Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty – The full story
As it was happening Rabin was opposed to the IDF’s gobbling up of the West Bank. At a meeting of senior officers with Dayan present, Rabin had asked, “How do we control one million Arabs?” He meant: “We won’t be able to. The idea of occupation is madness. We could well be sowing the seeds of catastrophe for the Jewish state.” The only response Rabin got was by way of a correction. A staff officer said: “Actually it’s one million, two hundred and fifty thousand.” As Shlaim noted, Rabin had asked the question to which no one had an answer. The real point was that nobody in the military high command except Rabin wanted to think about the implications of what the IDF was doing. More Arab land was there for the taking, so take it.
Rabin was opposed to an invasion of Syria. In his memoirs he wrote that Dayan ordered the attack on Syria “for reasons I have never grasped.” In my analysis that was Rabin pulling his punches. He knew why Dayan ordered the attack on Syria – to take the Golan Heights to complete the creation of Greater Israel; but he, Rabin, was not going to say so except by implication.
When the Liberty was being attacked, the insider gossip in Israel was that Rabin had “lost his nerve… cracked under the pressure… was drinking heavily… was under the table… a disgrace.” I first heard this gossip from Israeli friends I knew to be very close to Dayan. And it was former DMI Herzog who confirmed to me that such rumours were rife. In retrospect I think the gossip was inspired by Dayan to give him scope to discredit Rabin if the need arose – if he so much as hinted to anybody outside the command circle that he had tried to prevent the attack on the Liberty. (Could it not be said that the idea of attacking the Liberty was enough to drive any rational human being, even an Israeli general, to drink?) The idea that Rabin might have been tempted to make trouble for Dayan is not unthinkable if he shared -and he probably did – Eshkol’s private view of Israel’s warlord.
When the prime minister learned that Dayan had ordered the attack on Syria without consulting or informing himself or Chief of Staff Rabin, he thought about cancelling the order and said of Dayan, to his aide-de-camp, “What a vile man.” That quotation was unearthed by Shlaim. What could have made Eshkol resort to such extraordinary language? My guess is that use of the adjective “vile” reflected most of all the prime minister’s horror at Dayan’s ordering of the attack on the Liberty.
As related by Seymour Hersh, Eshkol also had a pungent way of expressing his grave doubts about the wisdom of keeping occupied territory. After the war Abe Feinberg visited Israel and Eshkol said to him (in Yiddish): “What am I going to do with a million Arabs? They fuck like rabbits.”
With the Liberty taken out of the equation, the first indication official Washington had of Dayan’s intentions thereafter was in the form of a “flash” telegram to Secretary of State Rusk from Evan Wilson, the U.S. Consul General in Jerusalem. (“Flash” was the highest precedence designation for State messages). Quoting the UN’s General Odd Bull, the telegram said that Israel had launched an “intensive air and artillery bombardment” of Syrian positions, and that Wilson assumed it was a “prelude to a large-scale attack.” That message was sent, flashed, at about 1530 hours local time, just before Dayan ordered the MTBs to finish off the Liberty.
Rusk was furious and wanted to take immediate action. The fact that it took him the best part of an hour to get President Johnson’s permission to read the riot act to Israel suggests that he had a considerable amount of internal opposition to overcome. (I can imagine the Rostow brothers joining forces – Eugene in the State Department, Walt in the White House – to have the President clip the Secretary of State’s wings). Rusk’s eventual response was another “flash” message in the form of an instruction to Walworth Barbour, the U.S. Ambassador to Israel. He was ordered, urgently, to approach the Israeli Foreign Ministry at the highest level to express “deep concern” at the new indication of military action by Israel. The text of Rusk’s instruction to Barbour included the following:
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