The sneak Attack that started a long War

Under the title: “The war that made the Mideast” and the subtitle: “A half-century ago, Israel battled its Arab neighbors; we still feel the ramifications,” Michael B. Oren who now lives and works in Israel, wrote an article about the Pearl Harbor style sneak attack that Israel launched on Egypt in June of 1967. The article was published on May 28, 2017 on the website of the New York Daily News.

The attack started a war that lasted six years, culminating in the Egyptian army crossing the Suez Canal in 1973 and chasing the Israelis out of the Sinai. The thing worth noting, however, is that when Michael Oren says, “we still feel the ramifications,” he means we feel them today, half a century later. This is a hugely important point to have been made because – deliberately or not – Oren just slammed the spin doctors populating the mob of Jewish pundits in North America … those who are trying to pull a very nasty trick.

What these characters are trying to do is cement the idea that ending the crime of Israel's occupation of Palestine will not end the troubles we see elsewhere in the Middle East because they want you to believe there is no connection between Israel's behavior and those troubles. This is like saying: if we stop poisoning the patient, he will not recover because there is no connection between his illness and our poison, so let's continue to poison him.

No, no, no, says Michael Oren, you are wrong, fellows, because what Israel did half a century ago has created ramifications we feel today. In addition, the clarification of this point has allowed the writer to establish the reality that every action committed by Israel – indeed by any actor in the neighborhood – creates ramifications that last a long time, affecting those in the region and those beyond.

In effect then, the lesson that the mob of Jewish pundits needs to grasp – and do its blasted best to impress it upon Israel's leaders and their congressional enablers – is that the leaders of Israel must stop living like the hoodlums of a street gang and start acting like normal dwellers of the neighborhood. What cannot be denied is that these thugs think of nothing when passing through a corner of the neighborhood where they wreak havoc before moving on to another corner. Sadly, the Israelis do what they do because they know that no matter what calamity they cause, their congressional enablers will keep enabling them.

What follows is a condensed version of the passages in the article where Michael Oren gives a thorough description of a desperate Jewish entity that's cut-off from the world, facing an economic crisis and going downhill. It is situated in a neighborhood that is full of jubilant Arabs whose future can only get brighter. To renew its sense of purpose, the entity did the very Jewish thing of “defending” itself by attacking neighbors that never threatened it, and by looting what it could from them … so very Jewish. Here are the pertinent passages:

“On one side are those who insist the Arabs never threatened Israel. Others maintain that Israel had no choice but to fight and that this defensive war provided the state with secure borders and a renewed sense of purpose. To decide one has to return to 1967. What did Israel look like then, and how did the region – and the world – appear to its leaders? Israel in 1967 was a nation of 2.7 million, many of them Holocaust survivors. At its narrowest, the state was nine miles wide. Its cities were within enemy artillery range. Economically, the country was in crisis, and internationally it was alone. Most of its arms came from France which, just days before the war, switched sides. The Arabs, by contrasts, were jubilant. With the Soviets arming Egypt, Iraq and Syria, and the U.S. arming Jordan and Saudi Arabia, they enjoyed massive superiority over Israel”.

What then did Israel do? It took a page from the history of the Pacific war a quarter of a century earlier. That was a time when Imperial Japan was mired in endless wars with its neighbors whereas America was jubilant and rising. Washington made it clear it will not tolerate the status quo forever but did nothing to threaten Japan. On their part, the Japanese made moves to lull America into believing they were ready to talk. At the same time, however, they were quietly preparing to launch a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, which they did eventually.

Israel played a similar lulling game during the months leading up to June 1967 because its military leaders wanted to catch the Egyptian Air Force on the ground and destroy it before anything else. Those leaders knew that if they could achieve this feat, the Sinai and Syria's Golan Heights and the West Bank of the Jordan would be an easy walk for their tanks and armored vehicles.

The Israeli politicians played their cards well, and the military followed by executing the plan they had been working on since 1956 when the French and the British showed them how to do these things. Israel pulled it off, thus triggering the six-year war whose ramifications continue to be felt today.

As to Michael Oren, he goes to great length spinning the tidbits of information he cherry-picks from the history of the event to make it sound like Israel was justified in “defensively” attacking and looting its neighbors. This is the way that Jews have lived since their genesis; it is the reason why they ended up alone, reviled and shunned by the human race ever since that time.