ican wrote:In large blue I inserted the truth. Those insertions were my attempt to provide a more complete description of the true history of events as I know it to have been from multiple news reports I personally heard and observed in 1948 and 1967.
There is, to put it mildly, a disparity between "the true history of events" as
you know it, and the true history of events themselves. What you know has been broadly dismissed as Zionist propaganda by Israeli historians such as Aharon Cohen who in the 1970's pointed out in his book "Israel and the Arab World" the complete collapse of the Arab leadership that contributed to the disorder among the Arab populace, but that in actuality the Arab leadership, namely the Arab Higher Committee had tried to forestall the Arab flight during the 1948 war. In 1979 Simha Flapan wrote in his book "Zionism and the Palestinians" that "the hard core of refugees were deliberately intimidated into a panic flight, or driven out by force even after the war was over." The scholarship most damaging to the Zionist propaganda that you adhere to is perhaps that of Benny Morris who in the late 1980's through his book "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem" brought to light the ethnic cleansing that was perpetrated by the Zionist forces as they swept through the Arab populated areas that came under their control during the 1948 war. The Arab populace ran in terror due to the increasing accounts of Jewish atrocities committed against the Arab villages that they'd subjugate. In response to claims that he ignored claims that the Arab leadership ordered the Palestinians to flee, Morris has stated that there is no evidence for these claims, what's more, he had uncovered documentation showing that the Arab leadership gave orders to the Palestinians to remain in their homes.
As far as the 1967 war goes, the concentration of forces along the Egypt/Israel border was a defensive posture as revealed in a letter to the United Nations Security Force in Egypt from the United Arab Republic which read, "To your information, I gave my instructions to all U.A.R. armed forces to be ready for action against Israel, the moment it might carry out any aggressive action against any Arab country. Due to these instructions our troops are already concentrated in Sinai on our eastern border. For the sake of complete security of all U.N. troops which install OPs along our borders, I request that you issue your orders to withdraw all these troops immediately." The Israeli military, going on past victories over the Arabs such as the aforementioned 1948 war, and the 1956 war, had determined that the Arab forces were not a threat. Martin van Creveld wrote in his book, "Defending Israel: A Controversial Plan Toward Peace" "the concept of 'defensible borders' was not even part of the IDF's own vocabulary. Anyone who will look for it in the military literature of the time will do so in vain. Instead, Israel's commanders based their thought on the 1948 war and, especially, their 1956 triumph over the Egyptians in which, from then Chief of Staff Dayan down, they had gained their spurs. When the 1967 crisis broke they felt certain of their ability to win a 'decisive, quick and elegant' victory, as one of their number, General Haim Bar Lev, put it, and pressed the government to start the war as soon as possible".
