Israel assasinates high officials in a sovereign nation. Then Israel and the United States bomb sovereign nation based on accusations of a nonexistent secret nuclear weapons program, while Israel has a secret nuclear weapons program.
Israel and the United States break the UN Charter and commit the high crime under International Law.
Americans celebrate and call for their president to get a peace prize.
@charliekirk11@LauraLoomer@Timcast
Little do they know there were Israeli terror groups long before Arab ones, and Israel is committing genocide as they celebrate.
How do we avoid this level of complacent ignorance of the historical record?
@martyrmade@ComicDaveSmith
Remember, they don't "hate us cause we are free"
#IranIsraelConflict #IranVsIsrael #Gaza
There would now be a war, which Israel felt certain of winning, against Egypt and Syria. Could the Israelis also exploit this unique opportunity to lay their hands on the rest of Palestine—East Jerusalem and the West Bank—which had eluded them in 1948? One wonders whether the open letter which the celebrated columnist, Ephraim Kishon, addressed to King Hussein is quite as ironic as it sounds:
Frankly, you were not the only one to fall for our little trick. Veteran statesmen of world calibre stepped dazedly into the fiendish trap we prepared over the years in order to fool both our enemies and our friends. Or did you imagine even for a second that all this was not planned? You silly man! Today it can be told, poor Hussi! Six or seven years ago we decided to take the Old City. But, we said to ourselves, we won't be able to pull it off unless the Arabs attack us first. Yes, but how could they be coaxed into doing that? As long as the Old Man [Ben Gurion] was at the helm, it was to be assumed that they would have cold feet. The Old Man therefore had to be removed. So we invented the Lavon Affair. We had a few spins on the Committee of Seven, published the brief of the Legal Adviser and played around with other odd-ball gimmicks. I hardly remember what, then we started building up Eshkol as a compromiser and waverer. It came off beautifully. He cooperated, so did Abba Eban. In short within a few years we succeeded in implanting in Gamal's mind that the time was ripe to attack us. The only thing that hampered our plans was the UN force in the Strip. How to get rid of it, how? In this matter we put our trust in U Thant and he did not let us down. Gamal innocently moved into Sinai and closed the Straits of Tiran. All this was exactly according to our plans. When would they at last conclude a pact, we asked ourselves anxiously, when? For long days we waited tensely—nothing, you wouldn't budge. We shamelessly tempted you, begged the naval powers to defend us, asked the Prime Minister to make a radio speech (a stammering performance which did anything but boost Israeli morale), pressed de Gaulle to drop us, what didn't we do to bring you nearer to Nasser? In the end our efforts were successful, you flew to Cairo and signed a mutual defence agreement. We sighed, relieved. Next day we brought in Dayan, and the rest is history. Sorry, Hussi, maybe they didn't teach you such tricks at Harrow but we had no choice, we wanted all of Jerusalem so badly.
There is a plausible theory that the Egyptian operation was orchestrated by Ben-Gurion and Dayan not only to create problems between the Western powers and Nasser but also to drive a spear through the heart of Sharett's peace negotiations. The chief of the team inside Egypt, who escaped and survived, has been quoted as saying that he believed the operation had been set up to fail and that it had been betrayed.
If this was indeed the case, the intrigue failed—for a time. Nasser's regime was not destabilized, the British stuck to their agreement to withdraw from the canal zone, the CIA found out almost immediately that the bombings were the work of the Israelis, and Nasser continued to believe that a peaceful solution to his dispute with Israel was possible. Furthermore, according to Isser Harel, Kermit Roosevelt came up with a scheme to use the affair to actually promote the peace negotiations.
In September 1954, as the pathetic team of Israeli agents were being interrogated by the Egyptian police (possibly with the assistance of the German experts so thoughtfully provided by the CIA), Roosevelt cabled Harel with a proposition. Nasser would be willing to start direct peace talks with Israel if Israel would let it be known that the Moslem Brotherhood had collaborated with the bombing operation. The Brotherhood was violently opposed to Nasser's negotiations with the British, and indeed nearly succeeded in assassinating him in October 1954.
Harel says that he agreed to the plan, which was code-named Operation Mirage, but told the CIA that if any of the Israeli agents were executed, the deal would be off. Nasser continued to indicate his interest in peace talks, so the settlement favored by Sharett was forwarded to Egypt. But while the proposal was "in the mail," as Harel puts it, the Egyptian court sentenced two of the saboteurs to death. Harel then cabled the CIA to say that Operation Mirage was off. Allen Dulles tried to get Nasser to commute the death sentence, but was told that there was nothing that could be done. Nasser had just hung six Egyptian Moslem Brothers for trying to kill him, so he was hardly in a position to be lenient toward Israeli spies. The CIA thought this reasonable. Harel, on the other hand, being an obstinate individual who never saw much point in talking to Arabs, did not.
These were the glory days of the agency. In 1953 Kermit Roosevelt and other operatives (including H. Norman Schwarzkopf, whose son was later to play a prominent role in the affairs of the region) had engineered the restoration of the Shah of Iran. The following year a nationalist regime in Guatemala had been removed in a military coup organized by the CIA. Other covert operations were hard at work setting up a client regime in southern Vietnam following the French defeat. These successes, in addition to the fact that the brother of CIA Director Allen Dulles was the secretary of state, meant that the agency had a remarkably free hand in covert initiatives and diplomacy around the world.
In July 1954 a series of incendiary bombs caused minor damage in Cairo and Alexandria. Among the targets were the U.S. Information Service libraries in the two cities. It might have been assumed that the attacks were the work of militant anti-Western Egyptians venting their spleen at Nasser's friendly relations with the Americans and British. Those who ordered the attacks hoped both Nasser and the outside world would make exactly that assumption, because in fact the sabotage campaign had been set up and put into operation by Israeli Military Intelligence. The aim of this particular covert action was to destabilize Nasser's relations with the United States and Great Britain, and possibly compel the British to put off their planned withdrawal from their bases on the Suez Canal.
“General Ezer Weizmann, unruly nephew of Chaim Weizmann, had for a decade or more been perfecting their master-plan for the destruction of Arab air power. Their men were trained for every eventuality. They had pored over scale models of every possible target; it was with astonishing precision that in the first few hours of the 1967 War the pilot of a Mirage fighter machine-gunned, at close range, what he knew to be King Hussein’s study at the Basman Palace in Amman.”
“It was not until five years had passed, when the Israelis were basking in an unprecedented sense of their own strength, security and achievement, that General Matitahu Peled, one of the architects of the Israeli victory, committed what, to an outraged public, seemed nothing less than blasphemy. But in the so-called ‘annihilation controversy’ which followed, and in spite of pleas to keep silent for the sake of Israel’s reputation in the world, none of his military colleagues seriously contested his central thesis. ‘There is no reason’, he said, ‘to hide the fact that since 1949 no one dared, or more precisely, no one was able, to threaten the very existence of Israel. In spite of that, we have continued to foster a sense of our own inferiority, as if we were a weak and insignificant people, which, in the midst of an anguished struggle for its existence, could be exterminated at any moment.’”
“True; General Peled went on, ‘Arab leaders may have sounded menacing, but it is notorious that the Arab leaders themselves, thoroughly aware of their own impotence, did not believe in their own threats. … I am sure that our General Staff never told the government that the Egyptian military threat represented any danger to Israel or that we were unable to crush Nasser’s army, which, with unheard-of foolishness, had exposed itself to the devastating might of our army. … To claim that the Egyptian forces concentrated on our borders were capable of threatening Israel’s existence not only insults the intelligence of anyone capable of analysing this kind of situation, but is an insult to Tsahal [the Israeli army].’”
“Not only did Nasser lack the means to take on Israel, he did not have the intention either. The generals were well aware of that too. Yitzhak Rabin, the Chief of Staff, was frank about it: ‘I do not believe that Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent into Sinai on May 14 would not have been enough to unleash an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it.’”
“To make matters worse, Nasser had a close relationship with the CIA. Prior to the coup that overthrew the monarchy, Kermit Roosevelt, the covert troubleshooter who engineered the restoration of the Shah of Iran, had been dispatched to make contact with Nasser and his fellow plotters in the Society of Free Officers. They found, Roosevelt cabled back to Washington, ‘a large measure of agreement,’ so much so that the CIA assisted in the coup through which the insurgent officers took power.
Roosevelt’s informal and close relationship with Nasser, as well as his readiness to disburse U.S. covert funds on a profligate scale, made the CIA the main U.S. link with the Egyptian leader. Initially at least, the news seemed all good. Not only did Nasser appear to have friendly feelings toward the United States, he did not even appear to harbor any special animus toward Israel. To Roosevelt, Nasser confided that even after the Israelis had thrashed the Egyptian forces in the war of 1948, he and his fellow officers directed their ire at ‘our own superior officers, other Arabs, the British, and the Israelis—in that order.’
Nasser, having negotiated an agreement on the withdrawal of British forces in October 1954, was anxious to get military aid from the United States, since his armed forces were no better armed than they had been at the end of the disastrous war of 1948. Roosevelt and his minions, reflecting the status the supposedly covert CIA station enjoyed in Cairo, carried on the negotiations. Even though the State Department, anxious not to irritate the British, was not wholly enthusiastic about the deal, the agency pressed ahead.
Endowed with his bulging covert budget, Roosevelt was keen to do well by Nasser. Among other endowments, he arranged for the CIA to construct a powerful transmitter to beam Egyptian propaganda across the Middle East. Later, when times and loyalties had changed, the CIA had to finance stations elsewhere in order to counter the overly successful effect of the ‘Voice of the Arabs.’
More straightforwardly, Roosevelt had decided that Nasser’s affection for the CIA and America could be enhanced with cash, so he slipped $3 million in 1953 to one of the president’s aides as a personal sweetener for the Egyptian leader. Nasser was less than gratified by the assumption that he was a hired hand, but instead of returning the money, he used it to build an ostentatious tower in the middle of the Nile opposite the Cairo Hilton, and called it ‘Roosevelt’s erection.’
Nasser was less offhand about a more practical aspect of U.S. assistance. He asked Roosevelt to help him build up Egypt’s military intelligence and internal security squads. This was considered too sensitive an area for the CIA to involve itself in directly, so Allen Dulles, who had become CIA director on Eisenhower’s election, arranged to have a surrogate do the job. There was, ready to hand, a team on the CIA payroll with ample experience in internal security intelligence work—the old Nazis of the Gehlen organization.”
“If, in laying the diplomatic groundwork for his all-out assault on Egypt, Ben-gurion had implicitly confined his aims to the ending of Egypt’s armistice ‘violations’ and the achievement of peace, Menachim Begin and his righting Herut (ex-Irgun) opposition, a hotbed of extremist pressures, had no such inhibitions. More than a year before Begin had urged on parliament a ‘preventive war against the Arab states without further hesitation’. By doing so we will achieve two targets: firstly the annihilation of Arab power and secondly the expansion of our territory.” After such an overwhelming victory, however, Ben-gurion and his ruling Labour party lost no time, characteristically, in ‘catching up’ with the extremists, whose leader now said that he supported the government ‘with all my heart and soul’. Even the most ‘dovish’ parties, such as the left-wing Mapam, were not far behind either. All, in greater or lesser degree, developed expansionist appetites. And when the United States called on Israel to withdraw, Ben-gurion was outraged. ‘Up to the middle of the sixth century Jewish independence was maintained on the island of Yotvan [as the victors promptly renamed Tiran] south of the Gulf of Eilat, which was liberated yesterday by the Israeli army. … Israel terms Gaza an integral part of the nation. No force, whatever it is called, was going to make Israel evacuate Sinai. And the words of Isaiah the Prophet were fulfilled.’
“Unfortunately for Ben-gurion, the pretext he had so carefully manufactured was simply not good enough for the Americans. President Eisenhower quickly secured the withdrawal of the chastened British and French by withholding oil supplies from them, but it took six months to prise Israel out of all Egyptian territory. It was only by raising the threat of economic sanctions, to be applied by all members of the UN, that he managed it. ‘Should a nation,’ he asked in a special television broadcast, ‘which attacks and occupies foreign territory in the face of UN 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.’”
In February 1955, the Israeli Army attacked an Egyptian military outpost in Gaza. Thirty-nine Egyptians died.
Not surprisingly perhaps, but disingenuously, Israeli leaders such as Bengurion and Dayan do not even mention the Gaza raid in their accounts of the period. Nasser called it a ‘turning point’ and all independent authorities agree with him. The raid brought him under intensified pressure not merely from the Arabs in general, but from quarters most directly involved—his own army and the refugees in the Gaza Strip. As a soldier, General Burns, the Chief of Staff of the UN forces, had a sympathetic grasp of Nasser’s problem with the army.
Shortly before the raid, he had visited Gaza and told the troops that there was no danger of war; that the Gaza Armistice Demarcation Line was not going to be a battlefront. After that many of them had been shot in their beds. Never again could he risk telling the troops they had no attack to fear; never again could he let them believe they could relax their vigilance. It was for this reason that he could not issue and enforce strict orders against the opening of fire on the Israel patrols which marched along the demarcation line, a hundred metres or less from the Egyptian positions. These positions were held by the friends and perhaps the relatives of the men who had perished in the Israeli ambush of that bloody night.
"In September 1953, Dulles informed the Israeli ambassador in Washington that all economic aid was being suspended immediately. Eisenhower had been infuriated by Israel’s ongoing project to divert waters from the river Jordan for its own use, in defiance of a United Nations plan. At first the cancellation of American aid was kept secret by both sides, but a month later a special unit of the Israeli army called Unit 101, commanded by a rising star in the IDF named Ariel Sharon, assaulted the Jordanian village of Kibya and blew up forty-one houses and a school. Fifty-three civilians sheltering in their houses were killed. Outraged, the president ordered that the aid cutoff be made public."
"The inhabitants of the Christian, and notably docile, village of Kafr Bar’am, which had become a ‘closed area’ too, applied to the Supreme Court in their turn. It ruled in their favour: they should be permitted to return. The authorities were extremely angry. Aircraft of the Israeli Defence Forces attacked the village. The bombardment went on until Kafr Bar’am was reduced to rubble, whereupon the aircraft returned safely to their bases. In July 1951 the Supreme Court ruled in favour of another Christian village, Iqrit, whose inhabitants had been ordered, three years earlier, to leave their homes ‘for two weeks’ until ‘military operations in the area were concluded’. After this judgement the Military Government found another justification to prevent them from returning. The villagers once more appealed to the Supreme Court, which decided to consider the case on 6 February 1952. But a month and a half before that date, on Christmas Day to be precise, the Israeli Defence Forces took the Mukhtar of this Christian community to the top of a nearby hill and forced him to watch the show—the blowing up of every house in the village—which they had laid on for his benefit.
It hardly needs to be demonstrated that, however democratic Israel was for the Jews, it was in every sense a tyranny for the Arabs."
@Tollerantheart Yes, it is very terrible what has been happening in Palestine for decades now, and that is fitting because Lehi wanted to ally with the Nazis back then.
Just as David Ben-Gurion has been associated with supporting certain controversial operations linked to Har-Zion, Benjamin Netanyahu today is sometimes seen as expressing similar support for actions carried out by the IDF, a military whose early history included influences from groups such as Irgun.
#Israel