Sunday, June 10, 2007
Jeff Jacoby does his usual excellent work in today's Boston Globe: Six days to remember -- accurately
On the BBC website, for example, Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen's retrospective on the war begins by noting that "it took only six days for Israel to smash the armed forces of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria." It goes on to emphasize that "the Israeli Air Force destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground on the morning of 5 June 1967 in a surprise attack."
But the BBC makes no reference to anything the Arabs might have done to provoke Israel's attack, other than broadcasting "bloodcurdling threats" on the radio. The vast buildup of Arab armies along Israel's border, the expulsion of UN peacekeepers from the Sinai Peninsula by Egyptian ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser, the closing of the Straits of Tiran, an illegal blockade cutting Israel off from its main supply of oil -- none of this is mentioned by the BBC.
Instead, Bowen claims that Israel's "hugely self-confident" generals couldn't wait to go to war because they knew they couldn't lose. (In reality, Israel's military and political leaders were deeply anxious; so severe was the stress that Yitzhak Rabin, the chief of staff, suffered a nervous breakdown.) "The myth of the 1967 Middle East war," declares Bowen, turning history on its head, "was that the Israeli David slew the Arab Goliath."...
...Considering how often the "occupation" is identified as the chief impediment to Arab-Israeli peace, you might expect 40th-anniversary discussions of the war to grapple with the fact that there was no occupation in 1967, when the Arabs were massing for war on Israel's borders. But that would mean acknowledging that Arab hatred and violence caused the occupation -- not, as current fashion has it, the other way around...
At today's meeting of Christians and Jews United for Israel, I heard a Rabbi discuss his visit to Israel before 1967, when Jews were not allowed anywhere near the Western Wall (to say nothing of the Temple Mount). He was standing on a hill with binoculars, straining just to catch a glimpse of the Wall when his guy ordered him to put them down...the glint from the glass could attract Jordanian sniper fire. So it was that before 1967, Jews couldn't even gaze upon the Wall through a glass.
Yet the first thing Moshe Dayan did was hand the keys to the Temple Mount over to the Waqf...
One of the more persistent anti-Semites and Holocaust Deniers on the net is M*tt G*w*r (the missing vowels are "a" "i" and "e"). His webpage has a page explaining why it is a legitimate act of war to kill any Israeli.
What bothers me is that this is the attitude that is becoming mainstream. How long before Denial follows?
The revisionism is becoming alarming. I think it's organized but maybe I'm just being paranoid. However the whole process is more than a little Orwellian.
First a totally false view of history is presented, including Holocaust Denial as pointed out above. Other websites spout lies about the 1948 war, portraying the Jewish forces as heavily armed, 1st world troops number over 100,000 men - when in fact, at the beginning of the war, only about 1/5 that number were (poorly) armed, there were a few Piper Cubs, and there were cases when survivors just off the boats from Europe were rushed into the lines. Jerusalem was rescued only by an acts of great heroism and at great cost.
I'm grateful to writers like Jacoby who are speaking the truth and more disgusted than usual with BBC. And Time??? What is the point of this - of completely ignoring the other people involved and forgetting the Jordanian annexation and attack AND - also very important - and something that should be discussed openly - the first King Abdullah's possible reasons for not wanting to empower a state led by al Husseini.
Thanks, Sol, for the article and the links.