Some Israeli leaders do sometimes tell the truth
For the first time the colonel looked up. There was an arrogance in his eyes and contempt in his voice. “You ought to know that Israel is a democracy”, he said. “We don’t censor opinion. Your story is opinion. You are free to express it. We censor only matters of a military nature that could be of use to our enemies.”
Shortly after that I sat in a small booth and delivered my text into a microphone for recording by ITN in London. My voice report would be overlaid with a picture of me and some library footage. One of the many good things about ITN was that it trusted the judgement of its reporters in the field. But… Later that evening I received the following cable from Hans Verhoven, the duty foreign editor who had really liked my piece. “REGRET YOUR GOOD SPECULATIVE STORY UNUSED STOP SQUEEZED OUT BY EVENTS STOP”
“Squeezed out” meant they had intended to run it. They had been prepared to back my judgement even though all other reporters and diplomats in the major capitals of the world were saying “No war”. But two civilian airliners had crashed – one in the English midlands and the other in France. From both locations there had been miles of dramatic film footage (moving pictures in every sense of the word) of the wreckage and distraught relatives of the dead and dying. My speculative story had not had a chance in a short Sunday evening bulletin.
At 07.45 the following morning Israel went to war. Fate had denied me the scoop of a war correspondent’s lifetime.
Israel’s immediate justification for its action was that it had been attacked by Egypt. When it quickly became obvious to all who mattered in the major capitals of the world that Israel was lying, the story changed. Israel had had to take pre-emptive action because the Arabs were going to attack. That, too, was propaganda nonsense.
In conclusion for now I’ll put some flesh on the bone of my headline for this article.
If the statement that the Arabs were not intending to attack Israel and that its existence was not in danger was only that of a goy, it could be dismissed by Zionists as anti-Semitic conjecture. In fact the truth of ithas been admitted by some of the key Israeli players. Here is a short summary of some pertinent, post-war Israeli confessions.
In an interview published in Le Monde on 28 February 1968, Israeli Chief of Staff Rabin said this: “I do not believe that Nasser wanted war. The two divisions which he sent into Sinai on 14 May would not have been enough to unleash an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it.”
On 14 April 1971, a report in the Israeli newspaper Al-Hamishmar contained the following statement by Mordecai Bentov, a member of the wartime national government. “The entire story of the danger of extermination was invented in every detail and exaggerated to justify the annexation of new Arab territory.”
On 4 April 1972, the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv contained the following statement by General Haim Bar-Lev, Rabin’s predecessor as chief of staff. “We were not threatened with genocide on the eve of the Six Day War, and we had never thought of such a possibility.”
In the same Israeli newspaper on the same day, General Ezer Weizmann, Chief of Operations during the war and a nephew of Chaim Weizmann, was quoted as saying the following. “There was never any danger of annihilation. This hypothesis has never been considered in any serious meeting.”
In the spring of 1972, General Matetiyahu Peled, Chief of Logistical Command during the war and one of 12 members of Israel’s General Staff, addressed a political literary club in Tel Aviv. He said: “The thesis according to which the danger of genocide hung over us in June 1967, and according to which Israel was fighting for her very physical survival, was nothing but a bluff which was born and bred after the war.”
And in a radio debate Peled said: “Israel was never in real danger and there was no evidence that Egypt had any intention of attacking Israel. Israeli intelligence knew that Egypt was not prepared for war.”
In the same programme General Chaim Herzog (a former Director of Military Intelligence, future Israeli Ambassador to the UN and President of his state) said: “There was no danger of annihilation. Neither Israeli headquarters nor the Pentagon – as the memoirs of President Johnson proved – believed in this danger.”
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