This June will mark an anniversary that will live in infamy for the people affected by the event it commemorates following a far greater one 19 years earlier on May 14, 1948.  On June 5, 1967, Israel launched its so-called “Six-Day (preemptive) War” against three of its neighboring Arab states – Egypt, Jordan and Syria – claiming it was in self-defense to avoid annihilation Israeli leaders later admitted was spurious and false cover for a large-scale long-planned, calculated war of aggression it believed it could easily win and did.

 

The New York Times quoted Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s (1977 – 83) August, 1982 speech saying: “In June, 1967, we had a choice.  The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that (President Gamal Abdel) Nasser (1956 – 70) was really about to attack us.  We must be honest with ourselves.  We decided to attack him.” 

 

Two time Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (1974 – 77 and 1992 – 95) told French newspaper Le Monde in February, 1968: “I do not believe Nasser wanted war.  The two divisions which he sent into Sinai on May 14 would not have been enough to unleash an offense against Israel.  He knew it and we knew it.”

 

General Mordechai Hod, Commander of the Israeli Air Force during the Six-Day War said in 1978: “Sixteen years of planning had gone into those initial eighty minutes.  We lived with the plan, we slept on the plan, we ate the plan.  Constantly we perfected it.”

 

General Haim Barlev, Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) Chief told Ma’ariv in April, 1972: “We were not threatened with genocide on the eve of the six-day war, and we had never thought of such a possibility.”

 

Other Israeli leaders and generals voiced the same sentiment that in June, 1967 Israel was under no threat, yet preemptively undertook a war of aggression falsely telling the world it had no other choice.  It had a clear one.  It could have chosen peace, but didn’t and never did earlier or since to the present because discretionary aggressive wars of choice serve Israeli interests as they do its US imperial partner.

 

 In 1967, it was the Jewish state’s third major aggressive war that grew out of the founding of Zionism in 1897 by Theodor Herzl aiming to establish a permanent Jewish state.  He planned the first Zionist Congress in Basle, Switzerland, became its first president, and envisioned a permanent Jewish homeland in Palestine justified by what Professor Norman Finkelstein called the “colossal hoax” Jews got there first establishing their ancestral home on “a land without people for a people without land.”  It became the state of Israel in May, 1948 during the new Jewish state’s first preemptive aggressive so-called “War of Independence” Palestinians call “al-Nakba” – the catastrophe. 

 

From it, Jewish forces seized 78% of British Mandatory Palestine establishing the state of Israel May 14 when the Mandate ended.  It was 40% more territory than UN Resolution 181 of November, 1947 allowed with a 56 – 44% division that already gave Israel most of the fertile land, nearly all urban and rural territory, and 400 of over 1000 Palestinian villages their residents lost by UN mandate, with no right of appeal, to the Jewish population comprising one-third of the total at that time.

 

The 1948 negotiated cease-fire line became known as the “Green Line.”  Egypt occupied Gaza, and Jordan controlled the West Bank. It was Israel‘s moment of triumph.  The war lasted six months, expelling and killing  about 800,000 Palestinians.  It destroyed 531 Palestinian villages, 11 urban neighborhoods, and was a clear case of ethnic cleansing international law calls a crime against humanity.  Guilty Israeli leaders were never held to account for it or forced to admit what, in fact, they indisputably did according to recently declassified Israeli archival material Israeli historian Ilan Pappe used for his important new book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.  Noted British journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger calls him “Israel‘s bravest, most principled, most incisive historian.”

 

In his book, Pappe documented Israeli crimes including cold-blooded mass-murder; destruction of homes, villages and crops; rapes; other atrocities; and massacres of defenseless men, women and children shown no mercy.  It happened because British Mandate forces did nothing to stop it, and when neighboring Arab states finally intervened, they acted pathetically without conviction against a superior Israeli fighting force easily able to defeat the small, ill-equipped and unmotivated token forces matched against it. 

 

Israel‘s second war of aggression was launched along with Britain and France October 29, 1956 against Egypt following President Nasser’s decision to nationalize the Suez Canal.  Invading forces gave in to US and Soviet pressure to cease fighting eight days later, and after the Federal Reserve began selling large amounts of British pounds undermining the dollar-pound exchange rate.  It ended when Israel withdrew its last troops March 8, 1957. 

 

On June 5, 1967, Israel launched its third major war of aggression but hardly its last with another one always planned and ready to unleash on the flimsiest pretext almost no other nation could get away with. It did it for the usual reasons nations go to war when under no external threat to do it – territory, resources (for Israel Golan’s water was key), and a desire for unchallengeable regional dominance.  As it always did since, Israel falsely claimed its security was threatened by creating myths Syria was shelling Israeli farmers; legitimate, non-threatening Egyptian military exercises masked a preparation for war; and that “incendiary Arab rhetoric” proved it.  With plans set and a date picked, Foreign Minister Abba Eban flew to Washington May 26 to inform Lyndon Johnson of Israel‘s intentions and was assured the US backed them. 

 

The war began preemptively June 5 and proved to be an impressive display of overwhelming power with Israel destroying 90% of Egypt‘s 300   aircraft on the ground and two-thirds of the Syrian Air Force the first day.  After 24 hours of conflict, Israeli Air Force (IAF) Commander Mordechai Hod announced the combined Arab air forces were destroyed, and the devastating toll on them proved it. Israel lost a mere 19 fighter aircraft while Egypt lost about 300, Syria 60, Jordan 35, Iraq 15, and Lebanon one or more.  The Palestinians were about to lose much more – the remaining Gaza and West Bank parts of their nation leaving them stateless.

 

On day 2, Israel invaded Gaza and the West Bank; on day three Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) entered northern Sinai, devastated Egyptian brigades, captured Jerusalem, and got Jordan to surrender.  On day four, the IDF invaded Haram Al-Sharif and central Sinai, and by day five had advanced to the Suez Canal, taking all of Sinai and the Syrian Golan Heights.  The war was practically over before it began, but Israeli forces showed no mercy using their unopposed air power to massacre thousands of defenseless Egyptian troops on the ground.  It was a turkey shoot made possible largely because Washington supported it providing Israel with the latest munitions including tarmac-shredding explosives preventing undamaged planes from taking off making them sitting ducks to follow-up attacks.  In addition, a US carrier group provided intelligence and communications help standing ready to intervene if needed. 

 

Though nothing like today, even then Washington showed its commitment to Israel, and ignoring and covering up the USS Liberty incident highlights it.  The intelligence ship was in the Mediterranean about 13 nautical miles off the Sinai Peninsula when Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats attacked it with full knowledge it was a US vessel as the senior Israeli lead pilot later admitted.  Thirty-four on-board were killed after which Johnson Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered an inquiry that concluded the incident was a case of “mistaken identity” despite knowing full well it wasn’t.  Later, retired Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral Thomas Moorer said the incident was “one of the classic all-American cover-ups” for a close ally Washington has made excuses and allowances for ever since along with providing huge amounts of financial aid and modern weaponry and munitions in near-limitless amounts.

 

Israel used what it got then for its one-sided blitzkrieg ending June 10 with Israeli forces completing the job left unfinished following their 1948 “War of Independence.”  They took the remaining 22% of ancient Palestine comprising Gaza and the West Bank, and on June 6, 2007 will have held the territories for 40 repressive years of the longest continuous illegal occupation in the world under which Palestinians (including Israeli citizens and Palestinian Christians) lost their personal, political and economic freedoms under Israeli rule affording those rights only to Jews.

 

Worldwide Solidarity Actions Opposing the Illegal Occupation

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