Netanyahu’s False Narrative
March 4, 2015
As
members of the U.S. Congress bobbed up and down with applause, Israeli Prime
Minister Netanyahu spun a tale of brave little Israel fretting about its
survival, but he left out the fact that Israel has a large arsenal of nuclear
weapons and has often been the one to invade its neighbors, as Marjorie Cohn
recalls.
By
Marjorie Cohn
On
March 3, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued an impassioned plea
to Congress to protect Israel by opposing diplomacy with Iran. Referring to
“the remarkable alliance between Israel and the United States” which includes
“generous military assistance and missile defense,” Netanyahu failed to mention
that Israel has an arsenal of 100 or 200 nuclear weapons.
The
day before he delivered that controversial address, Netanyahu expressed similar
sentiments to AIPAC, Israel’s powerful U.S. lobby. He reiterated the claim that
Israel acted in the 1967 Six-Day War “to defend itself.” The narrative that
Israel attacked Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in self-defense, seizing the
Palestinian territories in the West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem, the Golan Heights,
and the Sinai Peninsula in 1967, has remained largely unquestioned in the
public discourse.
An Israeli soldier prepares for a night
attack inside Gaza as part of Operation Protective Edge, which killed more than
2,000 Gazans in 2014. (Israel Defense Forces photo)
Israel
relies on that narrative to continue occupying those Palestinian lands. And the
powerful film “Censored Voices,” which premiered at Sundance in February, does
not challenge that narrative.
But
declassified high-level documents from Britain, France, Russia and the United
States reveal that Egypt, Syria and Jordan were not going to attack Israel and
Israel knew it. In fact, they did not attack Israel. Instead, Israel mounted
the first attack in order to decimate the Egyptian army and take the West Bank.
For
two weeks following the Six Day War, Amos Oz and Avrahim Shapira visited
Israeli kibbutzim and recorded interviews with several Israeli Defense Forces
(IDF) soldiers who had just returned from that war. Largely censored by the
Israeli government for many years, those reels have finally been made public.
“Censored Voices” features the taped voices of young IDF soldiers, as the
aging, former soldiers sit silently beside the tape recorder, listening to
their own voices.
The
testimonies documented in the tapes reveal evidence of targeting civilians and
summarily executing prisoners, which constitute war crimes. A soldier asks
himself, “They’re civilians – should I kill them or not?” He replies, “I didn’t
even think about it. Just kill! Kill everyone you see.”
Likewise,
one voice notes, “Several times we captured guys, positioned them and just
killed them.” Another reveals, “In the war, we all became murderers.” Still
another says, “Not only did this war not solve the state’s problems, but it
complicated them in a way that’ll be very hard to solve.”
One
soldier likens evacuating Arab villages to what the Nazis did to Jews in
Europe. As a soldier watched an Arab man being taken from his home, the soldier
states, “I had an abysmal feeling that I was evil.”
In
what proved to be a prescient question, one soldier asks, “Are we doomed to
bomb villages every decade for defensive purposes?” Indeed, Israel justifies
all of its assaults on Gaza as self-defense, even though Israel invariably
attacks first, and kills overwhelming numbers of Palestinians – mostly
civilians. Each time, many fewer Israelis are killed by Palestinian
rockets.
Israel’s False Self-Defense Claim
The
film begins by showing a map of Israel surrounded by Egypt, Syria and Jordan,
with arrows from each country aimed at Israel. The IDF soldiers felt those Arab
countries posed an existential threat to Israel.
“There
was a feeling it would be a Holocaust,” one soldier observed. The Israeli media
claimed at the time that Egypt had attacked Israel by land and by air on June
5, 1967. According to British journalist Patrick Seale, “Israel’s preparation
of opinion” was “brilliantly managed,” a “remarkable exercise in psychological
warfare.”
In
his book, The Six-Day War and Israeli
Self-Defense: Questioning the Legal Basis for Preventive War, published by
Cambridge University Press, Ohio State University law professor John Quigley
documents conversations by high government officials in Israel, the United
States, Egypt, the Soviet Union, France, and Britain leading up to the Six-Day
War.
He
draws on minutes of British cabinet meetings, a French government publication,
U.S. documents in “Foreign Relations of the United States,” and Russian
national archives. Those conversations make clear that Israel knew Egypt, Syria
and Jordan would not and did not attack Israel, and that Israel initiated the
attacks.
Egypt
was the only one of the three Arab countries that had a military of any
consequence. Israeli General Yitzhak Rabin told the Israeli cabinet that the
Egyptian forces maintained a defensive posture, and Israeli General Meir Amit,
head of Mossad (Israeli’s intelligence agency), informed U.S. Defense
Secretary Robert McNamara that Egypt was not poised to attack Israel. Both the
United States and the Soviet Union urged Israel not to attack. Nevertheless,
Israel’s cabinet voted on June 4 to authorize the IDF to invade Egypt.
“After
the cabinet vote,” Quigley writes, “informal discussion turned to ways to make
it appear that Israel was not starting a war when in fact that was precisely
what it was doing.”
Moshe
Dayan, who would soon become Israel’s Minister of Defense, ordered military
censorship, saying, “For the first twenty-four hours, we have to be the victims.”
Dayan admitted in his memoirs, “We had taken the first step in the war with
Egypt.” Nevertheless, Israel’s UN Ambassador Gideon Rafael reported to the
Security Council that Israel had acted in self-defense.
“The
hostilities were attacks by the Israeli air force on multiple Egyptian
airfields, aimed at demolishing Egyptian aircraft on the ground,” according to
Quigley. On June 5, the CIA told President Lyndon B. Johnson, “Israel fired the
first shots today.”
Article
51 of the UN Charter authorizes states to act in collective self-defense after
another member state suffers an armed attack. Although Jordan and Syria
responded to the Israeli attacks on Egypt, they – and Egypt – inflicted little
damage to Israel. By the afternoon of June 5, Israel “had virtually destroyed
the air war capacity of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria,” Quigley notes. “The IDF
achieved the ‘utter defeat’ of the Egyptian army on June 7 and 8.”
United States Empowers Israel
U.S.
Secretary of State Dean Rusk said that U.S. officials were “angry as hell, when
the Israelis launched their surprise offensive.” Yet, Quigley notes, “Israel’s
gamble paid off in that the United States would not challenge Israel’s story
about how the fighting started. Even though it quickly saw through the story, the
White House kept its analysis to itself.”
Although
Security Council resolution 242, passed in 1967, refers to “the inadmissibility
of the acquisition of territory by war” and calls for “withdrawal of Israel
armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict,” Israel
continues to occupy the Palestinian territories it acquired in the Six-Day War.
Israel
has abandoned its claim that Egypt attacked first. Yet the international
community considers that Israel acted in lawful anticipatory self-defense.
Quigley explains how the UN Charter only permits the use of armed force after
an armed attack on a UN member state; it does not authorize anticipatory,
preventive, or preemptive self-defense.
“The
UN did not condemn Israel in 1967 for its attack on Egypt,” Antonio Cassese of
the University of Florence explained. Quigley attributes this to Cold War
politics, as the USSR supported Egypt. “For the United States in particular,
Israel’s success was a Cold War defeat for the USSR. The United States was hardly
prepared to condemn Israel after it performed this service.”
The
United States continues to support Israel by sending it $3 billion per year in
military aid, even when Israel attacks Gaza with overwhelming firepower, as it
did in the summer of 2014, killing 2,100 Palestinians (mostly civilians).
Sixty-six Israeli soldiers and seven civilians were killed.
If
Israel were to mount an attack on Iran, the United States would invariably
support Israel against Iran and any Arab country that goes to Iran’s defense.
Indeed, Netanyahu intoned to Congress, “may Israel and America always stand
together.”
Marjorie Cohn is a professor at
Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild,
and deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic
Lawyers. Her most recent book is Drones
and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues.
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