Myths and facts about
The Wars
[Compiled by
http://www.electronicintifada.net]
Since the establishment of Israel there
have been five major wars between Arabs and the Israelis. These wars occured in
1948, 1956, 1967, 1973 and 1982. Israel claims that the Arabs started all the
wars. Although there has been low-intensity conflict in the intervening years
and major conflagrations during the "War of Attrition" in 1969-1970
and the 1978 invasion of Lebanon, massive civil disobedience during the
Uprising of 1988, and in 2000-2001 during the Al-Aqsa Intifada, it is these
five wars Israel refers to when it makes its claims, creating the impression
that Israel has only acted "in self-defence".
Myth
The roots of the 1948
war go as far back as the first
recognition on the
part of the Palestinians that the Zionists wished to establish a Jewish state
on their land. In late 1947 the United Nations proposed that Palestine be
divided into a Palestinian Arab state and a Jewish state. The UN Partition Plan
recommended that 55 percent of Palestine, and the most fertile region, be given
to the Jewish settlers who compromised 30 percent of the population. The
remaining 45 percent of Palestine was to comprise a home for the other 70
percent of the population who were Palestinians. The Palestinians rejected the
plan because it was unfair. Israel and
its supporters claim that the Arabs first attacked in Janurary 1948 and then
invaded Israel in May 1948.
Fact
The truth is that by
May 1948 Zionist forces had already invaded and occupied large parts of the
land which had been allocated to the Palestinians by the UN Partition Plan. In
January 1948 Israel did not yet exist.
The evidence that
Israel started the 1948 war comes from
Zionist sources. The
History of the Palmach which was
released in portions
in the 1950s (and in full in 1972)
details the efforts
made to attack the Palestinian Arabs and secure more territory than alloted to
the Jewish state by the UN Partition Plan (Kibbutz Menchad Archive, Palmach
Archive, Efal, Israel). Already, Zionist forces were implementing their
"Plan Dalet" to "control the area given to us [the Zionists] by
the U.N. in addition to areas occupied by Arabs which were outside these
borders and the setting up of forces to counter the possible invasion of Arab
armies after May 15" (Qurvot 1948, p. 16, which covers the operations of
Haganah and Palmach, see also Ha Sepher Ha Palmach, The Book of Palmach).
1. Operation Nachson, 1 April 1948
2. Operation Harel, 15 April 1948
3. Operation Misparayim, 21 April 1948
4. Operation Chametz, 27 April 1948
5. Operation Jevuss, 27 April 1948
6. Operation Yiftach, 28 April 1948
7. Operation Matateh, 3 May 1948
8. Operation Maccabi, 7 May 1948
9. Operation Gideon, 11 May 1948
10. Operation Barak, 12 May 1948
11. Operation Ben Ami, 14 May 1948
12. Operation Pitchfork, 14 May 1948
13. Operation Schfifon, 14 May 1948
The operations 1-8
indicate operations carried out before the entry of the Arab forces inside the
areas allotted by the UN to the Arab state. It has to be noted that of thirteen
specific full-scale operations under Plan Dalet eight were carried out outside
the area "given" by the UN to the Zionists.
Following is a list
drawn from the New York Times of the
major military
operations the Zionists mounted before the
British evacuated
Palestine and before the Arab forces
entered Palestine:
* Qazaza (21 Dec. 1947)
* Sa'sa (16 Feb. 1948)
* Haifa (21 Feb. 1948)
* Salameh (1 March 1948)
* Biyar Adas (6 March 1948)
* Qana (13 March 1948)
* Qastal (4 April 1948)
* Deir Yassin (9 April 1948)
* Lajjun (15 April 1948)
* Saris (17 April 1948)
* Tiberias (20 April 1948)
* Haifa (22 April 1948)
* Jerusalem (25 April 1948)
* Jaffa (26 April 1948)
* Acre (27 April 1948)
* Jerusalem (1 May 1948)
* Safad (7 May 1948)
* Beisan (9 May 1948).
David Ben-Gurion confirms
this in an address delivered to American Zionists in Jerusalem on 3 September
1950:
"Until the
British left, no Jewish settlement, however remote, was entered or seized by
the Arabs, while the Haganah, under severe and frequent attack, captured many
Arab positions and liberated Tiberias and Haifa, Jaffa and Safad"
(Ben-Gurion, Rebirth and Destiny of Israel (N.Y.: Philosophical Library, 1954,
p. 530).
Although late PM
Ben-Gurion speaks of "liberating" Jaffa it
was alloted to the
Palestinians by the UN Partition Plan.
Late PM Menachem Begin
adds: "In the months preceding the Arab invasion, and while the five Arab
states were conducting preparations, we continued to make sallies into
Arab territory. The
conquest of Jaffa stands out as an event of first-rate importance in the
struggle for Hebrew independence early in May, on the eve [that is, before the
alleged Arab invasion] of the invasion by the five Arab states" (Menachem
Begin, The Revolt, Nash, 1972, p. 348)
On 12 December 1948
David Ben Gurion confirmed the fact that the Zionists started the war in 1948:
"As April began, our War of Independence swung decisively from defense to
attack. Operation 'Nachson'...was launched with the capture of Arab Hulda near
where we stand today and of Deir Muheisin and culminated in the storming of
Qastel, the great hill fortress near Jerusalem" (Ben Gurion, Rebirth and
Destiny of Israel (N.Y.: Philosophical Library, 1954, p. 106).
Israeli historians
have themselves refuted the claim that the Arabs started the 1948 war. Benny
Morris uncovered a report from the Israeli Defense Force Intelligence Branch
(30 June 1948) that shows a deliberate Israeli policy to attack the Arabs
should they resist and expel the Palestinians (Benny Morris, "The Causes
and Character of the Arab Exodus from Palestine: the Israel Defense Forces
Intelligence Branch Analysis of June 1948", Middle Eastern Studies, XXII,
January 1986, pp. 5-19).
Conclusion
In sum, it is not true
that the Arabs "invaded Israel" in
1948. First, Israel
did not exist at the time of the alleged invasion as an established state with
recognised bounderies. When the Zionist leaders established Israel on 15 May
1948 they purposely declined to declare the bounderies of the new state in
order to allow for future expansion.
Secondly, the only
territory to which the new state of Israel had even a remote claim was that
alloted to the Jewish state by the UN Partition Plan. But the Zionists had
already attacked areas that were alloted to the Palestinian Arab state.
Thirdly, those areas
which the Arab states purportedly
"invaded"
were, in fact, exclusively areas alloted to the
Palestinian Arab state
proposed by the UN Partition Plan. The so-called Arab invasion was a defensive
attempt to hold on to the areas alloted by the Partition Plan for the
Palestinian state.
Finally, the commander
of Jordan's Arab Legion, was under
orders not to enter
the areas alloted to the Jewish state
(Sir John Bagot Glubb,
"The Battle for Jerusalem", Middle
East International,
May 1973).
Myth
Israel blames the 1956
Sinai war on Egypt's aggressive behavior, including the closing of the Suez
Canal.
Fact
The facts concerning
the Sinai war come from Israeli sources.
A decisive and
authoritative contribution exploding the myth of Israel's accusations are the
relevations from former Prime Minister Moshe Sharett's Personal Diary (Moshe
Sharett, Yoman Ishi, Ma'ariv, 1979, in Hebrew with portions trans. in Livia
Rokach, Israel's Sacred Terrorism: A Study Based on Moshe Sharett's Personal
Diary and Other Documents, AAUG, 1980).
The main reason often
given for the origin of the 1956 war
was Egypt's closing of
the Suez Canal. Moshe Sharett reveals that the Israeli leadership was planning
the territorial conquest of the Sinai and Gaza as early as the fall of
1953. The Israeli attack on Gaza in
February 1955 was undertaken as a conscious preliminary act of war. David
Ben-Gurion became Prime Minister and Israel soon became very aggressive. On 28 February 1955 Israeli troops invaded
Gaza killing 37 Egyptians and wounding 31. The attack came out of the
blue. Egyptian President Gamal Nasser
said it "was revenge for nothing. Everything was quiet there"
(Kennett Love, Suez: the Twice Fought War, McGraw-Hill, 1969, p. 83). The Chief
of Staff of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organisation, Swedish General
Carl von Horn, confirmed Nasser's claim, asserting that there had been
"comparative tranquility along the armistice
demarcation lines
during the greater part of the period November 1954 to February 1955"
(Report to the Security Council, UN Doc. S3373, 17 March 1955).
In the 1950s few
people believed that Nasser had aggressive
intentions towards
Israel. Richard Grossman, a British
Zionist, wrote in 1955
that: "not only Egypt, but the whole Middle East must pray that Nasser
survives the assassin's bullet. I am certain that he is a man who means what he
says, and that so long as he is in power directing his
middle-class
revolution, Egypt will remain a factor
for peace and social
development" (Richard Grossman, New Statesman and Nation, 22 January
1955).
The Gaza raid changed
everything. Arab public opinion was
outraged and demanded
action, as it was intended to. Nasser
needed arms to equip
his army which was hopelessly outgunned by Israel. Western Intelligence was
convinced that Egypt had no intention of attacking Israel. The Americans
rebuffed Nasser in any case and Egypt turned to the Russians who orchestrated
the famous Czech arms deal which was used by Israel for feigned outrage. The
Russians had also used the Czechs to supply arms to Israel in 1948.
Nasser did not realise
that he was being set up for the
Israeli invasion,
although he did recognise that the
situation was heating
up. In October 1955, a year before the war, Israeli PM David Ben-Gurion ordered
his Chief of Staff, General Moshe Dayan, to prepare invasion plans. Ben Gurion
was determined, according to Dayan, "not to miss any politically favorable
opportunity to strike at Egypt" (Moshe Dayan, Diary of the Sinai Campaign,
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966, p. 37).
Dayan expressed the
hopes of the Israeli leadership when he
said in December 1955:
"One of these days a situation will be created which makes military action
possible" (Kennet Love, Suez: The Twice Fought War, McGraw-Hill, 1969, p.
106).
The opportunity to
make war against Egypt came in July 1956
when Nasser
nationalised the Suez Canal, an act within the
legal right of the
Egyptian state. The Suez Canal was
controlled by
foreigners in 1956 and represented an important vestige of colonialism
affronting the Arab people. Nasser's action was popular although, in hindsight,
politically cataclysmic. France and Britain, in one of the last spasms of
European colonialism, colluded in a secret alliance with Israel to invade the
Sinai and destroy Nasser. On 29 October
1956 Israel attacked Egypt and occupied the entire Sinai. French war equipment
poured into Israel and French and British warships bombarded the Egyptian
coast.
French and British
troops landed and helped the Israeli armed forces. Eisenhower, who had been in
the dark about the invasion plans and the secret alliance, demanded that
Israeli forces withdraw from Egyptian territory. Israel refused, leading
Eisenhower to exclaim: "Should a nation which attacks and occupies foreign
territory in the face of U.N. disapproval be allowed to impose conditions on
its own withdrawal? If we agree that armed attack can properly achieve the
purpose of the assailant, then I fear we will
have turned back the
clock of international order..." (Address to the nation, 20 February
1957).
Myth
Israel claims that its
attack against Egypt in June 1967 was a defensive measure to prevent Gamal
Abdel Nasser from
attacking.
Fact
Israel began planning
the re-conquest of the Sinai soon after its forced withdrawal in 1956. In 1967,
as in 1956, Israel waited for favorable circumstances to put its plan into
action.
In 1967, however,
Israel had a greater appreciation of the
necessity and utility
of a sophisticated publicity campaign, waged through the international media,
to convince Western opinion that any Israeli military actions could only be
construed as acts of self-defense. This publicity campaign was two-pronged:
stressing that the Arabs attacked Israel and that Israel was in danger of
annihilation. Both presuppositions were patently false.
In the early hours of
5 June 1967, Israel announced to a
credulous Western
world that the Egyptian Air Force had
initiated hostile
actions. In fact, it was the Israelis who
had attacked the
Egyptians and destroyed virtually the entire Egyptian Air Force while its fleet
was still on the ground.
General Matityahu
Peled, one of the architects of the Israeli conquest, committed what the
Israeli public considered blasphemy when he admitted the true thinking of the
Israeli leadership: "The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging
over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is
only bluff, which was born and developed after the war" (Ha'aretz, 19
March 1972). Israeli Air Force General Ezer Weizmann
declared bluntly that "there was never any danger of extermination"
(Ma'ariv, 19 April 1972). Mordechai Bentov, a former Israeli cabinet minister,
also dismissed the myth of Israel's imminent annihilation: "All this story
about the danger of extermination has been a complete invention and has been
blown up a posteriori to justify the annexation of new Arab territories"
(Al Hamishmar, 14 April 1972).
After the 1967 war
Israel, claimed it invaded because of
imminent Arab attack.
It claimed that Nasser's closing of the Straits of Tiran constituted an act of
war. It also cited Syrian shelling on the demilitarized zone of the
Syrian-Israeli border. The claim that the Arabs were going to invade appears particularly
ludicrous when one recalls that a third of Egypt's army was in Yemen and
therefore quite unprepared to launch a war. On the Syrian front, Israel was
engaging in threats and provocations that evidenced many similarities to its
behavior in the lead up to the Gaza raid of 1955.
The demilitarized zone
on the Syrian-Israeli border was established by agreement on 20 July 1949.
Israeli provocations were incessant and enabled Israel to increase and extend
its sovereignty by encroachment over the entire Arab area. According to one UN
Chief of Staff, Arab villagers were evicted and their homes destroyed (E.L.M.
Burns, Between Arab and Israeli, Ivan Obolensky, 1962, pp. 113-114).
Another Chief of Staff
described how the Israelis ploughed up Arab land and "advanced the
'frontier' to their own advantage" (Carl von Horn, Soldiering for Peace,
Cassell, 1966, p. 79). Israel attempted
to evict the Arabs living on the Golan and annex the demilitarized zone. When
the Syrians inevitably responded, Israel claimed that "peaceful"
Israeli farmers were being shelled by the Syrians. Unmentioned was the fact
that the "farmers" were armed and using tractors and farm equipment
to encroach on the demilitarized zone (David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive
Branch: the Roots of Violence in the Middle East, Faber and Faber, 1984, pp.
213-15). This was part of a "premeditated Israeli policy [..] to get all
the Arabs out of the way by fair means or foul."
Shortly after the
Syrian response on 7 April 1967, the
Israeli Air Force attacked
Syria, shooting down six planes,
hitting thirty
fortified positions and killing about 100
people (Hirst, op.
cit., p. 214). It was unlikely that any
Syrian guns would have
been fired if not for Israel's
provocation. Israel's need for water also played a role
in the 1967 attack. The invasion completed Israel's encirclement of the
headwaters of the Upper Jordan River, its capture of the West Bank and the two
aquifers arising there, which currently supply all the groundwater for northern
and central Israel.
The Israelis
followed-up their massive retaliation with stern warnings. On 11 May 1967,
General Yitzhak Rabin said on Israeli radio: "The moment is coming when we
will march on Damascus to overthrow the Syrian Government" (Godfrey
Jansen, "New Light on the 1967 War", Daily Star, London, 15, 22, 26
November 1973). Syria sought Egypt's assistance under their Mutual Defense Pact
of November 1966. Nasser could not afford to stand idly by. He ordered the
removal of the small UN force stationed in Sinai and closed the Straits of
Tiran. This action provided the casus belli that Israel soon invoked.
Nasser's move was a
gesture of solidarity with Syria and no
threat to Israel's
economy or its security. The closure of
the Straits did not
force Israel into war. Claims of economic strangulation were absurd since only
5 percent of Israel's trade depended on free movement through the Straits of
Tiran. No Israeli merchant vessel had passed through the Straits during the
previous two years (Michael Howard and Robert Hunter, Israel and the Arab
World: the Crisis of 1967, Adelphi Papers 41, Institute for Strategic Studies,
1967, p. 24).
In sum, the threat to
Israel's survival in 1967 was non-
existent. According to
the British newspaper The Observer,
Nasser's purpose was
clearly "to deter Israel rather than
provoke it to a
fight" (The Observer, London, 4 June 1967).
New York Times
columnist James Reston reported that "Egypt
does not war [...]
certainly is not ready for war" (New York Times, 4 and 5 June 1967).
The Israelis
themselves were perfectly aware of this, given
their sophisticated
military intelligence capabilities.
Later, in the first
few days of the war, they were so
concerned that their
plans for attacking Syria would be
discovered that they
deliberately attacked the USS Liberty,
killing 33 American
sailors, in an attempt to prevent it from monitoring war preparations.
A few months after the
war, Yitzhak Rabin remarked: "I do not think Nasser wanted war. The two
divisions he sent to the Sinai on 14 May would not have been sufficient to
launch an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it" (Le Monde,
29 February 1968).
Israeli General Peled
was even more frank: "To pretend that
the Egyptian forces
massed on our frontiers were in a
position to threaten
the existence of Israel constitutes an
insult not only to the
intelligence of anyone capable of
analyzing this sort of
situation, but above all an insult to the Zahal [Israeli army]" (Ha'aretz,
19 March 1972).
Finally, in 1982, the
Israelis admitted that they had started the war (although official Zionist
propaganda in the United States still does not acknowledge this fact). Prime
Minister Menachem Begin, in a speech delivered at the Israeli National Defense
College, clearly stated that: "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 him" (Jerusalem Post,
20 August 1982).
Myth
The 1973 war – the Yum
Kipur war – holds a special place in Israeli mythology. Again, the myth is that Israel was attacked
unprovoked, that its existence was again at stake, and that Israelis were at
the periloud risk of annihilation.
Fact
After coming to power
in late 1970, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat indicated to the United States
that he was willing to negotiate with Israel to resolve the conflict in
exchange for Egyptian territory lost in 1967. In February 1971 he offered a
full peace treaty to Israel, which it rejected, although international
consensus supported the Sadat offer which conformed to the US position (John
Kimche, There Could Have Been Peace, Dial, 1973, p. 286).
When these overtures
were ignored by Washington and Tel Aviv, Egypt and Syria launched an coordinated
action in October 1973 against Israeli forces occupying the Egyptian Sinai and
Syrian Golan Heights. The devastating defeat of 1967 left Israel in control of
the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights and the Sinai. Israel rapidly moved to
incorporate these occupied territories into
its domain. Israel
illegally annexed Jerusalem and began
establishing colonial
settlements in all the occupied
territories.
It was clear that the
Arab World could not go on indefinitely watching Israel expel Egyptians, Syrians
and Palestinians while installing Jewish settlers in their thousands. By 1973
nearly 100 settlements had been established and hundreds of thousands of
Palestinians had been displaced, expelled, imprisoned or deported.
On 6 October 1973 the
Egyptian and Syrian armies attacked
Israeli positions in
the Sinai and on the Golan Heights in an attempt to liberate their territory
occupied by Israel. The Secretary-General of the Arab League explained the Arab
action: "In a
final analysis, Arab action is justifiable,
moral and valid under
Article 51 of the Charter of
the United Nations.
There is no aggression, no attempt to acquire new territories. But to restore
and liberate all the occupied territories is a duty for all able
self-respecting peoples" (Sunday Times, 14 October 1973).
Myth
In 1982, Israel
claimed that its military objective was to
attack, not Lebanon,
but the Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO) in
Lebanon in order to 'safeguard the
Galilee region from
enemy artillery and infiltration'.
Fact
The facts are that
Israel invaded Lebanon on 6 June 1982 in
order to totally
destroy the PLO, not only its insignificant military capability, but also all
of its civilian functions.
The other basic war
aim was described by Israeli Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon: "The bigger
the blow and the more we damage the PLO infrastructure, the more the Arabs in
Judea and Samaria, [the Biblical name for the West Bank used for obvious
political reasons by Israel] and Gaza
will be ready to
negotiate with us" -- The Times, 5 August 1982 -- Israel had hoped that,
with the destruction of the PLO, Lebanon could be ripped from its Arab moorings
in order to create an Israeli puppet regime of pro-Israeli Maronite Christian
Lebanese, a minority of the population.
As early as 1954,
David Ben-Gurion had urged that one of the "central duties" of
Israel's foreign policy should be to push the Maronite Christians to
"proclaim a Christian state". Moshe Dayan had said that: "[the]
Israeli army will enter Lebanon, will occupy the neessary territory, and will
create a Christian regime which will ally itself with Israel" -- Livia Rokach, Israel's Sacred Terrorism,
op.cit., pp.
24-30. Also see, Laura Zittrain
Eisenberg: My Enemy's Enemy: Zionist Intentions in Lebanon.
The Israeli claim that
it had invaded Lebanon "in self-
defense" is
false.
Between August 1981
and May 1982 the PLO
maintained a truce,
sponsored by the United States and Saudi Arabia, on Lebanon's southern border.
Israel, on the other hand, violated the truce 2,777 times (United Nations
records cited by Robin Wright in the Christian Science Monitor, 18 March 1982;
Alexander Cockburn and James Ridgeway, Village Voice, 22 June 1982). [For the
most thorough, as well as the most compelling treatment of Israel's invasion of
Lebanon, see Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation] Once again Israel only needed an
excuse to make war. This time the casus belli was the attempted assassination
of the Israeli ambassador to London, an act determined by Scotland Yard to have
been conducted by the PLO-dissent Abu Nidal group. In any case, Israel's excuse
was so flimsy that, for the first time in the Arab-Israeli conflict, Israeli
propaganda was not taken on board without question by the international
community.
At first the Israelis
operated under the pretense that they
were only securing
their borders and stated that they did not intend to go beyond a 25 mile limit.
But the truth was very different as described by the former chief of Israeli
military intelligence,
Aharon Yariv: "I know in fact that going to Beirut was included in the
original military plan"
-- Jerusalem Post, 24
September 1982. Israel's invasion of
Lebanon has no validity in international law. Israel thus had no grounds to
rely on the provision of the Charter of the United Nations concerning
self-defense, while the means used to effect the invasion clearly lacked
proportionality. The cease-fire of July 1981 had been observed scrupulously.
The objective of the
1982 invasion and war, therefore, was to achieve certain political and
strategic aims at a high cost, which included breaches of some of the most
fundamental rules of international law. As for the Israeli justification for
the conduct of hostilities, the principle of military necessity cannot excuse
the massive number of civilian casualties which resulted from Israeli attacks
on refugee camps, hospitals, schools, cultural, religious and charitable
institutions, commercial and industrial premises, Lebanese government and PLO
offices, diplomatic premises and urban areas generally.
Particularly heinous
was the August 8th bombardment of Beirut by the Israeli Air Force, which some
correspondents compared to the WWII bombing of Dresden in its ferocity.
Hundreds of innocent Beiruti civilians died as a result of this war crime. [See
Thomas Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem; Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation; Jean
Said Makdisi, Beirut Fragments; Chris Giannou, Besieged: A Doctor in Lebanon.]