Essence of the suppressed truth
For the first two or three days of the 1973 war virtually the whole world believed that Israel really was in danger of defeat and annihilation. It was not. Despite the fact that Eygpt and Syria started the action, Sadat’s war plan was only for his forces to cross the Suez Canal and stop. Which is what they did, There was not an Egyptian intention to attack Israel or even to try to regain more Israeli-occupied Egyptian territory. And the Syrian war aim was limited to trying to take back the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Fundamentally it was Sadat’s war for peace in secret collusion with the new American Secretary of State, Dr. Henry Kissinger. He wanted to teach his intransigent Israeli friends a little lesson in the hope that he could then bounce them into a separate peace process with Egypt. Kissinger knew that if Egypt could be taken out of the military equation, the Arabs could never fight Israel even if they wanted to; and Israel would then be completely free to impose its will on the whole Arab world. It all went badly wrong for Sadat and Kissinger when Israel’s generals realised that their American friend had colluded with Sadat. With General Sharon in the lead, they then decided to teach Kissinger as well as Sadat a lesson… Initially, and on Kissinger’s say so, President Nixon refused to supply Israel with the replacement weapons it needed. And that was why Israeli Defense Minister Dayan ordered the arming of two missiles with nuclear warheads, with Cairo and Damascus their targets. Dayan’s message to Kissinger and Nixon was something very like, “If you don’t give us what we want, we’ll go nuclear.” I tell the story of this war in Volume 3 of my book in a Chapter titled The Yom Kippur War and “Nuclear Blackmail”.
Complete understanding of why Israel’s existence has never, ever, been in danger from any combination of Arab force is assisted by this fact. When the Palestine file was closed by Israel’s victory on the battlefield in 1948 and Jordan’s annexation of the West Bank, it was not supposed to have been re-opened. There was not supposed to have been a regeneration of Palestinian nationalism. The Palestinians were supposed to accept their lot as the sacrificial lamb on the altar of political expediency.
And the whole truth includes this fact. Behind closed doors, and despite their rhetoric to the contrary, the Arab regimes shared the same hope as Zionism and the major powers - that the Palestine file would never be re-opened. They knew that if it was, there would one day have to be a confrontation with Israel and its big power supporters, the U.S. in particular, and they didn’t want that.
They, the Arab regimes, also feared that a Palestinian state, if it was ever established, would be more or less democratic and provide a model of government which all Arabs would want. Palestinian nationalism was therefore perceived by Arab autocrats as a potentially subversive force.
For their part Israel’s leaders were aware that if they failed to keep the Palestine file closed, a regeneration of Palestinian nationalism would cause the legitimacy of Zionism’s colonial-like enterprise to be called into question. Which is what is now happening.
The second of Zionism’s two biggest and most successful propaganda lies is in the assertion that Israel had “no partners for peace.”
The best introduction to the truth of history on this aspect of the matter is one sentence in a remarkable book, The Iron Wall, Israel and the Arab World, by Avi Shlaim, one of Israel’s leading “revisionist” which means honest historians. He wrote: “The files of the Israeli Foreign Ministry burst with evidence of Arab peace feelers and Arab readiness to negotiate with Israel from September 1948 on.” It’s worth repeating “from September 1948 on.” Avi was the first to have access to these files when they were de-classified.
In the time available to me on this platform today I’ll settle for just two examples of this Arab readiness or pragmatism. Which could also be called betrayal of the Palestinian cause.
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