|
Ralph Peters is a regular columnist with the New
York Post.
Register here for access to the Post's Online Edition.
| |
PETERS |
|
 |
Six-Day War, 40 Years On
by Ralph
Peters [author,
novelist] 6/6/07
With war forced upon it 40 years ago, Israel's outnumbered forces fought a stunning lightning campaign and shattered its enemies on three fronts. The victory enabled Israel to survive. But now revisionist historians are re-inventing the Six-Day War as the source of Israel's problems.
Contributor
Ralph Peters - Contributor
Ralph
Peters is a retired Army officer and the author of 19 books,
as well as of hundreds of essays and articles, written both
under his own name and as Owen Parry. He is a frequent columnist
for the New York Post and other publications. [go to Peters Index] |
Their nonsense makes it sound as if, prior to June 1967, Israelis had lived in an Age of Aquarius, eating lotus blossoms amid friendly Bedouin neighbors who tucked them in at night. The critics also imply that, by some unexplained magic, Israel might have avoided war and its consequences.
Let's remember the facts: Israel had been fighting for its life since independence, enveloped by hostile powers dedicated to the extermination of Jews. There was no peace, only lulls between wars and raids and murders.
In the late spring of 1967, Egypt's "President" Gamal Abdel Nasser massed more than 100,000 troops on Israel's southern border. Thousands of Egyptian combat vehicles lined up an hour's drive from Tel Aviv. In an effort to deprive Israel of fuel and international trade, Egypt also closed the Strait of Tiran - an act of war.
In the north, Syrian forces massed on the Golan Heights, their guns pointing down into Israel. With his throne threatened by his Arab "brothers," Jordan's King Hussein reluctantly put his forces under Egyptian command.
By the traditional logic of warfare, Israel didn't have a chance. And Israel's leaders sought peace. Until one minute before midnight.
With an Egyptian invasion looming and incitements to genocide filling the Arab airwaves, Israel had to move. In a desperate gamble, its aircraft struck. To the initial disbelief of the Israelis themselves, they destroyed three-quarters of the Egyptian air force on the ground, with minimal friendly losses.
There were passages of tough ground combat, but Israel's tanks - largely cast-offs of World War II vintage - tore through the massive Egyptian army.
Nasser had counted on numbers, but his regime was corrupt to the core, and his army was poorly led and largely untrained. Egyptian officers abandoned their soldiers, leaving them to die of thirst in the desert. A chaotic Egyptian retreat became a disaster.
In a bid to turn the war around, Nasser fell back on lies. In the days before instant global news and satellite imagery for all, he told King Hussein and Syrian dictator Hafez Assad that his victorious forces were approaching Tel Aviv. Cairo radio reported a string of imaginary victories. Even Egyptian diplomats abroad believed they were winning.
Encouraged, Syria pounded northern Galilee with artillery fire. Goaded by Egypt, Jordan set out on a short route to disaster.
Israel struggled to avoid fighting either Syria or Jordan. Worried by Egyptian military might, even the legendary Moshe Dayan, recalled to serve as defense minister, wanted to concentrate on a single front. But the Syrian and Jordanian determination to have a war forced Israel's hand.
The result? Incompetent Egyptian generalship wasted King Hussein's small, but capable, military in disorganized attacks, exploding the myth of Jordan's "invincible" Arab Legion. Syrian lieutenants resisted tenaciously - as their superiors fled to the coffee houses of Damascus.
On every front, Israeli soldiers fighting for their country's existence defeated numerically superior and better-equipped enemies. And on the seventh day, Israel found itself in possession of all Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and the Sinai and Gaza.
Israel didn't want to be an occupier and hoped to trade land for peace as rapidly as possible. But Arab autocrats didn't want peace. They realized that only the illusion of a great, enduring cause enabled them to remain in power.
And an illusion was all it was after June 1967: The destruction of Israel had become a rhetorical figment.
When Egypt "struck back" in 1973, President Anwar Sadat carefully limited his strategic goal to regaining the Suez Canal - but still lost the war and had to turn to diplomacy and peace. Jordan avoided any more direct confrontations with Israel and Syria's catastrophic defeat in the Yom Kippur War confirmed the military impotence Damascus had revealed six years earlier. Even with the latest Soviet weapons, Arab armies couldn't defeat Israel.
June 1967 announced Israel as a regional great power - less than 20 years after the state's desperate founding. And the Six-Day War remains more important today for what it achieved than for the Arab failures it left behind.
We Americans face a fundamental problem in interpreting Israel's history: We imagine that every problem has a solution, if only we can figure it out. But there are no solutions - none - to the Middle East's problems, short of atrocities too horrific for us to contemplate. Israel may dream of peace, but must be content to survive and muddle through. An erratic ebb and flow of violence may be as good as the region gets.
The Six-Day War didn't create the Middle East's problems, it only changed the math. For Israel, it marked a coming of age. Taken together with the Yom Kippur War six years later - two rounds in a single fight, really - the war of June 1967 meant the end of Israel's basic struggle for existence and the beginning of its "quality of life" wars.
We also forget that those two intertwined wars in 1967 and 1973 resulted in four decades of de facto peace between Israel and the Arab states it had fought in four wars. Intifadahs make great TV, but they can't destroy Israel.
In the real world, outcomes aren't perfect. There are no wars to end all wars. The proper question is, "Are you better off than before the shooting started?" Judged by that common-sense standard, Israel is vastly better off than it was on the eve of the Six-Day War. Thanks to the heroes of June 1967, Israel survived.
Miracle enough. ExileStreet
Ralph Peters'
latest book is Never
Quit The Fight.
This
piece first appeared in the New York Post
copyright 2007 - NY Post
Rush
Limbaugh
§
|
q