Why, really, was the USS Liberty attacked by Israel?
Despite the fact that in his own memoirs he went along with the fiction that Israeli pilots failed to identify the Liberty as a U.S. ship and that the attack was a tragic mistake, I think it was, very probably, Chief of Staff Rabin – the Israeli leader who, many years later as prime minister, was stopped from advancing the peace process with Arafat and his PLO by a Zionist assassin. In the time available to me this evening, I’ll give you just one reason of several why I’m convinced it was Rabin who opposed Dayan.
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, very close to Dayan. It was then 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 was not unthinkable if he shared – and he probably did – Eshkol’s private view of Israel’s one-eyed 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 Avi Shlaim, one of Israel’s leading “revisionist”, which means honest, historians). 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.
Who was it who described Thursday 8 June 1967 as a “Great Day“?
That evening Egypt’s President sent the following message to his Syrian counterpart:
“I believe that Israel is about to concentrate all of its forces against Syria in order to destroy the Syrian army, and regard for the common cause obliges me to advise you to agree to the ending of hostilities and to inform U Thant (UN Secretary General) immediately, in order to preserve Syria’s great army. We have lost this battle. May God help us in the future. Your brother, Gamal Abdul Nasser.”
That Nasser message, no doubt like all others, was intercepted by Israeli military intelligence. In the margin of a copy of it, Dayan scribbled the following note:
“Eshkol,
1. In my opinion this cable obliges us to capture maximal military lines.
2. Yesterday I did not think Egypt and Syria would collapse in this way and give up the continuation of the campaign. But since this is the situation, it must be exploited to the full.
A GREAT DAY. Moshe Dayan.”
The Syrian leadership took Nasser’s advice and announced its acceptance of the cease-fire. It came into effect at 0520 hours the following morning, Friday 9 June. So far as the Arabs and the organised international community represented by the UN were concerned, the war was over…. Six hours and ten minutes later, the IDF invaded Syria. Dayan had postponed the attack to allow for the redeployment of IDF units from Sinai – a redeployment that might not have been possible, Dayan had believed, if the Liberty was allowed to go on listening to IDF movement orders.
I end my chapter on this Israeli war crime with this sentence:
The lesson of the cold-blooded attack on the Liberty was that there is nothing the Zionist state might not do, to its friends as well as its enemies, in order to get its own way.
Now to my explanation of why the truth needs its necessary context and must be handled with great care.
The problem with the truth, not only the truth about Israel’s attack on the Liberty but its ethnic cleansing of Palestine and many other manifestation’s of its arrogance of power and contempt for international law, is that it’s pregnant with extreme danger because it could provoke anti-Semitism throughout the Western world where most Jews live as citizens of many nations. There is, however, a way to exorcise this extreme danger. It is by explaining the difference between Judaism and Zionism. I believe that knowledge of this difference is THE key to understanding.
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