Israel Since 1967: 50 Years of Self Admitted Liars

[grarpamp]

https://theintercept.com/2017/06/05/a-50-year-occupation-israels-six-day-war-started-with-a-lie/

A 50-Year Occupation: Israel’s Six-Day War Started With a Lie
Mehdi Hasan 2017-06-05T13:07:19+00:00

Fifty years ago, between June 5 and June 10, 1967, Israel invaded and
occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan
Heights. The Six-Day War, as it would later be dubbed, saw the Jewish
David inflict a humiliating defeat on the Arab Goliath, personified
perhaps by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt.

“The existence of the Israeli state hung by a thread,” the country’s
prime minister, Levi Eshkol, claimed two days after the war was over,
“but the hopes of the Arab leaders to annihilate Israel were dashed.”
Genocide, went the argument, had been prevented; another Holocaust of
the Jews averted.

There is, however, a problem with this argument: It is complete
fiction, a self-serving fantasy constructed after the event to justify
a war of aggression and conquest. Don’t take my word for it: “The
thesis according to which the danger of genocide hung over us in June
1967, and according to which Israel was fighting for her very physical
survival, was nothing but a bluff which was born and bred after the
war,” declared Gen. Matituahu Peled, chief of logistical command
during the war and one of 12 members of Israel’s General Staff, in
March 1972.

A year earlier, Mordechai Bentov, a member of the wartime government
and one of 37 people to sign Israel’s Declaration of Independence, had
made a similar admission. “This whole story about the threat of
extermination was totally contrived, and then elaborated upon, a
posteriori, to justify the annexation of new Arab territories,” he
said in April 1971.

Even Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, former terrorist and
darling of the Israeli far right, conceded in a speech in August 1982
that “in June 1967 we had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations
in the Sinai approaches did not prove that Nasser was really about to
attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack
him.”

The reverberations of that attack are still being felt in the Middle
East today. Few...