In 1967, The Mosque Loudspeakers Cried....

At 11:15 a.m. on June 5, 1967, Jordanian artillery launched a 6,000-shell barrage against Jewish Jerusalem, hitting the Knesset and the prime minister’s house as well as the Hadassah Hospital and the Church of Dormition on Mount Zion. Following Defense Minister Moshe Dayan’s orders, the Israelis responded only with small arms. At 11:30, Dayan ordered a strike against the Jordanian air force. Watching from the roof of his palace with his eldest son, the future King Abdullah II, Hussein saw his planes destroyed.

In Jerusalem, Israel offered a ceasefire but the Jordanians were not interested. The muezzin loudspeakers on the Dome of the Rock cried, “Take up your weapons and take back your country stolen by the Jews.”

Excerpted from Simon Sebag Montefiore's new book, the chapter: ‘The Temple Mount is in our hands’

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Syria Has A Problem with That June 1967 War

The story is here and I screensnapped it:

July???


(k/t = LBD)

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UPDATE

They corrected it.

Hope no one was shot because of that typo.

And if I helped bring the error to their attention, well, that's what Middle East peace is all about.

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Ten Years Ago

King Hussein of Jordan confessed to his countrymen, in a candid speech to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Six Day War, that he considers his decision to fight alongside other Arab nations was a costly mistake.

When war broke out on June 5, 1967, the Sandhurst-trained monarch rejected the offer from Levi Eshkol, the Israeli Prime Minister, that no action would be taken against Jordan if it stayed out of the conflict. Instead, the King told the United Nations mediator: "They started the battle. Well, they are receiving our reply by air."

In remarks published yesterday showing the honesty that has become the hallmark of his diplomacy, the King, 61, said: "In reality, it was probably our duty to try to prevent this country from being part of that battle."

Two More Interview Results

Here

On the morning of June 5, Israel launched air strikes against Egyptian, Syrian, Jordanian and Iraqi airfields. In the days that followed, Israeli ground forces swept into the Sinai, up the Golan Heights and eastward to the River Jordan, fighting their way into the heart of Jerusalem's Old City and to the Western Wall. In six days, Israeli forces defeated three Arab armies and reunified Jerusalem. Yisrael Medad says the 1967 War resolved issues left over from Israel's War of Independence in 1948.

"You could say a lot of people felt that the '67 War was the last stage of the '48 War that had never been finished," he explains. "Here, we felt what should have happened in '48 - a very strong military and uncontested victory - made clear that Israel is here to stay and we are not temporary and foreign. That was a sense of emotion that ran through many people."

and its repeated - or is that syndicated - here.

Left-of-Center or Left Is Center

The secret of the radical Left, our progressives, is that, through their ability (an analysis I can't go into here right now) to commandeer the position of "elite" in the crucial communicative public opinion fields and then self-praise themselves in it (media, theater, literature, culture) to further enhance their reputations. They are Left but appropriate the center.

I say this after reading Leonard Fein's mea culpafor having allowed the Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria to grow which turned the Six Days War victory into something else in The Forward:-

Few sweet victories have ever turned sour quite so quickly or comprehensively.

That’s not the standard view, I know, though it is increasingly accepted by Israelis to the left of center — not that any of them would have preferred defeat. True, peace with Egypt and Jordan have also happened and would perhaps not have without the 1967 victory. No small thing. But the victory left Israel the unwelcome occupier of 26,000 square miles of additional territory — the Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.

The occupation, it was widely assumed, would be temporary. In Sinai, it lasted 11 years; in Gaza, 38. But the West Bank lingers, a tumor that grows. As Gershom Gorenberg brilliantly details in his book “The Accidental Empire,” just seven months after the war there were already 800 Jewish settlers in the West Bank. The settlement project was advanced by Shimon Peres, Yigal Allon and Moshe Dayan, all stalwarts of the left, and soon enough it was taken up as a messianic project by Gush Emunim, then advanced with varying degrees of enthusiasm by Begin, Rabin, Netanyahu, Barak and Sharon.

Now, 40 years later, there are some 250,000 Jewish settlers in 120 officially recognized West Bank settlements, an indeterminate (but relatively small) number in 102 (or so) illegal outposts, many of them on land privately owned by Palestinians, 16,000 on the Golan and 180,000 in annexed areas of East Jerusalem...

...The passions of the settlers have become a central fact of Israeli public life, rendering the settlements a trap, and the misery and hatred of two generations of Palestinians are a constant sorrow and an ongoing threat. Forty years: Here and there, a lush oasis. But mostly a desert; wandering, stumbling, no promised time in view.

I repeat - the desert is the Arab refusal to recognize Jewish nationalism and all that it means: a free, sovereign political power controlling its national homeland.

And Now Comes "Six Days War Revisionism"

Like this opening?

Nowhere has revisionist history played a more crucial role in the political and moral consciousness of a nation than in Israel. The state came into being in 1948, and, almost immediately, its prehistory––the origins of Zionist ideology, the behavior of the British during the Mandate period, and, critically, the relationship with the Other, the Palestinian Arabs—became matter for schoolbooks, journalism, military indoctrination, scholarship, and public rhetoric. The founding generation that had come to Palestine and then fought what it called its war of independence against Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and other hostile neighbors was now in charge of its own story. To the victor goes the narrative. As in any fledgling state, that narrative tended to be set down in the most glorious terms—history as if written by a Hebrew-speaking Parson Weems. For a while, it was as if even the most basic facts could be wished out of existence. An entire group could be made invisible. “There was no such thing as Palestinians,” Golda Meir said in 1969.

It was not until the nineteen-eighties, after the opening of various state archives and the coming of age of a generation more disillusioned and less beholden to the old myths than the founders, that Israeli scholars began to confront some inconvenient facts.

It gets "better". It was Israel's fault:-

Michael Oren, who spent more time studying the Arab memoirs and available literature than Segev, places greater emphasis in his book on Nasser’s malevolent intentions, arguing that a full-scale invasion plan, Operation Dawn, was cancelled only at the last moment. He quotes this from Salah al-Hadidi, the chief justice in the trials that Egypt convened for officers held accountable for the defeat: “I can state that Egypt’s political leadership called Israel to war. It clearly provoked Israel and forced it into a confrontation.” Segev is less sympathetic toward Israel’s decision to attack first. While Eshkol was withstanding the pressure from his generals, Segev writes, he emerged as a “statesman with nerves of steel.” But, unlike Ben-Gurion, he did not have the stature to resist. “His weakness ate away at him,” Segev concludes. “He wanted to be remembered as a patriot, and at this point the public equated patriotism with war.”

The Israeli leadership ultimately justified a preëmptive attack as the only way to end an unbearable threat and, if war must come, to prevent huge casualties. Eshkol, who had for weeks resisted the pleas and imprecations of his generals and ministers, now asked, “Must we allow ourselves to be worn down and killed bit by bit, if not destroyed in a future all-out war, as promised by Nasser? Must we wait for Hannah Arendt to write articles about our failure to resist?”

But what really bothers Remnick is:-

Forty years later, a quarter of a million Israelis live in a hundred and twenty officially recognized settlements; an additional hundred and eighty thousand live in annexed areas of East Jerusalem, and sixteen thousand in the Golan. In the years before Israel was established, settlers argued that the more land they bought or seized, the greater their security. The settlers of “Greater Israel” and their supporters, who regarded the old borders as “Auschwitz frontiers,” refused to see the peril in their policy. The worst consequence of occupation, of course, has been the terrible privations, physical isolation, and psychological disfigurement that it has imposed upon the Palestinians. For the Israelis, occupation has been, as Gorenberg describes, a grave security hazard and source of moral corrosion.

And Where Were You in June 1967?

I was in a foxhole at Moshav Amatzia in the Lachish region. I'm on the left.

Yes, that's a Czech rifle from World War II. The soldier has a French FN.

My Six Day War Recollections

At this new site.