Why, really, was the USS Liberty attacked by Israel?
Now to my explanation of why, really, the Liberty was attacked. I’m going to follow this with some thoughts about why the truth has to be given its necessary context and handled with great care.
I’ll start by telling you where I was on Thursday 8 June 1967. I was in the Sinai desert. I was the first Western correspondent to the banks of the Suez Canal with the advancing Israelis. On reflection some years later, I realised that what I witnessed in the desert, well out of sight and sound of the attack on the Liberty, was a key to understanding why America’s most advanced and sophisticated spy-ship (perhaps I should say intelligence-gathering platform) was attacked. I’ll come to what I witnessed in a moment.
First, and to provide some context to assist complete understanding, I must summarise very briefly the whole truth about that particular war. By elements in the mainstream media which peddle Zionist propaganda, and other elements of it which are terrified of offending Zionism either too much or at all, the Western world was conditioned to believe that Israel went to war because it was in danger of annihilation – “the driving in the sea of its Jews”.
Zionism’s first assertion was that the Arabs started the war by attacking Israel. Zionism’s second story was that the Arabs were intending to attack and that in the name of self-defense, Israel had no option but to launch a pre-emptive strike because its very survival was at stake. Both those stories were big, fat, propaganda lies. The Arabs did not attack and were not intending to attack. It was a war of Israeli choice and aggression.
If that was only my Gentile view, it could be dismissed by supporters of Israel right or wrong as an alleged manifestation of anti-Semitism. But let me now tell you this. The forthcoming Volume 3 of my book begins with the longest chapter in the entire work. It’s titled America Takes Sides, War With Nasser Act II; and the Creation of a Greater Israel. In this chapter I name and quote a number of Israel’s political and military leaders of the time who, years after the war in most cases, admitted the truth. There isn’t time this evening for me to name and quote them all, but here to make the point are four:
- In an interview published in Le Monde on 28 February 1968, Israeli Chief of Staff Rabin said: “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 a posteriori to justify the annexation of new Arab territory.”
- In the spring of 1972, General 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.” 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.” He added, “Israeli intelligence knew that Egypt was not prepared for war.”
- In 1982, Prime Minister Begin, arguably the world’s most successful terrorist leader, went even further. He said : “In June 1967 we had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches did not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us, We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”
When I was writing the chapter on the 1967 war, I found myself saying to my readers that there were times, this was one of them, when I wanted to “cry out with the pain of knowing how much Israel’s Jews (not to mention the whole of the Western world) had been deceived, lied to, by their leaders“.
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