even remotely so sweeping in scope and scale, and so far-reaching in wickedness. There was certainly indiscriminate killing on both sides: allied fire bombing of German and Japanese cities as well as the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But all of those actions, however terrible, served a discernible strategic function: to win and end the war. The murder of the Jews served no necessary, war-winning function. Its sole purpose was exterminate a race of people from the face of the earth, from all of the elderly right down to the last infant.
The Jews had known persecutions before, but never had they known an enemy who would brook no parley and no compromise, and who demanded no ransom from them, just their lives. Who could have foreseen such a monster? The Jews did not believe that the Devil took human form. This is, and remains, the only government directed, bureaucratically organized attempt at the extermination of an entire people. They were murdered not because of Zionism, or any Zionist action, or anything Herzl wrote, the threat of a boycott, or any war-related reason or rationale.
They were murdered because they were Jews.
Now, that said, should the suggestion that Jews did in some way contribute to their persecution by the Nazis be banned from this site? As repugnant and anti-Semitic as I find the suggestion to be, I would ultimately have to say: no.
Unlike many people here, I do not have an ancestral or religious connection to the Holocaust. I do, however, believe it is the worst crime ever committed, all the more so in that a modern, sophisticated industrial power harnessed its energies and resources to targeting an entire people for annihilation, and I am often angered by those here whose advocacy of the Palestinians or dislike of Israel leads them to denigrate this event.
I thus do not underate the seriousness and the unique magnitude of this event, but I do not believe that any topic of historical controversy should be banned, and though I don’t want to suggest that there is any legitimacy in the suggestion that Jews provoked the Nazis' persecution, I think it far better to get such views out in the open to refute them with facts and evidence, than to ban them.
I do recognize that people of good faith can legitimately disagree on this matter, and I don’t wish to leave you with the impression that I think your suggestion intolerant or seeking to inhibit free and open discourse and debate. I am just saying that every controversial comment like this or others have to be evaluated on their individual merits, but my own view is that just about any comment that is not excessively ad hominen or does not incite violence should probably not be banned. However, it’s a judgment call, and it depends on the comment.
Obviously wrt the origins of the Nakba, whether Israel’s wars from 1948 to Cast Lead were just wars, my views are very, very different from the majority here. But I would have to say that, all in all though with some exceptions, the moderators here do an estimable job of keeping the discussions focused on the issues, and keeping the debates flowing freely and allowing all viewpoints to be registered.
Shingo,
1). Said you: “Fact: The radio frequencies of the USS Liberty were Jammed by the Israelis, as documented by the BBC Documentary.”
There is no evidence that the frequencies were being jammed. According to the Naval Court of Inquiry, the first strafing run on the Liberty at 1:58pm, disabled the ship’s radio transmission capability to the extent that they were unable to transmit on the ship’s standard encrypted transmitters. They then began transmitting on the CINCUSNAVEUR hi-com unsecured high-frequency voice circuit, but to no result. It was then discovered that someone in the transmitting room had put the frequency dial one kilocycle off, and this was quickly corrected by Radioman Chief Wayne L. Smith, who testified to this at the Naval Court of Inquiry in June 1967, and how he then transmitted distress signals to the USS Saratoga. This could not have happened if the Israelis were jamming all frequencies.
Also, there is simply no evidence that the Israelis positively identified the Liberty when it was targeted at 1:51 pm by MTB Commander Oren, that they knew it was an intelligence gathering vessel when it was targeted, or that they intercepted any communications the Liberty was engaged in. And even if the Israelis were listening in, what could they have heard that could have given them any concern? Absolutely nothing. They would have learned that the Liberty was NOT monitoring their communications because the Liberty had no Hebrew linguists, only Arab and Russian.
2) “Fact: Israelis were monitoring Sixth Fleet communications.”
They could not have monitored Sixth Fleet communications because those communications were taking place between Sixth Fleet Commander Vice Admiral William Admiral Martin on board the Sixth Fleet flagship USS Little Rock, which was some 500 miles west of the Liberty, to the carriers USS Saratoga and USS America, who were each, respectively, 700 and 600 miles to the west of the Liberty when Martin sent his communication to them at 2:50pm Sinai time.
Not only did the Israelis have no naval presence (or capacity) to monitor these communications more than 500 miles west of Israel, but even the USS Liberty could not have monitored these Sixth Fleet communications from where they were; the Liberty could only monitor communications in a line of sight range, i.e., about 25 nautical miles distance.
3). “Fact: The attack on the Liberty lasted for an hour and 15 minutes (as documented by the BBC Documentary).”
There simply is no record of any such attack after 2:35 pm occurring, and this is corroborated by a) the IDF investigation drawn from IDF Navy logs, b) the declassified NSA tapes of 2003 which monitored the chatter of the Israeli rescue helicopters and naval HQ in Stella Maris between 2:29pm and 3:19pm, c) both the Deck log and the Underway log of the USS Liberty, d) no mention of any such attack after the torpedo hit in the Naval Court of Inquiry, and e) the IAF transcripts.
It is thus corroborated by five sources, two Israeli and three American. There was no attack after Commander Oren ordered the attack ceased at 2:41 pm.
In fact, according to McGonagle’s testimony and the Deck log of the Liberty, there was not even any exchange of fire after the torpedo hit the Liberty at 2:35 pm, and no record of any subsequent attack or exchange of fire anywhere except in the hearsay-laden world of the conspiracy, where anything is possible, and the tales become more lurid with time. This is simply one of the many fabrications embellished years after the event.
This also means that the actual naval attack lasted about 3-4 minutes.
The Israelis thus did NOT attack the ship “for an hour and fifteen minutes.” (Some versions, James Bamford’s, for example, have the attack lasting over two hours—it depends on the conspiracy theorist, I guess) The combined air attacks lasted all of about nine minutes (1:58—2:02pm + 2:06—2:11 pm), and the following naval attack about 3-4 minutes (2:31—2:35 pm). Again, there is no record anywhere of any attack or exchange of fire after 2:35 pm Sinai time.
4). Said you: “Fact: The Israelis fired on lifeboats (as documented by the BBC Documentary).”
First of all, when the Israeli MTB’s got close enough to see hull markings on the Liberty at 2:41 pm, they cut off the attack. And though they had stopped firing for six minutes, they had still not got close enough to positively ID’d them. Four minutes later they radioed in that they might have hit a Russian vessel. A few minutes after that they picked up a few life rafts, saw the Latin markings on them, and concluded it was American. At 3:03pm they then approached the Liberty and offered assistance.
Secondly, they did not fire on the lifeboats of the Liberty with any sailors in them, and did not strafe either the ship or any lifeboats in the water after the torpedo attack. The lifeboats were strafed on the ship during the air and sea attacks, and the sailors of the Liberty, seeing them so damaged, threw them into the sea. This is attested to by former Liberty OOD Lloyd Painter, who testified at the Court of Inquiry, “We filed out to our life rafts which were no longer with us because they had been strafed and most of them burned so we knocked most of them over the ship.”
5). “Fact: Israeli MTB’s fired first on the Liberty (as documented by the BBC Documentary).”
That statement is false. The Israeli MTB’s attempted to signal the Liberty before attacking. The Liberty was unable to signal back to the Israeli MTB’s because a) their signaling equipment had been damaged, and b) they were unable to clearly read the signals from the MTB’s because of the smoke (McGonagle noted this in his testimony to the Court of Inquiry). A gunner on the Liberty DID open fire while the Israeli MTB’s were approaching and still attempting to signal her.
This fact is supported by:
a) The Deck log of the USS Liberty, which stated:
“14:31 (2:31pm) machine gun 53 opened fire on center of three MTB’s. Commanding officer ordered Ensign Lucas to proceed to machine gun 53 and to cease firing.” (See pages 13 and 22 of the pdf below)
link to thelibertyincident.com
b) By the testimony of Capt. McGonagle in the Naval Court of Inquiry:
“From the starboard wing of the bridge, I observed that the fire from machine gun 53 was very effective and blanketed the area and the center torpedo boat…As far as the torpedo boats are concerned, I am sure they felt that they were under fire from the USS Liberty. At this time they opened fire with their gun mounts, and in a matter of seconds, one torpedo was noted crossing astern of the ship at about 25 yards. ”
(To access McGonagle’s testimony describing the attack and the aftermath, see pages 140-149 on the pdf below)
link to thelibertyincident.com
c) By a press conference held by Capt. McGonagle on July 29, 1967 when the Liberty arrived back to the USA, where he said:
“A short time after the air attack had been completed, the three torpedo boats approached us from our starboard quarter at high speed and in an apparent torpedo launch attitude.
As they approached to within about one mile of the ship, I saw what appeared to me to be an Israeli flag on one of the boats, and at one time it appeared that the center boat was attempting to signal the ship, but because of the intermittent blocking of the signal light by the smoke and flame, we were unable to determine what this boat was attempting to signal.
I had previously directed a man from the bridge to proceed to the forward starboard gun mount and take the torpedo boats under fire in an attempt to defend ourselves. When I saw what appeared to be an Israeli flag, I yelled to the forecastle because I had no phone communications with the men and I yelled to him to tell him to hold fire. But before he was able to understand what I was trying to tell him, he opened fire on the boats as I had previously directed.”
d) The IDF History Report which states “the [Division 914 Commander] discerned flashes of gunshot fire emanating from the ship, and the commander of T-203 saw the fire and reported hits in the vicinity of T-206 (the other MTB).” (See pages 18-20 on the pdf below).
link to thelibertyincident.com
In all of the above sources, including the Deck log of the Liberty and McGonagle’s testimony, there is no mention of the Liberty being fired upon first by the Israeli MTB’s and there is clear confirmation that the Liberty’s machine gun 53 fired first on the approaching MTB’s.
The fact is beyond reasonable doubt or dispute: the Liberty fired first on the MTB’s, and, it should be added, under circumstances that were completely understandable and excusable.
6). Said you: “Fact: Captain McGonagle was rendered unconscious (as documented by the BBC Documentary).”
This is untrue. He was not unconscious at any stage, and he was most definitely conscious when the Israeli MTB’s offered assistance to the Liberty at 3:03pm. Though wounded by shrapnel in the air attacks, McGonagle was conscious and continued giving orders both during and after the attack. This heroism on his part rightly won for him the Congressional Medal of Honor. Do you think he would have been awarded our nation’s highest decoration if he had been unconscious during the attack?
Part of this falsehood that the Israeli MTB’s did not offer assistance to the Liberty has been spread by Liberty crewmember James Ennes Jr., who said,
“They claim that they came alongside and immediately offered help. Well, that is the purest of baloney. Instead of offering help, they circled us several times, machine gunning anything that moved. Pulled out, came in, machine gunned the life rafts in the water.”
This is false, every word of it. In the fist place, Ennes could not have been a first-hand witness as to whether an Israeli MTB did or did not extend help to the Liberty; he was wounded in the first minutes of the air attack and was taken below deck, where he remained until he was transferred to another ship the next day. Secondly, Ennes is contradicted on this by Commander McGonagle,
Here is his testimony:
MCGONAGLE: Immediately after the ship was struck by the torpedo, the torpedo boats stopped dead in the water and milled around astern of the ship at a range of approximately 500 to 800 yards. One of the boats signaled by flashing light, in English, “Do you require assistance”?”
Third, Ennes is contradicted on this by the testimony of Chief Communications Technician Harold J. Thompson:
THOMPSON: … I was asked to report to the bridge, which I did. When I got up there, Signalman David was attempting to rig a hand light. I assisted him. We went to the starboard wing of the bridge and one torpedo boat was making a run straight at us off the starboard beam while the other two stood off. At the Captain’s direction, David sent, “US Naval Ship” “US Naval Ship.” When they were about 500 yards off, the torpedo boat turned astern and came up on the stern on the starboard side and flashed, “do you need help.” … The Captain … said “no, thank you.” We sent this back to the boat … and saw on the last part of that message … “Do you want us to standby?” I passed this word to the Captain. He said, “no, thank you.” We sent this to the patrol boat. They came up along the port side, I say roughly 100 yards off, flashed “good luck” … and disappeared. That was the last we saw of them.”
Btw, McGonagle and Chief Thompson, along with the other 17 crewmembers who testified at the Court of Inquiry, made no mention of any exchange of gunfire with the Israeli MTB’s after being torpedoed at 2:35 pm.
7) The tales of James Bamford
As anyone who has studied the matter of the attack on the Liberty knows, the incident that led directly to the attack was an explosion at an Israeli ammo depot at El Arish at 11:24am. It has never been established what, exactly, caused this explosion. The Israelis, spotting a ship some 14 miles to the northwest, assumed it to be an enemy ship shelling them. Through a series of miscalculations from the motor torpedo boats sent to engage the vessel, including that of the vessel’s speed, the Israelis concluded, from about 20 miles distance, that the ship was an enemy vessel at about 1:51pm. That is when they ordered the first air strike on the Liberty, thought to be an Egyptian vessel shelling them.
James Bamford, like so many other Liberty conspiracy theorists, posits the following misleading narrative in his book, "Body of Secrets," implying that the Israelis knew that the ship they spotted off El Arish was the Liberty, knew it was incapable of shelling them, and then set out to attack it knowing it was an American ship because the ship had heard “secrets.”
Said Bamford, page 206:
“As any observer would have immediately have recognized, the four small defensive 50mm machine guns (Bamford is in error here; they were .50 caliber) were incapable of reaching anywhere near the shore, thirteen miles away, let alone the buildings of El Arish…And the ship itself, a tired old World War two cargo vessel crawling with antennas, was unthreatening to anyone—unless it was their secrets and not their lives they wanted to protect.
By then the Israeli air force and navy had conducted more than six hours of close surveillance of the Liberty off the Sinai, even taken pictures, and must have positively identified it as an American electronic spy ship. They knew the Liberty was the only military ship in the area. Nevertheless, the order was given to kill it. Thus at 12:05pm, three motor torpedo boats from Ashdod departed for the Liberty, about 50 miles away. Israeli air force fighters, loaded with 30mm cannon ammunition, rockets, and even napalm, then followed. They were all to return virtually empty.”
I hardly know where to begin with this tangle of fact, falsehood, innuendo, and deliberate omission. In the first place, if the Israelis had been able to inspect the USS Liberty up close they would surely have seen the ship as Bamford describes it. But they first noticed it at some 14 miles off the coast of El Arish at 11:24am, again at 1:47pm from 20 miles distance from a torpedo boat, and again at 2:24pm from the same boat while the Liberty was engulfed with smoke at 6,000 yards distance. Bamford neglects to mention this.
Also, the Israelis did not order an attack on the Liberty at 12:05pm; they were still uncertain about the identity of the ship at this time
At 12:15 pm the three torpedo boats (Division 914, commanded by Commander Moshe Oren) were ordered into the vicinity of El Arish to identify the vessel in question—that was all. They were not given orders to attack the vessel, and they were not “followed by Israeli air force fighters, loaded with 30mm cannon ammunition, rockets, and napalm.” No such air deployment was yet ordered or launched. At 1:41 pm Division 914 spotted a vessel on its radar some 20 miles northwest of El- Arish. The officer of the CIC on the flagship, Ensign Yifrach Aharon, miscalculated the Liberty’s speed once at 30 knots at 1:47pm, and, after a request for verification from Naval HQ, miscalculated it again at 28 knots at 1:51pm. (In naval circles it is common knowledge that a vessel steaming at over 20 knots in an area of belligerent operations is a warship).
The reasons for the miscalculation of the Liberty’s speed by Aharon are simple. The fix on the Liberty’s speed was being made in a small MTB bumping along at about 37 knots at about a 20 mile distance from the Liberty. The complex radar, radio, and navigational calculations (much of it guesswork or dead reckoning and done on primitive equipment) are rife with opportunities for errors. (The USS Maddox committed similar errors in the alleged second attack of the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964. In fact, there probably was no such attack, and the “vessels” spotted were probably radar echoes resulting from atmospheric conditions). After the second fix on the vessel’s speed, the CIC felt sure that it was an enemy vessel, and then called in for an air assault, which occurred at 1:58pm.
Bamford omits this crucial information, implying that the MTB’s and the fighter aircraft were both launched to attack the Liberty at 12:05pm when no such attack had been ordered, and the Israelis were in fact still uncertain about the vessel’s identity.
The truth, of course, is that they were not ordered to attack the Liberty at 12:05pm. The first deployment of aircraft to attack the Liberty only occurred after Ensign Aharon miscalculated the Liberty’s speed for a second time at 1:51pm. That was the first air assault, the Kursa mission of two Mirage IIIC’s. They were armed with 30mm cannon and possibly American Sidewinder air-to-air missiles; it is not clear if these missiles were used or were even on the planes during this mission. The first air attack lasted from 1:58 to 2:02pm.
The second air mission of two Super Mysteres, mission “Royal,” was, like the two Mirages of the Kursa mission recalled from an air patrol, also recalled from a strafing mission in the Sinai and were only armed with 30mm cannon and four canisters of napalm—hardly appropriate ordinance for attacking a ship. This indicates the haste at which both air attack missions were recalled mid air from previous missions; neither had time to land, refuel, and rearm.
According to the IDF report on the Liberty attack, Colonel Kislev was told that the Royal mission was only “armed with napalm, not effective for attacking ships.” Kislev nonetheless “instructed the formation to join the attack with ‘whatever they have.’”
On the IAF transcripts, after the Kursa mission was completed (about 2:02pm), another one of the Israeli ground controllers, who was incredulous that napalm was actually going to be dropped by mission Royal on the ship, cried out, “What can napalm do?”
The answer: not much. Napalm can start a fire but fires can be extinguished. Bombs are far more effective, and if they had time to land and rearm, that is what they would have been loaded with.
This is important. Why? Because it demonstrates that if the Israelis, who had just destroyed the superior air forces of three countries on the ground and in the air in the past three days, had really been given an hour, or even a half-hour or so to plan for the attack, they would certainly have loaded their planes with the proper ordinance to attack and destroy the Liberty in a single sortie, probably within minutes, silencing her and her crew forever, and sending both to a watery grave. And again: bombs are much more effective than napalm. Nobody throws napalm at a ship: that’s dumb!
They first called in for an air-strike at about 1:51pm, the Kursa mission hitting the Liberty seven minutes later. The Royal mission was called in by the Kursa mission at 1:56pm, and they arrived at the scene sometime between 2:04-2:06pm, breaking off the attack at about 2:11pm when there were questions about the identity. The inadequacy of the ordinance on the first two air attack missions betrays the evident lack of planning, and clearly indicates the haste in which they were both recalled mid-air from their previous missions for the attack.
Also, Bamford to the contrary, the Israelis did not take any pictures of the Liberty, and did not conduct “more than six hours of close surveillance.”
Bamford here muddies the waters to confuse the reader by weaving facts and falsehoods into his narrative. First, (pge. 199) he has the Israeli naval observer on the Nord recon plane that first spotted the Liberty giving positive ID at 6:03 am instead of 9:00am. (They actually spotted the Liberty at about 5:45am but did not positively ID it until 9:00am).
Secondly, on page 206, by omission and fabrication, he misrepresents how the explosions at El Arish at 11:24am were believed by the Israelis to be coming from the ship that they had spotted off the coast, and how and why they misidentified the Liberty as an Egyptiian ship shelling them.
This information, which explains how the Israelis ID’d the Liberty in the morning and then misidentified it as an enemy ship bombarding them later that afternoon, is critical to understanding how the tragedy unfolded.
Lt. Commander Pinchas Pinchasy, who had received the original report at 9:00am identifying the Liberty in the “pit” of the Kirya in Tel Aviv, had, by the time the explosion occurred at El Arish at 11:24am, assumed that the Liberty, which had been heading westward at about 15 knots when ID’d earlier, had long left the area (the green wedge marker representing the Liberty had been removed by Commander Lunz from the control board at Stella Maris at 11:00am, when he was relieved by Captain Rahav. More about that below).
Also, as he later commented, it did not occur to him at the time that an American intelligence gathering vessel that had been traveling westward for more than several hours would likely be shelling El Arish. For these reasons, he, like the others, assumed that an enemy vessel was bombarding them.
Why then did Lunz remove the green wedge marker representing the Liberty at 11:00am? Because he was of the opinion that the Liberty was at least 75 miles west of the point at which it had been first spotted 5-6 hours earlier, steaming at 15 knots, and at least 30 miles west from where it was when spotted again at 9:00am. When positively ID’d at 9:00am, the Liberty was at the extreme southwest end of the control board, and steaming west at 15 knots (this speed, btw, is confirmed by the Liberty’s own deck log). According to these calculations, this would have put the Liberty in the direct vicinity of Port Said—about 70 miles west of the point at which the Liberty was first attacked at 1:58pm. In retrospect, Lunz’s action was not only proper, but followed standard operating procedure for removing old information from the control board. Captain Rahav, who relieved Lunz at 11:00am, thus had no knowledge of the Liberty’s existence whatsoever. It was thus even more logical for him to assume that an enemy ship was bombarding Al Arish at 11:24am.
Bamford thus misleadingly implies that the Israelis were tracking the Liberty from six in the morning right up until the moment she was attacked. That is not true. They positively ID’d her at 9:00am, marked her location at the extreme southwest end of the control board, marked her speed and westward course of direction, and logically concluded that the Liberty was 30 miles west of the point at which she’d been ID’d at 11:00am when they removed the green marker representing the Liberty.
The overflights occurring from 9am onward were not reconnoitering the Liberty; they were doing submarine reconnaissance in an area that was very heavy with IAF traffic going back and forth to the Sinai, which had been intensified after the discovery of an Egyptian sub off Atlit; they were not tracking the Liberty. “Tracking” a ship’s movements is a rather elaborate recon activity that involves close coordination between ground, sea, and air. According to the IAF records, the Liberty was once spotted (5:45am) and once positively ID’d (9:00am). That’s it. After 9:00am they completely ignored the USS Liberty. It was not being “tracked.” (See footnote # 14 on page 42 on the pdf format of the IDF report)
link to thelibertyincident.com
Bamford, of course, mentions none of this, despite the fact that the information had been available to him for four years prior to publishing his book.
Also, Bamford has the Israelis strafing the Liberty after the torpedo attack in an attempt to ensure that there would be “no survivors.” This is nonsensical.
As I point out below, if it was really the intention to destroy and sink the ship and kill the survivors, why did the air controller Col. Shmuel Kislev order the “Royal” air mission to cease attacking at 2:11 pm and scrub the “Nixon” air mission of two Mystere IV aircraft armed with 500 lb. iron bombs that would surely have blown the Liberty to smithereens, and with all hands? If not cancelled, the Nixon air mission would have reached the Liberty in half the time it was taking the MTB’s. Again, why cancel the mission if the intent was to destroy and sink the Liberty, and kill all the survivors?
The truth is that they cut off the air attack at 2:11pm because a pilot spotted Latin markings on the hull, and hence were uncertain about the identity. The Israelis were still uncertain of the ship’s identity when Commander Oren attempted to signal the Liberty at 2:30 from his MTB. Consulting his intelligence manual of Arab ships (he had no “Jane’s Fighting Ships” with him), he misidentified the smoke engulfed ship from 6,000 yards, and concluded it was the El Qusier. Even as the MTB’s were approaching the ship they were still attempting to signal her, and it was only when the Liberty opened fire that they then concluded that she was indeed an enemy ship. Had Col. Kislev not cut off the air attack at 2:11pm, the Nixon air mission of Mystere IV’s would have destroyed and/or sunk the Liberty probably within the next five minutes.
Said Marvin Nowicki:
“According to Ennes (James Ennes, Liberty crew member), the three MTBs left the port of Ashdod at 1200 local, some 125 miles away, heading for the Liberty at 35 plus knots. They commenced a machine gun attack and launched torpedos at 1435 local.”
Said you:
“Which kinda debunks your suggestion that the Liberty fired on them first.”
No it does not. Nowicki was describing Ennes’ views, not his own.
In fact, I talked to Marvin Nowicki myself. He confirmed to me the accuracy of the criticisms of Bamford’s misuse of the material he provided him (Norwicki told me: “He turned it all around”), and confirmed to me his conviction that the attack was a mistake.
Bamford, to be fair, does indeed mention that Nowicki believed the attack a mistake, however, he misrepresents the sequence in which the American flag is mentioned. As we now know, the NSA only began recording traffic on the attack at 2:29pm. The NSA’s 1967 summary is unequivocal: “There is no COMINT reflecting on the attack itself.”
What they recorded at that time, however, was not the MTB’s communications, but those of rescue helicopters sent out to pick up survivors from the stricken ship, as some were reported to be in the water. To wit: there is no mention of any American flag on either the IAF or the NSA transcripts until 3:12pm Sinai time—37 minutes after the naval attack had ceased, meaning that there was no mention of the flag during the air attacks, and no recorded mention of the flag from the MTB’s during the naval attack. (In fact, by coincidence, both transcripts mention notice of the American flag at this exact time).
Bamford knew this. He might not have had access to the NSA transcripts because they were only released two years after he published “Body of Secrets,” but he had access to the IAF transcripts, and he in fact quotes them in his narrative, albeit selectively and misleadingly. He therefore knew that there was no mention of an American flag there until 3:12 pm, and that before this there is recorded nothing but confusion from the Israeli air controllers about the identity of the ship. Naturally, Bamford deliberately omits any mention of this confusion, lest it get in the way of his false narrative.
***
Most of the conspiracy theories promoting a deliberate attack usually begin by attempting to discredit the myriad of investigations that have already been conducted, particularly that of the Court of Inquiry. There have long been charges that the investigations were “cover-ups” and documents were “doctored,” and “forged”—all the indispensable watchwords of the conspiracy theorist to refute documents and memoranda that foils and confounds their lurid fantasies
For example, if the deck log that was entered into evidence at the Navy Court of Inquiry in June 1967 was doctored, then where is the undoctored one? The deck log of the Liberty runs to some ten hand-written pages, all on Department of the Navy deck-log book stationary. Can it really be asserted that all of the entries in the entire deck log, including Captain McGonagle’s signature entries, were forged, by hand, in the four days between the attack and the inquiry? How was the original one obtained and tampered with, and the other forged within a few days? When? By who? On whose authority? Where, when, and how has this log been authenticated, and the one in evidence been discredited as forgery? And by who?
Btw, the deck log is not the only log on the Liberty. Other than the other technical logs not concerned with the timeline of events (the Radar Bearing Log, the Engineering Log, the Gyrocompass Log, the Bearing Log, the DRT Log) there is the handwritten Underway log. The timeline of events on both logs corroborate each other. Now, was the Underway log doctored too? If so, in the four days between the attack and the convening of the Court of Inquiry, there was certainly a lot of log doctoring going on.
Also, the timeline of events in the Israeli and the American Navy logs are a near perfect match. The timeline of the IDF investigation and the timeline from the Navy Court of Inquiry, though conducted apart from one another, essentially corroborate one another, with a few discrepancies here and there.
If anyone is going to prove that the documentation that has been in evidence in both countries for 44 years, and which has been corroborated by the hundreds of pages of declassified evidence that was released by both countries in 1997, has been forged or doctored, then the burden is on those asserting such to document how this was so, when this was done, and by who.
A conspiracy to fabricate the evidence denying and disproving a deliberate attack would have involved superhuman prodigies of effort in record time, not to mention a considerable staff of forging experts to accomplish the task, none of whom has yet to step forward with the “undoctored” originals: The re-forging of the COMSIXTHFLEET communications records showing Admiral Martin’s launch order at 2:50pm and his recall order at 4:40pm, the Radio log, the Deck log, and the Underway logs of the USS liberty, and the Deck log of the USS Saratoga, all in the four day period between the attack and the convening of the Court of Inquiry in June 1967. Anyone who believes that this could have been done will believe anything.
There are many logical and evidentiary problems concerning the intentional attack theory.
The first is a plausible motive for the Israelis to have knowingly attacked a ship belonging to their strongest ally. On this count, no one has yet produced a plausible motive. The notion that the Israelis attacked the Liberty to conceal a massacre of Egyptian prisoners in the Sinai, or to hide their pending seizure of the Golan Heights from Syria from the United States are both contradicted by a) the absence of any evidence that any such massacre in the Sinai ever took place, and b) diplomatic cables showing that Washington was well informed of the Israelis impending attack, and had not objected. Again, there is no plausible motive for the Israelis to have knowingly attacked an American ship.
Secondly, it begs the question why the Israelis, if they had indeed been tracking the Liberty from the early morning to the moment of the attack as many have claimed, would knowingly allow the Liberty into the combat zone, reconnoiter the ship for nine hours, thus giving the Liberty nine priceless hours to relay the very information that the attack was supposed to silence, before finally attacking her in broad daylight. It makes no sense.
Third, even if the Israelis were monitoring the communications of the Liberty, they would have heard nothing to concern them because they would have known that the Liberty wasn’t even monitoring their communications, as the Liberty had no Hebrew linguists.
Fourth, if the Israelis were monitoring their communications, and heard, or sought to prevent them from hearing, something disturbing, and were able to jam the Liberty’s frequencies, why wouldn’t they have just done that rather than something as dangerous as attacking an American vessel?
Fifth, if it was really the intention to destroy and sink the ship, why did the air controller Col. Shmuel Kislev order the “Royal” air mission to cease attacking at 2:11 pm and scrub the “Nixon” air mission of two Mystere IV aircraft armed with 500 lb. iron bombs? If not cancelled, the Nixon air mission would have reached the Liberty in half the time it was taking the MTB’s, and would surely have blown the Liberty to smithereens with all hands; one 500lb fragmentation bomb to the boiler would have detonated her like a hand grenade. Again, why cancel the mission if the intent was to destroy and sink the Liberty, and kill all the survivors?
Hostage,
This is a pretty silly argument. Israeli did not launch an unprovoked attack on a vessel in international waters "in defense of the right of innocent passage"; they attacked what they thought was an Egyptian vessel shelling them at El Arish. Sounds like you're channeling Dean Rusk.
Shingo,
Your assertion that the radio frequencies of the USS Liberty were Jammed by the Israelis is false and is contradicted by evidence.
Your assertion that the Israelis were monitoring Sixth Fleet communications is without foundation.
Your assertion that the attack on the Liberty lasted for an hour and 15 minutes is false.
Your assertion that the Israelis fired on lifeboats with sailors in them is false.
Your assertion that the Israeli MTB's fired first on the Liberty is false and is contradicted by evidence.
Your assertion that Captain McGonagle was rendered unconscious during the attack is false.
All of these assertions are false.
Hostage,
It is true that there was of course shock and incredulity expressed by Johnson and his cabinet upon learning of the attack. But the President and McNamara, after they got the report from the Court of Inquiry, accepted that the attack was a mistake. CIA director Helms told Johnson the same thing. Repeat, there is no evidence that Johnson thereafter thought the attack to be deliberate.
Said McNamara in July 1967 testifying before the Committee on Foreign Relations:
“In the case of the attack on the Liberty, it was the
conclusion of the investigatory body headed by an
Admiral of the Navy [Isaac C. Kidd, Jr.] in whom
we have great confidence that the attack was not
intentional. I read the record of investigation and
I support that conclusion, and I think . . . it was not
a conscious decision on the part of the
government of Israel to attack a U.S. vessel.”
Said Clark Clifford in his memoir “Counsel to the President”:
“The best interpretation from the facts available
to me was that there were inexcusable failures
on the part of the Israeli Defense Forces.”
Said McGeorge Bundy to AJ Cristol on April 19, 1993:
“We came to the conclusion that it was an
interlocking collection of errors rather than
an interlocking plot that was the cause of
the tragedy.”
As for Richard Helms, whatever he may have said later, the declassification of the redacted sections of the 1981 NSA report on the Liberty attack released in 2003 read as follows:
“In part because of the press speculation at the time,
President Johnson directed the Director of Central
Intelligence, Richard Helms, to prepare a report by
June 13, five days after the attack, assessing the
Israeli intentions. The CIA report drew heavily on
the Signet reports referred to above. While these
reports revealed some confusion on the part of
the pilots concerning the nationality of the ship,
they tended to rule out any thesis that the Israeli
Navy and Air Force deliberately attacked a ship
they knew to be American.”
Thus President Johnson, Robert McNamara, Clark Clifford, McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, and Nicholas Katzenbach all believed the attack to be a mistake. All were miffed about it and had serious questions as top how it could have happened, but they accepted that the attack was not intentional.
Dean Rusk, whose belief that the attack was deliberate cannot be divorced from his hostility to Israel, later admitted that he did not read any of the Naval Court of Inquiry or any other investigations, except the CIA report. His belief, I suggest, was the product of both his bias, and his ignorance of the facts. Here is a transcript of an interview with him.
link to thelibertyincident.com
Said the Clifford Report:
“That the Liberty could have been mistaken for the Egyptian supply ship El Quseir is unbelievable. El Quseir has one-fourth the displacement of the Liberty, roughly half the beam, is 180 feet shorter, and is very differently configured. The Liberty’s unusual antenna array and hull markings should have been visible to low-flying aircraft and torpedo boats.”
I think this statement trivializes the difficulties of identification by both the IAF pilots and the torpedo boat skipper.
In the first place, Marvin Norwicki, the crewmember of an American reconnaissance aircraft who was intercepting Israeli transmissions during the attack on the Liberty, and who has himself commented on the identification issue, had this to say:
“In reconstruction of the attack, the Liberty
crew makes much of flying the American
flag, as if it would somehow protect them in
harm’s way (see Ennes, p. 152). Little does
the crew appreciate the difficulty of identifying
a ship from an aircraft merely on the basis of a
flag or even a hull number (GTR 5 displayed by
the Liberty). Based on my experience of flying
many “low and slow” reconnaissance flights
over ships in the Mediterranean and Atlantic
with VQ2, unless the flights are almost
overhead, target identification is virtually
impossible. High-powered binoculars are
not much good in a bouncing low-level aircraft.
Even post facto photos do not always reveal
identification. See, for example, Ennes’ photo
of the ship on page 146. This crisp overhead
photo does not clearly show the identity of the
American ship. So how could the attacking
Israeli forces conclude this was a friendly ship?”
Indeed. In the first air attack (which lasted from 1:58 to 2:02 pm) the two Mirage fighters made three forward strafing runs each on the bow of the Liberty at 600mph. In the attack run it had 2-3 seconds at most to fire its guns and pull off the target before getting closer than 3000 feet. This involved split-second timing. Each plane pulled off at about a 3000 foot distance from the front of the bow, giving them no opportunity to view the side, or to even see a flag, even if it was extended, which, at a 5 knot speed in calm waters, it probably wasn’t. The second attack (lasting from 2:06 to 2:11 pm) made similar forward strafing runs on the stern and then the bow, and then made a run on the port side in an attempt to hit the boiler. That’s when the pilot spotted the Latin hull markings.
Now, when you are strafing a ship in diving runs at 600mph from 7,500 feet and pulling up sharply at 3000 feet (i.e., 4 ½ seconds reaction time), and at breakneck speed, this makes ID a bit difficult. And all of this, mind you, occurred within a 3 ½ minute time frame for the first attack, and about a 5 minute time frame for the second attack.
Secondly, Israeli aircraft (who strafed the Liberty from 1:58 to 2:11 pm) did not ID the ship as the El Quseir; they only knew what their HQ had told them—that it was an Egyptian ship that had been shelling El Arish. The Israeli MTB (Motor Torpedo Boat) skipper, Commander Oren, arriving at the scene at 2:24pm, consulted his intelligence manual and, viewing the silhouette of a smoke-engulfed ship some six thousand yards distant and directed westward toward the sun at an elevation of 50 degrees and azimuth 88 degrees, concluded that the ship was the Egyptian freighter El Quseir, and the skippers on the other two torpedo boats reached the same conclusion themselves. Oren attempted to signal the ship, asking for identity; getting no response, he ordered the MTBs into battle formation. At 2:30pm Naval HQ gave the go ahead to attack. So the Liberty was not misidentified by the Israelis as the El Quseir until Commander Oren did so sometime between 2:24pm and 2:30pm from his MTB, at some 6000 yards distance while the Liberty was engulfed with black smoke.
The Israeli MTB’s did not fire on the Liberty until someone on the Liberty opened fire on them with .50 caliber machine guns.
As to the similar dimensions of the Liberty and the El Quseir, if viewed from a few hundred yards distance, it might have been possible to discern the shape of one from the other. But, again, the ID was done at a distance of some 6000 yards—nearly 3 ½ miles. From that distance the silhouettes of the ships are very similar. Even the CIA report of June 13, 1967 stated: “Although the Liberty is some 200 feet longer than the Egyptian transport El Quseir it could easily have been mistaken for the latter vessel by an overzealous pilot. Both have similar hulls and arrangements of masts and stack.”
***
All in all, no one has yet supplied an even remotely plausible motive for the Israelis to have knowingly attacked an American ship, and all of the evidence, as opposed to unsubstantiated conspiracies, overwhelmingly points to a case of mistaken identity. I would contend that many of those who believe in the theory of a deliberate attack do so more out of belief and ideology, rather than a rational appraisal of the circumstances, the evidence, and the facts.
Shingo,
Said you:
“Why would they have believed that US fighters were on their way? They were given the US radio frequencies to listen to were they not? Come on buddy, has your brain gone to sleep?”
Uh, no. And they were not “given US radio frequencies to listen to.” What evidence is there that the Israelis were ever monitoring Sixth Fleet communications? None whatsoever. Where would they have been monitoring those communications? The Israeli naval presence in 1967 was confined to the coastal area and not the western Mediterranean where they would have to be to monitor such communications.
If they had been listening, here is what they would have heard: Sixth Fleet Commander Admiral Martin gave the order for a launch of fighter aircraft from the USS Saratoga and the USS America at 2:50pm Sinai time—nine minutes AFTER the Israeli MTB’s cut off the attack. Martin ordered the launches for 3:39pm Sinai time with ETA of one hour and thirty minutes—giving the Israelis, if they had been listening, a good two hours and twenty minutes to finish off the Liberty without any outside interference if they had so desired. After learning that the attack was a mistake by the Israelis, Martin had the aircraft recalled at 4:40pm.
“Oh right, the same MTB’s that had just fire 5 torpedoes at the ship you mean? Yeah, makes perfect sense – just like a jackal doing a recon on a dead carcass to see if it’s still alive. This is absolutely false and you know it”
The Israeli MTB’s caught up with the Liberty as a sailor on board the Liberty opened up fire on them with .50 caliber machine guns (at 2:31pm according to the Liberty deck log), not receiving Liberty Captain McGonagle’s order not to fire on the approaching craft. The Israeli MTBs then returned fire with 20mm and 40mm cannon, and at 2:37pm (2:43pm in the Israeli account) fired back torpedoes. Four missed but one hit the Liberty’s starboard side midship, killing 25 sailors.
At 2:41pm, after a few minutes of circling the craft, the Israeli MTB skipper cut off the attack. At 2:45pm the IDF Navy log reads “May be Russian nationality, based on writing on aft”; the Israelis thought they might be attacking a Russian vessel. When the Israeli boat captain got close enough to identify the hull markings of the Liberty, now listing badly, he recognized the Latin markings on the hull, and, according to the deck log of the Liberty and Captain McGonagle’s testimony, offered help and medical attention to the survivors at 3:03pm. The attack was over, and there was no subsequent exchange of fire after 2:45pm.
This is confirmed by Marvin Norwicki, a Hebrew linguist aboard an American EC-121M Hawkeye recon plane patrolling in the vicinity that overheard the aftermath of the attack, and whose view that the Liberty was mistakenly attacked was misrepresented by author James Bamford, also commented on the Israeli MTB attack:
“According to Ennes (James Ennes, Liberty crew member), the three MTBs left the port of Ashdod at 1200 local, some 125 miles away, heading for the Liberty at 35 plus knots. They commenced a machine gun attack and launched torpedos at 1435 local. Three minutes later, the sabras mysteriously broke off the engagement. If the boat commanders had wanted to sink the Liberty, they could have done so at this time. Instead, they ceased fire and retreated, returning later to offer assistance to the stricken Liberty. I contend it was during the attack the identification of the American ship became known to the Israeli war planners. I also believe our VQ-2 voice intercepts showed this identification causing the cease-fire. “
Said you:
“It was clearly no mistake. Intercepts of IDF pilots conversing with HQ revealed they knew they were attacking a US ship.”
False and false. Both the IAF transcripts and the NSA transcripts of communications between IDF helicopter pilots and their HQ, recorded by Norwicki and his crew and declassified in 2003, contradict this completely.
The IAF transcripts show that the first air attack (code named “Kursa”) of two Mirage fighters lasted from about 1:58pm to about 2:02pm, each Mirage completing three forward strafing runs each on the Liberty’s bow before their ammo was spent. The second air attack, code named “Royal,” commenced at between 2:04-2:06pm, was by a squadron of two Super Mystere B-2 fighters returning from bombing Egyptian infantry in the Sinai. They raked the Liberty with what they had—napalm canisters (three missed, one may have hit), and 30mm cannon fire.
At 2:11pm transcripts of communications between the Israeli Royal wing leader and HQ show that after the second strafing run the Israeli pilot recognized the Latin markings on the hull of the ship: “Pay attention! Ship’s marking is Charlie Tango Romeo 5” (i.e., CTR- 5—the Israeli pilot in fact misidentified the hull markings; they were GTR-5) and adds, “She looks like a minesweeper.” An air controller named Menachem, Chief air controller at Air Control South in the Sinai, then unhelpfully garbled the pilot’s misidentification of the ship’s markings even further as “Charlie Senator Romeo,” i.e., CSR.
When this is reported to HQ, Colonel Shmuel Kislev, the Chief air controller at the Kirya in Tel-Aviv, obviously now shitting himself with the prospect that they could be attacking a neutral vessel, now screams “Leave her! What ship is this?” He then immediately orders the Royal leader and his wingman to disengage, and cancels the third air attack deployment headed to attack the ship (which was code named flight mission “Nixon,” consisting of two French-built Mystere IV’s armed with 500lb iron incendiaries that would surely blown the Liberty right out of the water, and with all hands). This second air attack had lasted about five minutes.
The IAF transcripts also show the intense rivalry between the air force and the navy. At 2:09pm, wishing their planes had bombs instead of just cannon and napalm, the Royal flight leader says,
“Homeland, if you had a two ship formation with bombs in ten minutes before the navy arrives, it will be a mitzvah.”
Then, adding dejectedly, “Otherwise the navy is on its way here.”
Air Controller Menachem, perhaps sniffing an opportunity to steal some glory from the navy, then adds, “Before the navy arrives, it will be a mitzvah!”
In fact, at this point the transcripts show that the air controllers at Air Control Central were, incredibly, still speculating about the identity of the craft an hour and thirteen minutes after she had been targeted:
At 3:04pm:
Robert: Is there any ID yet?
Shimon: None yet.
Menachem: Is it American after all?
Shimon: That’s still not clear, Menachem.
Menachem: Then why did they blast a torpedo?
Shimon: They [the navy] probably can’t read English.
(They probably can’t read English—another dig at the navy!)
That is, in any event, what is said on the IAF transcripts. There is no mention of attacking an American ship. This is a fabrication.
The NSA transcripts, which began monitoring the communications at about 2:30pm (19 minutes AFTER the air attacks had ceased) show that the IDF helicopter pilots en route to the point of action and their HQ were still confused about the identity of the ship.
2:34 pm—(HQ) “Pay attention. Ship has now been identified as an Egyptian ship. You are returning home.”
2:39 pm—(HQ) “Pay attention. You are going to the ship after all. You will try to pull people out of the water…For your info, it’s probably an Arab ship. It’s an Egyptian supply ship.”
link to thelibertyincident.com
2:59 pm—(HQ) “As soon as you begin picking up men, find out from the first man you pick up what his nationality is and report it to us right away. It is important that we know this.”
link to thelibertyincident.com
It is worth re-emphasizing: These NSA recordings are the only American record of communications of the Israelis concerning the attack on the Liberty. They record communications between rescue helicopters and their HQ from about 2:29 pm to about 3:19 pm. The transcripts speak for themselves.
Said you:
“Bamford’s book was never discredited. What ever gave you that silly idea?”
Bamford’s source for his assertion that Israeli planes or ships attacking the Liberty saw an American flag and kept attacking, Marvin Norwicki, who was then a chief petty officer aboard an NSA aircraft spying on Israel, wrote Bamford a letter in which he stated in no uncertain terms his belief that the attack on the Liberty was a mistake. Said Norwicki in a March 3, 2000 e-mail to Bamford:
“In this correspondence, I am concentrating on a
single event that involved the USS Liberty in June
1967. As you know, Jim Ennes and members of
the Liberty crew are on record stating the ship was
deliberately attacked by the Israelis. I think otherwise.
I have first hand information, which I am sharing with
you. I was present on that day, along with members
of an aircrew in a COMFAIRAIRRECONRON TWO
(VQ-2) EC-121M aircraft flying some 15,000 feet
above the incident. As I recall, we recorded most,
if not all, of the attack. Further, our intercepts, never
before made public, showed the attack to be an
accident on the part of the Israelis.”
In a letter to the Wall street Journal on May 16, 2001, Nowicki wrote:
“In regard to Timothy Naftali's review of James
Bamford's book "Body of Secrets" (Leisure &
Arts, May 9): Mr. Naftali doesn't quite have it right
concerning the book portion dealing with the Israeli
attack on the USS Liberty in 1967. I know because
I am the person to whom Mr. Natfali [sic] refers as
the "chief Hebrew-language analyst" aboard the
U.S. Navy (not Air Force) EC121 aircraft. He says
that I recall one of my teammates telling me of
hearing references to "a U.S. flag" from Israeli
pilots.
For the record, we (my teammate and I) both heard
and recorded the references to the U.S. flag made
by the pilots and captains of the motor torpedo
boats. My personal recollection remains after
34 years that the aircraft and MTBs prosecuted
the Liberty until their operators had an opportunity
to get close-in and see the flag, hence the
references to the flag.
My position, which is opposite of Mr. Bamford's,
is that the attack, though terrible and tragic
especially to the crew members and their families
on that ill-fated day in June 1967, was a gross
error. How can I prove it? I can't unless the
transcripts/tapes are found and released to
the public. I last saw them in a desk drawer
at NSA in the late 1970s before I left the
service.
MARVIN E. NOWICKI, PH.D.
Ashley, Ill.”
It should be noted that Norwicki’s recollection is confirmed by the release of the IAF transcripts of the attack, and the NSA tapes declassified in 2003.
Also, in addition to Norwicki and his teammate, mentioned by him above in the WSJ letter, there was a third Hebrew linguist on board the EC-121M recon plane, who, following the declassification of the NSA tapes in 2003 was revealed to be one Richard W. Hickman, and who testified to his own thoughts on the Liberty attack in 1981, when interviewed for the NSA report on the attack:
“From the SIGNET picture I witnessed, I would tend to
say that the Israelis did not know that they attacked a
US vessel…”
Also, James Bamford’s assertion that the Israelis attacked the Liberty to conceal a massacre of 1000 Egyptian prisoners in the Sinai is unsubstantiated by any evidence whatsoever. Journalist Gabi Bron and IDF historian Aryeh Yitzhaki, the two sources Bamford cites to prove this “massacre” contradict him completely, and have both stated that no such massacre ever took place. Along with Norwicki, Bamford thus knowingly and deliberately misrepresented the very sources he has cited to “prove” his conspiracy theories. He stands thoroughly discredited.
Your witness.
Shingo,
Said you:
"Israel only took responsibility and apologized because they were of the belief that US fighter planes were arriving on the scene."
This is completely false. Why would they have believed that US fighters were on their way?
"The first helicopter did not offer assistance, but wielded IDF troops carrying semi automatics. Eyewitnesses told the BBC documentary that they believed the Israelis had come to finish them off."
I was not referring to the helicopters. I was referring to the MTB that signaled to the Liberty offering help 16 minutes after the attack ceased. The helicopters that came afterward were rescue helicopters, one of which carried the US Naval attache, but they were refused permission to land because the ship was listing too far to the starboard.
"It was clearly no mistake. Intercepts of IDF pilots conversing with HQ revealed they knew they were attacking a US ship. James Bamford revealed this in his book."
This is absolutely false and you know it, and you know that Bamford's book has been discredited too.
Why do you continue peddling these falsehoods?
Justiceplease,
Said you:
" The fact that there even ARE US drills with the very same military that killed US sailors on the USS Liberty is shameful. The US government should try everything in its power to extradite the Israelis responsible for the Liberty massacre and convict them for life, and make the Israeli government pay reparations."
It may be of interest to you to know that the Israelis took responsibility for the attack moments after it occured, offered medical attention to the survivors, apologized to the United States government, and paid some $12-13 million in damages to the government, Liberty survivors, and the families of those who were killed.
Why is it just so impossible to believe that this attack was a mistake?
I know that passions on this issue are strong, but I hope someday those who are so certain this attack was deliberate can be and will be persuaded by the available evidence that it was not.
Shingo,
Can you or anyone else please tell me what agreement Israelis and Palestinians were on the verge of at Taba? For example, on refugees. What were they close to agreement on?
Said Shingo:
"The quote never existed. Even Wikipedia casts doubt upon the authenticity of that quote"
That is not true. It merely notes the reservations expressed by Morris and others about the quote's authenticity. It also notes Karsh's debunking of the inauthenticity charge with evidence, which you omit here.
"Of course, it’s harldy surprising that such a lame propogandist as Efraim Karsh is using quotes that cannot be confirmed."
Another false advertisement. Karsh has established the quote's authenticity and its source.
link to meforum.org
Here is the full quote from an October 11, 1947 interview with Azzam:
"Abdul Rahman Azzam Pasha spoke to me about the horrific war that was in the offing… saying:
"I personally wish that the Jews do not drive us to this war, as this will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Tartar massacre[10] or the Crusader wars. I believe that the number of volunteers from outside Palestine will be larger than Palestine's Arab population, for I know that volunteers will be arriving to us from [as far as] India, Afghanistan, and China to win the honor of martyrdom for the sake of Palestine … You might be surprised to learn that hundreds of Englishmen expressed their wish to volunteer in the Arab armies to fight the Jews.
"This war will be distinguished by three serious matters. First—faith: as each fighter deems his death on behalf of Palestine as the shortest road to paradise; second, [the war] will be an opportunity for vast plunder. Third, it will be impossible to contain the zealous volunteers arriving from all corners of the world to avenge the martyrdom of the Palestine Arabs, and viewing the war as dignifying every Arab and every Muslim throughout the world …
"The Arab is superior to the Jew in that he accepts defeat with a smile: Should the Jews defeat us in the first battle, we will defeat them in the second or the third battle … or the final one… whereas one defeat will shatter the Jew's morale! Most desert Arabians take pleasure in fighting. I recall being tasked with mediating a truce in a desert war (in which I participated) that lasted for nine months…While en route to sign the truce, I was approached by some of my comrades in arms who told me: 'Shame on you! You are a man of the people, so how could you wish to end the war … How can we live without war?' This is because war gives the Bedouin a sense of happiness, bliss, and security that peace does not provide! …
"I warned the Jewish leaders I met in London to desist from their policy,[11] telling them that the Arab was the mightiest of soldiers and the day he draws his weapon, he will not lay it down until firing the last bullet in the battle, and we will fire the last shot …"
He [Azzam] ended his conversation with me by saying: "I foresee the consequences of this bloody war. I see before me its horrible battles. I can picture its dead, injured, and victims … But my conscience is clear … For we are not attacking but defending ourselves, and we are not aggressors but defenders against an aggression! …"
Jerome,
I forgot to add something. If there is one single book that surveys the entire Asia-Pacific theater and all of the command issues (as well as an excellent account of the campaigns) comprehensively it is Max Hastings' "Nemesis: The Battle For Japan 1944-1945," (Harper Press, 2007).
It's also an excellent read. I highly reccomend it, if you can get it.
Jerome,
I agree with you that Japan’s capacity for offensive action was nil by 1945, but they were still well entrenched in China and SE Asia with some several million troops who could still fight and sustain themselves without much assistance from the home islands. Also they were palnning a series of offensive actions despite their plight. They had been training an outfit called the Yamoaka Parachute Brigade of some 300 Kamikaze soldiers who would be landed by submarine on the coast of California to shoot their way to aircraft factories in Los Angeles. They planned a similar attack on the Marianas islands involving some 2000 suicided soldiers. The former operation never got rolling because of the end of the war and the latter was only thwarted when Admiral Halsey recieved intel on the attack and targeted the 400 planes being readied on August 4, 1945. The Japanese were indeed beaten, but they still had plenty of fight--and bite left among them.
Clearing the Asian mainland of the Japanese would, I think, probably have taken years and possibly a million troops. All of the evidence shows that American policy makers never seem to have considered anything short of surrender, and that the Japanese would probably not have been amenable to any arrangement that smacked of surrender or the yielding of conquered territory, as communications from their commanders in China and SE Asia as late as mid-August 1945 indicate.
It’s just speculation on my part, but I am guessing that any arrangement that allowed the lunatic military regime to stay in power would only unwittingly abet them in their highest priority—rearming and re-conquering, regardless of what this meant for the Japanese people. It also seems to me that the Japanese militarists—like the German militarists after WW I—would regard any conclusion of the war that stopped short of surrender as an opportunity to scapegoat their defeat on civilians and as a spur to rearm for a future return engagement
Any type of peace arrangement short of surrender would ultimately founder on the Japanese refusal to countenance defeat of any sort, conditional or unconditional.
That said, and though I do think that the strategy of striking at the Japanese by securing key Pacific island locations while bypassing others to bring them within striking distance of the home islands was the correct course of action, there is one costly campaign that could have been avoided: the Philippines campaign, in which some 14,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Philippinos were killed, and Manila devastated. The campaign was a sop to MacArthur from Roosevelt so that MacArthur could “return.” It did nothing to bring Japan’s defeat closer.
If you’re interested, there are some excellent books on American and Allied decision-making in the Pacific war by British naval historian H.P. Wilmott:
--“Empires in the Balance: Japanese and Allied Pacific Strategies to April 1942,” (Naval Institute Press, 1982)
--“Barrier and the Javelin: Japanese and Allied Strategies February to June 1942,” (Naval Institute Press, 1983)
--“The War With Japan: May 1942 to October 1943,” (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1985)
Also informative are D. Clayton James “The Years of MacArthur, Vol. II: 1941-1945,” (1975), and Forrest Pogue’s “George Marshall: Ordeal and Hope 1939-1942,” (1965), and “Organizer of Victory: 1943-1945,” (1973).
Jeffrey,
FYI, I did not serve in the military. If I had, it is not likely that I would find occasion to revise my opinion that the dropping of the A-bomb was correct. Facts and logic dictate to me that the dropping of the bombs prevented much more bloodshed for Americans and Japanese alike; you may feel differently.
The anecdote you relate strikes me as authentic. The Japanese rarely surrendered, and often feigned surrender to lure American troops into the open and kill them. Consequently, Navy and Marine commanders would often sanction the shooting of those attempting to surrender, rather than risk lives taking them prisoner. This was especially true among small unit commanders in the bitter island engagements at Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. In October 1943 George Marshall cabled commanders in the Pacific to discourage the practice among soldiers in making necklaces from the teeth of dead Japanese, and Life Magazine published a photo of an Arizona woman looking at the skull of a dead Japanese soldier sent to her from her boyfriend, which bore the inscription: “This is a good Jap—a dead one picked up on the New Guinea beach.”
Also, German Admiral Doenitz relates in his memoirs how Admiral Nimitz sent an affidavit to his defense lawyer at Nuremberg, testifying that American submarines would often refuse to take on survivors of sunken Japanese ships for fear that it would put submarine crewmen at risk taking them aboard.
However, those Japanese who were taken prisoner received decent treatment. The same cannot be said of Allied prisoners in Japanese custody, of whom some 27% died in captivity—compared to 4% in German captivity. Testimony taken at the Tokyo Tribunal relates that Japanese commanders and soldiers routinely shot and tortured Allied prisoners on the slightest of pretexts, conducted sadistic medical experiments on them, and even committed acts of cannibalism on them when food was scarce.
So, I think it is fair to say that the Pacific war was a brutal war, and that both sides committed atrocities and acts of savagery, but the Japanese in China, SE Asia, and the Pacific, did so on a far, far greater scale that dwarfs the worst outrages committed by the Allies.
Woody Tanaka,
Said you:
“This is nonsensical, because it treats the four major Alllied powers, considering both theaters (US, UK, USSR, and China) as having the same goals, and nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, only two of them were involved in both theaters at the same time, and some in the US believed that Japan was the more immediate threat to the US, although FDR did not.”
I wouldn’t disagree with this. I should have clarified: I was speaking of the Western Allies (i.e., Roosevelt and Churchill), who had given the defeat of Germany priority over Japan. Obviously, Russia and China both considered the defeats of Germany and Japan, respectively, to take priority for their own reasons.
“The Chinese clearly saw the Japanese as the greater threat, indeed, they’d been fighting them since the early 1930s. The Russians weren’t going to join in the war against Japan unless Japan attacked them or until Germany was defeated. Not because Germany was “the greater, more immediate threat” but because they were at war with Germany and were not at war with Japan.”
I agree.
Said you:
“But Japan only capitulated because of the Russian declaration of war (not because of the atomic bombs), because they reached a point where they believed that continuing the war (and inviting, for example, Russian occupation or a Japanese Communist revolt) would be more harmful than surrendering to the US and UK.
The war in the Pacific could have ended sooner, even with the European War, had the Americans not insisted on unconditional surrender. Had they made it known that surrender could be done while still preserving the kokutai, Japan would have jumped at the chance to end the war much earlier.”
I would dispute both of these assertions. While there is of course evidence that the Japanese were troubled by the declaration of war by the Soviet Union (whom their diplomats had lately been delusionally courting to mediate peace terms between them and the Allies), and that this certainly reinforced the hopelessness of their situation, attributing this, rather than both atomic bombs to the Japanese surrender is problematic for two reasons. First, it overlooks the fundamental irrationality and divorce from reality that was at the heart of all Japanese war direction, especially in the last year of the war. The Japanese war leaders who ran the country and the war were, almost to a man, die-hard fanatics whom no disaster, however catastrophic, would impel them to ever consider surrender as a viable option.
As Gerhard Weinberg has found, American intelligence was monitoring Japanese diplomatic correspondence between Tokyo and their diplomats in Moscow and other capitols in the months prior to dropping the bomb, and Tokyo was adamant in its replies to its diplomats abroad that “the Japanese government would not accept the concept of unconditional surrender even if the institution of the imperial house were preserved.” These intercepted communications, along with watching the Japanese literally fight to the last man at battles like Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and plaster countless American ships with thousands of Kamikazes, communicated to American policy makers the fanatical intractability of the Japanese determination to fight to the bitter end, no matter the hopelessness of their situation. (See Gerhard Weinberg, “A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II,” 1994, pp. 882-890).
Secondly, the evidence is clear that even the dropping of the first atomic bomb and the Soviet declaration of war had absolutely no influence on the Japanese to consider surrender. The Japanese Minister of War, General Korechika Anami, on the day the Soviets declared war, even went out his way to deny that an A-Bomb had in fact been dropped on Hiroshima on August 6. The government announced that the dropping of the bomb was “contrary to international law”—having brutally and brazenly violated every conceivable tenet of international law for the last decade and a half, the Japanese now demanded its protection.
When the second bomb dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, the Imperial Council convened to meet that night and even then, incredibly, still resisted the option of surrender. While acknowledging that the Americans had as many 100 A-bombs left (they actually had none), Anami nonetheless urged that Japan fight on, and that the if the Japanese people “went into the decisive battle in the homeland determined to display the full measure of patriotism . . . Japan would be able to avert the crisis facing her.” He was seconded on this by the chief of the army general staff, Yoshijiro Umezu, who was fully confident of the military’s “ability to deal a smashing blow to the enemy,” and that “it would be inexcusable to surrender unconditionally.” Admiral Soemu Toyoda, chief of the navy’s general staff, also spoke confidently of unleashing the reserves of air power (read: Kamikazes) that they had accumulated on the home islands, and asserted confidently that that “we do not believe that we will be possibly defeated.”
And keep in mind: these were the sentiments expressed by Japan’s leaders AFTER the Soviet Declaration of war and the dropping of both A-bombs.
It was at this point that the emperor intervened, and he made clear Japan’s acceptance of the Allied terms with the condition that emperor be retained on August 14. Yet even this encountered fierce resistance from the fanatics in the military clique, and they resolved on the reversal of the emperor’s decision by way of a coup d’état. It might have succeeded had Anami lent his support to the coup, but he would not defy the emperor and the plot failed. Unwilling either to surrender or defy the emperor, he resolved his dilemma by suicide. But for Anami’s action, Japan would undoubtedly have fought to a far bloodier end for all concerned.
Some indication of both the fanatical resistance to surrender and the extent to which the Soviet declaration, the two A-bombs, and the emperor’s decision to surrender had not dented the Japanese will to fight can be gauged from an August 15 message to Tokyo from General Yasuji Okamura, the commander of the army in China:
“I am firmly convinced that it is time to exert all our efforts to fight to the end, determined that the whole army should die an honorable death without being distracted by the enemy’s peace offensive… Such a disgrace as the surrender of several million troops without fighting is not paralleled in the world’s military history, and it is absolutely impossible to submit to the unconditional surrender of a million picked troops in perfectly healthy shape. . . .”
Field Marshal Terauchi, commander of the Southern Army, had this to say on the Allies’ agreement to grant surrender terms in reply to Hirohito,
“Under no circumstances can the Southern Army accept the enemy’s reply.”
The Emperor considered the bomb the decisive factor in his decision to intervene and lead the initiative to surrender. Said Hirohito: “We must put an end to the war as speedily as possible so that this tragedy will not be repeated.” Premier Suzuki said that Japan’s “war aim had been lost by the enemy’s use of the new-type bomb.” Hirohito, in his August 14 speech to the nation said,
“The enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is indeed incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but it would also lead to the total extinction of human civilization. Such being the case, how are we to save the millions of our subjects. . . This is the reason why we have ordered the acceptance of the provisions of the Joint Declaration of the Powers.”
(The source for all of the above is Robert J.C. Butow, “Japan's Decision to Surrender,” 1954, pp.166-188).
***
The evidence is thus compelling that the Japanese leadership was a) adamant that there would be no surrender even if the kokutai had been retained, b) that not even the Soviet declaration of war combined with the dropping of both A-bombs was sufficient to persuade Japan’s military leaders of the necessity of surrender, just the opposite; they were even more determined than ever to fight on however hopeless the situation.
And while the importance of the Soviet declaration of war toward reinforcing the hopelessness of Japan’s situation should not be overlooked, it is clear that the emperor’s intervention was decisive in accepting the surrender terms, and that the bomb was decisive in forcing his intervention. Had he not intervened, there would have likely been a full scale invasion of the home islands causing hundreds of thousands of fatalities.
From all of this, I draw the conclusion that the dropping of the A-bombs was not only right, but necessary to save further bloodshed.
Shingo,
Said you:
"Furthermore, Wikileqks revealed that the reason for initiating Cast Lead had nothing to do with rockets, but fear that the ceasefire was benefitting Hamas politically. The military option was decided as the means to cut off Hamas at the knees politically. Israel were entirely to blame."
I address the rest of your assertions upthread, but here is what the Wikileaks memo of August 2008 says in full:
“Regarding the Tahdiya, Hacham (MOD Arab Affairs Adviser David Hacham) said Barak stressed that while it was not permanent, for the time being it was holding. There have been a number of violations of the ceasefire on the Gaza side, but Palestinian factions other than Hamas were responsible. Hacham said the Israelis assess that Hamas is making a serious effort to convince the other factions not to launch rockets or mortars. Israel remains concerned by Hamas' ongoing efforts to use the Tahdiya to increase their strength, and at some point, military action will have to be put back on the table. The Israelis reluctantly admit that the Tahdiya has served to further consolidate Hamas' grip on Gaza, but it has brought a large measure of peace and quiet to Israeli communities near Gaza.”
The memo, read honestly, makes nonsense of your assertion that Cast Lead had “nothing to do with rocket attacks but fear that the ceasefire was benefitting Hamas politically." It had everything to do with rocket and mortar attacks (some 601 between Nov. 4 and Dec. 27 alone) and your Wikileaks memo, in fact, reveals no such thing. It simply states that Israel was “concerned by Hamas’ ongoing efforts to use the Tahdiya to increase their strength, and at some point, military action will have to be put back on the table.” Your citation of this memo to support your assertion, in other words, is yet another example of your false advertising of sources that do not support your assertions.
Let us not forget: Hamas had fired some 2473 rockets and mortars into Israel between January and the June 2008 cease-fire. Barak was simply speaking in general terms about what everyone knew was inevitable, and expressing his concerns about the use that Hamas was putting the cease-fire to build up their arsenal. You act as if these were not legitimate concerns. In any event, there is not a shred of evidence here in the memo that he (or Israel) were plotting to sabotage the cease-fire and it most certainly indicates no planned, premeditated intention to do so in the November 4 incident. The same cannot be said about Hamas.
Hostage,
Said you:
"I’ve mentioned elsewhere that thousands of Allied POWs in the Asian theater died during WWII while they were waiting to be rescued. In the meantime, the remaining Jews in the European concentration camps were being saved. I don’t think it should offend anyone to admit that they were sacrificed to save the lives of others."
Is it really your belief that Allied POW's in the Asian theater were "sacrificed" so that the Jews of Europe could be saved? Isn't this a bit extreme?
What evidence is there to support this? While there is no question the Allies gave the defeat of Germany priority over Japan, this was not because the Allies were concerned to liberate Europe's Jews, but because they rightly considered Germany to be the greater, more immediate threat.
That said, it's not really clear to me how the Pacific campaign could have been won any sooner than it was regardless of the European war. Even if there was no European war, it would still have taken about the same time--and much longer, with more POW's killed, if the A-bombs had not been dropped.
“Do you think that the breach of the ceasefire by Israel on November 4th was justified, seeing as no Kassams were landing in Israel at the time?”
For the record, the six month cease-fire established in June 2008 was disrupted on November 4, 2008 when Israeli troops crossed into the Gaza Strip near the town of Deir al-Balah and targeted a tunnel that Hamas was planning to use to capture Israeli soldiers positioned on the border fence 250m away from the border and directly adjacent to an IDF border outpost, not unlike the one they used to snatch Shalit. Four Israeli soldiers were injured in the operation, two moderately and two lightly. One Hamas gunman was killed and they then launched a volley of mortars at Israel. An Israeli air strike then killed five more Hamas fighters. In response, Hamas launched 35 rockets into southern Israel, one reaching the city of Ashkelon.
The Nov.4 incursion was a necessary and completely justifiable action of self-defense. “This was a pinpoint operation intended to prevent an immediate threat,” the Israeli military said in a statement. “There is no intention to disrupt the cease-fire, rather the purpose of the operation was to remove an immediate and dangerous threat posted by the Hamas terror organization.”
According to the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center report: “Hamas and the Terrorist Threat from the Gaza Strip: The Main Findings of the Goldstone Report Versus the Factual Findings” published in March 2010:
“November 5 marked the beginning of the second period of the lull’s deterioration. It began with an abduction attempt prevented on November 4, which was supposed to be carried out through a tunnel near the border fence (in the vicinity of Kissufim). The preventive action conducted by the IDF was based on intelligence which began accumulating towards late October 2008, about a tunnel built by Hamas for an abduction in the region near the Kissufim outpost.
The planned Hamas operation included the specific training of operatives for an offensive mission, and the nature of the training and the equipment indicated that Hamas was preparing for an abduction. At the same time, it was learned that the excavation of the tunnel was about to end and that Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades operatives were conducting unusual activities. Reliable information in early November indicated the intention to activate the tunnel. As a result, Israel made the decision to launch a preemptive operation
in the Gaza Strip to prevent the abduction attempt.
Based on intelligence, on the night of November 4 an IDF force operated about 300 meters inside the Gaza Strip to prevent the abduction. As the IDF attacked the tunnel, it became clear that Hamas had taken the possibility into consideration and booby-trapped both the house at the end of the tunnel and the tunnel entrance. IDF forces blew up the house and left the Gaza Strip following the operation. Six IDF soldiers were injured, two of them
seriously; seven Hamas operatives were killed and several were injured.”
link to terrorism-info.org.il
“So you think it was justified given that Hamas proposed a resumption of the ceasefire in mid December, which Israel rejected? After all, a return to a ceasefire at that point would have ended 3 more weeks of rocket attacks.”
Please. The tunnel skirmish was then met by the launching of some 193 rockets and mortars in November, and some 290 between December 1 and December 24, every one of them a war crime.
On November 8, Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades spokesman Abu Obeida said to Al-Jazeera TV: “the lull is coming to an end and we will not renew that lull.” Khaled Mashaal, chief of the Hamas political bureau, said to Al Quds TV on December 14: “The lull was set for six months and it is ending on December 19. After December 19, the lull will come to an end and will not be renewed.”
Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said to Al-Aqsa TV on December 17: “The lull will end on December 18, and I believe that it should not be renewed between the Palestinian factions and the Zionist occupation. And in light of this assessment of the lull and our consultations with the Palestinian factions, all of the Palestinians, both our people in the West Bank and Gaza, do not wish to extend this lull, which the Zionist occupier has converted to his benefit.” This was echoed by Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades spokesman Abu Obeida on the same day, who also announced on the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades website that the lull would not be renewed.
link to terrorism-info.org.il
As a reward for this terrorist aggression, the Hamas regime now demanded the following terms for a renewal of the lull/cease-fire, which lapsed on December 18: a complete opening of all border crossings, an opening of the Rafah border with Egypt, and a ban on all IDF activity in Gaza. Hamas was thus now demanding a removal of all the restrictive measures and “IDF activity” that the terrorist actions they had previously committed, and were currently committing, had made absolutely necessary. On December 24 Hamas launched “Operation Oil Stain” to the accompaniment of a 60 rocket and mortar volley. On December 25 Prime Minister Olmert said: “I am telling them now, it may be the last minute. I’m telling them stop it. We are stronger.” This was met with an attack of 5 rocket and 14 mortar attacks, and the next day there were 12 more. All efforts to constrain or contain the attacks being ineffective, on December 27 Israel commenced Operation Cast Lead, a three-week sustained military strike on Hamas's terror infrastructure and rocket launching sites in an effort to thwart future attacks.
According to the ITIC report:
“Hamas’ unilateral decision to the end lull and the escalation it initiated played a major role in the events which ultimately led to Operation Cast Lead. On September 18, the Hamas leadership met to discuss whether or not to extend it. Opinions in the Gaza Strip leadership of Hamas were divided, while the Damascus leadership, headed by Khaled Mashaal, chief of the political bureau in Damascus, decided to bring it to an end in an attempt to achieve a new lull with better conditions for Hamas. The decision was made
knowing that it would lead to an escalation. The leadership, however, assumed Hamas would be able to control and contain it. Hamas was joined it its decision to end the lull by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the other Palestinian terrorist organizations.
The Palestinian Authority opposed the escalation initiated by Hamas. Prior to Hamas’ announcing the end of the lull, Palestinian Authority leaders, including Mahmoud Abbas, said that they supported its extension, and that firing rockets was useless because all it did was provide Israel with a pretext to attack Hamas. Accordingly, the Palestinian Authority attempted to make Hamas reconsider, claiming that such a step would lead to a blockade of the Gaza Strip and worsen the Gazans’ situation, and that it could lead to an Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip in the future.
Mahmoud Abbas’ referred to his attempts to persuade Hamas to extend the lull in a speech he gave at the opening ceremony of the Fatah Revolutionary Council meeting (October 2009). He said that one week or ten days prior to the launch of Operation Cast Lead (i.e., December 17, 2008), he had called two Hamas activists, Ghazi Hamad and Ahmed Youssef, informing them of the coming Israeli attack. He added that all they had to do to avoid it was to extend the lull. When they did not respond, he said, he ordered Sa’eb Erekat to contact the Hamas leadership in Damascus. After they, too, did not agree, Mahmoud Abbas contacted the president of Syria and asked him to convince the Hamas leadership to extend the lull (Palestinian TV, October 16, 2009), to no avail.”
It cannot be denied: Hamas wanted war, provoked war, and got war. Hamas’ total culpability for the Gaza War, their abrogation of the lull, and their refusal to renew it for their lunatic view that their continued terrorist aggression would somehow yield them better terms (spelled out by them before the Nov. 4 incident), is thus beyond serious dispute. Like Hezbollah in 2006, they greivously miscalculated Israel's response.
Wisdom from the asylum:
“In Kuwait, Saddam was given the green light by April Glasby to invade Kuwait.”
“The US didn’t failt to protect the Iraqi people from the chaos and the military operation. The US went into Iraq to kill Iraqis. When they were met with resistance from both the Shiites and the Sunnis, the took sides and backed the Shiite Death Squads. When the violence was getting seriously out of hand, the US finally accepted in 2006 the treaty the Sunnis had made in 2004 and branded it the surge.”
“Prior to the Iraq war, Bush was given multiple opporutnities to strike Al-Zarqawi’s camp in Northern Iraq, but chose not to. The thinking being that Al-Zarqawi would be more usedul to the propaganda war alive than dead.”
To attempt to argue rationally against such delusional, unhinged paranoia, is vain.
"As for Cast Lead I think it was justified."
I agree. Hamas' culpability in provoking the war is total. It was a just war.
Professor Slater,
You have given here one of the most robust, well-reasoned defenses of liberal-humanitarian just war theory that I have ever read.
The example of the Allied liberation of France in the light of the frightful civilian casualties it caused, is an excellent case in point to support your argument. Both Churchill and Eisenhower both agonized over the likely civilian casualties in the weeks prior to Overlord. Anthony Beevor, in his “D-Day: The Battle for Normandy,” relates how Eisenhower and Alanbrooke agonized over the decision to bomb Caen, a crucial strategic stronghold whose capture was crucial to the securing of the east Normandy beachhead. If the German 12 SS Panzer was allowed to reinforce and concentrate there, they might well have driven back the invasion. The Allies therefore had to bomb the German positions both in and around the city of Caen, a city of some 70,000 people, if they were to prevent reinforcements arriving, drive the Germans back, and secure the city. All told, some 1,150 civilians were killed in the bombing, some 350 killed while seeking refuge in shelters; a horrific tragedy, to be sure. Now, the Allies could have forfeited the bombing to spare the civilians, but only at the cost of losing the beachhead—a moral catastrophe for not only the people of Caen, but France, Europe, and the rest of the world.
Wars involve killing and they always will. Wars will not be abolished, and for us to signal to the world that we will no longer wage war will not render it a kinder, gentler world; just the opposite. The weakness we would be signaling would be dangerously provocative to wolf-like regimes like North Korea, Iran, China, and Russia, who would only be emboldened to expand their own spheres of influence for purposes other than making the world safe for democracy, to say the least.
Our interventions in Kuwait in 1991, Bosnia in 1995 and Kosovo were all necessary and morally justifiable interventions. It is difficult to understand the reasoning of those who objected to them. Afghanistan in 2001 was a no-brainer; the need to expel the Taliban, root out Al-Queda sanctuaries, and stabilize the country and prevent it from being a terrorist stronghold were absolutely essential. Our mistakes there over the past decade are to numerous to recount here, but if we are successful in building on the successes we have had in securing Kandahar, Kabul and elsewhere, we will be in a good position to hand over control to the Afghan police and army in the next few years, both of whom have made great strides in proficiency. This can only be to the good of all concerned, and it cannot be argued that our designs there are imperialistic.
Iraq is a different case; though I supported the war for reasons other than wmd and still do, I understand and respect the arguments of those who do not. It is something that people of good faith can honestly disagree on. The US, in my view, cannot escape responsibility for the breathtaking incompetence of its post-war administration and lack of foresight, and our failure to protect the Iraqi people from both the chaos that ensued following the military operation, and the murderous depredations of Al-Zarqawi and his like. Nor should we. But there is a moral distinction between trying and failing to protect, and deliberately planning and executing acts of indiscriminate mass-murder in the tens of thousands, and the attempts, aided and abetted by Iran, Syria and Al-Qaeda, to openly and unabashedly foment wholesale sectarian civil war and an even greater orgy of mass slaughter. The worst follies of the Americans and the coalition simply have nothing to compare with the nakedness of these acts of deliberate and nihilistic evil.
I did support the Libya war but I did not support Obama's feckless and indecisive conduct of it. There ought to have been a show of overwhelming force when Gaddafi was on the skids, or nothing at all. The President's tardy, half-hearted involvement in the conflict, and his tepid, scattershot application of force, coupled with his neglect of arming the rebels (and forming a strong relationship that could be helpful in a future state), guaranteed that military action could never be concentrated overwhelmingly at the decisive points at the time of maximum enemy vulnerability.
Meaning, of course, that Gaddafi had ample time to regroup his forces, the rebels would lost their momentum, and stalemate ensued, which meant more bloodshed and more destruction over a longer period. The war ended favorably to be sure, but the unnecessary extension of the conflict was the President's making, entirely.
For myself, I can only say this: I wish the world were not a dangerous place. But it is. And what is worse, we live in a world where so called “progressives” and “human rights” groups regularly and gleefully confer legitimacy and even victim status on terrorist entities and totalitarian regimes where racial persecution, religious intolerance, and suppression of free speech are rife, and where the citizen is a dispensable, disposable, and soulless fraction of the state.
I believe in the primacy and beneficence of American power in this dangerous world, and would shudder to contemplate its absence. The UN ultimately fails in its stead because nations do not sacrifice their core interests for a collective foreign policy, do not sacrifice for others’ interests, and often misbehave in pursuing them. The best that can be got is that nations who share similar values and objectives can combine together for their common purposes: America and Britian to defend and preserve law, freedom, and stability, the Russians and the Chinese to thwart them. American leadership is now more crucial than ever, and it cannot be said that we have presently got it.
In any event, your article provided a much needed countering to Paul’s childish, mindless pacifism and those who endorse it. There will always be debate and disagreement about what and what does not constitute just and unjust wars, and you sir, in a well reasoned and morally serious argument, have done justice to the terrible complexity of the reality that continues to burden this grave and unavoidable discussion.
I should like to say that I always enjoy your contributions here, and, even when I disagree with you, I always find your writings illuminating and thought provoking. Your contribution here is valuable, and I hope it will continue.
Btw, I particularly wanted to commend you for your takedown of Jeffrey Blankfort’s offensive attempts to implicate Zionists in provoking Nazi persecution and the Holocaust—a risible, repellent argument rife with anti-semitic implications. Nor is this an isolated instance for our friend Mr. Blankfort. A few days ago, he attempted to argue that the Balfour Declaration was a reward to the Jews from the British because Zionists got America into the war by way of giving the British the Zimmerman telegram. How about that?! Here is a link to my response:
link to mondoweiss.net
Gilad,
I got “Take it or leave it…” from Amazon UK a few years ago. It’s superb. Love Sam Anstice Brown’s dynamic drumming, too.
Hope you’re able to get the Coltrane; it’s excellent. There is a tendency to look askance at Coltrane’s pre-Giant Steps recordings, but this is a mistake. Trane’s intensity in albums like “Lush Life” and “Traneing In” are wonderfully complemented by Red Garland’s cool, elegant piano accompaniment, though nothing equals the magic that Coltrane, Miles, and Bill Evans would conjure up on “Kind of Blue.” Love Evans too. My uncle saw Evans perform at the Village Vangaurd with Scott La Faro and Paul Motian in 1961 before Lafaro was tragically killed. I would have given anything to have seen them live.
I’ve been a freak for a lot of these box sets they’ve been releasing this past decade. I got Ornette Coleman’s “Beauty is A Rare Thing,” (6 discs) which is a compilation of his Atlantic recordings, “Rahsaan,” (10 discs) which is a compilation of Roland Kirk’s recordings on Mercury, and Charles Mingus “Complete Debut Recordings” (12 discs). Recently, I also got Steve Lacy’s “5 X Monk X Lacy” and Art Pepper’s “Meet’s the Rhythm Section.”
Jeffrey,
Said you:
“There is no other reason that has ever been offered to explain why the Balfour Declaration was issued to a scion of the world’s leading banking family and a major supporter of Jewish colonization, Walter Rothschild, presenting Palestine to the Zionists as a Jewish homeland that has ever withstood scrutiny. Perhaps you can pull one out of your hat.”
While it seems that any explanation of a major world event that cannot be properly ascribed to the machinations of some sinister cabal of cynical, wily, string-pulling Jews is unlikely to satisfy you, here is one “out of my hat.”
In the first place, the Balfour Declaration resulted, ultimately, from the waning fortunes of the Allied powers in 1917. 1917, like 1916, was a bad year. By the spring, the Verdun and Somme offensives of the previous year had bled the Allies white on the Western front, Russia was mired in revolution and chaos, and the French army was now teetering on the brink of wholesale mutiny. There was thus a strong desire to avert Russia from making a separate peace, and to encourage America into a stronger, faster commitment on the continent (only some 77,000 American troops had yet landed in France by November 1917, when the Declaration was made public). Officials in the British Foreign Office were concerned about the hostility of world Jewry toward anti-semitic Russia, and even more concerned about American Jews of German and Austro-Hungarian descent, whom they feared supported the Central Powers. The men of Whitehall, almost to a man, all held exaggerated notions of Jewish power and influence; you’d have been right at home there, Jeffrey. And Zionists like Weizmann, of course, were only too happy to encourage this kind of thinking along.
There is thus no question that the British and the French both felt in the months before America entered the war, that supporting the Zionist cause and getting American Jews behind them would help bring America into the war, and keep Russia fighting the Germans. In the event, it did neither. America entered the war on account of German belligerence and stupidity, not the machinations of Zionists, and the efforts of Russian Zionist Nahum Sokolow, who promised the Quai d’Orsay (and later, Whitehall) to rally Jewish support for keeping Russia in the war in exchange for the pro-Zionist statement issued by French Foreign Minister Jules Cambon on June 4, 1917, came to nothing, and Russia was out of the war by the end of the year.
There was also, then, a British desire to thwart French claims to Palestine, which were enunciated in the pro-Zionist declaration of French Foreign Minister, Jules Cambon on June 4, 1917, and an even greater fear that the Germans would issue a pro-Zionist declaration of their own, and the British were determined to beat them to the punch. At the cabinet meeting on October 31, Balfour made the case for a pro-Zionist declaration. It would aid the British in generating propaganda among Jews in America (read: Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter—both close advisors to President Wilson) and Russia (read: Leon Trotsky), and among other Jews around the world. Lord Robert Cecil and Sir Ronald Graham also reminded Balfour that the clock was ticking, that a German declaration could be imminent, and that such a declaration would “throw the Zionists into the arms of the Germans.” That was the clincher. The cabinet then authorized Balfour to issue the declaration on November 2, which he did in the form of a letter to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, head of Britian’s Zionist Federation.
The issuance of the Balfour Declaration was therefore perfectly consonant with wartime and post-wartime British imperial strategic interests, as they judged them to be at the time; whether it had any discernable influence on the course of the war, which was at its lowest point for the Allies at the end of 1917, and was nearly lost the following spring under the weight of a crushing German offensive, is open to doubt. World Jewry and support for Zionism did nothing to win the war; it did nothing to keep Russia fighting, and it was American participation, courtesy of German intransigence and blundering, and the exhaustion of German human and material resources after four years of conflict in the summer of 1918, along with the collapse of the German home front, that did that. With regard to America, who had already been in the war for seven months, it was hoped, among other things, that it would encourage Jewish opinion around Wilson to influence him into a more favorable disposition towards toward British wartime and post-wartime strategic interests currently at odds with some of the President’s more dreamy post-war visions. The success of this is open to even more doubt. In any event, the British sensibly saw the Balfour Declaration as a win-win proposition, whatever it might or might not actually achieve.
Hope this clears things up for you.
My sources for the above are:
1) Isaiah Friedman, “The Question of Palestine: British-Jewish-Arab Relations,” 1973, pp. 57, 268-269, 278.
2) David Fromkin, “A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East,” 1991, pp. 41-42, 92, 292-293, 295.
***
The notion that there exists some relationship between the Balfour Declaration and the Zimmerman Telegram is laughable, and is not entertained by any reputable historian that I am aware of.
Mr Cornelius, writing in the virulently anti-Israel Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, posits the following: that Zionists in Britian and Germany, working in tandem, engineered the following changes to facilitate their agenda: the removal of the Asquith government in December 1916, the result of a “secret agreement” between Weizmann and Balfour and Lloyd George, so that the pro-Zionist Lloyd George government could be brought to power because Asquith was in danger of endorsing a negotiated settlement with Germany, contrary to Zionist interests, and the removal of Gottlieb von Jagow, the German Foreign Minister, with Arthur Zimmermann, who “enjoyed good relations with German Zionists and was thus susceptible to Zionist influence.”
With Zionists thus now controlling the Lloyd George government and the German Foreign Office, Zionists in the German Foreign Office, among them one Herr von Kemnitz, an East Asia expert in the German foreign office and “presumably a Zionist agent,” gives Zimmerman a text of the proposed telegram which he had “likely received from London,” and which Zimmerman then forwards on his own authority. The telegram is exposed by the British, and revealed to the Americans, thus provoking an outraged America into war with Germany. Zionists in Britian thus drafted the telegram, relayed it to their brethren in the German Foreign Office to be sent, and won for themselves the reward of the Balfour Declaration.
I hardly know where to begin with this. In the first place, this ignores the fact that the Asquith government was brought down not by Zionist machinations, but by a severe failure of confidence on the part of the public engendered by the disasters at the Somme, at Gallipoli, and in Mesopotamia, along with a perception of Asquith’s ineffectiveness as a war leader, for which he was ill-suited. Cornelius to the contrary, there was not much of a chance of a negotiated settlement in 1916 or anytime else; the German “peace note” of December 12, 1916, envisaged a Central Powers dominated Europe from the English Channel to the Black Sea: The German army currently occupied Belgium, Poland, most of European Russia, Serbia, Rumania, and ten of the richest provinces of France. The Germans, in effect, were offering the Allies “peace” if they could only keep the conquests resulting from the war of aggression they had initiated. Lloyd George, now PM, rejected the offer with contempt. The notion that Asquith, even if he had wanted to, would have seen this as a basis for negotiations, is preposterous. That the French would have is even more so. At the very height of the bloodshed and public outrage, no British government would have, or could have, consented to that. Both Britian and France were both unwilling to surrender without being properly beaten, Zionists or no Zionists.
Secondly there is no evidence that von Kemnitz—an obscure German official about whom very little is known—was a “Zionist agent,” that the British drafted the Zimmerman telegram and relayed it to Zionists in the German Foreign Office, or that anyone in the German Foreign Office relayed it to London. The evidence is overwhelming that the British intercepted the telegram and were able to decipher it because they had cracked the German codes, without the benefit of Zionist intrigue, I should deign to mention.
Specifically, Room 40 intercepted code 13040 from Persia in 1915, and they intercepted code 0075 in the weeks prior to intercepting the Zimmerman telegram in January 1917. The latter code was used to transmit the telegram first from Berlin to Washington, and the former code was used to transmit the message from the German embassy in Washington to Mexico. Mr. Cornelius’ thesis that the British somehow needed the help of German Zionists to obtain the Zimmerman telegram betrays an ignorance of the wiliness and the reach of British of counter-intelligence in both world wars—this was particularly demonstrated by their getting wind of the German plans for their High Seas Fleet to attack the Royal Navy at Jutland in 1916, and in their cracking of the Enigma code in WWII.
My sources for the above:
1) C.M. Andrews, “Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community,” 1985, pp. 106-114.
2) Henry Newbolt, “Naval Operations: History of the Great War Based on Official Documents,” Vol. IV, 1928, pp. 229-276.
3) Robert K. Massie, “Castles of Steel: Britian, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea,” 2003, pp. 696-697, 712-713.
4) Cecil John Edmonds, “East and West of Zagros: Travel, War, and Politics in Persia and Iraq, 1913-1921,” pp.60-81.
Also, for those who would cast doubt on the reach and agility of British counter intelligence, I would recommend David Kahn’s “Seizing the Enigma: The Race to Break the German U-Boats Codes, 1939-1943,” 1991.
Gilad,
Thank you for your reply. I would have replied yesterday but my neighborhood’s internet service was shut off all day until late this morning. I will be more than happy to read Amos Elon’s “The Pity of it All,” and promise to read it with an open mind. I am currently finishing Trevor Royale’s excellent biography of Orde Wingate, which I had been reading on my vacation until a few days ago, and promise to begin reading Elon’s book, which I have ordered on Amazon, the moment I am finished.
I am, btw, an admirer of your “Take it or Leave it,” and “Nostalgico.” I recently obtained an 18-disc recording of John Coltrane’s recordings for Prestige on Original Jazz Classics, which I highly recommend, if you don’t already have it.
Gilad,
This is ahistorical. It was not "Jewish bankers" that brought America into the war. It was German unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmerman Telegram, in which the Germans, incredibly, promised the Mexicans the return of territories lost in the Mexican-American War in return for entering the war on Germany’s side, which provoked America into the war. An outraged America declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917.
Long term, it was not in America’s interest to have Germany exploiting and enslaving the continent. It was also just plain wrong. By the time America declared war, Russia was all but out of the war, and the British and the French were exhausted and demoralized. Without American intervention, the Allies would have lost the war. Our intervention was therefore right as well as critical.
I would be most interested in knowing what this readily available information supporting Bankfort's assertion could be.
Peace tj,
The sentiments expressed by Lloyd George here relate to the reason for making the declaration of the policy public at that particular time (which was in November 1917--seven months after America declared war), rather than for initiating the the policy itself. In any event, Blankfort has said that the Balfour Declaration was "[The Jews'] reward for pushing the US into WW1 on Britain’s side." This is baseless.
Jeffrey Blankfort says,
"Without it, there would have been no Balfour Declaration which was viewed by Britain as their reward for pushing the US into WW1 on Britain’s side when its chances of defeating Germany were next to nil."
So "the Jews" got the Balfour Declaration for pushing America into the war? Got it.
Are you kidding with this? The Jews "pushed" America into WWI? Tell me Jeffrey, so "they" were behind Ludendorf's unrestricted sub warfare and the Zimmerman telegram?
The German defeat did indeed sire Hitler's rise, but I hardly think a German victory would have been a blessing, and would have seen much, if not most of the continent enslaved by them.
Johnh,
You speak of the harsh terms imposed on Germany, but considering that the war was a war of aggression waged by Germany, and the fact that German terms on Russia and the Allies would have been infinitely more severe (take a peak at the map that emerged from the Brest-Litovsk treaty), I'd say the Germans got off rather easy, and they borrowed far more than they ever paid out in reparations.
I quite agree that we do owe the Iraqis an apology, though not for removing Saddam from power. We owe them an apology for the breathtaking incompetence of our post-war administration and lack of foresight, and our failure to protect the Iraqi people from both the chaos that ensued following the military operation, and the murderous depredations of Al-Zarqawi and his like. However, there is a moral distinction between trying and failing to protect, and deliberately planning and executing acts of indiscriminate mass-murder in the tens of thousands, and the attempts, aided and abetted by Iran, Syria and Al-Qaeda, to openly and unabashedly foment wholesale sectarian civil war and an even greater orgy of mass slaughter.
Said Bin-Laden in 2005: “Anyone who participates in these elections…has committed apostasy against Allah…their blood is permitted. They are apostates whose deaths should not be prayed over.”
Said Al-Zarqawi of the Sh’ia: “They are the lurking snakes and the crafty scorpions, the spying enemy, and the penetrating venom, the most evil of mankind.”
To cite just a few of literally dozens of examples attacks on Sh’ia civilians in 2005 alone proudly claimed by AQI and other Sunni insurgent groups: the police recruiting center in Al Hillah, on Feb. 28, 2005 where 127 were killed, the marketplace in Musyyab on July 16, 2005 where 100 Sh’ia worshipers returning from evening prayers were killed, the bombings in Baghdad on Aug 17 and Sept 14 which killed 203, and the suicide attacks on two Sh’ia mosques in Khanaqin Nov.18 in which 74 were killed.
The overwhelming number of these attacks were aimed at Iraqi civilians, not coalition troops. The worst follies of the Americans and the coalition simply have nothing to compare with the nakedness of these acts of nihilistic and unearthly evil, and it is nothing less than shameful that not one person here has a single word to say about this. The murderers of tens of thousands of innocents are not only excused here from the crimes whose responsibility they so loudly and proudly claimed as their own, but are themselves given an ennobled status under the euphemistic obscenity of “resistance,” while those who, however imperfectly, fought and sacrificed to thwart the designs of these monsters, are portrayed as thuggish, imperialistic, racist grunts who would happily slaughter whole families in a fit of pique just to emphasize their displeasure. The moral myopia that informs this viewpoint is simply beyond belief.
We do not know exactly what happened in Haditha on November 19, 2005. An interview with Chief Warrant Officer K. R. Norwood of Kilo Company has him answering a question posed to him whether civilian deaths were out of the ordinary, to which he responded,
“Not out of the ordinary, sir, because, I mean, we had 24 major operations in Huseba, you know, insurgents using houses with civilians in the basement with not knowing. Insurgents utilizing children as shields for implanting IEDs, I mean these--I mean , we had this everyday . And as the Ground.Watch Officer, I mean, I was so engaged. I mean, it just happened, and I don't think you get sensitized to it, but it happened everyday, sir.”
Norwood was thus not talking here of coalition inflicted deaths, but of all civilian deaths. Col. John Ledoux similarly commented the tactics of insurgents, and their contempt for the lives of civilians,
“But to have, like I'm saying, just thousands of incidents, thousands of noncombatant deaths as well as, you know, enemy. It's just that there is a pretty tough mix out there. You're being—and the guys that are trying to do it in such a way that it does put you in a difficult position where you're being ambushed and your enemy really has no concern about the Iraqis, and in fact, you know, is trying to create situations, even through their IO (Intelligence operations) campaigns with fake videos where you'd have things come up, or Marines killed so many guys and they are at this hospital or that hospital, and then all of a sudden, you know, you see the same picture thing over and over again where you allegedly, you know, it's like the MEU-SOC (Marine Expeditionary Units-Special Operations Capable training) playbook, where they pull out the Marines kill, you know, forty civilians and innocent people, you know, and start playing that. That's all bullshit, but you know, it gets people spinning arid it's just part of their game. And I think part of their game too, is, you know, to try to put you in a tough spot where it is hard to distinguish the insurgent from the, you know, from the civilian. Your guys got to make hard calls all the time out there.”
An interview with Col. S. Davis,
“Q. But here you've got specific allegations, whatever the source, however suspect--however suspicious you are of the source, that your Marines killed guys in ways that they shouldn't have killed them.
A . Okay, what do we have here? All right. Let's go back and review the story boards. We reviewed the story boards, talked to Chessani (Commander of 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines) and there is no meat here. If I am not mistaken, McGirk's (Time magazine reporter’s) allegations are that he had been contacted by the mayor of Haditha, that the Americans had slaughtered people and that there was a video of that. Now I have never seen this video but I've been told it's films of the deceased in a morgue or something along that line. Haditha is a special place for the insurgents. It was the center of their information operations.
When we did Operation River Gate we overran a facility, captured it, ten stack computers, each one capable of producing ten CD's simultaneously. So if you have a beheading, and IED incident, within ten minutes you get 100 CDs out in the nukes. And this is all part of the murder intimidation campaign. We to this day don't know why, outside of the obvious strategic nature of Haditha, why Haditha is so important to the enemy. I mean, it figures greatly in their history, the revolt against the British of 1920. Quite clearly, it is very strategic terrain for them for other than just the geographic reasons. They don't want us in that town. We are well aware of that. The mayor, if he is not an insurgent himself, he is clearly an insurgent sympathizer, which Colonel Chessani dealt with routinely through out that time. In my mind this was all part of a play. They could not get what they wanted through Chessani, this was never hidden, this was never covered up, so they go outside to let the press come in and try to work it as an angle to move us out of there.”
These sentiments do not indicate a casual indifference to civilian deaths; they indicate the stresses typical of young men living daily with the specter of combating a shadowy enemy ruthlessly indifferent to human life, let alone rules of engagement, and whose sole objective is to maximize confusion between civilians and combatants and wreak the greatest possible havoc to spur along a war of sectarian bloodletting.
Perhaps no form of warfare puts more strain on those who wage it than counterinsurgency. The confusion between civilian and combatant, the stress of knowing that today’s friendly civilian could be tomorrow’s assailant or terrorist, sap nerves and morale sometimes to breaking point. Almost all anti-guerilla and anti-insurgent campaigns in history—the Peninsular War in Spain in 1808-1814, where Napoleon’s Grand Armee slowly bled to death under the blows of Spanish guerillas and Wellington’s army (and immortalized in Goya's "The Third of May,1808"), the Philippines in the 1890’s, and, of course, Vietnam, have incidents where soldiers have been involved in the deaths of civilians or prisoners of war. My Lai is merely the most famous.
One particularly famous example occurred in the Second Boer War (1901-1902) between the British and the Boer Guerillas of South Africa, which was one of the more brutal insurgent wars of the century. Australian Lt. Harry “Breaker” Morant, upon learning his commanding officer, Capt. Hunt, had been murdered in cold blood by Boer guerillas and his body savagely abused, determined to avenge his murder. Morant responded “like a man demented, and…vowed there and then that he would give no quarter and take no prisoners.”
Morant then led a contingent and set about to the farm where Hunt had been killed in search of the perpetrators, only to find they had fled. After one engagement with guerillas, they captured a Boer insurgent named Visser, who was found to have clothes on resembling those of a British officer, thought to be of Capt. Hunt (They weren’t. In fact, it later turned out that Hunt had been killed in action, not murdered). Morant then ordered that Visser be shot; there were objections voiced by some, but one soldier carried out the shooting, botching the job and leaving him alive. Morant then had a subordinate carry out the coup de grace with a revolver. This was only the beginning. Morant then rampaged about killing some 20 Boer prisoners, including a German missionary who had witnessed the killings.
At his court martial, there was much talk about the brutality of the conflict, the stresses on the soldiers, and the savage behavior of the Boer guerillas. As with Calley at My Lai, the defense argued justification for Morant’s actions on orders from a superior officer. Again as with Calley, no such orders given could be proven to exist. George Ramsdale Witton, a fellow officer of Morant’s whose sentence was commuted, and who later published the book “Scapegoats of the Empire” (1907), which portrayed Morant’s conviction and execution as unjust and Moran himself as being sacrificed for behavior that was widespread and rampant throughout the conflict (and which formed the basis of the famous film “Breaker Morant”), had this to say:
“War is calculated to make men's natures both callous and vengeful, and when civilised rules and customs are departed from on one side, reprisals are sure to follow on the other, and the shocking side of warfare in the shape of guerilla tactics is then seen. At such a time it is not fair to judge the participants by the hard and fast rules of citizen life or the
strict moral codes of peace. It is necessary to imagine one's self amidst the same surroundings--in an isolated place, with the passions of war aroused, men half-starved, dangers constantly threatening from all quarters, and responsibilities crowding one upon another--to enable a fair decision to be reached.”
This is of course all true. But Lord Kitchener, the Commander in Chief of the British Army in South Africa, in a letter to the Australian government, touched also upon a truth not to be overlooked,
"In reply to your telegram, Morant, Handcock and Witton were charged with twenty separate murders, including one of a German missionary who had witnessed other murders. Twelve of these murders were proved. From the evidence it appears that Morant was the originator of these crimes which Handcock carried out in cold-blooded manner. The murders were committed in the wildest parts of the Transvaal, known as Spelonken, about eighty miles north of Pretoria, on four separate dates namely 02 July, 11 August, and 07 September, 1901. In one case, where eight Boer prisoners were murdered, it was alleged to have been done in a spirit of revenge for the ill treatment of one of their officers - Captain Hunt - who was killed in action. No such ill-treatment was proved. The prisoners were convicted after a most exhaustive trial, and were defended by counsel. There were, in my opinion, no extenuating circumstances. Lieutenant Witton was also convicted but I commuted the sentence to penal servitude for life, in consideration of his having been under the influence of Morant and Handcock. The proceedings have been sent home."
Kitchener was right. These were cold blooded executions that no “fog of war” or extenuating circumstances in the heat of battle, could ever justify. To have condoned or ignored such atrocities would have been a moral travesty. Kitchener here upheld both the sentence and the principle that none are above the law, and that one man’s savagery can never be another man’s alibi for murder when his own life is not even threatened. When a prisoner avails himself to the custody of his captors, his life and security are inviolable under every custom of law and morality. Period.
(An appeal to the British Crown to review and overturn Morant’s court-martial and conviction last year was rightly rejected.)
link to smh.com.au
These principles are sacrosanct, as all regarding non-combatant immunity must always be. The difference between Morant’s crime and the killings at Haditha is that Morant’s guilt was never in question and the circumstances at Haditha are still unclear. According to all of the evidence, it would seem that the Marines of Kilo Company took fire after their vehicle hit an IED, and responded by promptly seeking out the source. This would be plausible: insurgents would often conduct ambushes by planting an IED, then smothering the vehicle (and those in the vicinity) with direct and indirect fire. (Hezbollah also used this tactic on the Israelis in the 2006 War.)
In the course of seeking out four dwellings, the Marines killed 24 Iraqis, 8 of whom they said were armed insurgents. Whether the 16 civilians killed was accidental, a deliberate slaughter of innocents, or a criminally negligent killing, we do not know. If this was a deliberate killing, nothing can excuse it. All we do know is that Marines subject to combat stresses and strains beyond what most of us can imagine were involved in an engagement that involved the deaths of 24 Iraqis.
And those strains are real, lasting long after shots are fired in anger. A U.S. Naval Medical Bulletin report examining combat fatigue in Marines on Guadalcanal in November 1942 said,
“Many of these patients reported being buried in foxholes, blown out of trees, blown through the air…Many who had no anxiety in the daytime would develop a state of anxiety and nervous tension at night. These were shadow troops. They were the young ancients, the old young, staring with a fixed thousand yard stare out of eyes that were red-rimmed and sunken. Their bodies were taut rags of flesh stretched over sticks of bone. They had come to Guadalcanal muscular and high spirited young men, but now their high fervor had ebbed and nearly flowed away. They were hanging on by habit only, fighting out of the rut of an old valor.”
General Alexander Vandegrift, commander of the 1st Marine Division at Guadalcanal, had no illusions about the price of that valor. He had seen too many brave men whose nerves and physique could no longer bear the strain of explosions and flying shrapnel. One officer came to him and said, “I am awfully sorry, sir, but I know I cannot stand another shelling and I do not want to crack up in front of my men.” Vandegrift sent him to the hospital, where, rested and apparently cured, he once again braved open combat, only to collapse again in a fit of nerves. The doctor who treated the officer did not understand, but Vandegrift did. “I did not ask because I knew,” he wrote. “It is not a matter of physical build, stamina, faith, courage, or what have you. It is a matter of man, and thus fortune…’There but for the grace of God go I.’”
Allison,
Said you:
"The article also made alterations suggesting Arab armies invaded before the Zionist para-military attacks, rather than "soon" after, as originally reported."
It could equally be pointed out that the article makes no mention of the war being waged on the Yishuv by the Arabs form the passing of the partition till early April 1948. These "Zionist paramilitary attacks" as you call them, only occurred after four months in which Arab and Palestinian militias were assaulting Jewish settlements, strangling the roadways between them, and besieging Jewish Jerusalem, all to a cost of about 1,000 dead among the Yishuv by early April.
You may feel differently, and, believe me, I'm not in the habit of defending the NYT, but I am inclined to think that the NYT article did not intend to deny that about half of refugees had fled before May 15. It was just a summary. One could fault it for omitting all sorts of details.
If anyone is fiddling with the truth here, it would seem to be Mr. Munayyer, who states before quoting the following article, “Another New York Times story, this one from April 18th, 1948, tells of horror among refugees and massacres in the Galilee:
‘According to reports telephoned from Nablus, that town and Jenin are crowded with refugees, among whom the rumor is circulating that the Jews are driving on Jenin. The Haganah said it had killed 130 Druse [sic] tribesmen yesterday when it seized Usha, a village east of Haifa.’”
Mr. Munayyer is here being deliberately misleading. The article does not speak of a “massacre.” The 130 Druze were not massacred, they were members of the Druze battalion of the ALA who were killed in their failed attack against the Yishuv in Usha and Ramat-Yohanan on April 13-16.
Teta MM,
Said you:
“Have you considered the possibility that there are alternate interpretations of the declassified documents? For example, maybe they are part of a still-only-partially revealed cache of documents inserted into the record as red herrings, or as ex post facto excuses for the incident.”
Well, I suppose no truly open minded person could reject the possibility, I just think it’s very unlikely. However, I’ve been studying and reading about this incident ever since I did a book report in my senior year in high school on Liberty crew member James Ennes’s book “Assault on the ‘Liberty’: The True Story of the Israeli Attack on an American Intelligence Ship,” which had just been released in paperback back in 1988. Ever since then I‘ve read just about every book and article I could get hold of on the subject, and I’m always looking for new information or evidence on any aspect of it. If you or anyone else here has any, I’d love to read about it.
American,
Said you:
“Oh really..then give us a link to these declassified documents. But you can’t, can you?….. you never give evidence for what you say.”
Your wish is my command.
Here is the US Navy Court of Inquiry, June 18, 1967 ("Case of mistaken identity")
link to libertyincident.com
Here are the findings of fact from the Naval Court of Inquiry, June 1967 (See points 6, 20, and 28)
link to libertyincident.com
Here is the CIA Report, June 13, 1967 ("It remains our best judgment that the attack on the Liberty was not made in malice toward the US and was a mistake")
link to libertyincident.com
Here is the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) memo of June 13, 1967, indicating that "The weight of the evidence is that the attacking force originally believed their target was Egyptian" and "This evidence fails to show that the Israelis made a premeditated attack on a known U.S. ship."
link to libertyincident.com
Here is the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Russ Report) June 9, 1967 (Compiled all message traffic and found no evidence that the attack was not a mistake)
link to libertyincident.com
Here is the Clifford Report, July 18, 1967 (Attack was a mistake)
link to libertyincident.com
Here is Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s testimony to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, June 12, July 14, July 26, 1967 ("The attack was not intentional")
link to libertyincident.com
The House Armed Services Committee Investigation, May 10, 1971 ("The Navy remains in the Dark Ages insofar as routine communications with its deployed ships")
link to libertyincident.com
The National Security Agency report of 1981
link to libertyincident.com
As for then-CIA director Richard Helms, the declassification of the redacted sections of the 1981 NSA report on the Liberty attack released in 2003 read as follows:
“In part because of the press speculation at the time, President Johnson directed the Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms, to prepare a report by June 13, five days after the attack, assessing the Israeli intentions. The CIA report drew heavily on the Signet reports referred to above. While these reports revealed some confusion on the part of the [Israeli] pilots concerning the nationality of the ship, they tended to rule out any thesis that the Israeli Navy and Air Force deliberately attacked a ship they knew to be American.”
There was also:
The House Appropriations Committee, April and May 1968 ("The use and operational capabilities of the Defense Communications system is nothing less than pathetic, and the management of the system needs to be completely overhauled")
And,
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence 1979/1981 (USS Liberty mistaken for Egyptian ship as a result of miscalculations and egregious errors)
Every investigation into this incident has thus come back with the same verdict: the attack was an accident.
Here also is the Ram Ron report of June 1967, conducted by IDF Colonel Ram Ron as a preliminary inquiry to determine if there was gross negligence or any court-martial offenses committed under section 283 of the Israel Military Justice Law of 1955.
link to libertyincident.com
The IDF examining judge’s report
link to libertyincident.com
The IDF history of the incident
link to libertyincident.com
There was of course shock and incredulity expressed by President Johnson and his cabinet upon learning of the attack. But the President and McNamara, after they got the report from the Court of Inquiry, accepted that the attack was a mistake. CIA director Helms told Johnson the same thing. There is no evidence that Johnson or McNamara thereafter ever thought the attack to be deliberate, thus removing any motive to cover anything up.
Said McNamara in July 1967 testifying before the Committee on Foreign Relations:
“In the case of the attack on the Liberty, it was the
conclusion of the investigatory body headed by an
Admiral of the Navy [Isaac C. Kidd, Jr.] in whom
we have great confidence that the attack was not
intentional. I read the record of investigation and
I support that conclusion, and I think . . . it was not
a conscious decision on the part of the
government of Israel to attack a U.S. vessel.”
Said Clark Clifford in his memoir “Counsel to the President”:
“The best interpretation from the facts available
to me was that there were inexcusable failures
on the part of the Israeli Defense Forces.”
Said McGeorge Bundy to AJ Cristol on April 19, 1993:
“We came to the conclusion that it was an
interlocking collection of errors rather than
an interlocking plot that was the cause of
the tragedy.”
Annie,
Said you:
“no it doesn’t and that’s why we never had any formal congressional investigation. just stop the lies robert.”
This is not true. There have been several congressional investigations that for lack of evidence have never resulted in congressional hearings.
There seems to be some confusion here between a congressional investigation and a hearing. When a committee decides to investigate a matter, the investigation is performed by staffers. If the staffers investigating discover something of note or importance, then the House or Senate committee holds public hearings, and finally issues a report. The reason there has been no formal congressional hearings on the Liberty attack is for the simple reason that every single investigation (See above) by all available intelligence and information has indicated that the attack was a case of mistaken identity.
There was a Senate Armed Services Committee investigation in 1968, a House Armed Services Committee investigation in 1971, as referenced in the above link, and a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence investigation in 1979-1980. The last time Congress investigated was twenty years ago per the request of the Liberty Veterans Association. The investigation by the House Armed Services Committee, Investigation Subcommittee lasted from July of 1991 to April 1992. The investigation confirmed the verdict of every previous investigation—a case of mistaken identity—and thus no hearings were held and no report issued. The LVA were informed of the investigation’s finding by way of a letter to Liberty crew member Joe Meadors.
Also, the events in the Israeli and the American Navy logs are a near perfect match. The American timeline from the IDF investigations and the US Navy Court of Inquiry, though conducted apart from one another, essentially corroborate one another, with a few discrepancies here and there. On balance, the evidence indicating a deliberate Israeli attack is not only conjectural, but luridly conspiratorial, and is bereft of any plausible, discernable motivation, and the evidence in all of the declassified material released by both Israel and the U.S. in 1997 overwhelmingly exonerates Israel of the charge of having knowingly and deliberately attacked the Liberty, and further exonerates our government and military of having covered up any evidence to the contrary.
Daniel Rich,
Said you:
“Yes, I fully believe in ‘accidents’ going on for 1 hour and a half or so. I also believe that after this ‘accident’ the biker-gang [the MTBs spewing torpedoes at the US Liberty, killing 24 more US sailors and strafing the ship, its crew and life rafts] encircling the vessel, are a mere coincidence and part of said ‘accident,’ ‘friendly fire’ and ‘mistaken identity.’
The attack did not go on “for 1 hour and a half or so.” The combined air attacks lasted all of about eight and a half minutes, and the following naval attack about ten minutes.
The Israelis, pursuing what they thought was an Egyptian warship heading home that had been shelling their compound at El Arish, called in for air support, and two Mirage fighters, closing in on the Liberty from the west at 1:58pm, raked her with 30mm cannon fire in three strafing runs until their ammo was spent. The first air attack had lasted three and a half minutes.
By this time Commander McGonagle, the Liberty skipper, though seriously wounded, ordered the ship to turn right full rudder 360 degrees to the north. The second air attack, code named mission “Royal,” commenced at between 2:04-2:06pm, was by a squadron of two Super Mystere B-2 fighters returning from bombing Egyptian infantry. Hastily recalled from this ground support mission and, like the previous mission, with no opportunity to land and properly rearm, they raked the Liberty with what they had—napalm canisters (three missed, one may have hit), and 30mm cannon fire—again hardly appropriate ordinance for attacking a naval vessel.
At 2:11pm transcripts of communications between the Israeli Royal wing leader and HQ show that after the second strafing run the Israeli pilot recognized the Latin markings on the hull of the ship: “Pay attention! Ship’s marking is Charlie Tango Romeo 5” (i.e., CTR- 5—the Israeli pilot in fact misidentified the hull markings; they were GTR-5) and adds, “She looks like a minesweeper.” An air controller named Menachem, Chief air controller at Air Control South in the Sinai, then unhelpfully garbled the pilot’s misidentification of the ship’s markings even further as “Charlie Senator Romeo,” i.e., CSR.
When this is reported to HQ, Colonel Shmuel Kislev, the Chief air controller at the Kirya in Tel-Aviv, obviously now shitting himself with the prospect that they could be attacking a neutral vessel, now screams “Leave her! What ship is this?” He then immediately orders the Royal leader and his wingman to disengage, and cancels the third air attack deployment headed to attack the ship (which was named flight mission Nixon, consisting of two French-built Mystere IV’s armed with 500lb iron incendiaries that would surely blown the Liberty right out of the water, and with all hands). This second air attack had lasted about five minutes.
There was also a breakdown in communications between the three torpedo boats and the IAF HQ—another common occurrence in the heat of battle. The Israeli Motor Torpedo Boat (MTB) skipper, Commander Oren, arriving at the scene at 2:24pm, consulted his intelligence manual and, viewing the silhouette of a smoke-engulfed ship some six thousand yards distant and directed westward toward the sun at an elevation of 50 degrees and azimuth 88 degrees, concluded that the ship was the Egyptian freighter El Quseir, and the skippers on the other two torpedo boats reached the same conclusion themselves. Oren attempted to signal the ship, asking for identity; getting no response, he ordered the MTBs into battle formation. At 2:3opm Naval HQ gave the go ahead to attack.
The Israeli MTB’s caught up with the Liberty as a sailor on board her opened up fire on them with .50 caliber machine guns, not receiving McGonagle’s order not to fire on the approaching craft; the MTBs then returned fire with 20mm and 40mm cannon, and at 2:35-37pm fired back torpedoes. Four missed but one hit the Liberty’s starboard side midship, killing 25 sailors.
At 2:47 the MTB captain cut off the attack. At 2:51 the IDF Navy log reads “May be Russian nationality, based on writing on aft”; the Israelis thought they might be attacking a Russian vessel. When the Israeli boat captain got close enough to identify the hull markings of the Liberty, now listing badly, he recognized the Latin markings on the hull, and offered help and medical attention to the survivors at 3:03pm.
Audio tapes transcripts indicate that the Israelis did not know they were attacking an American ship in both air attacks and, five minutes into the second air attack, immediately disengaged when they did.
All available evidence, including IDF Navy logs, indicate that the Israeli boat captain misidentified the ship, then engulfed with smoke, at 6000 yards distance at about 2:30 pm, incurred fire from the Liberty as they approached her, returned it, cut off the attack at 2:47pm pending further ID, got close enough to identify the Latin hull markings of the Liberty, and offered help and medical attention to the survivors at 3:03pm.
Those are the facts. The air attacks occurred in minutes, not hours, of intense combat at high subsonic speeds and long distances, rendering positive ID difficult to say the least, and the naval attacks lasted about ten minutes from distances of thousands of yards while being fired on, making positive ID also difficult. The only logical inference that can be drawn from them is that the attack was a case of mistaken identity. There is, in all the hundreds of pages of declassified material from both countries, not a shred of evidence to support the contention that Israel deliberately sought to attack and sink the USS Liberty. None whatsoever.
The attack on the Liberty was a classic case of friendly fire. After winning the battle of Chancellorsville in 1863, Stonewall Jackson was accidentally killed by his own Confederate troops. On the first day of the German invasion of Poland September 1, 1939, a platoon of German soldiers fired their rifles on what they thought to be an enemy plane that had been flying about them, causing the plane to come crashing down into their midst; out stepped a raging Luftwaffe general in charge of ground-air coordination. On February 22, 1940 a German bomber sank two German destroyers in the North Sea, killing 578 German sailors. During the 1956 War the Israelis attacked a British destroyer, the HMS Crane, that it had mistaken for an Egyptian Z-class destroyer. The largest tank battle of the 1956 War occurred at Abu Ageila where two Israeli tank units fought each other to a standstill. On June 5, 1967 The IAF bombed a column of IDF Sherman tanks in the battle for Jerusalem, and did so again on June 8, just a few hours before the attack on the Liberty. Many, many more instances could be cited.
Lysias,
I also did not know you were a former naval officer. Thank you for your service to our country.
According to the Naval Court of Inquiry, the first strafing run on the Liberty at 1:58pm, disabled the ship’s radio transmission capability to the extent that they were unable to transmit on the ship’s standard encrypted transmitters. They then began transmitting on the CINCUSNAVEUR hi-com unsecured high-frequency voice circuit, but to no result. It was then discovered that someone in the transmitting room had put the frequency dial one kilocycle off, and this was quickly corrected by Radioman Chief Wayne L. Smith, who testified to this at the Naval Court of Inquiry in June 1967, and how he then transmitted the following distress signal:
1:58pm (1158Zulu): “Any station from Rock Star [i.e., the Liberty], any station from Rock Star, we are under attack, we are under attack, over.”
The deck logs also show a response two minutes later from the USS Saratoga, who responded:
“Rock Star from Schematic [i.e., the Saratoga], Rock Star from Schematic, u are garbled, say again, over.”
For the torpedo attack, the following message was sent to the Saratoga:
“schematic from Rock Star be advised that we have been hit by torpedo listing about 9 deg request immed assist over.”
All of these messages were successfully transmitted from the Liberty during the air attacks and the naval attack.
The time signature is corroborated by the deck log of the Liberty in Exhibit 23 of the Naval Court of Inquiry (page 501 in the pdf format)
link to libertyincident.com
“I was an officer in the same signals intelligence branch of the Navy that most of the crew of the USS Liberty belonged to, the Naval Security Group. So I know something about naval use of radio frequencies. And nobody in the Naval Security Group, when I was in it, believed that the attack on the Liberty was a case of mistaken identity.”
This isn’t surprising. If I were a naval officer at the time or afterward, I probably would have believed the attack was deliberate based on the information that was then available, too. It must have seen incredible that the Israelis could have misidentified the ship, but the declassified evidence shows in detail the tragicomedy of errors occurring at the Kirya and at Naval HQ in Haifa that led to the mistake in identity.
All of the evidence shows that the Israelis thought they were attacking an Egyptian ship that had been firing on El Arish, and the MTB’s clearly misidentified the Liberty from some 6000 yards as the Egyptian ship the El Quseir, and it is worth noting that the MTB’s did not fire on the Liberty before someone on the Liberty, unaware of the skipper’s orders to hold fire, opened up on the MTB’s with the twin .50 caliber machine guns.
Lysias, let me just say this. If 34 Americans were deliberately killed in cold blood, then I want those responsible held accountable and punished. But the evidence shows that the attack was a mistake, and one for which the Israelis immediately apologized moments afterward, and paid some $12 million in compensation. Also, no one, to my knowledge at least, has ever really adduced a plausible motive for the Israelis to have attacked a ship of their strongest ally. Why would they do it?
I realize there are strong opinions on this issue, and though I believe that some people only pay even passing notice to the issue for hatred of Israel (and Jews), I know that many people like yourself genuinely believe the attack was deliberate, and are outraged by it. And I respect that. For myself, I can only look at the facts and draw the conclusions.
Thank you again for your service.
Me too, Woody. So glad you mentioned it. You’re such a card. Good to know I could take but one, brief moment here and pay tribute to any veterans or anyone else who might have lived thru or sacrificed through that era in a way complimentary to them, and have it dragged thru the muck of the left's usual narrative of a nation sired and perpetuated in sin to the exclusion of anything noble or heroic.
But perhaps I exaggerate. Perhaps we should have told the Japanese after they attacked Pearl Harbor and the Germans after Hitler declared war on us that we are far, far too flawed a nation to be fighting for anything worth defending.
I, mean who were we look down our noses at the naked expansionism of the Japanese, and, say, their unprovoked butchery of several hundred thousand innocent souls in a single work week at Nanking, or their murder of millions of other Chinese at the time?
Or the Germans’ enslavement of Europe, and their most recent slaughters of 16,000 Jews in a single day at Pinsk with pistols, grenades, clubs, and pickaxes, or of 33,771 Jews at Babi Yar on September 29-30, 1941, conducted by Nazi Einsatzgruppen Commander Otto Rasch, who bragged in an SS report to his superiors, "Because of 'our special talent of organization', the Jews still believed to the very last moment before being murdered that indeed all that was happening was that they were being resettled!"
After all, compared to all this, we had racial and gender discrimination, and massive inequality of income. I mean, really, what was there to defend?
"During that war, incidentally, Israel deliberately destroyed an American naval vessel, the USS Liberty, which was monitoring the conflict, killing 34 and wounding 171 Americans. Amazingly, the United States helped cover up the prolonged and unprovoked attack on its own naval vessel."
This statement by Prof Hixson is incorrect. I don't know if you (or he) know this or not, but a wide volume of documents were declassified in 1997 that showed the attack to be a case of mistaken identity. Both the Israeli and American governments foolishly kept these details secret far longer than was necessary, in disrespect of the survivors of the attack, and the families of those killed, and denying them closure. This also went a long way toward aiding and abetting the conspiracy theories surrounding the attack. The declassified info confirms what every investigation has concluded: the attack was a mistake.
I hope I can be excused a slight digression to remember here a not-insignificant event that occurred seventy years ago today.
The morning of December 7, 1941 found Pearl Harbor under a brilliant blue sky and bathed in sunlight and warm breezes. Church bells ringing in the Sunday mass could be heard by the sailors of the forenoon watch taking their breakfast, and sailors on the battleship U.S.S. Nevada hoisted the morning colors while the band on the fantail piped the national anthem. At 7:55am Rear Admiral William Furlong, skipper of the U.S.S. Oglala, spotted a plane descending on the runway of Ford Island diving too steeply to be coming in for a landing, and saw it drop a bomb on the seaplane ramp. When the plane turned about, he saw the red-orange insignia on the fuselage and knew in that moment that Pearl Harbor was being attacked by the Japanese. He sounded general quarters, and hoisted the signal “All Ships in Harbor Sortie.”
The situation in the harbor now was hellish. While being strafed and bombed, men desperately tried to man the AA guns to fend off the attackers, while ships shook and roared fire from the explosions, lights went dark, and crew members below deck milled about in confusion. The Japanese plastered the heavily armored USS Arizona with four armor-piercing incendiaries, the fourth of which detonated the forward magazine like a massive hand grenade, sending armor plate, debris, and bodies all mushrooming two-hundred feet into the sky, instantly killing 1177 of the 1400 Arizona crewmen who died in the attack.
Below the decks of the other ships, mattresses and shores plugged holes from bombs and torpedoes against the oil-drenched water. Surgeons with bloody scalpels bent above the wounded, the acrid odor of cordite smoke filled the dank air, and burned men screamed in agony. Crippled by explosions, and hopelessly blanketed with holes and fire, ships like the U.S.S. California, the U.S.S. Nevada, and others either sank, capsized, or were run aground.
On land, a bomb sliced through the mess hall at Hickam Airfield, catching the men innocently at mid-breakfast, killing 35, and sending trays and dishes flying. The bugler at the Schofeild Barracks, unsure of what would rouse his regiment out of their bunks the quickest, sounded the pay call. At the end of the attack lay 2403 dead, 1178 wounded, 18 ships sank or crippled, 188 planes destroyed, 159 damaged, and the United States of America at war.
The attack, in retrospect, was a blunder for the ages by the Japanese. A divided nation, wary of war and “other people’s quarrels,” rose instantly united in shock, grief, and anger, and the recruiting centers were soon flooded to suffocation. The rich boy and the poor boy, the country boy and the city boy, the joiner, the welder, the farmer and the doctor—here the many became one, encapsulating that genius for spontaneous self-organization that De Tocqueville had so clearly seen a century before, and all were harnessed into that massive, charging juggernaut by which the victory was forged.
Destiny seems to serve us notice at odd intervals—1861 at Fort Sumter, 1941 at Pearl Harbor, and 2001. In each emergency, a vast reservoir of selfless patriotism pours forth to duty and sacrifice, and the young men of 1941 gave of themselves unsparingly, fighting and dying, that others may live in a world where they may speak, worship, and assemble without fear, where the average Joe could walk the town street with his best girl on his arm, and not be stopped by policemen asking for “papers,” where law and liberty are safe, and where the individual is never a small, soulless fraction of the state.
For all this, they fought and died. Memory fades, but the valor of those who fought and sacrificed on that warm December morning seventy years ago, shines as brightly as if it were yesterday. Someday those who survived will no longer be with us, but their deeds are deathless. Their glory is forever.
If Annie genuinely believes what she wrote, then she should apologize to no one. I'm not in the habit of demanding people apologize for what they believe. It is rather difficult, however, to know what to make of some of these literally incredible statements about the Itamar murder being posted here.
Amjad Mahmad Awad, along with accomplice Hakim Awad, entered the Fogel family home in Itamar, catching two children, Yoav (11) and Elad (4), unawares. Amjad led Yoav to another room and stabbed him to death there, while Hakim attempted to strangle Elad. Amjad then returned and dispatched Elad, stabbing him with the two knives he held in his hands.
They then proceeded to the parents’ bedroom, where a struggle developed. Amjad managed to slash Rabbi Ehud Fogel to death and then stabbed his wife Ruthie in the neck and back. Hakim then shot and killed her.
They then heard the three-month old baby girl, Hadas, crying, and stabbed her to death too.
Amjad Mahmad Awad, and Hakim Awad were arrested for the crime, which they confessed to in gruesome, remorseless detail , and then performed a detailed re-enactment of the crime that their Shin Bet interrogators described as “chilling.”
“I'm proud of what I did, and will accept any punishment I receive, because I did it all for Palestine,” so declared Amjad Mahmad Awad, ahead of his indictment hearing in June. "I don't regret what I did, even if it means I'm sentenced to death.”
At his sentencing in September, he reaffirmed his utter lack of remorse for butchering a family of strangers:
“Prior to the sentencing Awad declared he was not sorry and claimed he murdered the five "because of the occupation."
During the court hearing, Awad claimed that Israeli security forces tied up and killed two men from his village. "I am 18 and in my teenage years. Not any young man of this age thinks about murder, only a Palestinian man whose land was taken. This is what the state does to me every day. When I want to leave my village I have to undergo a search which always involves beatings."
As he left the court he motioned the V sign for Victory with his fingers. (See picture)
The judges asked Awad, who confessed to the murder last month, to refrain from discussing politics and instead talk about himself. "I am a person like you, I have no mental condition, I never had a serious illness. My only illness is the Israeli occupation." He replied negatively when asked if he regrets his actions.”
link to ynetnews.com
According to Haaretz,
“Two Palestinians charged with the brutal murder of five members of the Fogel family in Itamar were indicted in a West Bank military court yesterday - Amjad Awad,19, and Hakim Awad, 18. The two confessed.
The military prosecution said forensic evidence - including DNA samples and fingerprints - linked them to the crime scene.
link to haaretz.com
Now, I’m all for withholding judgment until the facts can be ascertained, for protecting the rights of the accused, seeing that they receive fair treatment and due process, and that false confessions are not extorted from them by torture.
However, when there is forensic evidence linking those arrested for the crime, when they confess to it in cold, remorseless, and elaborate detail without any provable benefit of coercion, perform a detailed re-enactment of the crime for their interrogators, and proudly own responsibility for the crime at their indictment hearing, and again at their sentencing hearing, then responsibility for the crime can, I think, be plausibly established beyond a reasonable doubt, that there was about zero chance that a Thai worker in the vicinity would be guilty of a crime for which he would have had an unfathomable motive to commit, and that those who assert otherwise, and with no evidence, can be clearly seen as the disingenuous, partisan, anti-Israel prevaricators that they are.
Congratulations, Annie.
This means a lot from someone as moderate and reasonable as yourself. Please.
David,
Said you:
“Do you really think the Zionist leadership was OK with a 40+ percent minority of Arabs in the Jewish State? Apparently you dismiss the statements made by the Zionist leadership themselves, some of which already were discussed in detail by Hostage. But even if there were no such publicly available statements, do you think they were stupid enough to believe that that proportion was a viable basis for a Jewish State, especially since the Palestinians had a higher birth rate?”
No. The Zionist leadership had believed from the beginning that their objective for a Jewish majority in Palestine would come about by means of massive Jewish immigration, not expulsion. Plans within the movement at the end of the 1930s envisioned the influx of a million Jews to Palestine within a decade. That number, of course, was aimed at guaranteeing a Jewish majority, which is why the Arabs were so intransigent and hostile to immigration: because they wished to prevent a demographic transformation.
Ben Gurion emphasized this in his much-misquoted speech to Mapai on December 3, 1947, where there is, by the way, no mention of any rejection of the partition here, or of any transfer or expulsion, but another method to increase the Jewish majority of the state: immigration.
After “Such a composition does not even give us absolute assurance that control will remain in the hands of the Jewish majority,” Ben Gurion says:
“From here stems the first and principal conclusion. The creation of the state is not the formal implementation process discussed by the UN General Assembly. . . . To ensure not only the establishment of the Jewish State but its existence and destiny as well — we must bring a million-and-a-half Jews to the country and root them there. It is only when there will be at least two millions Jews in the country — that the state will be truly established.
There can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60 per cent, and so long as this majority consists of only 600,000 Jews. . . .We have been confronted with a new destiny — we are about to become masters of our own fate. This requires a new approach to all our questions of life. We must reexamine all our habits of mind, all our systems of operation to see to what extent they suit our new future. We must think in terms of a state, in terms of independence, in terms of full responsibility for ourselves — and for others. In our state there will be non-Jews as well — and all of them will be equal citizens; equal in everything without any exception; that is: the state will be their state as well.”
Ben Gurion continued: “The attitude of the Jewish State to its Arab citizens will be an important factor—though not the only one—in building good neighbourly relations with the Arab States. If the Arab citizen will feel at home in our state, and if his status will not be the least different from that of the Jew, and perhaps better than the status of the Arab in an Arab state, and if the state will help him in a truthful and dedicated way to reach the economic, social, and cultural level of the Jewish community, then Arab distrust will accordingly subside and a bridge to a Semitic, Jewish-Arab alliance, will be built…” (Ben Gurion’s own words in his Ba-Ma’Araha Vol IV, Part 2, pp. 260, 265) cited from “Fabricating Israeli History,” (1997, Efraim Karsh, p.44)
Of all the national movements in history, Zionism has been one of the most copiously documented and the most openly, transparently discussed within. There are records, not only in the political and diplomatic sphere, but also in all of the social, educational and propagandistic work over many years throughout the movement. Yet, despite all this massive documentation, what do they show? That the “transfer” idea is expressed, at best, in only isolated and fragmentary statements–secret thoughts and wishes, but nothing remotely resembling a program, or plan of action.
As Benny Morris, who has researched and written more thoroughly and indefatigably than just about anyone on this issue has written,
“My feeling is that the transfer thinking and near consensus that emerged in the 1930’s and the early 1940’s was not tantamount to pre-planning and did not issue in the production of a policy or master plan of expulsion; the Yishuv and its military forces did not enter the 1948 war, which was initiated by the Arab side, with a master plan for expulsion.” (“The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited,” p.60).
You earlier said:
“Your effort to mostly, though not completely, absolve the Haganah from responsibility is unpersuasive, but most importantly, these terror attacks were necessary for Israel to be created. There had to be widespread flight of Palestinians, and they were not going to leave their homes unless they were afraid for their lives. To suggest that these necessary attacks – massacres of civilians – were incidental rather than deliberately planned is pure sophistry.”
What I am suggesting is that all of these events occurred in a war—a war that was waged on the Yishuv from the moment the partition plan passed the GA. This is a fact.
Between November 30, and December 4, 1947, most of the Arab violence against Jews was scattershot and the result of intifada-like incited mayhem. It was on December 4, however, that the real Palestinian Arab assault began in earnest, when some 120-150 armed Arabs attacked the Efal kibbutz, the first small unit military attack on a Jewish settlement, and on December 8 Hasan Salame, commander of the Lydda front, launched another large-scale attack on the Hatikva quarter in south Tel-Aviv. Two days later there was another abortive assault on the Hatikva, and an armed assault on the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem. All these company-sized attacks were repulsed, but they set the pattern for the conflict, which was evolving from mob rioting and armed clashes to more military/guerilla style small unit operations. It was not until December 9 that the Hagana’s head of operations, Yigael Yadin began responding in kind to consolidate and protect crucial Jewish transportation arteries. The war had begun, and the Arabs were attacking the Yishuv, not the other way around. At the Arab league summit in Cairo, it was decided to send one million Egyptian pounds and 10,000 rifles to the Palestinian war effort.
Not including the tit for tat terrorist attacks occurring between the Arabs and the Stern and Irgun, between December and April, the Arab and Palestinian militias launched no fewer than 15 full scale company and battalion sized assaults on Jewish settlements. There was not one single attack, or counter-attack by the Yishuv on any Arab position in this period even close to this scale and frequency. Only after seeing Jewish Jerusalem surrounded and besieged, the roadways between the settlements being sabotaged and strangled, and after suffering some four months of unrelenting attacks, took to the counter-offensive with Operation Nachshon on April 6, and drove back and defeated the Arab militias. This period saw the collapse of the Palestinian war effort, and the flight of some 3-400,000 refugees.
The UN correctly held the Arabs responsible for the outbreak of violence. The UN Palestine Commission was never allowed by the Arabs or British to go to Palestine to implement the resolution. On February 16, 1948, the Commission reported to the Security Council:
“Powerful Arab interests, both inside and outside Palestine, are defying the resolution of the General Assembly and are engaged in a deliberate effort to alter by force the settlement envisaged therein.
The main facts controlling the security situation in Palestine today are the following:
a. Organized effect by strong Arab elements inside and outside Palestine to prevent the implementation of the Assembly’s plan of partition and to thwart its objectives by threats and acts of violence, including armed incursions into Palestinian territory.
b. Certain elements of the Jewish community in Palestine continue to commit irresponsible acts of violence which worsen the security situation, although that Community is generally in support of the recommendations of the Assembly.”
link to unispal.un.org
The report leaves no doubt about the AHC’s utter rejection of the partition and their sworn and bitter determination to resist it’s implementation by force, which is, by the way, what they had been doing since the vote was taken. The report also recounts, in detail, on the activities and attacks of the various Arab militias and the Arab Liberation Army that had been infiltrating from neighboring countries. While the report duly notes the “irresponsible acts of violence” committed by “certain elements of the Jewish community” (i.e., the Stern-Irgun terrorists), the Commission acknowledges the Jews’ acceptance of the partition, and posits blame for the violence almost solely on the Arabs’ rejection of the partition, and their attempts to thwart it by force.
The Arabs, indeed, made no attempts to deny starting the war. Jamal Husseini told the Security Council on April 16, 1948:
“The representative of the Jewish Agency told us yesterday that they were not the attackers, that the Arabs had begun the fighting. We did not deny this. We told the whole world that we were going to fight.”
Indeed they did.
Yet you take absolutely no notice of this. The war waged by the Arabs on the Yishuv in this period is invisible to you. You are certain that an act of unprovoked and nakedly expansionist ethnic cleansing occurred in this period by the Yishuv against the Palestinians, yet you do not seem acquainted with any of the particulars of what actually occurred on the ground in this period that completely contradict this notion. Nor do you seem interested. You merely show how little you know, and how little you care about how little you know. Facts and circumstances be damned, you just sing the same old song: Israel ethnically cleansed the Palestinians, and Israel is always guilty.
As far as can be seen from your perspective, there does not seem to have been any need for the Yishuv to have been armed altogether. After all, since the Arabs of Palestine and their brethren in the neighborhood presented no threat to the Zionist endeavor, and, later on, to the UN partition resolution, why should Palestine’s Jews have had to bother with self defense? Sired from the corrupting bad seed of Zionism, it would thus seem that if the Haganah came into being, it was not in response to any danger posed by Arab attacks on Jewish life and property in Palestine, or, later, to defend the nascent state against an all out assault, but rather as a kind of predatory, at-the-ready task force to enforce expulsions of the Arabs when the time was right, and secure the borders of the nascent state that the Arabs would leave for the Yishuv in their wake.
Thus, every Israeli contingency plan, every hint of a far-fetched idea expressed by David Ben-Gurion and other Israeli planners, finds its way into this narrative as conclusive, damning evidence for the Yishuv’s plans for expansion and ethnic cleansing, to the exclusion of any other consideration or contingency, and painting Ben Gurion himself and the others as a cabal of racist scoundrels and Milosevich-like ethnic cleansers.
It does not seem to occur to you that it is simply disingenuous to deduce longstanding national trends, ideologies, or policies on the basis of a handful of random statements uttered over decades of extensive political, diplomatic, and military activity.
“And the Israelis did not reject UNGA 194? Are you serious? The resolution called for the right of return of all refugees who wished to live in peace. The Israelis offered return to a tiny percentage, and you call that acceptance?”
I do. In the first place, the resolution was passed at a time (November 1948) when hostilities were in effect between the belligerents; the borders of the partition were rendered irrelevant, and borders of both states were going to be dictated by which side was holding what territory when hostilities ceased.
Secondly, the resolution nowhere calls for an unlimited repatriation of Arab refugees to the Jewish state, the configuration of which was then currently in flux. It posits a vague, non-specific recommendation that “the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.” The GA, indeed, specifically rejected Bernadotte’s draft that stated, “the right of the Arab refugees to return to their homes in Jewish-controlled territory at the earliest possible date.”
As I have already pointed out, at the Lausanne Conference, the Arabs, as with all previous discussions, refused direct dealings with the Israelis, and demanded acceptance of the refugees’ repatriation in full as a precondition to further talks. The Israelis insisted on discussions of the refugee problem in the context of a full regional peace; the Arabs refused, and the discussions broke down. The Arabs, in effect, were demanding that the Israelis take into their state over three quarter of a million refugees, created by the war of aggression waged by them, which would make the Jews a 41% minority in their own state, and without any assurance that even this would impel the Arab states to make peace with Israel. Really incredible.
After the Arabs opted for war, the refugee problem caused by the war was probably never realistically going to be settled inside Israel except on a limited basis. The notion that the Israelis would have negated the results of the war of annihilation waged on them and rendered themselves a minority by those who had just attempted their annihilation was always absurd. Most of all, since when do the losers of a war dictate terms to the victors?
As I have said many times before, the 1948 War was a brutal war, fought in close quarters, sometimes hand to hand where regulars, irregulars, and civilians all confusingly intermingled. It is not surprising that in such circumstances atrocities on both sides did occur, as they do in all wars. The violence was not all one way.
Certainly the Deir Yassin massacre on April 9 (3 days after the the Haganah took to the offensive), and the hysterical broadcasts exaggerating the scale of it, certainly sowed panic and influenced the flight of the refugees, but the violence of the fighting in the towns and villages, the flight of so many high ranking Arab functionaries, and the near total breakdown in services also played a role in the exodus of the refugees throughout the 1948 War. This is not to deny that there were not some expulsions at Lydda and Ramle; there were, but the numbers of those expelled were rather few. Palestine was a war zone in those days, and, in general, Palestinian Arab society had always been governed by a somewhat fragile polity at that time, and it simply collapsed under the strain of the conflict, as did countless other societies in Europe during World War Two. When war comes to your village, it is only human to want to get out of the way until it is over.
What the evidence shows is that the Nakba (see the spelling?) was sired from the war, and the war from the Arabs’ rejectionism, lack of realism, and still-persisting allergy to compromise that made it inevitable. The war resulted from the Arabs’ rejection of the partition, and the refugee crisis resulted from the war. Again, the chain of causation here is simply undeniable: there would have been no refugee crisis if there had been no war.
Having rejected diplomacy and compromise, the Arabs sought the arbitration of force; it was to be a war of annihilation. Ever since the announcement of the partition in November 1947, they sought to destroy the nascent Jewish state, failed, suffered catastrophe and defeat in the process, and, as usual, blamed everyone but themselves, and still do. The Nakba was indeed needlessly self-inflicted by them, and the refugees and their descendants have paid a horrific price for their unpardonable folly and intransigence. They still do.
“As for Israeli rejection of UN authority since then, you cannot be ignorant of the yearly resolutions on the peaceful settlement of the Palestine question that Israel and the US vote against with a handful of other countries..”
You have not answered the question. You stated earlier that “Israel has almost entirely rejected any UN authority to resolve the dispute in the 63 years since,” to which I responded, “Please detail what these UN attempts to resolve the conflict were, what was proposed, what was accepted by the Arabs, and what was rejected by Israel.”
I did not ask you about the myriad of spurious, one-sided resolutions against Israel passed over the years that take no account of Arab/Palestinian rejectionism and intransigence and confuse terrorism with the defense against it. I wanted to know, specifically, “what these UN attempts to resolve the conflict were, what was proposed, what was accepted by the Arabs, and what was rejected by Israel.”
As for the ICJ ruling, please don’t waste my time with that outrage. The ruling was a travesty, another sordid, shameful victory for the politicization of international law, and a clear demonstration of how the International Court of Justice, like the gruesome, Kafkaesque Human Rights Council, is a mere plaything of the General Assembly in its sinister attempts to delegitimize the Jewish state.
While all members of the General Assembly have an equal vote, in practice the number of despotic nations outnumber those that are truly democratic and free. Israel has almost nothing but enemies in the former category, and most of the latter are lukewarm at best. There are a number of entities within the General Assembly that are openly hostile to Israel and devote much of their collective efforts toward castigating and deligitimizing her: the League of Arab States, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and the “Non-Aligned Movement”—an amalgam of over 100 countries, including the Islamic ones, all of whom recognize the occupied territories as a Palestinian state. Further reflecting the reality of this sinister super-majority, in 1968 the General Assembly created a standing entity whose very title makes a mockery of any impartiality toward the Jewish state: “The United Nations Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories.”
This vast alliance of hostile entities and states, reflecting the corrupt arithmetic of the General Assembly, has made for a repository of anti-Israel activity, and has facilitated the passing of scores of spurious, one-sided and politically charged resolutions condemning Israel over the years. Like the Goldstone Report sired from the despot-infested UNHRC, the advisory opinion of the ICJ judges merely reflected and underscored this biased state of affairs, and, like the General Assembly, willfully ignored the dire circumstances that necessitated the creation of the security barrier, rubber-stamped the Islamic Bloc’s tendentious characterization of the barrier as a “wall’ instead of a fence that can be moved or dismantled, and treated Israel not as a litigant but as a target. That the court did not exercise its discretion to demur when asked to adjudicate ex parte a highly charged, two sided political conflict, is instructive of its biased disposition as well.
“You manage to spruce up the usual hasbara with proper grammar and exhaustive details, for which you rarely provide any citations. You have a lot of energy and even more time on your hands. But you’re a very silly man, Robert. You obviously want to be taken seriously, but why you continue to peddle your nonsense here is beyond me.”
If there are any assertions I have made which you call into question, please be good enough to point out what these are, and I’ll be happy to address them.
For the rest, please trouble me no more with your adolescent name calling and hysterical accusations. Make an argument based on facts and evidence for a change, instead of sub-contracting out to Hostage or someone else. If you have no argument to make, then have the decency to just pack it in and remain silent.
This is actually beneath contempt. A sad, sorry, pitiful attempt to deflect from your inability to posit a counter-argument based on facts and evidence, as usual. Failing to defend your arguments, or refute mine, you heckle, name-call, and smear with the usual ad-hominem jibes and table-pounding hysterics. Kind of like a lawyer who knows his client is guilty.
But look on the bright side. At least you got me on the Nakba misspelling.
Hostage,
There is a problem, I think, with interpreting all of Ben Gurion’s statements as clues to some massive plan to ethnically cleanse Palestine of Arabs when no such plan ever existed. It is simply impossible to remove Ben Gurion’s statements from the context of the events in which they were occurring: the Arab Revolt, the intransigence of the British on immigration, the persecution of the Jews in Europe, and the coming war. All of this inevitably induced an understandable sense of siege. Surrounded by enemies and restricted and obstructed by the British, the Yishuv, in the decade before the partition, was mostly concerned with the prospect of just surviving and remaining a viable, cohesive entity, not with pipe dreams of expelling all the Arabs. Simply put, they had other things to worry about.
The Haganah was created to protect the communities of the Yishuv against Arab violence and was a largely defensive force prior to the 1948 war. In lieu of the violence and uncertainty of the Arab revolt and the at best equivocal stance of the British, a whole number of plans and contingency scenarios were drawn up by the Haganah, at Ben Gurion’s behest, in the decade before the UN partition. What community, what fighting force, surrounded by hostile enemies and uncertainty, and unable to rely on anyone else, would do any less? The attempts of left-leaning anti-Zionist historians (Pappe, Khalidi, etc.) to read into these contingency scenarios one long conspiracy to ethnically cleanse Palestine is a narrative for the paranoid. While the situation facing the Yishuv in these years was uncertain and unpredictable, to put it mildly, none of these scenarios were ever acted upon.
There is no evidence that the Yishuv accepted the partition in 1947 with the intention to violate it, and not much sense to the notion that they did. Why not simply reject the partition in the first place, and make a grab for as much territory as you can get? Also, if it was the plan to accept the partition and then violate it, why wait through nearly five months of bloody and near fatal attacks by the ALA and Palestinian militias before they finally took to the offensive in April?
The truth is that though the Haganah had been reforming and refitting itself since Ben Gurion took the defense portfolio in 1946, they had not really begun the process of restructuring itself from a defensive militia into a full-fledged military force until the weeks before the partition vote. On November 7, 1947, Ya’akov Dori, Haganah chief of the general staff, issued an order concerning “the order for a national structure”:
“The danger of an attack on the country by the armies of the neighboring Arab countries…necessitates a different structure and deployment. Opposite regular armies it is imperative to prepare in a military, as opposed to a militia force—trained, armed and structured along military lines.”
According to Morris:
“The restructuring took on a life of its own, fueled by the spread of hostilities that began at the end of November, and the prospect of pan-Arab invasion, and by March 1948, nine brigades had begun to form, with expanding brigade and battalion HQ’s, recruitment centers, training camps, logistical services, and armories. It was a race against time, and everything was in flux; in every sphere there were shortages. The organization and equipping of the brigades was hampered by the continuous operational burdens to which each was subjected by the ongoing war against the Palestinian Arab militias…” (Benny Morris, “1948: The First Arab-Israeli War” p.200)
What was taking place then, in the months between the partition vote and the launching of Operation Nachshon in April 1948 was a hurried, often haphazard process of restructuring, re-equipping, and reorganization, all of which were occurring under the strain of a sustained military assault on the settlements and the roadways between them.
As for Ben Gurion’s Feb 18 remarks to Sharett, it is more likely that Ben Gurion was whistling in the dark here and putting up a brave front. Looking about himself at the time, he had not much cause for optimism.
The outbreak of hostilities the day after the partition vote caught the Haganah flat footed. They thought the attacks were just more “disturbances.” Only by January, with increasing numbers of Arab militias and armed groups attacking Jewish communities and roadways, did they realize that the war that they had long feared had in fact begun. On January 10, the ALA attacked Kfar-Szold. On January 14 a Palestinian militia attacked Etzion Bloc, taking heavy casualties, but, in the next two days, wiping out a platoon of 35 Jewish fighters sent in as reinforcements. On January 20, the ALA attacked Yechiam. On February 16, the ALA attacked Tirat-Zvi. These attacks were repulsed, to be sure, but the attacks were not only increasing in frequency and size, but in sophistication as well. The situation in March continued to deteriorate even further, with further attacks on Magdiel and Ramot-Naftali, and the ambush of three Jewish convoys where much equipment was lost and 59 killed. A British report commented at the time:
“The intensification of Arab attacks on communications and particularly the failure of the Kfar Etzion convoy (March 27-28), probably the Yishuv’s strongest transport unit, to force a return passage has brought home the precarious position of Jewish communities both great and small which depend on supply lines running through Arab controlled country. In particular, it is now realized that the position of Jewish Jerusalem, where a food scarcity already exists, is likely to be desperate after 16 May.”
It is difficult to know, therefore, what “practical examination” this supposedly “cold and rational calculation” could have been based upon. In any event, Ben Gurion’s statements here were made during a war in which the Arabs/ Palestinians were assaulting the Yishuv and coming along at it rather handsomely. It is not evidence that BG intended to abort the partition, absent a war waged on the Yishuv by the Arabs.
As Benny Morris has written,
“My feeling is that the transfer thinking and near consensus that emerged in the 1930’s and the early 1940’s was not tantamount to pre-planning and did not issue in the production of a policy or master plan of expulsion; the Yishuv and its military forces did not enter the 1948 war, which was initiated by the Arab side, with a master plan for expulsion.” (“The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited,” p.60).
Morris also wrote on Walt and Mearsheimer’s Spurious Opus,
“Until 1936-1937, certainly, the Zionist mainstream sought to establish a Jewish state over all of Palestine. But something began to change fundamentally during the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939, which was conducted against the background of resurgent anti-Semitism in Europe and the threat of genocide. In July 1937, the British royal commission headed by Lord Peel recommended the partition of Palestine, with the Jews to establish their own state on some 20 percent of the land and the bulk of the remainder to fall under Arab sovereignty (ultimately to be conjoined to the Emirate of Transjordan, ruled by the Emir Abdullah). The commission also recommended the transfer--by agreement or "voluntarily," and if necessary by force--of all or most of the Arabs from the area destined for Jewish statehood. The Zionist right, the Revisionist movement, rejected the proposals. But mainstream Zionism, representing 80 to 90 percent of the movement, was thrown into ferocious debate; and, shepherded by David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leadership ended up formally accepting the principle of partition, if not the actual award of 20 percent of the land. The movement resolved that the Peel proposals were a basis for further negotiation.
It is true that Ben-Gurion harbored a hope, in 1937, that such a partition would be but a "first step," to be followed by eventual Zionist expansion throughout Palestine. But the years that followed sobered Zionism and changed the movement's thinking. The movement's formal acceptance of the principle of partition was gradually digested and incorporated into the mentality of the Zionist mainstream, which understood that the Jewish people needed an immediate safe haven from European savagery, and that the movement would have to take what history was offering and could gain no more. The Jewish nationalist leaders called this "pragmatism."
By November 1947, the Zionists' reconciliation to a partial realization of their dreams was complete (except on the fringes of the movement), and Zionism's mainstream, led by Ben-Gurion and Weizmann, once and for all internalized the necessity of partition and accepted the U.N. partition resolution. The 1948 war was fought by Israel with a partitionist outlook, and it ended in partition (with the West Bank and East Jerusalem under Jordanian rule and the Gaza Strip controlled by Egypt), despite Israel's military superiority at its conclusion. During the following two decades, down to June 1967, there was a general acceptance by the Israeli mainstream of the fact, and the permanence, of partition.”
link to israel-palestina.info
Hostage,
Said you:
"The UNSCOP only reported that the Jews refused to accept a bi-national state, not that it was a non-starter. In fact, the report of the UNSCOP 2nd Committee was devoted to a proposal for a bi-national state. "
This is correct, and I was in error. Thank you for the correction.
David,
Said you:
“Once again, you point the finger of blame at the Arab side for refusing to accept “Jewish sovereignty” where quite a number of non-Jewish people happened to be living. I simply do not understand how the partition resolution could have been acceptable to any people. The Zionists were not asking for the right to emigrate and live among the Palestinians as equals, but were demanding the right to implement some sort of Jewish rule over the indigenous population… Even the borders proposed by the UN depicted a Jewish State with only a small unsustainable majority of Jewish people. The creation of a Jewish State necessarily required ethnic cleansing of most inhabitants and subjugation as second-class “citizens” for those who were able to remain.”
David, there were some 650,000 Jews and more than twice the number of Arabs living in Palestine in 1947. What was to be done? Both the Peel and UN commissions concluded that peaceful co-existence in a binational state was a non-starter, and recommended partition. You call the portion of Palestine apportioned to the Jews for a state as the Yishuv “demanding the right to implement some sort of Jewish rule over the indigenous population” and thus judge it to be unreasonable; I view the matter rather differently. They were demanding the right to state of their own, consented to include a sizable Arab minority within that state, and to respect their rights as equal citizens.
The notion that “The creation of a Jewish State necessarily required ethnic cleansing of most inhabitants and subjugation as second-class “citizens” for those who were able to remain” is nonsense.
In the first place, the partition envisaged no expulsion or transfer of any Palestinian Arabs.
Secondly, it would at least have given the Palestinians a state of their own and those living in the Jewish state would have been living in a democracy, whatever its flaws and imperfections; absent the partition, Arabs and Jews alike would have been subject to Syrian, Jordanian, and Egyptian rule, or, rather, misrule, as all the surrounding states had no intention of allowing an independent state to be formed.
The fortunes of those Arabs who remained in Israel after the war, compared to those who were now living in the WB and Gaza, including those 400-500,000 who were not refugees and were already living there, only underscores this reality. To describe those oppressed and left rotting in refugee camps for decades as being as being merely “subjugated” and treated as “second-class citizens” would be an understatement. Dhimmi status subjugation, expulsion, or worse awaited any Jews left living in Palestine at that time, and the Mufti had more than made clear how he would treat the Jews in his midst if he were their master.
Third, the partition was far from perfect, but what arguments against it ignore is that while some 550,000 Jews and some 397,000 Arabs would be living in the proposed 55% allotted to the Jewish state, and some 800,000 or more Palestinian Arabs would be living in the 41% of the Arab Palestinian state, 62% of the Jewish state envisioned by the partition would have consisted of desert, while the Palestinians were offered the most fertile land. (Some 100,000 Jews and an equal number of Arabs would inhabit the 4% international protectorate of Jerusalem).
“You even concede that there were “Stern and Irgun terror attacks and a few isolated acts by the Haganah,” but consider such incidents to be exceptions. Your effort to mostly, though not completely, absolve the Haganah from responsibility is unpersuasive, but most importantly, these terror attacks were necessary for Israel to be created. There had to be widespread flight of Palestinians, and they were not going to leave their homes unless they were afraid for their lives. To suggest that these necessary attacks – massacres of civilians – were incidental rather than deliberately planned is pure sophistry.”
What I said was this: “The Arab and Palestinian militias had been attacking the UN apportioned areas of the Jewish state’s borders ever since December 1947. With the exception of Stern and Irgun terror attacks and a few isolated acts by the Haganah, the Yishuv was, in the main, on the defensive until early April 1948.”
And this is true. I was discussing the so-called “Civil War period” of the 1948 War, which was fought inside Palestine between the Yishuv and Arab and Palestinian militias between December 1947 until the Pan-Arab invasion on May 15, 1948. This period of the war developed in two stages: The first was between early December 1947 to April 6, 1948, when, following the rejection of the partition, numerous small unit military attacks were launched by Arab and Palestinian militias on Jewish settlements and roadways, and with the Yishuv, with the exception of Stern and Irgun terror attacks and a few isolated acts by the Haganah, were on the defensive. Some 75-100,000 refugees fled during this period, and they were not expelled. As Benny Morris has said,
“During this period, Jewish troops expelled the inhabitants of only one village—Qisariya, in the Coastal Plain, in mid-February (for reasons connected to Jewish illegal immigration rather than the ongoing civil war)—though other villages were harassed and a few specifically intimidated by the IZL, LHI, and Haganah actions (much as during this period Jewish settlements were being harassed and intimidated by Arab irregulars).” (“1948: The First Arab-Israeli War,” pp.94-95).
In the period between the passing of the partition Nov.29, 1947 and April 6, 1948, I am certainly aware of retaliatory attacks (actually, revenge killings) by the Haganah on Khisas in Galilee on December 19, Balad ash Sheik and Hawasa on Dec.31-Jan.1, and the Semiramis Hotel in west Jerusalem on January 5-6 (in which some 26 civilians died). There were also certainly a series of small counter-assaults on other small targets in this period, but the Haganah was, by and large, on the defensive in this period. But other than these mentioned, and, of course, terrorist attacks by the Stern and Irgun, I am not aware of any large scale Haganah attacks in this period, least of all any that could have expelled any Palestinians en masse.
The second stage of this period of the war occurred from April 6 to May 15, when the Haganah, seeing Jewish Jerusalem surrounded and besieged, the roadways between the settlements being sabotaged and strangled, and after suffering some four months of unrelenting attacks, took to the counter-offensive with Operation Nachshon, and drove back and defeated the Arab militias. This period saw the collapse of the Palestinian war effort, and the flight of some 3-400,000 refugees.
David, one of the points I have repeatedly tried to emphasize here is that the first Arab-Israeli War was indeed a war, and not just an assault by one side against a helpless victim. This ignores entirely the military dimension of the conflict, and the role that the fighting played, among other things, in the flight of the refugees. It is not even clear to me that you concede there was even a war at all; just one long, extended, well planned ethnic clearing operation that met negligible or meager resistance.
But this is untrue. The Arabs launched company sized assaults (i.e., 150 + soldiers) against the Efal neighborhood (December 4), the Hatikva quarter of Tel-Aviv (December 8 &10), the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem (December 10), and a major convoy to Ben-Shemen (December 14).
On January 10, a battalion sized (900 man) assault was launched on Kfar-Szold (January 10), a 1,000-man assault on Etzion Bloc (January 14), company sized assaults on Yechiam (January 20), Tirat Svi (February 16), Magdiel (March 2), Ramot-Naftali (March 4), a successful ambush on three major Jewish convoys (March 27, 28, & 31), and an attack on Mishmar-Haemak (April 4).
Again, the period was certainly punctuated with terrorist attacks by the Stern and Irgun from December 12 and onward, and a few limited retaliatory attacks by the Haganah in the first two weeks of February, but nothing any where near the scale of the Arab attacks. Despite their weaknesses and disorganization, the Palestinian militias and the Arab Liberation Army had found the Yishuv’s weak spot: the crucial roadways between the scattered settlements, and they hammered home their operational and geographical advantages with a tenacity and a skill that stretched the Yishuv almost to their breaking point. Before early April, the Haganah was, by and large, on the defensive, and fighting for its existence.
The Arabs were concerned about the collapse of the Arab war effort following the Yishuv counter-offensive in early April, and the mass exodus from the towns and villages that accompanied it. But that was not all. They did not, as I pointed out earlier, attack only the Arab-held and apportioned areas, but mostly Jewish held areas, and the Yishuv were not only occupying but a sliver of Arab apportioned territory, they weren’t even occupying some of the Jewish apportioned areas on May 15. The Arabs, on May 15, tried to finish what they started in December 1947: to abort the nascent Jewish state and establish an Arab ruled entity that they would then divide between themselves. They failed. That’s how it goes.
“Finally, Robert, the Jewish side generally (though not unanimously) accepted the notion of partition, but it clearly rejected the boundaries imposed by the plan, murdered the UN mediator Bernadotte (a genuine Holocaust hero, no less), and rejected the UNGA refugee return resolution 194 that was at least as authoritative as the partition resolution of a year earlier.”
If you are suggesting that the Yishuv rejected the boundaries of the partition plan after it was passed absent the subsequent war to abort the nascent Jewish state by the Arabs, this is false. They accepted the principle of partition and accepted the UN partition plan that passed the UNGA on November 29, 1947. There is no evidence that they had any intent of violating these boundaries or expelling any Arabs in the state at this stage, nor did they do so. The acceptance of the partition was explicitly noted and emphasized in Ben Gurion’s December 3, 1947 speech to Mapai.
Benny Morris, in a critique of Walt and Mearsheimer's “The Israel Lobby” has written:
"The Palestinian Arabs, supported by the surrounding Arab world, rebelled against the U.N. partition resolution and unleashed a bloody civil war, which was followed by a pan-Arab invasion. The war resulted in a large, partial transfer of population. The chaos that all had foreseen if Palestine were partitioned without an orderly population transfer in fact enveloped the country. But this is emphatically not to say, as Mearsheimer and Walt do, that the Zionists' occasional ruminations about transfer were translated in 1947-1948 into a overall plan and policy--unleashed, as they put it, when the "opportunity came," as if what occurred in 1948 was a general and premeditated expulsion.
The Zionist leadership accepted the partition plan, which provided for a Jewish state in 55 percent of Palestine with 550,000 Jews and between 400,000 and 500,000 Arabs. The Jewish Agency called on the Arabs to desist from violence, and promised a life of beneficial co-existence. In private, Zionist officials began planning agricultural and regional development that took into account the large Arab minority and its continued citizenship in the new Jewish state. Indeed, down to the end of March 1948, after four months of the Palestinian Arab assault on the Yishuv, backed by the Arab League, Zionist policy was geared to the establishment of a Jewish state with a large Arab minority. Haganah policy throughout these months was to remain on the defensive, to avoid hitting civilians, and generally to refrain from spreading the conflagration to parts of Palestine still untouched by warfare.
Indeed, on March 24, 1948, Yisrael Galili, the head of the Haganah National Command, the political leadership of the organization, issued a secret blanket directive to all brigades and units to abide by long-standing official Zionist policy toward the Arab communities in the territory of the emergent Jewish state--to secure "the full rights, needs, and freedom of the Arabs in the Hebrew state without discrimination" and to strive for "co-existence with freedom and respect," as he put it. And this was not a document devised for Western or U.N. eyes, with a propagandistic purpose; it was a secret, blanket, internal operational directive, in Hebrew. It was only at the start of April, with its back to the wall (much of the Yishuv, in particular Jewish Jerusalem, was being strangled by Arab ambushes along the roads) and facing the prospect of pan-Arab invasion six weeks hence, that the Haganah changed its strategy and went over to the offensive.."
There was no rejection of Res. 194 by Israel; the Israelis accepted Resolutions 181 and 194 in being admitted to the UN as a member state. It was the Arab states that rejected it.
The state of Israel in its post-armistice configuration resulted from the war and the Israelis were not going to negate the results of the war in which they had just sacrificed 1% of their population and return to the vulnerable partition lines of 1947 which a) the Arabs had rejected anyway, and b) while the Arabs continued a state of hostilities and a policy of non-recognition.
Following the armistice and Israel’s admission to the UN, the Israelis, consistent with their obligations in gaining UN membership and Resolution 194, offered to resettle some 100,000-200,000 refugees in Israel at the Lausanne Conference; the Arabs rejected it without discussion. The Arabs, as with all previous discussions, refused direct dealings with the Israelis, and demanded acceptance of the refugees’ repatriation in full as a precondition to further talks. The Israelis insisted on discussions of the refugee problem in the context of a full regional peace; the Arabs refused, and the discussions broke down.
The full return of the refugees to Israel in 1949 with the surrounding states still in the midst of a state of hostilities would have put some 750,000 (or more) Palestinians along with some 160,000 remaining Palestinians alongside some 650,000 Jews, thus making the Jews a (41%) minority in their own state. This would seem to have blunted the Jewish people’s right to self-determination, and negated the entire reason for the creation of the Jewish state in the first place.
Jewish self-determination did not need to come at the price of the Palestinians’ exodus. The Palestinians, who also had a right to self determination that the Jews never denied, certainly would have had it if they and the surrounding Arab states had accepted the partition. Rejecting the partition and opting for war had consequences.
Their self-determination was not only suppressed by the surrounding Arab states in the 1949-1967 period, but spurned repeatedly by their leadership on multiple occasions afterward.
Regarding Resolution 194, here is the relevant paragraph:
“Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible”
The resolution is in the form of a recommendation and is hortatory. It may have slipped your notice that the Arabs rejected the resolution precisely because the GA rejected Bernadotte’s original draft:
“the right of the Arab refugees to return to their homes in Jewish-controlled territory at the earliest possible date… and their repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation, and payment of adequate compensation for the property of those choosing not to return…”
The resolution in its final form makes no mention of a “right of return” or of “Arab” refugees. It merely recommends that all refugees “wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.”
The Conciliation Commission for Palestine established by the UN was charged with the task to "take steps to assist the Governments and authorities concerned to achieve a final settlement of all questions outstanding between them," meaning resolving the refugee issue (which was but one paragraph in the resolution) within the larger task of the establishing of a full regional peace among the former belligerents. It does not anywhere state that Israel is in any way obligated to allow an unlimited repatriation of Palestinian refugees independently of all the other provisions and recommendations, while the Arabs/Palestinians continue a state of hostilities and defy the provisions calling for them to live “at peace with [their] neighbors” i.e., Israel, and it most certainly never envisaged those refugees not repatriated to remain unsettled and stateless in their host countries. Para graph 4 of UNGA resolution 393, in fact, states clearly and unequivocally that “the reintegration of the refugees into the economic life of the Near East, either by repatriation or resettlement, is essential in preparation for the time when international assistance is no longer available, and for the realization of conditions of peace and stability in the area.”
Said you:
“In fact, Israel has almost entirely rejected any UN authority to resolve the dispute in the 63 years since.”
Please detail what these UN attempts to resolve the conflict were, what was proposed, what was accepted by the Arabs, and what was rejected by Israel.
Wow! Guess you got me there! I stand exposed and corrected.
“Is the article referring to the “Israel” as drawn by the Partition Plan borders? If so, there was very little “invasion,” only some by the Egyptian Army, as the Israeli forces managed to keep almost all of the fighting in the territory allotted for the Palestinian State. Wasn’t that an “invasion”? That is why when the dust cleared, and the cease fire lines were drawn, Israel controlled not just 55% of the area as envisioned in the Partition Plan, but 78% of the land.”
David, if you want to complain about misrepresentations of history, you might start with your own contribution to the genre quoted above. Your trivialization of the extent and reach of the Pan-Arab invasion of the newly-declared state of Israel is a case in point.
By the time of the Pan-Arab invasion of May 15, 1948, the Yishuv were actually holding very little territory outside the Jewish apportioned areas. In Galilee the Arabs held parts of the northeast Jewish section west of Safed, while the Yishuv held the Arab section north of Acre, and the Arabs held the 10-15 mile stretch of the coastal plain south of Haifa apportioned to the Jews. What is today the West Bank was almost completely in Arab hands with the exception of a narrow corridor east of Isdod and south of Latrun running east to Jerusalem. The Negev wasn’t even completely occupied by the Yishuv at this time. The main population centers of Nazareth, Jenin, Tulkarm, Nablus, Ramallah, Lydda, Latrun, Beersheba, Hebron, Gaza, and Isdod were all in Arab hands. On May 15, the Yishuv were holding barely any Arab apportioned territory, and were not even occupying all of the Jewish apportioned territory.
(For a map of Jewish and Arab held areas on May 15 1948 and the Arab invasion routes see Benny Morris “1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War,” 2008, p.p.64, 184, and Chaim Herzog “The Arab-Israeli Wars: War and Peace in the Middle East,” p.p. 20, 50)
In any case, the Arab and Palestinian militias had been attacking the UN apportioned areas of the Jewish state’s borders ever since December 1947. With the exception of Stern and Irgun terror attacks and a few isolated acts by the Haganah, the Yishuv was, in the main, on the defensive until early April 1948.
See the UNITED NATIONS PALESTINE COMMISSION’s “First Special Report to the Security Council: The Problem of Security in Palestine,” February 16, 1948.
link to unispal.un.org
The Arab Liberation Army attacked Jewish held Malikya from Lebanon, the Syrians attacked Jewish held Mishmar Hayarden north of the Sea of Galilee, and Jewish-held Samakh to the south of the sea. An Iraqi force from the East Bank 20 miles south of Tirat- Svi shot northwest across the Jordan to Nablus and further north to Jenin, wheeling round Ulm al-Fahm south to attack Jewish held Geulim.
The Jordanians launched both northern and southern attacks. The north Jordanian force shot north to Nablus, where it divided, one pivoting north to Tulkharm, then wheeling south through Taybe and Qalqilya to Ras al-‘Ein, and the other shooting south from Nablus to Ramallah, where it linked with the southern force, which had shot across the Jordan and through Jericho. At Ramallah the Jordanians split their forces, one south to Jerusalem, one southwest to Latrun, and one east by northwest, wheeling round Ben Shemen to Lydda to Ramla.
The 6000 man Egyptian force pivoted at Rafah into a parallel two-pronged advance to the north, the eastern thrust slicing through Jewish–held areas of the Negev just north of Nirim, Gvulot, Tse’elim, Alumim, northward through Beersheba and Hebron to Jerusalem. The western thrust cut through Gaza to Isdud with Tel-Aviv as the objective, with a detachment peeling off eastward from Maidal to al-Faluja to Beit Jibrin in an attempt to link up with the eastward thrust and surround the Jewish encampments in the Negev.
This then was the attack that was put into action. Its aim was to abort the nascent Jewish state and establish a “unitary Palestinian state” that the Arabs would then slice up between themselves. It is certainly true that ‘Abdullah of Jordan had decided at the last moment to confine his objectives to seizing as much of the West Bank as possible but that doesn’t negate the fact that Syrian, Iraqi, and Egyptian attacks both into and toward Jewish held areas were occurring all around the crescent shaped perimeter that the Yishuv were presently holding: Malikya, Mishmar Hayarden, Samakh in Galilee, Geulim near the coastal plain, and the areas of the Negev just north of Nirim, Gvulot, Tse’elim, Alumim.
In the post-May 15 stage of the conflict the Yishuv certainly had a modest superiority in numbers, and they increased those numbers as the conflict progressed, but this ignores the fact that a) Arab numbers also increased, and b) those numbers of the Yishuv could never be concentrated at a single decisive point. The Yishuv were now fighting three distinct, interconnected entities on a vulnerable multi-front crescent perimeter that was extremely awkward to defend: the Palestinians, a pan-Arab volunteer force, and the regular armed forces of six Arab states—Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and a Saudi contingent. The ability of the Arabs to field their forces on a wide front., and concentrate their individual armies at decisive points of the front created a fundamental asymmetry between them and the Yishuv.
The Yishuv had prepared for war, and they were certainly not going to remain within the vulnerable lines of the partition if the surrounding Arab states attacked. The defense of those lines would be any staff officer’s nightmare. In the event of hostilities they were simply not defensible. In September Moshe Sharett told an interlocutor that if the Arabs initiate war, “we will get hold of as much of Palestine as we can hold.” The war and the pan-Arab invasion were thus the game-changers, and rendered the partition lines functionally irrelevant. The collapse of the Palestinian war effort in late April and early May necessitated a response from the Arabs if they were going to claim any of the Palestine that they coveted, and they gave it when the British Mandate expired. The effort to abort the nascent Jewish state that had begun in December 1947 merely entered a new, escalated stage after May 15.
David, you can look at it upside down and sideways and it all comes down to this: there would have been no refugee crisis if there had been no war, and there would have been no war if the surrounding Arab states had not rejected the partition. From the moment it passed the GA the Arab states have literally organized their whole polity toward denying any Jewish sovereign state whatever its size, and to delegitimizing and destroying it when it was established. I have always believed that the Palestinian people, if given a choice, would have voted to accept the partition and live in peace beside the Jewish state, though I have no evidence to support it. But they really had no say in the matter; the surrounding Arab states decided for them.
Just imagine what the lives of the Palestinians and the other Arabs would be like today if they had decided to live in peace and accept the partition instead of devoting lives, resources and prodigies of energy down the sinkhole of this destructive obsession.
I wonder if Ms. Geller knows that it was from the Mishna and the halakah the Prophet derived many rituals of diet and hygiene, such as ceremonial purification before prayer.
“O you who believe! when you rise up to prayer, wash your faces and your hands as far as the elbows, and wipe your heads and your feet to the ankles; and if you are under an obligation to perform a total ablution, then wash (yourselves) and if you are sick or on a journey, or one of you come from the privy, or you have touched the women, and you cannot find water, betake yourselves to pure earth and wipe your faces and your hands therewith, Allah does not desire to put on you any difficulty, but He wishes to purify you and that He may complete His favor on you, so that you may be grateful.” (Sura v, 6)
Or that Mohammed adopted the Jewish institution of the Sabbath, marking Friday as the Muslim day of prayer.
Or that the Qur’an, like the Mosaic Law, forbids the eating the blood and flesh of swine, or dogs.
“Forbidden to you is that which dies of itself, and blood, and flesh of swine, and that on which any other name than that of Allah has been invoked, and the strangled (animal) and that beaten to death, and that killed by a fall and that killed by being smitten with the horn, and that which wild beasts have eaten, except what you slaughter, and what is sacrificed on stones set up (for idols) and that you divide by the arrows; that is a transgression.” (Sura v, 3)
Or that Jewish and Muslim eschatology—devils, angels, Satan, hell, heaven, the resurrection, the Last Judgment—are virtually the same. Mohammed accepts the principal revelations: the Pentateuch to Moses, the Psalms to David, the Gospel to Jesus, and, of course, the Qur’an to Mohammed. The Prophet evinces agreement of the Qur’an with the Bible as evidence of his holy mission.
Not that anyone will reciprocate, but Happy Thanksgiving everyone.
Stein's book is excellent. So is his article "Palestine's rural economy1917-1939."