Israel’s Six-Day War objective

On 5 June 1967, Israel launched its Six-Day War for territorial expansion and population-control in what was left of Palestine following the Nakba and the Zionist State’s unilateral ‘declaration of independence’. The result has been 50 years of belligerent military Occupation – the longest in modern history.

The UNGA Partition Plan of 1947 (Non-binding Resolution 181) was, for the Zionists, a stepping-stone towards the achievement of their real agenda. Indeed, the erstwhile terrorist leader and later prime minister of Israel, Menachem Begin, said of the partition plan: “The Partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognised …. Jerusalem was and will forever be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And for Ever.” [See Iron Wall, p. 25 and Simha Flapan, p. 32. Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion (another one-time leader with a terrorist background), put it this way: “No Zionist can forgo the smallest portion of the Land Of Israel.” In a written letter he made it absolutely clear that, for Zionists, “A Jewish state must be established immediately, even if it is only in part of the country. The rest will follow in the course of time.”

The world has been led to believe that Israel launched the Six-Day War in 1967 because its very existence was threatened – but that is not supported by the facts. In 1982, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin admitted in a speech to the National Defence College that Israel’s war on Egypt in 1956 had been a matter of choice. He said: “In June 1967 we again had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack . . . We did not do this for lack of an alternative. We could have gone on waiting. We could have sent the army home.”

“We could have sent the army home”

Author Alan Hart, former Middle East Chief Correspondent for Independent Television News and BBC Panorama presenter, describes in an article, What really happened in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the events leading up to Israel’s assault on its neighbours: “On that day [Thursday 1 June] in Israel there was a coup organised and executed by the Israeli army’s top generals and other security chiefs without a shot being fired.” Hart tells us that, “Prime Minister Levi Eshkol was required to form a unity government and bring into it as minister of defence Israel’s one-eyed war lord, General Moshe Dayan.” Hart wrote: “On Friday 2 June, Dayan’s second day as defence minister, the beach and streets of Tel Aviv (where many foreign correspondents were based in two hotels) were suddenly alive with soldiers returned from the front lines. They were swimming, playing on the beach, strolling and drinking in the pavement cafés of Dizzengorf Street. This was evidence – even proof – that Israel was not, after all, going to war. Contrary to expectations, Dayan was standing down the Israeli army. Now that he had the prime responsibility for Israel’s security, he wanted to be seen to be giving diplomacy a chance. The two weeks of waiting since Nasser had closed the Straits of Tiran were ending with an anti-climax. Message: no war.”

Hart says that Dayan successfully fooled the Press and that most foreign correspondents had booked the first available flights out of Israel. Hart believes that the recall of Israeli soldiers was part of a deception strategy. He already knew, from high level sources, that Dayan was about to take over, adding that “The day before his appointment I door-stepped him with my ITN camera crew. If I had asked him if war was coming, he would have ignored me and walked on without saying a word. So I settled for ‘What do you think the future holds?’ He stopped, gave me a big smile and made a gesture with the index finger of his right hand which supported his words. His reply was, ‘The desert is beckoning.’ I said to myself and then my ITN crew, ‘that means war is very close’.”

That night Hart saw blacked-out buses quietly taking Israeli soldiers back to the frontline. He cabled: “For some reasons I can report, for others I cannot, I think the war is going to start tomorrow morning. Alan Hart, ITN, Tel Aviv, on the eve of war.”
Hart recalled that, “Shortly after that I sat in a small booth and delivered my text into a microphone for recording by ITN in London. My voice report would be overlaid with a picture of me and some library footage.” The warning never made it to the public because of the number of competing news stories that suddenly emerged. “My speculative story had not had a chance in a short Sunday evening bulletin. At 07.45 the following morning Israel went to war. Fate had denied me the scoop of a war correspondent’s lifetime.” There is much more to know concerning the Israeli deception and it can be found in Alan Hart’s book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews.

Preparing for war in June 1967

Egypt and Syria had signed a defence agreement, meaning that if Israel attacked Syria, President Nasser would either have to come to its defence or lose face. With this in mind, Israel began provoking cross-border fire with Syria and, on 7 April 1967, Israeli jet fighters shot down six Syrian MIG 21s. Israel’s purpose was to force Nasser into making a military move that it could point to as evidence that it was about to be attacked. The Egyptian leader responded by forcing UN peacekeepers out, militarily occupying the Sinai right up to Israel’s border and closing the Straits of Tiran. That was enough! Israel struck, justifying the move by claiming that it had been attacked by Egypt. The problem for Israel is that it had lied and soon had to change its story. Since then, overwhelming evidence from Israeli sources, many of them from the Israeli military itself, reveal the Israeli narrative about the Six-Day War for what it is – another Zionist myth.

Israeli witnesses to the truth

In his article, Alan Hart publishes nine statements that more than adequately prove that Israel’s Six-Day War was nothing less than aggression for territorial gain. Hart quotes Israeli Chief of Staff Rabin, in an interview with Le Monde on 28 February 1968, Mordechai Bentov, a member of the wartime national government, General Haim Bar-Lev, in the Israeli newspaper Maariv, two comments by General Ezer Weizmann, Chief of Operations during the war, and three comments by General Matetiyahu Peled, Chief of Logistical Command during the war. Peled was one of 12 members of Israel’s General Staff.

In a nutshell, all of them agree that Nasser did not want war and that everyone knew it. The story of the danger of extermination was invented to justify annexation. Israel was certainly never in any danger of annihilation. Israeli Intelligence knew that Egypt was not prepared for war and President Lyndon Johnson’s memoirs also prove that the Pentagon, as well, did not consider Israel to be in danger. Israel’s war was purposefully expansionist. A CIA assessment, presented to President Johnson on 23 May 1967, stated that Israel could “defend successfully against simultaneous Arab attacks on all fronts . . . or hold on any three fronts while mounting successfully a major offensive on the fourth”.

Finally, Hart’s article contains the following comment by General Matetiyahu Peled: “To pretend that the Egyptian forces concentrated on our borders were capable of threatening Israel’s existence does not only insult the intelligence of any person capable of analysing this kind of situation, but is primarily an insult to the Israeli army.”

In the aftermath of Israel’s Six-Day War and its Occupation of the West Bank, Israeli forces ethnically cleansed and destroyed a number of Palestinian villages, including Imwas and Beit Nuba. Ten additional UNWRA refugee camps were established to accommodate the new wave of displaced persons. The Zionist project had completed one more stage.

Jerusalem – destruction and contempt

Following the invasion of East Jerusalem, Israel almost immediately demolished the 800-year-old Mughrabi Quarter, contemptuously expelling 600 residents and destroying 135 homes. In its place, Israel created the Western Wall Plaza. The then Labour-led government, in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, established the first West Bank settlement in September 1967. This was in spite of the fact that a legal adviser to the Israeli Government had affirmed, in a secret memo, the illegality of civilian settlement. In 2003, Israel began to build its so-called Separation Wall in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, around 85% of which annexes land Occupied in 1967. The International Court of Justice in The Hague has confirmed that the Wall is contrary to international law. Israel’s annexation of newly-Occupied territory, in order to expand Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries in 1967, has never been recognised by the international community.

Gaza – impoverishment and exploitation

For decades, Israel militarily Occupied Gaza and annexed land for Jewish colonies, with a population that grew to more than 8,000. In 2005, Israel removed the settlers and established a blockade that cut off Gaza from the outside world, turning it into a deprived and increasingly impoverished ghetto. The Gaza Strip, along with the West Bank and East Jerusalem, forms part of a single Occupied Palestinian territory, as affirmed in a 2009 UN Security Council Resolution, as well as by the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Israel’s purpose in Gaza, as always and everywhere, is self-interest and greed. While Gaza fishermen are molested daily by the Israeli Navy, Israel is robbing the Palestinian people of their natural gas in Gaza’s territorial waters. A video from the The Real News Network (TRNN) shows US and Israeli companies, in blatant violation of international law, siphoning-off Gaza’s natural gas.

Israel’s exploitative colonisation of the Syrian Golan Heights

Driven out of their homes and their country by Zionist aggression, 560,000 Palestine refugees struggle to survive in war-torn Syria. One refugee, 30-year-old Hanan Odah, lives in the Jaramana refugee camp in Damascus. When her husband was killed in 2014, she fled her home in fear. After two years of struggling hand-to-mouth to survive, and with enemy forces now driven out, she has returned with her family to their damaged and looted house, supporting her family with the aid of UNRWA funding. UNRWA hopes to provide more help for returning Palestinian refugees but with so many outside parties aiming to dismember Syria, security for Palestinian refugees and the Syrian people remains far off. The grim presence of Israeli Occupation forces a mere 60 kilometres away is a further reminder for refugees of the dangers they face.

The online Oxford Public international law service explains that “on 14 December 1981 Israel adopted the Golan Heights Law ([1981/82] 36 Laws of the State of Israel 7) under which ‘the law, jurisdiction, and administration of the State of Israel shall apply to the area of the Golan Heights’.” However, when Prime Minister Begin introduced this law in the Knesset he said specifically that “the minute the President of Syria will express his readiness to negotiate a treaty of Peace with Israel, at that very minute negotiations will start and nothing will stand in our way”. The Supreme Court of Israel was evasive when faced with the obvious illegality of annexation, stressing that the mere extension of the law to a certain area outside State territory does not necessarily constitute annexation. International, as well as Israeli public opinion, certainly saw the Golan Heights Law as annexation and the UN Security Council pronounced it as being null and void and without international legal effect, and demanded that the law be rescinded.

Nevertheless, in April 2016, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chose to hold one of his weekly Cabinet meetings in the Golan Heights. At the start of the meeting, he proclaimed that the Golan Heights were “an integral part of the Land of Israel since ancient times”. He also said that, “In the 49 years that the Golan Heights have been under Israeli rule, they have been for agriculture, tourism, economic initiatives and building.” Netanyahu was referring to Israel’s lucrative tourism industry, which advertises the Golan Heights as being in Israel, and to the plunder of the region’s water and fertility. No wonder he also declared “The Golan Heights will forever remain in Israel’s hands.” !

Israel’s 1967 determination: irreversible territorial gains and no Palestinian state

In October 2015, the Israeli Justice Minister, Ayelet Shaked, told a conference in Washington DC “We are against a Palestinian state. There is not and never will be a Palestinian state.” On 19 May 2017, she reacted angrily to a map showing Israel minus 1967 conquered territory that had been released by the White House, saying “I hope this is just ignorance and not policy”. She told her audience that her party was given a mandate to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. Shaked also said, interestingly, “these are ideological matters and they are our job.”

Zionist reference to ‘Judea and Samaria’ means only one thing – no Palestinian state. Asked by an interviewer with the Israeli news site NRG, in March 2015, if it were true that a Palestinian nation would never be formed while he is prime minister, Netanyahu replied, “Indeed.” He further said it was necessary to beat back international pressure to divide Jerusalem and return Israel to its pre-1967 borders. “I do not give in”, Netanyahu told the interviewer. “We stood fast against huge pressure, and we will continue to do so”. In February 2017, prior to Netanyahu’s departure for Washington to meet President Trump, the Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan told Israeli Army Radio that “all members of the security cabinet, and foremost the prime minister, oppose a Palestinian state”.

This implacable hostility to the concept of a Palestinian state is shared by Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely, Minister of Education Naftali Bennett, Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom, Minister of National Infrastructure Yuval Steinitz, Minister of Immigration Absorption Ze’ev Elkin, Minister of Agriculture Uri Ariel, Minister of Science, Technology and Space Ofir Akunis, Minister of Transportation and Road Safety Yisrael Katz, Minister for Social Equality Gila Gamliet and Minister of Welfare and Social Services Haim Katz.

A single state with equal rights for all

It should be plain to all by now that the Palestinian Authority, established in 1994 under the Oslo Accords, will never be allowed to become the fully-functioning state government that had been promised by 1999. The Authority’s jurisdiction has always been, intentionally, severely limited. Diana Buttu, former adviser to the negotiating team of the Palestine Liberation Organisation tells us that in reality:

“The Palestinian Authority served as a subcontractor for the occupying Israeli military. The overwhelming focus on security, we were told, was necessary for the duration of peace talks. Today, fully a third of the authority’s roughly $4 billion budget goes to policing, more than for health and education combined. These security forces do not provide a normal police service to Palestinians, but instead aid the Israeli Army in maintaining the occupation and Israel’s ever-expanding settlements. The internationally lauded ‘security co-operation’ between Israel and the Palestinian Authority has resulted only in the arrest and imprisonment of Palestinians, including non-violent human rights activists, while armed and violent Israeli settlers are allowed to terrorise Palestinians with impunity. The Palestinian Authority has no jurisdiction over the settlers, and the Israeli Army almost always looks the other way.”

Collaboration with the Occupying power could only ever have played into Israel’s hands, and the fraudulent nature of the so-called ‘negotiations’ process has been undeniably revealed, out of their own mouths, by Israel’s leaders and lawmakers. Diana Buttu believes that already, even without the advocacy of a single major political party, more than one-third of Palestinians in the Occupied territories support the concept of single-state solution. In the end, it must be up to the Palestinian people but the world community’s complicity in bringing about this tragedy means that, together with the Palestinian people, we have a collective responsibility to help create a peaceful and just solution. The purpose of political Zionism runs counter to the universally-accepted provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention and this past fifty years of territorial expansion and terror has added enormously to the suffering. Two generations of Palestinians have reached adulthood, never having experienced a moment of freedom or justice. The achievement of future peace and harmony in the Holy Land can only be founded upon mutual recognition and respect. That means the repudiation of Zionism and due observance of international humanitarian law.