Netanyahu, 'Censored
Voices,' and the False Narrative of
Self-Defense
By Marjorie Cohn
March 05, 2015 "ICH"
- On March 3rd, Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu
issued an impassioned plea to Congress
to protect Israel by opposing diplomacy with
Iran. Referring to "the remarkable alliance
between Israel and the United States" which
includes "generous military assistance and
missile defense," Netanyahu failed to
mention that Israel has an arsenal of 100 or
200 nuclear weapons.
The Six-Day War
The day before he
delivered that controversial address,
Netanyahu
expressed similar sentiments to
AIPAC, Israel's powerful U.S. lobby. He
reiterated the claim that Israel acted in
the 1967
Six-Day War "to defend itself." The
narrative that Israel attacked Egypt, Syria,
and Jordan in self-defense, seizing the
Palestinian territories in the West Bank,
Gaza, Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and the
Sinai Peninsula in 1967, has remained
largely unquestioned in the public
discourse. Israel relies on that narrative
to continue occupying those Palestinian
lands. And the powerful film
"Censored Voices," which premiered at
Sundance in February, does not challenge
that narrative.
But
declassified high-level documents from
Britain, France, Russia and the United
States reveal that Egypt, Syria, and Jordan
were not going to attack Israel and Israel
knew it. In fact, they did not attack
Israel. Instead, Israel mounted the first
attack in order to decimate the Egyptian
army and take the West Bank.
Censored voices
uncensored
For two weeks following
the Six Day War, Amos Oz and Avrahim Shapira
visited Israeli kibbutzim and recorded
interviews with several Israeli Defense
Forces (IDF) soldiers who had just returned
from that war. Largely censored by the
Israeli government for many years, those
reels have finally been made public.
"Censored Voices" features the taped voices
of young IDF soldiers, as the aging, former
soldiers sit silently beside the tape
recorder, listening to their own voices.
The testimonies documented
in the tapes reveal evidence of targeting
civilians and summarily executing prisoners,
which constitute war crimes. A soldier asks
himself, "They're civilians - should I kill
them or not?" He replies, "I didn't even
think about it. Just kill! Kill everyone you
see." Likewise, one voice notes, "Several
times we captured guys, positioned them and
just killed them." Another reveals, "In the
war, we all became murderers." Still another
says, "Not only did this war not solve the
state's problems, but it complicated them in
a way that'll be very hard to solve." One
soldier likens evacuating Arab villages to
what the Nazis did to Jews in Europe. As a
soldier watched an Arab man being taken from
his home, the soldier states, "I had an
abysmal feeling that I was evil."
In what proved to be a
prescient question, one soldier asks, "Are
we doomed to bomb villages every decade for
defensive purposes?" Indeed, Israel
justifies all of its assaults on Gaza as
self-defense, even though Israel invariably
attacks first, and kills overwhelming
numbers of Palestinians - mostly civilians.
Each time, many fewer Israelis are killed by
Palestinian rockets.
Israel's false
self-defense claim
The film begins by showing
a map of Israel surrounded by Egypt, Syria,
and Jordan, with arrows from each country
aimed at Israel. The IDF soldiers felt those
Arab countries posed an existential threat
to Israel. "There was a feeling it would be
a Holocaust," one soldier observed. The
Israeli media claimed at the time that Egypt
had attacked Israel by land and by air on
June 5, 1967. According to British
journalist Patrick Seale, "Israel's
preparation of opinion" was "brilliantly
managed," a "remarkable exercise in
psychological warfare."
In his book,
"The Six-Day War and Israeli Self-Defense:
Questioning the Legal Basis for Preventive
War," published by Cambridge University
Press, Ohio State University law professor
John Quigley documents conversations by high
government officials in Israel, the United
States, Egypt, the Soviet Union, France, and
Britain leading up to the Six-Day War. He
draws on minutes of British cabinet
meetings, a French government publication,
U.S. documents in "Foreign Relations of the
United States," and Russian national
archives. Those conversations make clear
that Israel knew Egypt, Syria and Jordan
would not and did not attack Israel, and
that Israel initiated the attacks.
Egypt was the only one of
the three Arab countries that had a military
of any consequence. Israeli General Yitzhak
Rabin told the Israeli cabinet that the
Egyptian forces maintained a defensive
posture, and Israeli General Meir Amit, head
of Mossad (Israeli's intelligence agency),
informed U.S. Defense Secretary Robert
McNamara that Egypt was not poised to attack
Israel. Both the United States and the
Soviet Union urged Israel not to attack.
Nevertheless, Israel's cabinet voted on June
4 to authorize the IDF to invade Egypt.
"After the cabinet vote,"
Quigley writes, "informal discussion turned
to ways to make it appear that Israel was
not starting a war when in fact that was
precisely what it was doing." Moshe Dayan,
who would soon become Israel's Minister of
Defense, ordered military censorship,
saying, "For the first twenty-four hours, we
have to be the victims." Dayan admitted in
his memoirs, "We had taken the first step in
the war with Egypt." Nevertheless, Israel's
UN Ambassador Gideon Rafael reported to the
Security Council that Israel had acted in
self-defense.
"The hostilities were
attacks by the Israeli air force on multiple
Egyptian airfields, aimed at demolishing
Egyptian aircraft on the ground," according
to Quigley. On June 5, the CIA told
President Lyndon B. Johnson, "Israel fired
the first shots today."
Article 51 of the UN Charter
authorizes states to act in collective
self-defense after another member state
suffers an armed attack. Although Jordan and
Syria responded to the Israeli attacks on
Egypt, they - and Egypt - inflicted little
damage to Israel. By the afternoon of June
5, Israel "had virtually destroyed the air
war capacity of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria,"
Quigley notes. "The IDF achieved the 'utter
defeat' of the Egyptian army on June 7 and
8."
The United States
empowers Israel
U.S. Secretary of State
Dean Rusk said that U.S. officials were
"angry as hell, when the Israelis launched
their surprise offensive." Yet, Quigley
notes, "Israel's gamble paid off in that the
United States would not challenge Israel's
story about how the fighting started. Even
though it quickly saw through the story, the
White House kept its analysis to itself."
Although
Security Council resolution 242, passed
in 1967, refers to "the inadmissibility of
the acquisition of territory by war" and
calls for "withdrawal of Israel armed forces
from territories occupied in the recent
conflict," Israel continues to occupy the
Palestinian territories it acquired in the
Six-Day War.
Israel has abandoned its
claim that Egypt attacked first. Yet the
international community considers that
Israel acted in lawful anticipatory
self-defense. Quigley explains how the UN
Charter only permits the use of armed force
after an armed attack on a UN member state;
it does not authorize anticipatory,
preventive, or preemptive self-defense.
"The UN did not condemn
Israel in 1967 for its attack on Egypt,"
Antonio Cassese of the University of
Florence explained. Quigley attributes this
to Cold War politics, as the USSR supported
Egypt. "For the United States in particular,
Israel's success was a Cold War defeat for
the USSR. The United States was hardly
prepared to condemn Israel after it
performed this service."
The United States
continues to support Israel by sending it $3
billion per year in military aid, even when
Israel attacks Gaza with overwhelming
firepower, as it did in the summer of 2014,
killing 2,100 Palestinians (mostly
civilians). Sixty-six Israeli soldiers and
seven civilians were killed.
If Israel were to mount an
attack on Iran, the United States would
invariably support Israel against Iran and
any Arab country that goes to Iran's
defense. Indeed, Netanyahu intoned to
Congress, "may Israel and America always
stand together."
Marjorie Cohn is a
professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law,
former president of the National Lawyers
Guild, and deputy secretary general of the
International Association of Democratic
Lawyers. Her most recent book is
"Drones and Targeted Killing:
Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues."