Contemporary coverage of the Six Day War — clear-sighted and moral
Bookworm on May 20 2011 at 5:31 pm | Filed under: Israel
Given Obama’s obsession with the 1948 borders, this seemed like an appropriate day to resurrect some contemporary coverage of the Six Day War, culled from a commemorative issue that Life Magazine published back in 1967. (For those with long memories, I first published these excerpts back in 2006. It’s a shame Obama wasn’t reading my blog then.)
The commemorative issue opens by describing Nasser’s conduct, which presented such a threat that Israel had no option but to react. It makes for interesting reading, in part because it assumes a legitimacy to Israel’s 1967 preemptive strike. After describing how Pres. Abdel Gamel Nasser, speaking from Cairo, demanded Israel’s extermination, the Life editorial board goes on to say this:
The world had grown accustomed to such shows [of destructive hatred towards Israel] through a decade of Arab-Israeli face-offs that seasonally blew as hot as a desert sirocco. Since 1948, when Israel defeated the Arabs and won the right to exist as a nation, anti-Zionist diatribes had been the Arab world’s only official recognition of Israel. Indeed, in the 19 years since the state was founded, the surrounding Arab states have never wavered from their claim that they were in a state of war with Israel.
But now there was an alarming difference in Nasser’s buildup. He demanded that the U.N. withdraw the 3,400-man truce-keeping force that had camped in Egypt’s Sinai desert and in the Gaza Strip ever since Egypt’s defeat in the Suez campaign of 1956 as a buffer between Egyptians and Israelis. A worried United Nations Secretary-General U Thant agreed to the withdrawal, then winged to Cairo to caution Nasser.
He found him adamant. Plagued by economic difficulties at home and bogged down in the war in Yemen, Nasser had lately been criticized by Syrians for hiding behind the U.N. truce-keeping force. With brinksmanship as his weapon, Nasser had moved to bolster his shaky claim to leadership of the divided Arab world.
In contrast to the fevered, irrational hatred on the Arab side, the Life editors are impressed by the Israelis. Under the bold heading “Israel’s cool readiness,” and accompanied by photographs of smiling Israeli soldiers taking a cooling shower in the desert, listening to their commander, and attending to their tanks, Life has this to say:
With the elan and precision of a practiced drill team, Israel’s largely civilian army — 71,000 regulars and 205,000 reservists — began its swift mobilization to face, if necessary, 14 Arab nations and their 110 million people. As Premier Levi Eshkol was to put it, “The Jewish people has had to fight unceasingly to keep itself alive…. We acted from an instinct to save the soul of a people.
Can you imagine a modern publication pointing out the vast disparity in land mass and population between Israel and the Arabs, or even acknowledging in the opening paragraph of any article that Israel has a right to exist? The text about Israel’s readiness is followed by more photographs of reservists preparing their weapons and of a casually seated Moshe Dayan, drinking a soda, and conferring with his men. Under the last photograph, you get to read this:
The Israelis, Dayan said, threw themselves into their hard tasks with “something that is a combination of love, belief and country.”
After admiringly describing the Israelis’ offensive strike against the Arab air-forces, which gave Israel the decisive advantage in the War, Life addresses Israel’s first incursion into Gaza. I’m sure you’ll appreciate how the Gaza area is depicted:
Minutes after the first air strike, a full division of Israeli armor and mechanized infantry . . . was slashing into the Egyptian-held Gaza Strip. A tiny wasteland, the strip had been given up by Israel in the 1956 settlement and was now a festering splinter — the barren harbor for 315,000 refugees bent on returning to their Palestinian homes and the base for Arab saboteurs.
Wow! Those clueless Life writers actually seem to imply that Egypt, which controlled Gaza for eleven years, had some responsibility for this “festering,” dangerous area.
The Life editors, circa June 23, 1967were both clear-headed and prescient about the refugee problem that remained when war ended (emphasis mine):
The 20th Century’s excellence — and its horrid defects — find some of their most vivid monuments in the hate-filled camps of Arab refugees. The refugees have been supported by the voluntary U.N. contributions of some 75 governments, not to mention the Inner Wheel Club of Hobart, Australia, the Boy Scout Union of Finland, the Women’s Club of Nes, Iceland, the Girls High School of Burton-on-Trend, England, and (for some reason) a number of automobile companies including Chrysler, Ford, G.M. and Volkswagen.
The philanthropy, governmental and private, that has aided these displaced Arabs is genuine — and admirable. The stupidity and political selfishness that have perpetuated the problem are appalling.
Down the ages, there have been thousands of episodes in which whole peoples fled their homes. Most were assimilated in the lands to which they fled. Brutally or beneficently, previous refugee groups were liquidated. Not until our time have there been the money, the philanthropy, the administrative skill, the hygienic know-how and the peculiar kind of nationalism which, in combination, could take a wave of refugees and freeze it into a permanent and festering institution.
In the wake of Israeli victories, the refugee camps received thousands of new recruits, and there may be more if, as seems likely, Israel successfully insists on some enlargement of its boundaries. Thus the refugee problem, one of the main causes of Middle East instability, is about to be magnified.
The early Zionists, looking toward a binational state, never thought they would, could or should replace the Arabs in Palestine. When terrorism and fighting mounted in 1947-48, Arab leaders urged Palestinian Arabs to flee, promising that the country would soon be liberated. Israelis tried to induce the Arabs to stay. For this reason, the Israelis do not now accept responsibility for the Arab exodus. Often quoted is the statement of a Palestinian Arab writer that the Arab leaders “told us: ‘Get out so that we can get in.’ We got out but they did not get in.”
After the Israeli victory, Arab leaders outside of Palestine reversed their policy and demanded that all the refugees be readmitted to Israel. Israel reversed its policy, [and] refused to repatriate large numbers of Arabs on the ground that they would endanger the state. Nasser, for instance, has said, “If Arabs return to Israel, Israel will cease to exist.”
Now 1.3 million Arabs, not counting the recent influx, are listed as refugees. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has an international staff of about a hundred and spends nearly $40 million a year, 60% of it from the U.S. government. UNRWA services are performed by 11,500 Arab employees, most them refugees. Obviously, this group has an interest in not solving the refugee problem.
So have the host governments. Consistently they have refused to go along with any plan or policy for the resettlement or assimilation of the refugees, preferring to use them politically. In 1955 the Arab League scuttled a Jordan Valley development project precisely because it would have reduced, perhaps by 250,000, the number of Arab refugees.
It’s about time this dangerous deadlock ended. The inevitable reshuffle of the Middle East ought to include a plan to phase out the refugee problem in five or 10 years. Israel, to show goodwill, should repatriate a few thousand refugees per year. All of the 1.3 million could be absorbed in underpopulated Iran and Syria, provided their governments would cooperate in internationally supported developments projects. Persuading Arab governments to adopt a policy of resettlement should be central to U.S. policy, and it would be worth putting up quite a lot of A.I.D. money to get the job done.
History has shown the Life editors to be correct when they predicted that UN economic interests and Arab political interests would leave the refugee camps as a permanent blight on the Middle Eastern landscape. They were naive only in believing that anyone had the political will to solve the problem. They also could not have anticipated that, in a very short time, the same situation, with its same causes, would be plunged into a looking-glass world, where the Arab governments and the UN were absolved of their sins, and the blame was placed on Israel for not having engaged in an act of self-immolation by taking in these 1.3 million (and counting, and counting, and counting) hate-filled refugees.
These same editors understood the Cold War aspects of the 1967 War. They editorialized about the Soviet Union’s UN fulminations (an editorial I’m also quoting in its entirety):
As the Arab soldiers and refugees made their sad and painful way from the scenes of their defeat, the Soviet Union threw its heaviest oratorical gun into the United Nations in an effort to salvage some of what it had lost in the Mideast. Premier Aleksei Kosygin arrived at the General Assembly with an arsenal of invective.
Kosygin put all the blame on Israel and its “imperialist” backers (i.e., the U.S. and Britain). As he saw it, Israel’s “atrocities and violence” brought to mind “the heinous crimes perpetrated by the fascists during World War II.” He demanded the Assembly’s approval for a resolution — rejected earlier by the Security Council — that would condemn Israel as sole aggressor in the conflict, and he proposed that Israel not only be made to pull back to her prewar borders but also to pay reparations to the Arabs for their losses.
He was answered by the Israeli foreign minister, Abba Eban [his speech is here], whose detailed documentation and eloquence told how the Arabs had given his country the choice of defending its national existence or forfeiting it for all time. Then he put Kosygin himself in the defendant’s dock. Russia, he charged, was guilty of inflaming passions in a region “already too hot with tension” by feeding the arms race and spreading false propaganda. He called Kosygin’s reference to the Nazis “an obscene comparison . . . a flagrant breach of international morality and human decency.” As for the Russian demand that Israel pull back to her prewar lines, that, he said, was totally unacceptable until durable and just solutions are reached “in free negotiations with each of our neighbors.” The Arab states “have come face to face with us in conflict; let them now come face to face with us in peace.” Israel was determined not be deprived of her victory.
Did you catch that the Soviet speaker used precisely the same rhetoric about Israel that has become normative throughout Europe and in most Leftist publications? He castigated Israel as an imperialist entity and claimed that her tactics were “atrocities” that were identical to those the Nazis used. Unlike today’s MSM, Life’s 1967 editorial team appears appalled by the tenor and falsity of those accusations.
My Mom was quite the packrat. In addition to the Life magazine that I quoted from above, which was published at the end of the War, my Mom also saved the June 16, 1967 edition of Life magazine, which was written within days of the War’s abrupt beginning and swift end. The news reports are pretty much the same as in the commemorative edition (sometimes verbatim), but there’s still something new and surprising, making it an enlightening glimpse at a different era of reporting. How’s this for unimaginable journalism , which appears in the magazine’s opening editorial?
The tremendous discrepancy between the competence of Israeli and Arab armies is the most obvious fact from which to start [in searching for meaning about the War]. The Israelis are very patriotic, brave and skillful soldiers, brilliantly led. But that only gives half an explanation of their huge — and mounting — military superiority. The other half may yield to an impolite but unavoidable question: what is the matter with the Arab armies? Was there ever a people so bellicose in politics, so reckless and raucous in hostility — and then so unpugnacious in pitched combat — as Nasser’s Egyptians?
The editors than take on what they perceive as the canard that the U.S. blindly allies itself with Israel. Au contraire, say the editors. The fact is that the U.S. allies itself with the moral side, and that side is Israel (can we find some editors to write this way now?):
The error [the belief that the U.S. unthinkingly supports Israel] arises out of the fact that in most disputes the U.S. has been found on Israel’s side. That’s because it is the Arabs who challenge the existence of Israel, and not vice versa.
I really can’t add anything to that, can I? This is how normal people once viewed the world, before Leftism overtook academia and the media. People had a fundamental understanding of right versus, and they understood that, whether one viewed Israel from a historic, legal, military or moral perspective, Israel had the high ground.
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31 Responses to “Contemporary coverage of the Six Day War — clear-sighted and moral”
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Thanks for posting this. Those of us who were old enough to have followed the Six Day War are much less likely to fall for Palestinian propaganda. Not all Palestinians have fallen for the propaganda.
More history:
http://raelovitz.blogspot.com/2011/05/truth-of-mire.html?spref=fb
“Did you catch that the Soviet speaker used precisely the same rhetoric about Israel that has become normative throughout Europe and in most Leftist publications?”
Yes. Much of contemporary liberal rhetoric and “thought” is derived from Soviet propaganda.
I can’t understand why liberals are offended when this is pointed out. You’d think they’d be proud of their role models.
Terrific post! I really don’t remember much about the Six-Day War — I was 10 then — but the Yom Kippur War was during a time I was beginning to read national magazines and newspapers and to develop an interest in foreign affairs and world history. And if I recall correctly, the MSM tone had already changed a considerable amount — not to its current anti-Israel corrosiveness, but not this clear-eyed either — by 1972.
Pfft. My memory is obviously unreliable, though, the Yom Kippur War was in 1973, Google reminds me. Sorry.
“Did you catch that the Soviet speaker used precisely the same rhetoric about Israel that has become normative throughout Europe and in most Leftist publications?”
Yes. Much of contemporary liberal rhetoric and “thought” is derived from Soviet propaganda.
Propaganda takes time to set in. Normally without kinetic operations backing it up (such as hanging Saddam or killing Osama), propaganda takes awhile to percolate into the target brains. The more ridiculous and retarded the premise is, the more times it takes to set in. Although after one generation, it’s pretty much ingrained as “truth”. Just look at A through Z here.
I am still amazed at how these old Life magazine type reporters got so many things right. I read their articles on WWII, MacArthur, and Japan and they were quite right in terms of reporting the actual conditions and the possible future. And this was in a nation that didn’t even know what Japan’s full potential was economically or culturally.
Of course, the Left took over magazines, newspapers, and journalism a long time ago. Such people would have been long ago purged and replaced with Leftist minions, like A through Z.
Beldar commenting here? Excellent!
Exactly as I remember it. When the news of the 1967 attack happened, I was walking along the sunny street of a European city. Everything seemed to stop. The sense that I had was that most people expressed a sense of relief that Israel was vanquishing its foes. I don’t think that would be the EUro reaction today.
Of course, given this very clear eyed history, we still have those poor deluded souls, sitting in their comfortable armchairs, that breezily propose that it is Israel that must make peace with the Arabs.
I happen to think that there is no way that Israel’s opponents will make peace with Israel as it goes against the foundational tenets of their religion. Perhaps, like the British and French, they are destined to remain in mortal combat for hundreds of years until, one day, they find their interests coincide after all.
I’m also old enough to remember the 6day war. I wonder though, if Life at that time was like Readers Digest, a bastion of conservative thought Vs a MSM already descended into a cesspool of left leaning Hackery?
[...] Bookworm Room » Contemporary coverage of the Six Day War — clear … [...]
I was in the car for a couple of hours yesterday. I flipped the radio from Sean Hannity to Public Radio. The BBC was on the local public radio station. Both Sean Hannity and the BBC used the same long soundbite from Netanyahu at the White House. Sean Hannity was expressing embarrassment for the President being kindly lectured about basic history. The BBC had a person from J Street asserting that Netanyahu is unwilling to compromise with Obama and that he is backed into a corner by Obama, with several more extreme perversions.
The most telling was the cut of one short phrase from the middle of the Netanyahu soundbite. The BBC cut out the words, “because the attack of Israel was so attractive from them” during Netanyahu’s description of the 1967 borders.
On the NPR news later in the evening, they did not even cover Netanyahu’s statement. Instead, they interviewed a Palestinian negotiator and did not challenge him on basic flaws in his remarks. We have Netanyahu acting as a world class statesman, with a petulant-acting President Obama, and all NPR can do is provide BBC coverage that takes out the most important one second from a five minute soundbite and uses J Street for a base of objectivity, and then on All Things Considered, interview a mouthpiece for anti-Israel propaganda.
NPR may need to change the name “All Things Considered.” The coverage of the President was, as always, positive and, again, without serious analysis. The Israeli position was (yet again) marginalized. There was nothing about the President’s outrageous treatment of Netanyahu during his prior visit to Washington, and nothing about the prudence of this radical announcement on the eve of his current visit and his address to Congress next week. As well, there was nothing about Obama taking G.W.Bush’s positions on foreign policy in this second speech and the complete failure of President Obama’s policy in his 2009 Cairo speech.
So many voting, college-educated, people take this propaganda for objective news! I am sickened. If this does not wake up liberal-leaning Jews and other good people to break with the heard I don’t know what will. For those on the left who somehow got to this (very nice) corner of the Internet and are having a revelation about this extreme bias, think of what it is like to be a person with honest positions that are routinely treated similarly on NPR, the BBC, the NYT, Reuters, the AP Wire, Reuters, etc. I am not asking you to agree on anything a conservative non-politician believes but the need for honesty in reporting. A lot is at stake.
NPR = National Palestinian Radio. It’s a long-standing joke.
Their claim to objectivity is an irritant, of course. And it continues to fool people. But the bias itself is human nature, not a problem.
Except for the fact of course that they’ve chosen the wrong side. ;-)
My Jewish yellow dog-Democrat wife no longer makes strangling sounds now that I’ve started bringing up Obama’s support of the Palestinians (aka Hamas) and the indefensible May 1967 borders. She is beginning to realize that when she voted for Obama’s glibness and melanin (which cemented the deal for so many people), she was also voting for—aside from Jimmy Carter—the most anti-Israeli/Pro-Arab president in U.S. history.
She no longer argues what has been clear to me since the left started reverting in the 1970s to its classic anti-Semitism: Aside from Israel itself, there is no other truly safe place for Jews except the United States. And if the people running this country turn on Israel, as they are doing now, she’d better really start worrying her sweet liberal patootie.
Yea, I’ve heard the joke. It is not the bias that gets me. They can think whatever they want. It is the glib tone of objectivity that so many people still buy into. That, and my tax dollars fund it. Oh, and that the Obami nitwits are weakening the value of my savings, destroying the rule of law, and laying the ground for a major war.
Andrew notes that “We have Netanyahu acting as a world class statesman, with a petulant-acting President Obama, and all NPR can do is provide BBC coverage that takes out the most important one second from a five minute soundbite and uses J Street for a base of objectivity, and then on All Things Considered, interview a mouthpiece for anti-Israel propaganda.”
It’s the same tactic of “omission” of critical information that others on the Left (NYT and others) use, including some visitors to this blog page. When others vouchsafe that information, they are demeaned, labeled as ignorant or “skeptics” against conventional wisdom and told to shut up.
We are headed for some very dark times.
Charles M, tell your wife to forget about Israel for a minute and think about what happens if and when the Liberal/Lefties have their way with Israel, they will inevitably turn on the Jews here as well…including the kapos that somehow think they will be spared for having made friends with the scorpion.
[...] Must Read! Contemporary coverage of the Six Day War — clear-sighted and moral This is how normal people once viewed the world, before Leftism overtook academia and the [...]
Danny, if the Jeremiah Wrights, Van Joneses and Bill Ayerses ever took over this country, I don’t think they’d resort to outright pogroms against the Jews. So many U.S. Jews are deracinated and self-hating that they’d pose no real problem to the thugs. It’s the orthodox, traditional Jews that they’d go after. Of course they lump them in with Evangelicals, Pentacostalists, orthodox Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians, the better to hide whatever persecution they have in mind by claiming to campaign against intolerance in general, not any denominations in particular.
Linked: worthwhile reading & viewing
I think you’ll see a lot of George Soroses in Jewish land. They don’t need pogroms against Jews. The Jews themselves can be motivated to loot other Jews.
It is not the 1930s all over again. But there are some serious comparisons in the clouds of war, economic crisis and institutionalized lawlessness. Antisemitism uncorked is the same canary in a coal mine now as it was then. And, again, so many good, otherwise pretty rational, Jewish people are willfully blind or just conditioned, baited and switched, or plain flimflammed to tolerate or join institutions that are contrary to Jewish values.
Or, within the Jewish left, take any conference of Reformed Rabbis or the leadership of Reformed Judaism. It is extreme to call them Kapos. They are just shills for the Democratic Party, and fools. The Democratic Party, as Barry Rubin has documented so well, is not the party of tolerance it could claim itself to be before it was taken over by extremist interests.
The non-affiliated are to often stricken with nihilism (sometimes pimped in post-modernist terms), or to just too “smart” to have the wisdom that comes with religious teaching and humility. Too many people, Jewish or non-Jewish, are misdirected by what exists in academia to have what was once considered the basic education. In an Orwellian way, tolerance is redefined to support oppression and hatred is allowed to fester in the place of intellectual development. Crazy ideas are normalized, institutionalized and applied. Then the shills, at NPR or elsewhere, are surprised by the results.
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[...] Israel and their previous borders have been a topic of great interest and angst for the past couple of weeks. We know the Progressive line that Israel is an occupier, but did you know that as late as 1967 the American viewpoint, as plainly expressed by Life Magazine, was much, much different? And we know this because Bookworm Room has copies of her Mother’s old Life Magazines, which confirms the knowledge that 1) Arabs urged Arabs to leave the area, that 2) Israel didn’t have a prayer for survival, that 3) Gaza was a “festering splinter,” that 4) there was abundant land for Arabs in Syria and Jordan, that 5) refugees not solving the “refugee problem” was about money, and 6) the Soviets had a hand in it all. I hope you will read this bit of important history as documented by Life Magazine and found by Bookw… [...]
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