Why, really, was the USS Liberty attacked by Israel?
To guarantee that Israel could complete the job on the Egyptian front in a race against the diplomatic time clock, Dayan had to assign the bulk of Israel’s armour, including elements of it that would be needed for an extended war on the Jordanian and Syrian fronts, to the Sinai.
Now to the significance of what I witnessed in the Sinai on the afternoon of Thursday 8 June when (unknown to me at the time) the Liberty had been silenced…. Scores of Israeli tanks and armoured personnel carriers, which had blitzkrieged their way through the Sinai sand, were being loaded onto huge lorries with trailers for transportation to the north, and re-deployment to the Jordanian and Syrian fronts. The orders for this re-deployment were coming by radio from Dayan’s staff at the Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv.
This takes us to what the Liberty’s mission was.
It was assigned to listen to all of Israel’s military communications because some in the highest levels of American military and political decision-making did not trust the Israelis to keep their word about not extending the war to take chunks of Jordanian and Syrian territory, to create a Greater Israel of Zionism’s mad dream.
The biggest fear of those who didn’t trust Israel was the possible consequence of an Israeli attack on Syria, which had also been armed by the Soviet Union. The reasoning behind the fear went something like this. Soviet leaders almost certainly could and would live with the humiliating defeat of their Egyptian client, but for reasons of face they might not be able to live with the humiliating defeat of their Syrian client also. And that raised at least the possibility – if Israel attacked Syria – of Soviet military intervention, leading to the Cold War going Hot. (And this at a time when American forces were getting bogged down in an unwinnable war in Vietnam).
The idea behind the Liberty’s deployment was that if it picked up messages indicating that Israel was re-deploying from the Sinai to launch major offensives in the north, and against Syria in particular, the evidence of Israeli intent and duplicity would be passed to Johnson, and that he would then pick up the ‘phone to Prime Eshkol and say something like: “We know what your generals are up to. You must order them to stop, and if you don’t or can’t, I will.”
Simply stated, the Liberty was on station as the Johnson administration’s insurance policy. It’s main mission was to prevent Israel going to war with Syria and possibly provoking a U.S-Soviet confrontation.
Dayan ordered the attack on the Liberty to prevent it giving the Johnson administration early warning of his intentions to extend the war.
As it happened, Israel’s last land grab of the war – the taking for keeping of the Syrian Golan Heights – DID provoke the threat of Soviet military intervention. For some hours there was the prospect of a superpower confrontation and possibly World War III. But at the brink, catastrophe was averted by use of the White House-Kremlin hot line.
Of all the evidence indicating that Dayan didn’t want any of the Liberty’s crew to live to tell the story, the most compelling in my view is the use of NAPALM during the attack. In Vietnam I saw what napalm can do. It reduces targeted human bodies to small piles of squelchy, black pulp.
So far as I am aware, the only honest piece of reporting in the American media in the immediate aftermarth of the attack was on 19 June in Newsweek’s “Periscope” section. A small item in that read as follows:
“Although Israel’s apologies were officially accepted, some high Washington officials believe the Israelis knew the Liberty’s capabilities and suspect that the attack might not have been accidental. One top-level theory holds that someone in the Israeli armed forces ordered the Liberty sunk because he suspected it had taken down messages showing that Israel started the fighting.”
One could salute Newsweek’s brief moment of courage, but in one important respect the item was very wide of the mark. Everybody in Washington’s war-loop who needed to know did know that Israel had started the war and that President Johnson had given it the greenlight to do so.
For many years there has been speculation that an Israeli general opposed Dayan’s decision to attack the Liberty and said it would amount to “Pure murder“? Who was that general? I think I know.
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