November 23, 2004

Quotes on the 1967 War

With so many Zionist sites on the internet it's useful to keep reminding ourselves of the gulf between what the Zionists say about Israel's wars and what actually happened. I'll post quotes of self-exposure by Zionists every now and then about this or that war. Here are some about the war of June 1967:

Regarding any threat from Egypt, the former Commander of the Air Force, General Ezer Weitzman, regarded as a hawk, stated that there was "no threat of destruction" but that the attack on Egypt, Jordan and Syria was nevertheless justified so that Israel could "exist according the scale, spirit, and quality she now embodies."

Menahem Begin had the following remarks to make: "In June 1967, we again. had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him." It's not clear why Menahem Begin was so keen on honesty in this case.*

Moshe Dayan, the celebrated commander who, as Defense Minister in 1967, gave the order to conquer the Golan said that many of the firefights with the Syrians were deliberately provoked by Israel, and the kibbutz residents who pressed the Government to take the Golan Heights did so less for security than for the farmland. "They didn't even try to hide their greed for the land...We would send a tractor to plough some area where it wasn't possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn't shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance further, until in the end the Syrians would get nervous and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that's how it was...The Syrians, on the fourth day of the war, were not a threat to us."

That's the amazing thing about Zionist propaganda. The leaders of the Zionist movement have been perfectly candid about the motives and causes of the 1967 war and yet the popular perception is still one of a plucky little Israel beseiged by aggressors.

*Comment from AJP: Do you have the date of Begin's statement? I think that it was made after the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 [It was 8/8/1982 and reported in the New York Times on 21/8/2004]. and the reason why he was being so honest was that, at the time, he was being attacked by Labour over the conduct of the war. There was a powerful feeling in Israel that, by acting as the aggressor, the IDF had lost it's "purity of arms", something Labour blamed on Begin, Sharon and Likud.
Begin was trying to point out that the attack on Lebanon was actually no different from the attack on Egypt in 1967 when that "purity" was supposedly still intact.

No comments:

Post a Comment