Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty – The full story
In Shlaim’s overview Greater Israel was created by chance. It just happened, was not policy. In my analysis that conclusion is both right and wrong. Right because Israel’s national unity government did not go to war with the intention of creating the Greater Israel of gut-Zionism’s mad dream. Wrong because Dayan did. From the moment he became Defence Minister and consigned to the dustbin of history the Rabin-Eshkol plan for limited military action, it was his war, not the government’s war. It was Dayan who took most if not all of the critical decisions, and in the case of his decision to attack Syria, he took it without consulting or informing Prime Minister Eshkol and Chief of Staff Rabin until after the attack had been launched.
Dayan’s “appetite” for more land came not from “eating” – not simply because the opportunities to eat were there. He was hungry because he was a gut-Zionist, conditioned by centuries of persecution, traumatised by the Nazi holocaust, driven by the belief that Gentiles were never to be trusted and, above all, convinced that the world would one day turn against the Jews again. I know he was convinced because he told me so. When that day came, Israel had to be big enough and secure enough to serve as the refuge of last resort for all the Jews of the world. Israel confined to its pre-1967 borders was not big enough and did not possess sufficient natural resources, water especially.
I once said the following to Dayan in private conversation: “What you really fear is that a day will come when the major powers will require Israel to be the sacrificial lamb on the altar of political expediency – just as in 1947 and 1948 they required the Palestinians to be the sacrifice on that altar.” Dayan replied, “You could put it like that.” Then, after a long pause, he added, “But we won’t let it happen.” Though he did not say so, he meant, “We have an independent nuclear deterrent and nobody is going to make Israel do what it does not want to do.”
So is there really need to call in the psychologists to explain Dayan’s behaviour, including and especially his truth-telling in conversation with Rami Tal for publication after his death? I think not. If the Syrians “were not a threat to us”, why did he order the IDF to attack them and grab a chunk of their territory – i.e. if not for the sole purpose of completing Zionism’s Greater Israel project? There was a part of the Dayan I knew that wanted to say out loud: “I created Greater Israel. I delivered on the promise our founding fathers made.” But there was also a part of Zionism’s warlord that knew it would not be a good idea to say so – in case the Greater Israel of his creation turned out to be, as it has, a ghastly mistake.
Dayan was never entirely comfortable in the presence of non-Jews and gave me the impression that he was sometimes uncomfortable with himself. I think he went to his grave wondering whether he had done the right or wrong thing for the best interests of Jews everywhere. On that basis the main difference between Moshe Dayan and Golda Meir defines itself. In the privacy of her own conscience (as I indicated in Volume One, Chapter One) she had the courage at the end of her days to consider the possibility that Zionism might have done the wrong thing. Dayan, at times the most charming and most engaging war criminal I ever met, did not have that kind of courage. It was moral courage and he allowed Zionism to rob him of it.
As it happened, the most vivid expression of Zionism’s Great Lie about the 1967 war was given voice by Prime Minister Eshkol himself. In the Knesset on 12 June he asserted that the war had been started by “the Arab invasion of Israeli territory.” He then said: “The very existence of the State of Israel hung upon a thread, but Arab leaders’ hopes of annihilating Israel have been confounded.”
A week earlier, in the first moments of the war, Foreign Minister Eban had launched the lie with an equally remarkable and astonishing statement. In the course of his assertion to reporters (including me) that Israel was acting in self-defence, he said: “Never in history has there been a more righteous use of armed force.” In retrospect, it could and should be said that never in history has a country’s foreign minister talked such nonsense. Thereafter Israel’s ambassadors around the world spoke from Eban’s script.
We know that our leaders tell lies in war (and peace), and that disinformation is sometimes necessary if right is to triumph over wrong. But why, really, did Israel’s leaders lie, and lie so completely, in 1967?
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