Israel Under Attack: Does Anyone Care?

A classic line that I intend to steal and use elsewhere without attribution to you.

Thanks in advance.

f.

You're presupposing a conclusion based on cynicism.

The alternative, the maintenance of the status quo, which isn't tenable, portends a worse scenario seeing as how it only serves to destabilize the region, and looks to be leading to a region wide conflict.

It actually requires 72,000 angels, and we all know they don't exist - even where 3 religions were born.

Six-Day War
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the Arab–Israeli war in 1967.

Six-Day War
Part of the Arab–Israeli conflict
The Six-Day War, also known as the June War, 1967 Arab-Israeli War, or Third Arab-Israeli War, was fought between June 5 and 10, 1967, by Israel and the neighboring states of Egypt (known at the time as the United Arab Republic), Jordan, and Syria.

The war began on June 5 with Israel launching surprise bombing raids against Egyptian air-fields after a period of high tension that included an Israeli raid into the Jordanian-controlled West Bank,[12][13] Israeli initiated aerial clashes over Syrian territory,[14] Syrian artillery attacks against Israeli settlements in the vicinity of the border followed by Israeli response against Syrian positions in the Golan Heights and encroachments of increasing intensity and frequency (initiated by Israel) into the demilitarized zones along the Syrian border[15] and culminating in Egypt blocking the Straits of Tiran.[16] and ordering of the evacuation from the Sinai Peninsula of the U.N. buffer force.

Within six days, Israel had won a decisive land war. Israeli forces had taken control of the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria.

This paragraph needs to be repeated, just in case people like Advocate missed it.

Cicerone Imposter wrote:
This paragraph needs to be repeated, just in case people like Advocate missed it.

Moment-in-Time wrote:


I was browsing the older posts and ran across Advocate's fiercely stated response that Israel had not started the '67 war. If Advocate was serious about finding the truth with respect to Israel, he could check wikipedia.....it's unbias and free.....it keeps one from looking foolish.

It's just that Advocate et al have negated facts about the treatment of Palestinians by the Jews (Zionists) in Israel, and deny the atrocities perpetrated against a minority that once was the majority in Palestine.

We need to continue providing FACTS on these issues, because some day they may also realize that truth is more powerful than the lies they try to perpetrate.

Setting aside for a moment the fact that Advocate is correct about the war beginning with the Arab blockade of Israel, even if the war had actually begun with Israel's strike, that would not make Israel responsible for starting the war. It was a preemptive strike against an imminent attack.

Advocate already knows the truth about Israel. That is why he was so easily able to point out that Israel was not the one who started the war.

As most of you know, Wikipedia is amateur hour. Here is a piece from the Washington Post, which tells the truth.


HISTORY MIDDLE EAST
Who Started It?

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Reviewed by Michael Oren
Sunday, June 10, 2007

1967

Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East

By Tom Segev

Metropolitan. 673 pp. $35

The scenes flashed across the TV screens: tens of thousands of Arab troops massing on Israel's borders, frenzied demonstrations in every Arab capital demanding the demise of the Jewish state, the leaders of the Soviet bloc proclaiming unqualified support for Arab war aims while the French -- Israel's only ally -- abruptly changed sides. "Our objective is the freeing of Palestine and the liquidation of the Zionist existence," declared the Syrian chief of staff, while the Iraqi president proclaimed, "Our goal is clear -- to wipe Israel off the face of the map." Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, who ousted U.N. peacekeepers from the Egypt-Israel border and blockaded Israeli shipping through the Straits of Tiran, foresaw a "total war . . . aimed at Israel's destruction." Bracing themselves for the onslaught, Israelis called up their army reserve, hoarded gas masks, and dug trenches and thousands of graves. Yet even these preparations seemed insufficient. "We shall destroy Israel and prepare boats to deport the survivors," the Palestine Liberation Organization pledged, "if there are any."

Israel did not wait to see if Arab leaders would fulfill their promises. On June 5, 1967 -- 40 years ago last week -- the Israelis struck. In an attack lasting a little over an hour, the Israeli air force destroyed more than 250 Egyptian planes, and Israeli ground forces broke through Egyptian lines in Sinai. Israel had urged Jordan to stay out of the war, but Jordanian artillery began shelling West Jerusalem and suburban Tel Aviv, and Jordanian warplanes struck Israeli coastal cities. From atop the Golan Heights, Syrian gunners rained thousands of shells onto Israeli farms in Galilee. Though faced with a multi-front war, the Israelis fought vigorously, first driving the Egyptians out of Sinai and Gaza and the Jordanians out of the West Bank and Jerusalem. They then silenced the Syrian guns and captured the Golan Heights. In six extraordinary days, Israel's citizen soldiers had defeated three major Arab armies and captured territories four times the size of pre-1967 Israel.


Hundreds of books have been written about the Six-Day War, as it is known in the West -- the Arabs prefer "the June War" or simply "the Setback" -- and more are appearing still. The newest and lengthiest of these is Tom Segev's 1967. A columnist for Israel's leftwing Ha'aretz newspaper, and a self-styled New Historian who has labored to debunk what he regards as Israel's founding myths, Segev has previously set out to demonstrate Zionist culpability for the deterioration of Arab-Jewish-British relations in the period before Israel's creation and, thereafter, Israel's indifference to the survivors of the Holocaust. 1967, however, aims at overturning what Segev deems the most hallowed of Israeli myths -- namely, that the Six-Day War was a just and existential struggle that Israel, isolated and outgunned, had no choice but to wage.

Though it is never explicitly stated, Segev's thesis is clear. Israeli fears of an Arab attack "had no basis in reality," he argues; "there was indeed no justification for the panic that preceded the war, nor for the euphoria that took hold after it." Rather than responding to an imminent Arab threat, Israelis were reacting out of a deep-seated trauma born of years of Jewish suffering. Referring to the digging of graves in anticipation of mass Israeli casualties, for example, he writes, "Only a society drenched in the memory of the Holocaust could have prepared so meticulously for the next one." Segev also faults the economic crisis of 1966 that sensitized Israelis to perceived perils, and castigates Prime Minister Levi Eshkol for failing to stand up to his warmongering generals. Indeed, the belligerence of military leaders such as Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Rabin was, for Segev, the primary cause of the war: "They clung to the Israeli culture of youth; they were like adolescent boys or bulls in rut. They believed in force and they wanted war. War was their destiny."

Substantiating these claims requires Segev to engage in rhetorical acrobatics. Fortifying his contention that Israeli malaise created an atmosphere for war, he writes, "Beginning in 1966, more and more Israelis had started to lose faith in themselves and sink into depression." A few pages later, however, to show how an excess of Israeli bravado heightened the war-fever, he asserts, "At the beginning of 1966 . . . Israelis expressed satisfaction and a fundamental faith in their future . . . generating hope and pride." To reconcile these inconsistencies, Segev is forced to divide the war into separate conflicts, each with its own Israel-based cause. "While war with Egypt was the outcome of Israel's demoralization and a sense of helplessness, the fighting with Jordan and Syria expressed a surge of power and messianic passion."

Laboring to prove his point forces Segev not only to contradict himself but also to commit glaring oversights. The book repeatedly asserts that war might have been averted if Israel had accepted an American plan to break the Egyptian blockade by sending an international convoy through the Straits of Tiran. But the American plan, code-named Regatta, was rejected by Congress, as well as by 24 of the 26 nations invited to contribute to the convoy. Segev knows this fact but throughout the book pretends that a diplomatic option remained. Similarly, his need to demonstrate Israel's strength before the war compels him to overlook Soviet support for the Arab war effort and France's last-minute decision to back the Arabs. The French move is mentioned only at the end of the book and then -- bizarrely -- as one of the reasons that Israelis clung to their newly conquered territory.

But the most telling omission relates not to the Israelis or to any foreign power but rather to the Arabs. Segev's book is all but devoid of Arab calls for Israel's destruction and the slaughter of its citizens. There is no mention of pro-war demonstrations, of Egypt's willingness to use poison gas against its enemies, or of the detailed Arab plans for conquering Israel. Segev even ignores the Khartoum resolution after the war, in which the Arab states refused to negotiate with Israel and to grant it peace and recognition. These omissions inflict an injustice on the Arabs by treating them as two-dimensional props in a solipsistic Israeli drama.

1967 presents some engaging portraits of Israel in the mid-1960s, from the high cost of apartments to the subservience of young Israeli wives. Segev has scoured the Israeli and American archives and has shed light on the post-1967 period. But by disregarding the Arab dynamic and twisting his text to meet a revisionist agenda, he undermines his attempt to reach a deeper understanding of the war. Such an understanding is vital if Arabs and Israelis are to avoid similar clashes in the future and peacefully co-exist. ·


Michael B. Oren is a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and the author of "Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East."

Demonstrations is not war. War is when one country fires upon another; that's war.

Before actual hostilities, Egypt dismissed the UN peacekeepers and blockaded an Israeli port. The latter is an act of war. Also, Egypt had a huge military force in the Sinai marching on Israel. As proof of this, after the war, the Sinai was filled with hulks of tanks and other vehicles, as well as a lot of dead Egyptian troops.

Who fired the first shot? That started the war. You don't shoot at demonstrations no matter how provocative. That's the reason North Korea and Iran are developing nuclear weapons with the west staying out of a war. Their actions are provocative in every way, but nobody is firing the first shot.

When the first shot is fired, that's when war starts. The balls in their country - in any event. The west will not shoot first. Israel might, because that's their thing, but the west will not.

Christ, are you oblivious? A BLOCKADE IS AN ACT OF WAR, which no country would, if it had the means, tolerate.

Beautifully stated, my fellow poster. Since the 1948 inception of Israel, the tiny hawkish Yitzhak Shamir, leader of the Stern Gang, hit the ground killing and running Palestinians from their homes....some surviving Palestinians or their offspring still hold the keys to the homes Israelis are living in today. So, is it any wonder that Israel will always be surrounded by hostile neighbors?! Israel is a warlike vicious little nation who feel it can continue to get away with murder while her critics are multiplying faster and faster.

You said the UN was responsible for the blockade? Why did they attack Egypt?

You wrote,

The UN did not attack Egypt; they were there as Peacekeepers. See the following from Wikipedia.

From Wikipedia:

I know. What I was questioning was the fact that Advocate said UN peacekeepers were blocking the border, but Israel attacked Egypt.

Egypt may moved to the border, that was not reason enough to shoot them. They were in their own country.

CI is a retard, so yes he is.

But he is also a incessant liar and an outright anti-Semite, so even if he were smart enough to know what he's talking about, he'd still spew the same horrific lies.

Hardly beautiful. The retard was suggesting that the Arabs' imminent invasion was just a demonstration.

Anti-Semites never tell the truth.





Israel is not responsible for the fact that Arabs are evil.





Your anti-Semitic lies are really horrible, you know that?





The notion that anti-Semitism is somehow spreading is a fallacy.

Anti-Semites remain fringe lunatics.