A 3rd feature promoting the BBC’s chosen Six Day War narrative - by Hadar Sela

...Like the other recent Six Day War features by Tom Bateman and Jeremy Bowen, this article by Paul Adams is essentially an exercise in advancing a transparent political narrative according to which the modern-day conflict is exclusively rooted in the outcome of those six days in June 1967 – especially the ‘occupation’ and ‘settlements’. And like those other two articles, Adams’ advancement of that narrative does not serve the purpose of enhancing audience understanding of either the root causes of that war, the ones that preceded and followed it or the continued lack of progress in resolving the century-long conflict.

Hadar Sela..
BBC Watch..
11 June '17..

On June 9th an article by the BBC’s diplomatic correspondent Paul Adams was published in the ‘features’ section of the BBC News website’s Middle East page under the title “Six Day War: Six ways the conflict still matters“.

Like other items included in the BBC’s coverage of the 50th anniversary of that war, the main – but inaccurate – message behind Adams’ article is that the modern-day conflict has its roots in that week in June 1967.

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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BBC’s Six Day War backgrounder video falls very short - by Hadar Sela

...Once again we see that the BBC is not in the least committed to providing its audiences with the full range of accurate and impartial information that would enhance their knowledge and understanding of an event it so vigorously promotes.

Hadar Sela..
BBC Watch..
06 June '17..

On June 5th a video billed “1967 Six Day War – in 60 seconds” appeared on the BBC News website’s main homepage and its Middle East page.

The video itself is titled “Six Day War: What happened – in 60 seconds” and its synopsis reads:

“In June 1967, Israel and Arab countries fought a war which lasted six days, but changed the face of the Middle East.”

The video’s opening frame tells viewers that they are about to learn “How the conflict unfolded”. However, the events which caused Israel to launch what the BBC rightly recognises as “a pre-emptive strike” are bizarrely erased from this account.

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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An eternal people who are not deterred by a long path - by Dr. Haim Shine

...Most Israelis identify with the words of Prophet Zechariah: "After having saved my people from the land of the east and from the land of the west, I will also bring them back to live in the midst of Jerusalem" (Zechariah 8:7-8). We have won in the past and we will win in the future, because we have no other country.

Dr. Haim Shine..
IsraelHayom..
06 June '16..
Link: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=16323

We'll always win

During the Six-Day War in 1967, I was a high school student in Tel Aviv. Ahead of the war, my classmates and I were sent to dig trenches on Jerusalem Boulevard in Jaffa. On the homefront, there was a sense of being under siege, as Israel once again faced the threat of being overrun by large enemy armies. Israel's political leaders, as revealed by recently published documents, were tired and frightened. Israel's military leaders, on the other hand, demonstrated determination and a fighting spirit. Believing in the IDF's power, they were prepared to stare down our enemies and defeat them.

Then-GOC Northern Command David Elazar advocated a pre-emptive strike and believed the IDF should take the fight to the enemy on the other side of the Green Line. GOC Southern Command Yeshayahu Gavish complained that Israel's political leaders did not believe in the IDF's power. GOC Central Command Uzi Narkiss told Chief IDF Rabbi Shlomo Goren to prepare a shofar to blow after the IDF liberated Jerusalem's Old City. Over the course of six days, IDF troops changed the face of Jewish history forever. "When the Lord brought back Zion's exiles, we were like dreamers" (Psalm 126:1).

We will never forget the images of IDF troops breaking through Lions' Gate and heading toward the Western Wall. Both religious and secular soldiers felt the Jewish commonality that unites us all. Our liberated capital emanated rays of golden light. The people of Israel have always kept Jerusalem in their hearts.

Modern Zionism was needed to establish the cultural, political and linguistic underpinnings of a state. The goal was to create a unifying melting pot for all Jews by building a common future. Israel's political leaders in 1967 did not understand that there would be no common future without a common past. The Left, which has tried to erase our historical heritage, has been pushed to the sidelines and is now driven by despair, depression, despondency and defeatism.

(Video) Chanukah - Against All Odds

Chanuka is a time for miracles, both in those days and ours.


Torah Live

To see more Torah Live Chanuka videos, 
visit http://www.youtube.com/user/TorahLive

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

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To Get the Fuller Sense of Israel Independence Day

So when we toast Israel's 65th birthday, it behooves Israel and all its supporters to refresh memories of 1967 because today, like then, Jerusalem beckons as the touchstone of maintaining the independence of Jewish sovereignty in the Promised Land.


Leo Rennert..
American Thinker..
First posted 19 April '10..

Jews all over the world will celebrate by the Jewish calendar the 65th anniversary of Israel's independence this year on April 16. It has become traditional on such occasions to focus almost entirely on the events of May 1948, when a nascent Jewish state, authorized by a U.N. two-state partition vote the year before, faced half a dozen Arab armies intent on destroying it. In the ensuing battles, that Jewish state managed to survive and lay the foundation for a return of Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land.

This year, however, I would argue that while reminiscing about the events of 1948, it would behoove us to focus more on 1967, when Israel again was under siege and marked for extinction by Egypt, Syria, and Jordan.

Why 1967 more than 1948? Because an exclusive focus on 1948 tends to abet a misleading impression that the events of that year permanently guaranteed Israel's independence. They did not.

Instead, Israel has had to fight for its independence without much respite for the last 65 years -- and at least three times has faced imminent threats of extinction. Such threats, while not imminent today, nevertheless continue into the present , as Iran with its surrogates (Hamas and Hezbollah) now seeks to pick up the mantle of Egyptian President Nasser.

To get a full sense of Israel's repeated and continuing challenges to confront enemies bent on extinguishing its independence, the Six-Day War of 1967 offers a perfect paradigm, if fully and properly recalled. It's all too easy and misleading, when examining 1967, to concentrate only on the totally unexpected and lightning-fast speed of Israel's victory. That's just the triumphant finale. What also needs to be recalled is what Israel actually faced in June 1967, in the days leading up to the Six-Day War.

(Video) Against All Odds

Chanuka is a time for miracles, both in those days and ours.



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If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
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Please: Israel did not “choose” war in June '67

Robert Werdine..
Times of Israel..
02 October '12..

A recent article here in the Times of Israel by Mr. Emanuel Shahaf posits the assertion that Prime Minister Netanyahu is needlessly escalating tensions with regard to the situation in Iran and their nuclear program, that he has shunned the path of compromise and diplomacy, and that this militant tendency of Israelis to escalate tensions that lead to wars has become something of a national pastime. One can just hear the impatient shrug of Mr. Shahaf’s shoulders: When, oh when, will they ever learn?

Illustrating his point, Mr. Shahaf cites the example of the Six-Day War of 1967, where, he asserts,Israel needlessly chose war from a menu of other viable options:

“During the nerve wracking buildup to the war there were plenty of opportunities to deescalate. To make the closure of the Straits of Tiran into a casus belli was not necessarily the correct choice and it might have been smarter to put the US on the spot and insist on the fulfillment to keep the straits open to Israeli shipping. To make a long story short, most scholarly accounts of the build-up towards the Six-Day War attribute its eventual outbreak to an unwanted escalation. Despite a desire to avoid war on all sides, everyone in the end was responsible for making it unavoidable.”

I hope Mr. Shahaf, will grant me a moment of his time and bear with me a while I take a moment to rehearse a slice of history in the lead up to the crisis that sparked the ’67 War, which concerns two issues that are as depressingly familiar to Israelis today as they were to them back in 1967: the regional issue of water, and the issue of the violent, provocative instability of the Ba’athist regime in neighboring Syria, and perhaps we can get an idea of just who was doing the escalating that led to the war, and who was not.

Born on the 4th of June, 1967

Would the Israeli cabinet have done better on June 4, 1967, to decide to sit and wait for Nasser to strike the first blow, and to accept several thousand more dead—as Golda Meir would six years later by waiting for the Arab attack that began the Yom Kippur War? What would that have achieved, other than, at best, a more victimized victory?

Bret Stephens..
Commentary Magazine..
July 2012..

On June 4, 1989, parliamentary elections in Poland gave Solidarity 99 out of the 100 seats they were allowed to contest. For those who still doubted it—and there were many—the vote illustrated the utter illegitimacy of Communist rule in central Europe. Five months later, the wall came down in Berlin. Two years after that, the hammer-and-sickle was lowered, hopefully for the last time, over the Kremlin.

Also on June 4, 1989, soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army seized control of Tiananmen Square in Beijing from the students who had been occupying it for the previous several weeks. The result, in that case, was the death of hundreds, maybe more, the imprisonment of thousands, the reconsolidation of hard-line Communist Party rule and the emergence of China not as a nation tracing a slow but steady course toward freedom but as a new form of dictatorship, one that sought to harness the energies of private enterprise to the ambitions of despotism.

What’s in a date? It was surely coincidental that two epochal events took place on the same day. Yet sometimes coincidences can illuminate deeper truths. In these cases, they remind us of the brittleness of tyrannical regimes, but also of their brutality; of their susceptibility to sudden collapse, but also of their capacity for endless slaughter; of their inner weakness, but also of their will to power.

Above all, they remind us that tyranny is a scandal—not a scandal in the sense of Watergate, or of Eliot Spitzer’s socks—but in the sense of being a gigantic lie hiding in plain sight, a lie that seeks to violently compel others to submit to its claims or else participate in them. As with any lie, it is sustained only to the extent that it is believed. And, as with any lie, it is undone the moment one person—whether that’s Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Natan Sharansky or Václav Havel or Liu Xiaobo or Ayaan Hirsi Ali—stands up and says: It is not so.

And so the fourth of June ought to be a date to mark in our calendars. It is a reminder that a core democratic task is to preserve the capacity to be scandalized by tyranny: wise enough to fear it, bold enough to resist it, persistent enough to expose it, and idealistic enough to believe it can be brought down.

Yet they aren’t the only fourths of June from recent history that ought to matter to us. There is also the fourth of June, 1967. It was a Sunday, the day before the Six-Day War broke out between Israel and the Arab countries surrounding it. It was the eve of battle, the moment of decision.

Who Is Being "Intransigent"? No Peace, No Recognition, No Negotiations, No Problem

Michael Curtis..
Gatestone Institute..
09 July '12..

Forty-five years after the Six Day War, declassified transcripts were released this June of the Israeli cabinet and government committee meetings in the days after war that ended on June 10, 1967. The documents provide a breathtaking insight into the efforts of Israeli leaders to reach a peace settlement with the countries and groups which had been at war with Israel. The evidence of the hard work and the varied opinions on the part of the Israeli ministers, all eager to reach a peace treaty and an understanding with the Palestinians and Arab states, presents a revealing contrast to the long-term refusal of the Arab parties to come to the negotiating table -- an attitude that was reiterated at the summit meeting of the Arab League on September 1, 1967 in Khartoum, Sudan. As has now been revalidated by the declassified transcripts, the Israelis were ready to negotiate land for peace; the Arab leaders instead issued their statement of the three "nos:" no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel -- an unconditionally negative position taken by Arab leaders that still persists.

The Arab and Palestinian intransigence, the refusal to accept a peace agreement, has a long history and is all too familiar. In 1922 the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine was officially established. Under it a Jewish Agency, set up in 1929, and composed of representatives of world Jewry, would assist the British administration in establishing the Jewish National Home in Palestine. The Jewish Agency then organized an infrastructure of political and social institutions that became the basis for the state of Israel. The Arabs refused the offer to create a similar Agency.

Richman - 45 Years Later, No Closer to the Truth

Rick Richman..
Commentary/Contentions..
10 June '12..

The Six-Day War ended 45 years ago today. In his comprehensive history, Michael Oren noted the war was one of the shortest in recorded history, but that in that brief period Israeli fatalities were the equivalent, in per capita terms, of 80,000 Americans.

Two days after the war ended, Israeli Prime Minister Eshkol summarized what had led to it: on May 15, Egyptian forces had crossed the Suez Canal; by May 18 they were deployed on Israel’s border; Egypt demanded the withdrawal of UN peacekeeping forces and on May 23 closed the Strait of Tiran to shipping both to and from Israel; on May 30, Egypt signed a military agreement with Jordan and another one with Iraq on June 4; together with the one already in place with Syria, the encirclement of Israel was complete, and secret orders had been issued to prepare for the attack on Israel. Then Eshkol addressed the Arabs directly:

Gold - Why the Six-Day War still matters

Dore Gold..
Israel Hayom..
08 June '12..

Forty-five years ago this week, the Israel Defense Forces liberated the Old City of Jerusalem and re-united Israel's capital. Today, most of the battles that took place back then are almost a distant memory. Few recall that on the eve of the Six-Day War most of the brigades of Jordanian Army were deployed right next to the Green Line and encircled Jerusalem on three sides. Moreover, an Iraqi expeditionary force was poised to join them across the Jordan River. When the Jordanian artillery opened fire, nearly 6,000 artillery shells fell on Jewish neighborhoods in the western side of Jerusalem, leaving 1,000 Israelis wounded. After multiple warnings to the Jordanians, the IDF finally crossed the 1949 armistice lines and captured the territories from which Israel had been attacked and threatened.

These details still matter forty-five years later. When the rights of the parties that claimed Jerusalem were debated after the Six-Day War, it became necessary to look into the circumstances of how each came to possess the city. Jordan's capture of Jerusalem in 1948 resulted from what had been described at the time by the U.N. secretary-general, Trygve Lie, as the first case of "armed aggression" since the Second World War. This stood in contrast to how Israel entered the eastern portions Jerusalem in 1967, that came about through what was plainly a war of self-defense. This distinction became glaringly apparent when the Soviet Union failed in its repeated efforts to have Israel branded as "the aggressor" in the Six-Day War first in the Security Council, in June 1967, and then a month later in the General Assembly.

Werdine - So, There Was No Threat in June ’67? Really?

Robert Werdine..
Times of Israel..
31 May '12..

By my calendar at least, the 45th anniversary of the Six-Day War looms, and the refrain denying and downplaying the threat then facing down the Jewish state emanating from Israel’s revisionist critics will no doubt be heard again.

I must confess that I have always found this most peculiar. As an avid, life-long student of military history, I have always found the circumstances of the Six Day War (as I do all of the Arab-Israeli wars) fascinating to study: the cast of characters, the drama of the countdown to war, the clash of hubris and heroics, of courage and cowardice, but above all how a small, young nation groped its way through a crisis of danger and uncertainty, to mastery, security and victory. If I am ignorant of this subject, then my ignorance is incurable, as I have spared no effort to understand it, and have ransacked just about every book on it upon which I could lay hands over the last twenty-five years. How any person could know the circumstances of the conflict, and simply look at a map and not see the peril facing Israel in early June 1967, is a mystery to me.

Tobin - What Six Days Achieved

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary/Contentions..
05 June '12..

Forty-five years ago today, the Six-Day War began. But rather than this being an occasion for the world to remember when Israel’s existence hung in the balance, it is, instead, merely being used as an opportunity for pundits and critics to urge the Jewish state to recreate in some way the world of June 5, 1967. In one such column, Jeffrey Goldberg resurrects the now familiar theme that Israel’s famous victory was actually a defeat because it left the Jewish state in possession of the West Bank. For Goldberg, the only way for Israel to finally win the war that began on that day is for it to begin a process of unilateral withdrawal from the territories.

Goldberg’s thesis is that the demographic threat from the Arab population of both the West Bank and pre-1967 Israel to the country’s Jewish majority requires the withdrawal of Jewish settlements even if a peace accord is not in sight. Goldberg’s support for another Israeli attempt at unilateralism is misguided, because the experience of Gaza proved that such tactics lead only to grief, and no critic of Israel will think better of it if the settlers are removed but troops remain. But the assumption that the outcome of that war is still in the balance and depends on Israel’s exit from the territories is flawed. It misunderstands the nature of the conflict and Israel’s ability to transform the attitudes of its neighbors or the world. So long as the goal of Israel’s foes is its destruction and not merely withdrawal from the West Bank or parts of Jerusalem, the only way to look at the Six-Day War or the current impasse is through the prism of survival, not the world’s perceptions. That was just as true 45 years ago when Israel’s government was instructed by the world — including the United States — to sit back and wait to be attacked as it is today.

Point of No Return - Bracing for Arab revenge after Israel's 1967 victory

Bataween
Point of No Return
29 June '11

http://jewishrefugees.blogspot.com/2011/06/bracing-for-arab-revenge-after-israels.html


The Six-Day War, whose 44th anniversary passed a few weeks ago, had serious repercussions on the remnants of the Jewish communities in Arab countries. Max Sawdayee's memoirs, 'All waiting to be hanged', now uploaded by his daughters to the Internet since his death in February this year, contain a detailed and moving record of those anxiety-filled days in Iraq. If Israel won, the Arabs would wreak terrible revenge - on the local Jews. And so it came to pass.

"A particular problem faces us Jews here, though it isn’t so grave yet. We do realise that the country persecuted us in times of stress, and punished us even when we had nothing to blame for. It has always been like that, since Babylon. But we must admit that when the enormous majority of our community emigrated to Israel in 1950 and 1951 according to a special authorization from the Iraqi government, it was time then to quit. We did not. We stayed behind. Consequently, everything concerning Israel that would have repercussions in the area was bound to affect us directly or indirectly. So we, the last of the adventurers, have got to take it. We have got to accept the consequences.

Monday, June 5, 1967: This morning I didn’t feel quite well. I’m rather disturbed. So I decide to leave for the office at a late hour.

Mother rings up at 9:00 a.m., tells me to turn on the radio, and hangs up.

The Iraqi news broadcast shrieks like a storm. ‘Today is the big day! It is the holy day!’ The tone is violent and martial. Stress is laid on such words and phrases as revenge, death, murder, ‘throw them into the sea!’ and so on. With stirring songs and martial music to fill the time; a stream of communiqués and commentaries, all of them extremely harsh. They howl about Zionists having started their evil aggression, and about Egypt already driving them back and causing them heavy losses and casualties. They speak of Arab aircraft having destroyed a large number of military targets and heading for Tel Aviv and Haifa.

So it’s war after all. The war that we all hated and were frightened of.

The Israeli broadcast is almost mute: martial music and a few short but vague communiqués of which nothing can be made out.

My wife returns from the market at 10 a.m., pale and alarmed. She has seen Jews returning from downtown and trying to get home quietly but quickly. Muslims, on the other hand, are jubilant, excited, with transistors in hand, and happily discussing the news. ‘We are winning! A couple of days and Israel is finished!’
I tell my wife not to worry, to get busy doing something and leave me alone with my transistors. I’d like to follow the news more closely for a while.

From the window I see little Jewish children running home without understanding what has happened; some are accompanied by their schoolteachers. I am glad to see my daughter back.

At noon Iraq is blazing with the flame of victory and expected revenge. High schools and universities close, workers flea their factories, employees stop working. The streets are crowded with people shouting and cheering. In their imagination Israel is about to disappear. It’s a matter of hours.

At 2:00 p.m. there is still no way to understand anything solid from Israeli broadcasts. They are vague all the time, while Iraqi and other Arab broadcasts are growing hysterical. They speak of a hundred and forty two Israeli aircraft shot down. But it’s already clear that the war is being fought mainly on two fronts – with Egypt and Jordan.

Daphne Anson - In the Shadow of '67: A Voice From Israel's Past

Daphne Anson
22 June '11

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2011/06/in-shadow-of-67-voice-from-israels-past.html

I've found two interesting items that appeared in the leftwing London weekly New Statesman on 31 July and 14 August 1970. The earlier of the two was an open letter to the then Israeli Foreign Minister, Abba Eban. It was written by the prominent Labour MP Richard Crossman, a steady friend of Israel who features in an earlier post of mine: http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2010/11/british-plans-for-resettlement-of.html

In his well-meaning open letter, Crossman, who had just become editor of the New Statesman, a post he left in 1972, urged the Israelis to relinquish the territories as soon as possible:

"....Your military ascendancy is a wasting asset, just as the territories you have occupied become heavier liabilities the longer you hold them. I know you did not want this military ascendancy. I know that your occupation of the West Bank was not premeditated, that you recognise that the Suez Canal is not your natural frontier. I also know that any peace initiative you now take involves a military risk. But in a year's time the risk will be even greater. The vision of Arab-Jewish accord which was so fervent in 1948 and which has grown today, will grow dimmer still.


....An Israel which aped the ethos of a Prussian state would be a contradiction in terms...."

Replied Abba Eban, with his customary courtesy yet with incisive firmness:

".... You are clearly anxious about the effects of victory on Israel's character and conduct: and you have a picture of an Israel dominated by formidable 'soldiers' who are hostile to cease-fire and recalcitrants to political initiatives. Now it is better that the editor of the New Statesman should be agitated than that he should be complacent: but when you get worried about whether we 'ape the ethos of a Prussuian state' your agitation carries you much too far. One of the disadvantages of your status in the last six years is that you could not come to Israel very often. the public 'media' on which you had to rely are more fascinated by violence than by peaceful action. For these reasons you, like others, have not seen Israel in a full length mirror. All Israeli life is lived today in the memory of the peril we faced in 1967. Every one of us had good reason to fear the very worst that can befall a man, his family, his home and his nation. In our people's history many things are too strange to be believed: but nothing is too terrible to have happened. We have vigorously survived the danger with consequent injury to our martyr's image. And if you ask me as you seem to do, 'What have you gained by victory?' I answer simply: 'Everything that we would have lost without it.' [My emphasis]

....[T]his abnormailty [occupation] was not sought: it was created by war, and it can be cured by peace. Peace would replace cease-fire lines by negotiated and agreed boundaries to which armed forces would be withdrawn: and in any solution which my present Cabinet colleagues would endorse, the majority of the two million Palestinian Arabs on both sides of the river would be the citizens of an Arab state (beginning on our newly negotiated eastern frontier), whose structure, name and regime they would be free to determine.


I do not know how long the attainment of peace will take: but you really need not worry lest we have become Prussian by the time it comes about. When you come to see us, you will not find us paralysed or obsessed by war. You will find that 40,000 Arabs from neighbouring lands vistied the West Bank this summer. You will be astonished in Jerusalem by an unceasing contact of Jews, Arabs, and thousands of all faiths which puts the segregation and fanatical exclusiveness of the Jordanian occupation to shame. [My emphasis.] You will find a vast flow of visitors from Israel from all over the world. You will see hundreds of the future leaders of developing countries studying here. Israel, of course, is a society which has its imperfections: but these are redeemed by the free and lucid criticism of them as well as by the constant quest for improvement. In short: you will find that you are as far from Prussia as you can get in the modern world.

The main achievement of Israel since 1967 is to have remained a fighting nation without becoming a warrior state. Nor do I think you will find us dominated by 'soldiers'. I put the word in quotation marks because it conjures up a special breed which does not belong to our experience. We have nothing here but civilians, some of whom are temporarily under arms. We may show you a pilot who shot down eight aircraft bringing in the fruit from a kibbutz orchard...."

This was a period when the Left had already entered upon that slippery slope into hypocritical tunnel-visioned Israel-bashing that has become such a pit of putridity today. For Eban went on to observe (and his strictures regarding Nasser surely have a resonance today in view of the threat posed to peace and stability in the wake of the downfall of Mubarak and the lurking presence in the wings of power of the Muslim Brotherhood):

"If you find that the diversity, turbulence, paradoc and indiscipline of our democracy are from Prussia I may suggest that you write your next open letter to President Nasser. An authoritative socialist voice calling Nasser to the peace table is overdue. There has been too much indulgence of [George] Habash [founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and mastermind of the trick of hijacking airliners] and Arafat and their exclusivist fantasies about a purely Middle East without a sovereign Israel as part of its memory, reality and hope. There has been too much docile acceptance by part of the Left of a rampant Israelophobia with its ugly Stuermer-like expression portraying Israel as lying outside the human context. In your letter, if you feel like writing it, you could remind President Nasser that the idea of an israel-Egyptian treaty as the gateway to a new era of peace and development in the Middle East would evoke his better days. For Israel respected the progressive ideals of the Egyptian revolution in its early phase. All this has been corrupted by the senseless war against Israel...."

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Harris - Why the Six-Day War Still Matters

David A. Harris
aish.com
12 June '11

http://www.aish.com/jw/me/Why_the_Six-Day_War_Still_Matters.html

Ten crucial lessons that resonate to this day.

Mention the word "history" and it can trigger a roll of the eyes.

Add "Middle East" to the equation and folks might start running for the hills, unwilling to get caught up in the seemingly bottomless pit of details and disputes.

But without an understanding of what happened, it's impossible to grasp where we are -- and where we are has profound relevance for the region and the world.

Forty-four years ago this week, the Six-Day War broke out.

While some wars fade into obscurity, this one remains as relevant today as in 1967. Many of its core issues remain unresolved and in the news.

Politicians, diplomats, and journalists continue to grapple with the consequences of that war, but rarely provide context. Yet without context, some critically important things may not make sense.


First, in June 1967, there was no state of Palestine. It didn't exist and never had. Its creation, proposed by the UN in 1947, was rejected by the Arab world because it also meant the establishment of a Jewish state alongside.

Second, the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem were in Jordanian hands. Violating solemn agreements, Jordan denied Jews access to their holiest places in eastern Jerusalem. To make matters still worse, they destroyed many of those sites.

Meanwhile, the Gaza Strip was under Egyptian control, with harsh military rule imposed on local residents.

And the Golan Heights, which were regularly used to shell Israeli communities far below, belonged to Syria.

Singer - An Arab West Bank Is A Lost Cause

David Singer
analyst-network.com
11 June '11
H/T Daphne Anson

http://www.analyst-network.com/article.php?art_id=3797

The 44th Anniversary of the Six Day War occurred this week on 5 June 1967.

It is therefore opportune to recall some of the significant events that led to Jordan’s loss of the West Bank in that War ending 19 years of uninterrupted occupation - and to understand why all of the West Bank - or its equivalent area - will never again return to Arab control.

I am indebted to the Six Day War Comprehensive Timeline for much of the material that follows. This website should be required reading for all who wish to understand why international pressure to return all of the West Bank to the Arabs must fail.

Jordan’s path down the road to its disastrous loss of the West Bank began on 30 May 1967 - 6 days before the start of the Six Day War. This was the fatal day that Jordan signed a five year mutual defence treaty with Egypt, thereby joining the military alliance already in place between Egypt and Syria. Jordanian forces were given to the command of an Egyptian General.

Jordan’s King Hussein had been caught up in the Arab euphoria and vitriol emanating from Egypt’s President Nasser who had declared on 28 May 1967:

“We will not accept any…coexistence with Israel.…Today the issue is not the establishment of peace between the Arab states and Israel….The war with Israel is in effect since 1948”.

Such was the mood of Jordan’s population that Jordan’s Army Commander-in-Chief General Sharif Zaid Ben Shaker warned in a press conference that :

"If Jordan does not join the war a civil war will erupt in Jordan".

The West Bank had been unified with Transjordan in 1950 and the country renamed Jordan after unanimous ratification by a Parliament comprised equally of representatives from the West Bank and Transjordan. No demand was made in the next 17 years for the creation of a separate Palestinian Arab State - even though all the Jews living there had been driven out by six invading Arab armies in 1948.

The liberation of the Old City of Jerusalem by Gen. Uzi Narkis (Video)

cinevisionusa
Jun 1, 2011
H/T Carl



A never-released personal account of the liberation of the Old City of Jerusalem by Gen. Uzi Narkis who commanded the liberating forces in June 1967 - filmed by Ashley Lazarus 10 days before General Uzi Narkis passed away in 1997. Music by Yehuda Jordan Kaplan. With thanks to Brig.Gen. Yoram Agmon, who arranged the interview.



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1967 and memory

Martin Kramer
Sandbox
17 November '08
H/T PostWest*

http://www.martinkramer.org/sandbox/2008/11/1967-and-memory/

How did the outcome of 1967 change the way Arabs think about themselves and the world? It was the late Malcolm Kerr, one of America’s leading Arabists at the time, who perfectly summarized the consensus. (Kerr was a UCLA professor, later president of the American University of Beirut, who was killed there in 1984.) He put it thus, in a famous passage written only about four years after the 1967 war:

Since June, 1967 Arab politics have ceased to be fun. In the good old days most Arabs refused to take themselves very seriously, and this made it easier to take a relaxed view of the few who possessed intimations of some immortal mission. It was like watching Princeton play Columbia in football on a muddy afternoon. The June War was like a disastrous game against Notre Dame which Princeton impulsively added to its schedule, leaving several players crippled for life and the others so embittered that they took to fighting viciously among themselves instead of scrimmaging happily as before.

I leave aside the identification of the Arabs with Princeton. Kerr was a Princetonian, but so am I, and I would have preferred to identify the Arabs with Columbia, for all sorts of reasons. But it is the way Kerr contrasts pre-1967 with post-1967 Arab politics that is striking—and misleading. Even in 1967, Arab politics hadn’t been “fun” in a very long time: as early as the 1940s, they had become a serious and deadly game of costly wars and bloody coups. True, Kerr was writing in the aftermath of Black September in Jordan, a time when Arab politics seemed to have come completely unhinged. But the idea that 1967 put an end to the “good old days” of Arabs “scrimmaging happily” was a pure piece of nostalgic romance in the grand Arabist tradition.

Unfortunately, such nostalgia is seductive. For years, it has been at the root of a notion that persists even today: if we could somehow undo the 1967 war—if we could undo the injury inflicted in those six days—we could put the Middle East back to where it was in the “good old days.” In this view, the Arabs and the world could have “fun” again if only we could erase the Arab memory of that war—by erasing its every consequence.

But the “good old days” analysis is entirely false, and not only in its distortion of Arab politics prior to 1967. It is false because it overlooks how the 1967 trauma trimmed the ideological excess of the pre-war period, and opened the way to pragmatic Arab acceptance of Israel.

Jerusalem Day: Reflections by Rabbi Yisrael Ariel

The Temple Institute
Templeinstitute.org

In the June, 1967 Six Day War, Rabbi Yisrael Ariel was a young soldier in the paratrooper brigade, led by Gen. Motta Gur, which liberated Jerusalem's Old City. He was one of the first soldiers to reach the Temple Mount. The very first night that the Temple Mount returned to Israeli sovereignty, Rabbi Ariel was assigned the duty of guarding over the Dome of the Rock, site of the Holy of Holies in the Holy Temple.



Looking back at that time, he relates to the uniqueness of the moment, both universally for all Jews and for himself personally: the return of the Jewish people to this spot, the one place on earth that G-d has chosen for Himself, to begin the resumption of the Divine service. Indeed, this moment was a harbinger for the birth of the Temple Institute.

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