Yusuf Dhia-Allah
Egyptian prisoners of war in the Sinai Peninsula were forced to take off their shoes and made to march barefoot on the burning sand for many hours. Some 2,000 Egyptian prisoners of war were executed; others perished due to thirst in the scorching heat. These are the ways of the 'only democracy in the Middle East' and the West's favourite ally with whom it shares many values! Indeed.
On the morning of June 5, 1967, the Israeli air force launched unprovoked strikes against two neighbouring Arab countries: Egypt and Syria. Within a short time, almost the entire Egyptian and Syrian air forces were wiped out on the ground. Most of their air fields were also destroyed.
Contrary to Zionist propaganda, it was a naked act of aggression as Miko Peled, author of the book, The General’s Son, explains.
His father, Matti Peled was one of the generals that had pushed then Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol to launch the attack as the Egyptians were simply not ready for war. This was an opportunity not to be missed!
Once the Egyptian and Syrian air forces were wiped out, the Zionist invaders quickly occupied the Sinai Peninsula including Gaza, the Syrian Golan Heights, and the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan.
The Jordanian forces did not put up a fight; the putative King Husain ordered his army to withdraw abandoning al-Masjid al-Aqsa (the first qibla of the Muslims) to the Zionist invaders.
Treachery is a special trait of the ‘Hashemite’ rulers. King Husain (d.1999) always sought British, American and Israeli protection while pretending to be with his fellow Arabian rulers.
What led to the June 1967 War between Zionist Israel and its Arab neighbors?
In November 1966, an Israeli strike on the village of Al-Samūʿ in the Jordanian West Bank left 18 dead and 54 wounded.
Then in April 1967, two months before the Israeli attack on three Arab countries, the Israeli Air Force shot down six Syrian MiG fighter jets.
Egypt, the largest Arab country was accused of not helping fellow Arabs. President Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser was under pressure to help.
As usual, Nasser resorted to the favourite ploy of Arabian rulers: hot rhetoric without taking any concrete steps.
This is what the Zionists were looking for. They accused Nasser of threatening to invade Israel and “drive the Jews into the sea.”
This canard has been frequently peddled by the Zionists as a pretext to grab more Arab and Palestinian lands.
What was the basis of this scandalous allegation? Nasser had ordered two divisions of his army into the Sinai Peninsula as a precautionary measure. The Zionists immediately presented this an “existential threat.”
This was a preposterous lie. General Ezer Weizmann, chief of the Israeli air force at the time admitted, “There was never a real danger of extermination [of Israel].”
General Yitzhak Rabin, chief of staff of the Israeli army, also admitted that two divisions of the Egyptian army in the Sinai posed no threat to Israel.
The Zionists then used US President Lyndon Johnson (actually lied to him) that they “feared” an invasion from Egypt or a combination of Arabian armies.
Israel had already planned to attack the three Arab countries to grab more land, as revealed by Peled.
Johnson contacted Nasser and assured him that the Israelis would not attack if he (Nasser) did not initiate hostilities. He asked Nasser to show good faith by pulling his forces back from the Israeli border in Sinai.
Nasser knew his armed forces were not ready for war with Israel.
Lieutenant General Anwar al-Qadi, the chief of operations, had told Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer, head of the Egyptian armed forces, that more than half of the army, including some of its best troops, were bogged down in Yemen.
The Egyptian army was in no condition to fight Israel.
Both Nasser and Amer were lulled by Johnson’s assurances that Israel would not attack.
So confident were the duo that on the day Israel launched its attack, Field Marshal Amer was not even in Cairo and his aircraft could not land as he returned from a trip.
Cairo airport had been bombed and the entire Egyptian air force wiped out on the ground. The Syrian air force suffered a similar fate.
In six days, the Arabian armies were crushed. Tens of thousands of soldiers were killed in Israeli air strikes or tank and artillery fire. Many others died of thirst in the scorching heat of the desert.
Miko Peled narrates that Israel “captured thousands of Egyptian soldiers who were stationed in the Sinai Desert and caught unprepared. According to the testimonies of Israeli officers, at least two thousand Egyptian prisoners of war were executed right there and buried in the dunes.”
This clearly constituted a war crime. Israeli generals should have been tried as war criminals but not one has been held to account to this day.
“The Arab countries’ losses in the conflict were disastrous. Egypt’s casualties numbered more than 11,000, with 6,000 for Jordan and 1,000 for Syria, compared with only 700 for Israel,” according to a report prepared by Encyclopedia Britannica.
The lie of “existential threat” to Israel was exposed by Prime Minister Menachem Begin, a one-time terrorist mastermind and on the British list of “Most Wanted Terrorists”. During a speech to the Israeli National Defense College on August 2, 1982, Begin said: “We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him [Egyptian President Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser].”
General Matti Peled, an Israeli commander in the June 1967 war, also corroborated this lie.
He told the Israeli newspaper Ha‘aretz (March 19, 1972), “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 a bluff, which was born and developed after the war.”
Such confessions, however, have not deterred Zionist apologists in North America and elsewhere to continue to peddle the lie that the June 1967 War was a ‘defensive war’ and Israel had to defend itself against ‘Arab aggression’!
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