Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty – The full story
“In the twilight and semi-blacked-out streets, hundreds of thousands, some of them still in pyjamas and the women in nightgowns, came out of their houses weeping and shouting, ‘Nasser, Nasser, don’t leave us, we need you.’ The noise was like a rising storm. Tens of thousands threatened to kill any deputies who did not vote for Nasser. Half a million people massed along the five miles from Nasser’s home, millions more began to pour into Cairo from all over Egypt to make sure that Nasser stayed.”
The following day, while the IDF was going for the Golan Heights, the National Assembly, by a unanimous decision, invited Nasser to remain as President.
It might have been that he resigned in the hope and even the expectation that his announcement would trigger a popular response in his favour, but there can be no doubt that it was spontaneous. Why, really, did it happen?
In my analysis the best way to explain it is by comparing perceptions.
Zionism had succeeded in selling its lie for the war. As a consequence (generally speaking), Nasser was perceived in America and throughout the Western world as the common enemy in general and, in particular, the Arab aggressor who had gone to war to annihilate the Jewish state. If that’s what you believed, whether you were Jewish or not, the events in Cairo following Nasser’s resignation statement were perplexing. He had led his people to catastrophe. He was a disaster for them. Surely now they would see that and, if he did not quit, they would overthrow him. Or ought to.
The perception of the people of Egypt and almost all Arabs everywhere was rather different and rooted in reality. In it the Zionist state was the aggressor and the Arabs were the victims of aggression. There were, of course, some Egyptians who realised that Nasser had made mistakes and miscalculations which had contributed to the disaster – given Israel’s hawks and their American conspirators the pretext they wanted for war. But such criticism as there was of Nasser for his leadership failings was the small-print on the invoice for catastrophe.
In summary: The vast majority of Egyptians, and very many other Arabs, still saw Nasser for what he really was – the symbol of their wish not to be dominated, not to be controlled and exploited by the combined forces of emerging American imperialism (replacing British and French imperialism) and its Zionist ally.
That’s why Nasser survived.
I think the best account of the 1967 war by any Jewish writer, Israeli or other, is in Avi Shlaim’s revision of modern Israel’s history: but I think his conclusions about what really happened on the Israeli side in the war miss a fundamental point. (I remain puzzled by the fact that he did not mention the attack on the Liberty, let alone the reasons for it). Shlaim wrote:
“Dayan’s various accounts of the reasons for war against Syria are so alarmingly inconsistent that one indeed needs to be a psychologist to fathom his behaviour. But one thing emerges clearly from all his contradictory accounts: the Eshkol government did not have a political plan for the conduct of the war. It was divided internally, it debated options endlessly, it improvised and it seized opportunities as they presented themselves. It hoped for war on one front, was drawn to war on a second front and ended up by initiating war on a third front. The one thing it did not have was a master plan for territorial aggrandisement. Its territorial aims were defined not in advance but in response to developments on the battlefield. Appetite comes with eating. The decision-making process of the Eshkol government during the war was complex, confused, convoluted. It did not bear the slightest resemblance to what political scientists like to call ‘the rational actor model.’”
The notion that one needed to be a psychologist to fathom Dayan’s intentions was inspired by a remark made by Eshkol’s aide-de-camp, Israel Lior. He said that, hard as he tried, he was unable to fathom Dayan’s intentions, and thought his decisions needed to be examined by a psychologist no less than by a historian.
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