Democratic Palestine : 24 (ص 29)
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- Democratic Palestine : 24 (ص 29)
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ed down in its war on Vietnam to intervene elsewhere on a large
scale.The Zionist leadership eyed the chance to assert its role in
defending imperialist interests in the Middle East.
The Zionists had already been encouraged by the first major
delivery of US arms in 1962 (Hawk missiles). In the years
1964-6, under the Johnson Administration, a «new, un-
precedented covert military-security relationship was forged» ®
between the US and the Zionist state, motivated by concern
over the advance of the Arab national liberation movement
and Soviet influence in the area. In this sense, the Zionist state,
via the 1967 aggression, provided the model for the subse-
quently devised Nixon Doctrine for local gendarme regimes to
enforce US policy in the ‘third world’. With increasing inter-
national polarization between the pro- and anti-liberation
forces, ‘Israel’ wanted to show it could take care of the libera-
tion movement in the Middle East. Also, in view of its political
and military aims, and economic needs, ‘Israel’ had begun to
develop its arms industry for export; it needed a testing field to
show its wares.
These goals dovetailed with Zionism’s inherent ambitions to
wipe out the Palestinians as a people, for they would all be
uprooted or subject to occupation. By occupying more Arab
land, the Israelis would confront the Arab regimes with a new
status quo, to force them to negotiate ‘peace’ on unequivocally
pro-Zionist conditions. ‘Israel’ had begun detailed planning of
a military government for the West Bank in 1962,” relying on
the experience of having imposed martial law on the Palesti-
nians under occupation since 1948. Throughout the early six-
ties, provocative raids were ‘periodically launched against
neighboring countries, especially Syria. In May 1967, such
provocations led Nasser to close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli
ships and to station troops in the Sinai. Though the closure had
minimal economic effects on ‘Israel’ and the troops in the Sinai
were less than needed to defend the area, ‘Israel’ used these
measures as the pretext for air attacks on Syria, Jordan and
Egypt on June Sth, igniting the six-day war.
Israeli Prime Minister Eshkol had asked for US support if
the Soviet Union were to intervene. President Johnson had
authorized emergency arms shipments to ‘Israel’ on May
23rd, and the entire 6th Fleet was despatched to the Mediter-
ranean. In fact, the US itself had plans for intervention if the
Israelis did not fare well in combat. As it turned out, the most
meaningful US support came in the form of a secret operation
whose full dimensions have only recently been revealed.
On June 3rd, the 38th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron of
the US air force was secretly flown from Ramstein, West
Germany, to a US base in Spain, purportedly for a NATO ex-
ercise. There it was joined by cargo planes with reconnaissance
equipment and technicians of the US 17th Tactical Recon-
naissance Squadron, flown from Upper Heyford, England. By
June 4th, these forces were in the Negev, their planes painted
as Israeli planes and the US pilots equipped with papers to ap-
pear as civilian contract employees hired by the Israeli
government. On June Sth, they began overflights, surveying
the damage inflicted on the Syrian, Egyptian and Jordanian
armed forces, making films that were delivered to ‘Israel’ and
the US. On June 8th and 9th, they made night reconnaissance
flights with phosphorous after most of the Arabs’ planes were
destroyed, to ferret out troop movements. The next day,
‘Israel’ staged air attacks to devastate the retreating troops.
Without this US reconnaissance, ‘Israel’ would have been
totally unable to capture the amount of territory it did in sucha
short time. !°
Protected by the US umbrella, the Israeli forces not only
knocked out three Arab armies. They began their still ongoing
drive to Judaize the West Bank and Gaza Strip, relentlessly at-
tacking Palestinian civilians, to force them from their
homeland. As the US was becoming notorious for dumping
napalm on Vietnamese children, the Zionists were spewing the
same lethal product down on fleeing civilians. On June 6th,
while only isolated elements of the Jordanian army were still
fighting, the Israeli air force made a series of strikes on the
West Bank where there were no military forces or positions.
On June 8th, as the United Arab Republic accepted the UN
ceasefire, Israeli planes were bombing Mafraq, on the outskirts
of Amman. A UPI despatch of June 11th reported Israeli
planes straffing refugees running for safety. In the Latrun
area, on the Jerusalem-Ramle road, three villages, Imwas,
Yalu and Beit Nubah, home of 10,000 Palestinians, were
dynamited and bulldozed out of existence. Their residents were
rounded up and expelled with only the clothes on their backs by
the Zionist army’s 4th brigade on its way to the Jordan River.
Two-thirds of Qalqilia was destroyed in the same operation. In
June 1967 during, but mostly right after the fighting, 200,000
Palestinians were expelled from the West Bank; another
200,000 were expelled in the following months, many of them
from the Gaza Strip. i
STATE WITHOUT BORDERS
AGGRESSION WITHOUT LIMITS
For reasons of space, we will stop our review of the Arab-
Zionist wars at this point. The next war - October 1973 - was,
as Stated earlier, the Arab bourgeois regime’s response, though
an insufficient one, to the 1967 Zionist expansion. The course
of the October war demonstrated the US’s readiness to go all
out to rescue the Zionist state from even partial threats. The
aftermath has been a concerted Israeli-US political and
military onslaught to impose stability in the region under their
joint domination, culminating in the US-sponsored, all-out
Israeli war on the PLO and Lebanon in 1982. The 1982 war
exposed to the world the full dimension of Israeli aggression,
which as we have tried to point out here, was equally the case in
the prior wars.
The Zionist state, by virtue of its goals and mode of crea-
tion, assigned itself to a perpetual condition of war, making it
an ideal tool for striking anti-imperialist forces in the region.
The ultimate result of the Israeli drive for total domination is
the development of nuclear weapons, which we will cover in
the next installment of this study.
Green, Stephen, Taking Sides: America’s Secret Relations with a Militant
Israel, New York: William Morrow and Co., Inc., 1984, p. 74.
Gabriel, Richard A., Operation Peace for Galilee, New York, Hill and Wang,
1984, p. 11. (This book is both full of deliberate lies to defame the PLO and
other errors which appear to be pure carelessness. However, Gabriel is a former
US intelligence officer and enjoys close ties with the Israeli military establish-
ment, so we include reference to his book on such matters.)
Rabinovich, Itamar and Jehuda Reinharz (editors), Israel in the Middle East,
Oxford University Press, 1984, p. 25.
both quotes from Hadawi, Sami, Palestine in Focus, Beirut: PLO Research
Center, 1968, pages 10-12.
quoted in Green, op. cit., p. 85.
ibid, p. 99.
ibid, p. 144.
ibid, p. 180
Journal of Palestine Studies, no. 59, Spring 1986, p. 125.
Green, op. cit., pages 205-8.
Hadawi, op. cit., p. 104.
—- © Oo I HR A
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