One of my long-time neighbors, a Hungarian-born sovietologist, said that one should read both the New York Times and the Washington Post like he read Pravda and Izvestia during the cold war. It was some of the best advice I ever received only I added NPR to his list some time ago.
The only way that this can be looked at as a defensive war is if one were naive enough to accept the Bush administrations’s contention that their unprovoked attack on Iraq was a purely defensive reaction to an imminent threat. At first the Israelis tried to sell their preemptive war as a response to an attack by the Egyptian Air Force, and when the world saw this for the total fabrication it was, they launched an intense propaganda campaign to convince the world in general and its protector and financial supporter, the United States in particular, that once again the Arabs attacked Israel and that Israel was in danger of annihilation. The undisputed facts are that it was Israel that preemptively attacked Egypt and destroyed virtually the whole Egyptian Air Force while it was still on the ground, and Israel was never in danger of extermination at any time. Egypt, which had a third of its armed forces in Yemen at the time, was never in a position to threaten Israel’s security. Both Yitzak Rabin and Begin admitted publicly that Israel knew Nasser was not planning an attack. Rabin, quoted in Le Monde in 1968 said that, “I do not think Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to the Sinai in May (in a show of support for the Syrians who were under threat and attack by the Israelis) would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it.” In a speech in August of 1968, Begin was quoted in the New York Times as saying, “In June 1967, we again had a choice, the Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai did not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.” Also, in 1972 Ha’aretz quoted General Matityahu Peled, who played a major role in developing strategies for the Israeli conquest, as saying, “The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June of 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence was only a bluff, which was born and developed after the war.” Israeli Air Force General Ezer Weizmann openly declared that, “There never was any danger of extermination.”, and Mordecai Bentov, a former Israeli cabinet minister, stated in an interview in the paper Al Hamishar also in 1972 that, “All this story about the danger of extermination has been a complete invention and has been blown up a posteriori to justify the annexation of new Arab territories.”
One of my long-time neighbors, a Hungarian-born sovietologist, said that one should read both the New York Times and the Washington Post like he read Pravda and Izvestia during the cold war. It was some of the best advice I ever received only I added NPR to his list some time ago.
The only way that this can be looked at as a defensive war is if one were naive enough to accept the Bush administrations’s contention that their unprovoked attack on Iraq was a purely defensive reaction to an imminent threat. At first the Israelis tried to sell their preemptive war as a response to an attack by the Egyptian Air Force, and when the world saw this for the total fabrication it was, they launched an intense propaganda campaign to convince the world in general and its protector and financial supporter, the United States in particular, that once again the Arabs attacked Israel and that Israel was in danger of annihilation. The undisputed facts are that it was Israel that preemptively attacked Egypt and destroyed virtually the whole Egyptian Air Force while it was still on the ground, and Israel was never in danger of extermination at any time. Egypt, which had a third of its armed forces in Yemen at the time, was never in a position to threaten Israel’s security. Both Yitzak Rabin and Begin admitted publicly that Israel knew Nasser was not planning an attack. Rabin, quoted in Le Monde in 1968 said that, “I do not think Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to the Sinai in May (in a show of support for the Syrians who were under threat and attack by the Israelis) would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it.” In a speech in August of 1968, Begin was quoted in the New York Times as saying, “In June 1967, we again had a choice, the Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai did not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.” Also, in 1972 Ha’aretz quoted General Matityahu Peled, who played a major role in developing strategies for the Israeli conquest, as saying, “The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June of 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence was only a bluff, which was born and developed after the war.” Israeli Air Force General Ezer Weizmann openly declared that, “There never was any danger of extermination.”, and Mordecai Bentov, a former Israeli cabinet minister, stated in an interview in the paper Al Hamishar also in 1972 that, “All this story about the danger of extermination has been a complete invention and has been blown up a posteriori to justify the annexation of new Arab territories.”