Fifty years
ago, between June 5 and June 10, 1967, Israel invaded and occupied
East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights.
The Six Day War, as it would later be dubbed, saw the Jewish David
inflict a humiliating defeat on the Arab Goliath, personified perhaps
by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt.
“The
existence of the Israeli state hung by a thread,” the country’s
prime minister, Levi Eshkol, claimed two days after the war was over,
“but the hopes of the Arab leaders to annihilate Israel were
dashed.” Genocide, went the argument, had been prevented;
another Holocaust of the Jews averted.
There is,
however, a problem with this argument: it is complete fiction, a
self-serving fantasy constructed after the event to justify a war of
aggression and conquest. Don’t take my word for it: “The
thesis according to which the danger of genocide hung over us in June
1967, and according to which Israel was fighting for her very
physical survival, was nothing but a bluff which was born and bred
after the war,” declared General Matituahu Peled, Chief of
Logistical Command during the war and one of 12 members of Israel’s
General Staff, in March 1972.
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