Why, really, was the USS Liberty attacked by Israel?
In passing I’ll tell you why I was well informed in my television reporting days about what was happening behind closed doors in Israel. One of my sources, my deep-throat, was General Chaim Herzog, a founding father of Israel’s Directorate of Military Intelligence. (He went on to become Israel’s ambassador to the UN and eventually the state’s president). On the second day of the war, when he was advising me on the best route into the Sinai to catch up with the advancing Israelis, he said to me: “If Nasser had not been stupid enough to give us a pretext to go to war, we would have created one within a year or 18 months.”
Another summary truth about what happened in June 1967 is that there would NOT have been a war if Israel’s prime minister, the much maligned Levi Eshkol, and his Chief of Staff, General Yitzhak Rabin, had had their way. After Eygpt’s President Nasser had closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, they wanted only a limited military operation – to satisfy Israeli public opinion and, most of all, to put pressure on America to lead the international community in delivering on a promise President Eisenhower had made – that in the event of Eygpt closing the Straits of Tiran, the “society of nations” would be mobilized to cause the Straits to be re-opened by all means short of war. That was what Nasser was hoping would happen. For reasons of face, he needed to be able to say to the Arab world, “I backed down because of international pressure.”
So why didn’t Prime Minister Eshkol and Chief of Staff Rabin have their way?
The short answer is that in Israel the week before the war there was what amounted to a MILITARY COUP in all but name and without a shot being fired.
The best journalists have their brains not up here in their heads, but down here in their guts. From early May, my gut instincts were telling me that war was inevitable, and I persuaded my editor-in-chief at ITN (Independent Television News) to let me go to Israel with a film crew to report on the countdown to it. In those weeks I witnessed Israel’s military and political hawks rubbishing Prime Minister Eshkol. They were painting him as indecisive, weak and frightened to confront Nasser. Their objective was to create a crisis of confidence in his leadership ,in the hope that he would be forced to resign. When that didn’t happen, the generals demanded that Eshkol, who was both PM and Defense Minister, surrender his Defense Portfolio and give it to Israel’s one-eyed warlord and master of deception, General Moshe Dayan. And that’s what happened on Thursday 1 June, when a government of National Unity came into being. It was then inevitable that Israel would go to war in a matter of days. I actually predicted that it would do so on the morning of Monday 5 June.
Defense Minister Dayan (whom I knew quite well) was a law unto himself and had plans that went far beyond the war aim on which all of Israel’s generals were agreed. It was the total destruction of Eygpt’s Soviet supplied military equipment – planes, missiles, artillery, tanks, the lot. (For further background I have to tell you that Nasser had not wanted to be armed by the Soviet Union. He wanted America to be his arms supplier, and it was only when America refused that he turned in despair to the Soviet Union. Also true is that Nasser didn’t want an upgraded military for the purpose of initiating war with Israel. He wanted Eygpt to be well enough armed to be able to demonstrate to Israel that attacking Eygpt to impose Zionism’s will on it would not be a cost free option).
The key to understanding WHY Dayan ordered the attack on the Liberty is in President Johnson’s pre-war understanding with Israel’s generals. Probably through Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Johnson gave Israel’s generals the greenlight for war with Eygpt. But it was, effectively, a CONDITIONAL GREENLIGHT. On no account was Israel to widen the war the purpose of grabbing Jordanian and/or Syrian territory.
Dayan intended to do just that if and as the opportunity arose, but he had a problem. He knew, as all of Israel’s generals and politicians knew, that although they had Johnson’s greenlight to attack Eygpt, they would have only three or four days of complete freedom to act. Why? Because by the end of the third or fourth day, the Johnson administration would have to go along with a Security Council Resolution demanding an end to the fighting.
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