Digery Cohen (I bet he's not really called Cohen) is off on one of his antisemitic rants as usual. If he doesn't post at least one a day he gets withdrawal symptoms. I really think the moderators here should adjust his meds.

If the Israelis have ethnically cleansed and slaughtered the Palestinians they have been remarkably inefficient about it. If not how do you explain the growth in the Pali population since 1967? Must be all those dastardly Zionist health and welfare benefits.

I see no mention of the 300 self-inflicted Palestinian deaths in the past 2-3 months - that is self inflicted by the Palestinians themselves. Efficient eh?

If you want to post gruesome photos of dead kids I can find a couple too. Just google Israelis+murdered+bus+bombings+suicide+bombers and see what comes up.

Whilst ank's "300 self-inflicted Palestinian deaths" sounds a bit dodgy (but then I remembered the Hamas-Fatah fighting), Diggery Cohen's parodies (or whatever term they deserve) might have been interesting the first time, but they're boring now and, yes, I agree, dodgy shit, subtly calling Israelis Nazis (undermenschen etc).

Plus inaccurate - the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising gave a good fight, and then all got killed, so not really an example you should use, eh! And Northern Ireland's still occupied ya twat! Guess you must not be from these islands if you think that situation's sorted!

Unable to seize all of Palestine for their state through Partition, the Zionists plotted to capture the remaining portion through force of arms, prohibited under International Law.
What was forgotten that morning
By Tom Segev

Six months prior to the Six-Day War, the heads of the Mossad, Military Intelligence and the Foreign Ministry explored the possibility of Israel occupying the West Bank.

Various scenarios that might lead to such an outcome were discussed, such as the fall of King Hussein's regime in Jordan, an Iraqi invasion of Jordan or a Palestinian uprising. At the end of the deliberations, all were in accord that the occupation of the West Bank would be contrary to Israel's national interest. They concluded that Israel would reap nothing good from ruling over the Palestinians, only bad - including an erosion of the country's Jewish majority and a violent uprising against the occupation.

When Jordan bombarded Jerusalem on June 5, 1967, an occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem was still contrary to Israel's national interest. But what was dictated by sound thinking six months prior to the war was quickly forgotten that morning.

There is something amazing in the cabinet transcripts documenting the decision to occupy the West Bank and East Jerusalem. No expert was called in for his opinion, no options were evaluated, even the legal aspects were not discussed. None of the ministers asked why it would be worthwhile for Israel to occupy the Old City. There was no need to ask; the answer was obvious, the way that only a wild fantasy can be. Nothing necessitated the occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, not even the attack against the western part of the city on June 5. The decision stemmed from the ministers' hearts, not their brains.

It is possible to argue over whether Levi Eshkol, Moshe Dayan and Yitzhak Rabin could have known then how damaging the decision to occupy the West Bank and East Jerusalem would be. Either way, from one war to another, from one disappointment to the next, some half a million Israelis live in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and Islamic extremism guides many Palestinians - making it much more difficult to achieve peace today. Forty years after the war, nearly everyone recognizes this, and many are even willing to admit that nothing good came out of the occupation.

This is a recognition that has manifested itself only in recent years. There is a generation of Israelis who barricaded themselves behind the illusion that the war created a temporary situation. At first, it seemed that there was no need to rush: Life in the territories returned to normal with surprising speed, "enlightened occupation" appeared to be a success story, the Palestinians did not immediately rise up, and the world did not force Israel to withdraw. The convenient formula of "land for peace" proved itself with the signing of the peace agreement with Egypt.

Most Israelis were willing to give up only part of the territories. Almost none were willing to give up everything. Everyone had his own map. Yes to withdrawal, but not from the Golan Heights. Not from the Jordan Valley. Yes, but not from the Gaza Strip. Not from Gush Etzion, and of course not from East Jerusalem. The peace agreement with Jordan showed that it was possible to achieve peace without a withdrawal.

It cannot be said with certainty that had all Israelis agreed to withdraw from all the territories, all the Arabs would have agreed to make peace. But those of the 1967 generation did not appreciate the damage caused by the occupation - among other things, to the fundamental ideological and moral values that gave birth to the country, and to its democratic fabric. This was the major failure of that generation.

More and more Israelis say today that they do not believe in peace. Many among them are young. That is the main difference between them and the Peace Now generation. The lack of peace, the oppression and the terrorism have become part of their identity as Israelis. They see a generation that disappointed. Less idealistic, perhaps more realistic, they will not waste their time on a comprehensive peace plan. There is no need: Their parents have bequeathed them every plan that could possibly be conceived. The challenge they face is merely to manage the conflict in a better way than their parents did, so that life will be more tolerable. In view of the circumstances they are inheriting from their parents, that is no small task.

www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/867052.html

Israel provoked Six-Day War, says former Dutch UN observer

Middle East News

Jun 5, 2007, 8:51 GMT

Amsterdam - A former Dutch UN observer has said Israel was not under siege by Arab countries preceding the Six-Day War, the 40th anniversary of which falls Tuesday, and that the Jewish state provoked most border incidents as part of its strategy to annex more land.

Speaking on a Dutch current affairs programme late Monday, Jan Muhren, who was stationed interchangeably at the Golan Heights and the West Bank in 1966-67, says neither Jordan nor Syria had any intention to start a war with Israel.

Meanwhile, it was announced Tuesday that Dutch Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Verhagen will take 10 Dutch teenagers with him on his upcoming trip to the Middle East. The 10 are Christian, Muslim, Jewish and atheist.

A foreign affairs spokesman told Deutsche Presse-Agentur

© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur

Declassified US documents indicate that Israel's Six-Day War may not have been a war of necessity

Rethinking Israel's David-and-Goliath past

Little-noticed details in declassified U.S. documents indicate that Israel's Six-Day War may not have been a war of necessity.

By Sandy Tolan


Jun. 04, 2007 | At a little after 7 on the morning of June 5, 1967, as Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser's commanders were finishing their breakfasts and driving to work, French-built Israeli fighter jets roared out of their bases and flew low, below radar, into Egyptian airspace. Within three hours, 500 Israeli sorties had destroyed Nasser's entire air force. Just after midday, the air forces of Jordan and Syria also lay in smoking ruins, and Israel had essentially won the Six-Day War -- in six hours.

Israeli and U.S. historians and commentators describe the surprise attack as necessary, and the war as inevitable, the result of Nasser's fearsome war machine that had closed the Strait of Tiran, evicted United Nations peacekeeping troops, taunted the traumatized Israeli public, and churned toward the Jewish state's border with 100,000 troops. "The morning of 5 June 1967," wrote Israel's warrior-turned-historian, Chaim Herzog, "found Israel's armed forces facing the massed Arab armies around her frontiers." Attack or be annihilated: The choice was clear.

Or was it? Little-noticed details in declassified documents from the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, indicate that top officials in the Johnson administration -- including Johnson's most pro-Israeli Cabinet members -- did not believe war between Israel and its neighbors was necessary or inevitable, at least until the final hour. In these documents, Israel emerges as a vastly superior military power, its opponents far weaker than the menacing threat Israel portrayed, and war itself something that Nasser, for all his saber-rattling, tried to avoid until the moment his air force went up in smoke. In particular, the diplomatic role of Nasser's vice president, who was poised to travel to Washington in an effort to resolve the crisis, has received little attention from historians. The documents sharpen a recurring theme in the history of the Israeli-Arab wars, and especially of their telling in the West: From the war of 1948 to the 2007 conflict in Gaza, Israel is often miscast as the vulnerable David in a hostile sea of Arab Goliaths.

"You will whip the hell out of them," Lyndon Johnson told Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban during a visit to the White House on May 26, 1967. The president's conclusions were based on multiple intelligence reports, including a CIA assessment that Israel "can maintain internal security, defend successfully against simultaneous Arab attacks on all fronts, launch limited attacks simultaneously on all fronts, or hold any of three fronts while mounting successfully a major offensive on the fourth." As Nicholas Katzenbach, U.S. undersecretary of state at the time, recalled: "The intelligence was absolutely flat on the fact that the Israelis ... could wipe out the Arabs in no time at all."

A key discrepancy lay between U.S. and British intelligence reports and those conveyed to the administration by the Israelis. On May 26, the same day Eban met with Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, the secretary of state, relayed a message from Israel indicating "that an Egyptian and Syrian attack is imminent." In a memo to the president, Rusk wrote: "Our intelligence does not confirm this Israeli estimate." Indeed, this contradicted all U.S. intelligence, which had characterized Nasser's troops in the Sinai as "defensive in nature" and only half (50,000) of the Israeli estimates. Walt Rostow, the national security advisor, called Israeli estimates of 100,000 Egyptian troops "highly disturbing," and the CIA labeled them "a political gambit" for the United States to stand firm with Israelis, sell them more military hardware, and "put more pressure on Nasser."

As for the Egyptian president, there was a huge difference between his public and private signals. He had threatened Israelis with "annihilation," causing fear bordering on paralysis for a population devastated by the Holocaust. He had closed the Strait of Tiran, a source of less than 10 percent of Israel's shipping, but nevertheless a casus belli as far as Israel was concerned. He had expelled the U.N. peacekeepers from Sinai, further raising fears of war. (Israel, however, refused to accept those same peacekeepers -- a move that would have diminished the chance of war.) And, as the leader of the "Arab nation," Nasser was under great pressure from other Arabs to cut short Israel's nuclear ambitions and deliver the Palestinians back to the homes they had fled and been driven out of in the war of 1948.

But privately Nasser was sending strong signals he would not go to war. On May 31, he met with an American emissary, former Treasury Secretary Robert Anderson, assuring him that Egypt would not "begin any fight." Two days later, Nasser told a British M.P., Christopher Mayhew, that Egypt had "no intention of attacking Israel." The same day he met again with Anderson, agreeing to dispatch his vice president, Zakariya Mohieddin, to Washington, in an apparent last-ditch attempt to avoid war. (Anderson and Johnson had also spoken of a visit to Cairo by Vice President Hubert Humphrey.)

Rostow decided that Israel should know about the secret visit. In a June 2 note to the president, the national security advisor urged that the United States inform Israel of Mohieddin's impending trip to the White House: "My guess is that their intelligence will pick it up." The same day, Nasser sent a telegram to the American president indicating that Egypt would not attack Israel, but that "we shall resist any aggression launched against us or against any Arab state."

The archives for the 1967 war, as with the documentary evidence from other Arab-Israeli wars, thus reveal a history far more complex, and far more interesting, than the inflated portrayal of Arabs poised to crush Israel. "One against 40," declared David Ben-Gurion in describing the odds facing Israel in the war of 1948, ignoring the fact that comparisons of total populations meant little. The records show that the key Arab and Jewish forces -- a much more crucial benchmark -- were about the same, and that after a June 1948 cease-fire, a rearmed Israel had a decided advantage, which it parlayed into victory. Fifty-nine years later, in today's conflict in Gaza, the tragic, well-publicized deaths of Israelis in Sderot from crudely built Qassam missiles -- nine in the last six years -- are dwarfed by the deaths of 650 Palestinians last year (more than half unarmed civilians, according to Amnesty International) from attacks by Israel, one of the most potent and sophisticated military powers in the world, armed with nuclear weapons.

Yet the David vs. Goliath narrative persists, obscuring a more nuanced view of the balance of power in the region. Much of this has to do with Americans' familiarity with the story of Israel as a safe haven for Jews ravaged by the Holocaust. By contrast, Arabs, especially Palestinians, have long been seen as a vaguely menacing Other, as depicted in Leon Uris' hugely influential best-seller, "Exodus." The "Exodus" history, in which Arabs are alternately pathetic or malicious, holds no room for a more layered narrative of the struggle between Arabs in Jews, in which someone like Gamal Abdel Nasser, blustering for the Arab street, may have been privately seeking a way out of war.

Did Nasser truly want peace? We may never know. On June 3, 1967, after Secretary of State Rusk had informed Israel of the pending visit from Egyptian Vice President Mohieddin, Rusk relayed a message from the president to Nasser. "In view of the urgency of the situation," Rusk wrote, "we hope it will be possible for him to come without delay." That same day, however, at a Pentagon meeting between Mossad director Meir Amit and McNamara, the prospects for war seemed closer than ever. Amit told McNamara bluntly that he was "going to recommend that our government strike." This time, the Americans did not object; indeed, the CIA had grown sympathetic to Israel's war aims, in which Nasser, seen as too close to the Soviets, would be defanged. When McNamara asked Amit how long a war would last, the Mossad director replied: "Seven days." And so the meeting between the White House and Mohieddin, scheduled for June 7, never took place. By that time, it was already Day 3 of the Six-Day War, and Israel was already in control of Sinai, the West Bank, Gaza and the skies over much of the Middle East.