Reaping the Whirlwind: History With Comment

On June 11, 1967 the Six day War ended with Israel controlling large areas of captured land and people. As we enter the fortieth year of Palestinian captivity it is long past time we ask who exactly started the war and why.

The PR spin that Israel has been able to maintain for two generations is that they played the roll of the small and beleaguered David to the Arab nation’s aggressive Goliath. However just as was the case with the ancient Israelite mercenary David so it is with his modern “decedents.” Things aren’t always the way they seem. As the Biblical story is usually told the fight between David and Goliath was wildly unequal and this much is true however all the advantages lay with David, not Goliath. Ancient military sources coupled with modern research have confirmed that a skilled man with a sling, known in those days as a Psiloi, can kill a fully armored may at ranges of over two hundred yards, much too far for the armored man to pose any threat to the Psiloi. Just as in the Biblical story so to in the modern battle all the advantages lay with the Israelis who were confident of their advantages and spoiling for a fight. The United Nations had negotiated a demilitarized zone in the Golan Heights between Israel and Syria and had moved large numbers of Arab farmers off their land to provide the neutral space. Israel saw this as a chance to snatch more land and promptly began sending “settlers” in to stake claims to the Arab farms. Military historians researching the war have discovered that the numerous small firefights that characterized the area before the war were the result of kibbutz residents who were greedy for land. As Moshe Dayan, the one eyed general made famous by the Six Day War wrote in his memoirs “We would send a tractor to plow some are where it wasn’t possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn’t shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance further, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that's how it was...The Syrians, on the fourth day of the war, were not a threat to us.'" The New York Times, May 11, 1997. Using these tactics Israel was able to manufacture a crisis in order to launch its preplanned war of aggression. As the fighting escalated in the Golan Heights the Syrians demanded that their allies help relieve the pressure on their front by making demonstrations on Israel’s other borders to draw forces away from the disputed areas. Jordan, who’s King had been trying for years to develop better relations with Israel, despite that country’s continued aggression against his people, refused to even mobilize any troops in the West Bank region. The Jordanian Air Force was laughably small compared to the mighty Israeli Air Force (IAF) and boasted only 24 antiquated Hawker Hunter fighters compared to Israel’s 200 modern jet fighters. David and Goliath indeed. Egypt, whose main army, some 50,000 well trained and well equipped troops, was tied down in a major civil war in Yemen at the time, was only to scrape together two rag tag armored divisions, composed mainly of reservists and poorly trained recruits driving out dated and dilapidated equipment and lacking sufficient food, ammunition or even water for more than a day or two of fighting. They were moved into defensive positions in the Sinai and told to just sit there. No plans were made to attack or even to defend themselves if they were attacked. As Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s Chief of Staff in 1967 put it "I do not think Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to The Sinai would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive war. He knew it and we knew it." Le Monde on 28 February 1968. This was just the excuse that Israel was looking for and at 07:45 civil defense sirens sounded all over Israel announcing the beginning of the war while at the same time the Israeli Air Force (IAF) struck Egyptian airbases without warning or provocation destroying most of the planes on the ground. The Israelis had been rehearsing this attack for years and their highly trained ground crews were able to refuel and rearm their planes in record time, allowing for up to four sorties a day compared to one or at most two for the Arab air forces. King of the skies. IAF planes Once the Egyptian Air Force was destroyed Israeli army, at 265,000 the biggest and best equipped in the region, some launched a surprise attack into the Sinai cutting the ill trained and under equipped Egyptian reservists to pieces, taking large numbers of prisoners, many of whom they murdered, their bodies being tossed into mass graves. “Ruah Shaked” (The Spirit of Shaked), Broadcast on Israel Channel 1 Philistines in their chariots of iron. Judges 4:3 Once the fighting had started the King Hussein of Jordan was forced into action and launched his ill prepared and ill equipped army against the Israeli Goliath in the desperate hope of relieving the pressure on the beleaguered Egyptians but his tiny air force was contemptuously swept aside by the mighty IAF who then proceeded to tear the Jordanian forces apart from the air. On June 6th, with Egypt largely knocked out of the fight Israeli ground forces turned their attention to Jordan. With complete control of the air the outcome of the fight was a forgone conclusion and by June 7th the air of Jerusalem was rent with the sound of Israeli Shofars, ram’s horn trumpets, gloating over their capture of the city. Israeli Chaplin blowing the Shofar. Following the destruction of the Egyptian Air Force the IAF struck the Syrian Air Force on the evening of June 5 and destroyed two thirds of it on the ground. Knowing that they stood no chance against the mighty Israeli army, particularly now that their air force had been rendered ineffective, the Syrians decided dig in their tiny 75,000 man army and to stand on the defensive. Their only contribution to the war was to shell Israeli positions in the Golan Heights. This did not save them and, once Egypt and Jordan had been destroyed the might Israeli Army turned its baleful eyes on Syria. They launched a brilliant pincer movement to cut off the Syrian army but the Syrians, seeing what had happed to the Egyptians and Jordanians, decided that discretion was the better part of valor and had withdrawn from their positions so that the Israeli jaws snapped shut on nothing. In the midst of all this fighting the Israelis still had time to stab their ally the United States in the back and on June 8 they launched a deliberate and premeditated attack on the intelligence ship USS Liberty. Although the Israelis tried to claim that the whole thing was a tragic mistake the crew of the most highly decorated warship in American history begs to differ. They were there and saw what happened and it is their opinion that the deaths of their 34 comrades were premeditated murder. USS Liberty bombed by Israel By June 10th Israel stood triumphant over the bodies of the Arab armies having killed some 21,000 at a cost of only 779 of their own soldiers, a dramatic demonstration of the power of the sneak attack. At a stroke Israel had almost doubled its size and although International Law and the Geneva Conventions forbid the colonization of occupied territories there were soon legions of land hungry and exulting Israelis flooding into the area, driving Palestinians from their homes so that they could set up illegal settlements. In the West Bank some 300,000 Palestinians fled before the conquering armies of Israel while in the Golan Heights, where Israeli land grabs had precipitated the war some 80,000 Syrians fled. To support these illegal settlements the Israeli Army has demolished some 1,300 Palestinian homes in the West Bank alone. Since then Israel has fought every attempt to bring peace to the region or give back what they conquered. Fleeing Israeli oppression Although supporters of Israel try to pretend that the Israelis were only defending themselves Former Israeli Prime Minister Menahem Begin said

“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.”

Why did Israel, whose founders had hoped that it would be a “light unto the world” in matters of justice and morality, decide to launch an unprovoked sneak attack? The former Commander of the IAF General Ezer Weitzman had the honesty to tell the blunt truth when he acknowledged that Israel faced 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.” The quality, scale and spirit that Israel now embodies has been labeled by former US President Jimmy Carter, and many others, as a state of Apartheid and Israel has rightly become one of the most feared and hated countries in the region if not in the world. It is fair to say that most of the problems that beset the region today can be traced back to that fateful morning of June 5 1967 when the Israeli Air Force sowed the winds of war. “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind” Hosea 8:7 The face of resistance.