Soccer Dad

Persistent libels

Last week the Egyptian media reported a television report in Israel claimed that during the six day war in 1967, the Israeli army massacred some 250 Egyptian prisoners.
The problem is that the Israeli program did no such thing. My Right Word in An Israeli journalist comments on Israeli journalism quotes:

Shklar said in a statement that reports about the documentary in the Israeli press - including in Haaretz, Yedioth Ahronoth and Maariv - had relied on the Egyptian media.
He said that such publications had not bothered to watch the documentary before reporting about it. Adelist accused the Israeli media of acting with "typical indolence" in quoting the Egyptian media without verifying the validity of the claims.

Meryl Yourish observes the double standard demonstrated in the reaction to this "news."

Funny how when a terrorist blows himself up in a crowded market, the anti-Israel crowd is quick to leap on the term “resistance.” But when Egyptians and palestinians are killed in battle, those selfsame people are quick to scream “MURDER!”

YidwithLid notices that the charge isn't new and that it's been debunked before (along with photos and help from CAMERA)

Twelve years ago that this story (supposedly "broke" on Israeli TV last week) began to filter out of the bowels of the earth, It was investigated and proven false by the Jerusalem Post and supported by (believe it or not) the New York Times. In fact the day this massacre supposedly happened (June 7, 1967) there were reporters embedded with the troops that supposedly killed these POW's.

And while Israel may criticize the rhetorical Egyptian attacks the sad fact is that Israel or more specifically, some Israelis had a hand in resurrecting this libel. That has Fresno Zionism questioning The perverse urge to self-criticism that afflicts way too many Israelis. (This isn't just self-criticism, it's more like self-condemnation.)

Why are there always Israeli documentaries alleging Israeli wickedness? Why are people like Sarid always ready to say the worst possible things to the worst possible audiences?
Before he even knows what the Egyptians are talking about, he knows Israel is guilty: “Sarid told the paper he had not seen the documentary, but that he was aware that Israeli forces had committed such acts [JPost]”!

The answer, unfortunately, is that the freedom to express outrageous opinions is part of living in a free society. Any self examination would never occur among Israel's neighbors.
The problem is that this isn't self-examination.

The outright falsehood is something that was seized upon by Israel's enemies. A blog called the civil platform makes the necessary connection.

At the same time the Israelis were attacking and killing American servicemen aboard the USS Liberty in 1967, they were also busy butchering up to 1,000 unarmed Egyptian POWs and Indian UN peacekeepers along the Sinai coast. Indeed, some say that one of the reasons for the attack on the Liberty was to cover up the slaughter of prisoners taking place, whose actual number has been placed as high as 1,000.* Now Egyptian lawmakers, unlike their American counterparts, are demanding an investigation.

The belief in the massacre of the Egyptian POW's is necesssary because it provides the motive for the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty. And this has some level of credence even in mainstream circles. In 2001, James Bamford, a respected author, wrote "Body of Secrets" in which he ties this together. The charge was so explosive that it merited its own news item at the time. James Risen, an intelligence reporter at the NY Times, wrote:

While the Israeli government said the incident was an accident, it did pay modest reparations to the victims and their families. But Mr. Bamford writes that the Israeli explanation is a cover story for a deliberate attack meant to prevent the United States from eavesdropping on its military activities. And the book provides evidence from crew members of an American spy plane that overheard the attack.
While Israeli planes and boats were attacking the Liberty, the American plane, a Navy EC-121 intelligence-gathering aircraft, was far overhead, and recorded Israeli conversations, Mr. Bamford wrote.
And the crew heard Israeli pilots talking about seeing an American flag.

The Times's reporter, reported Bamford's charges straight with no criticism. However the book reviewer for the same paper showed a bit more skepticism. (One of the crew of the Navy plane disputes Bamford's allegations about what the crew heard. Risen wasn't interested.) In an otherwise very positive review, Joseph Finder, who reviewed "Body of Secrets" wrote:

Where ''Body of Secrets'' is weakest, I think, is in its account of the most horrific incident in the N.S.A.'s history, the assault on the spy ship Liberty a few miles off the Sinai peninsula during the 1967 Middle East war. On orders from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the N.S.A. had sent the Liberty into the war zone to collect intelligence on the presence of Soviet troops and weapons in Egypt. On the afternoon of June 8, 1967, the Liberty was attacked by Israeli forces; 34 Americans were killed, 171 wounded. Was it, as Israel maintained, a ''tragic accident''? Or was it, as conspiracy theorists and some of the ship's survivors insist, a coldblooded and deliberate action by the Israelis in order to eliminate evidence of damaging information the Liberty had intercepted?
Rather too credulously, Bamford sides with the conspiracy theorists. He argues that the Israelis were attempting to cover up a gruesome mass murder by Israeli soldiers of some 400 Egyptian P.O.W.'s at the Sinai town of El Arish. Israel, Bamford claims, acted because it was convinced that the N.S.A. ship was recording intelligence on this massacre. ''Israeli soldiers were butchering civilians and bound prisoners by the hundreds,'' he writes, ''a fact that the entire Israeli Army leadership knew about and condoned.'' He charges, too, that the White House and Congress ''covered up'' the facts of the attack. But is it really possible that such an explosive secret could have been kept under wraps for so long by the Johnson administration, the United States Congress and all of the famously fractious Israeli Army leadership?
. . .
It hardly seems plausible that Israel would deliberately attack an American ship, killing dozens of American sailors, risking a confrontation with a superpower and its only ally -- in short, perpetrating one massacre in order to cover up another. Perhaps Bamford's analysis has been skewed by his palpable distaste for the Israeli state: ''Throughout its history, Israel has hidden its abominable human rights record behind pious religious claims,'' he writes. ''Critics are regularly silenced with outrageous charges of anti-Semitism.'' And: ''No one in the weak-kneed House and Senate wanted to offend powerful pro-Israel groups and lose their fat campaign contributions.''

Bamford, a well regarded intelligence analyst and frequent contributor to op-ed pages is a member of the Walt-Mearsheimer "Israel Lobby" club.

In his book, the Liberty Incident, Judge A. Jay Cristol, laid out a minute by minute reconstruction of how the accident took place. The United States never informed Israel that it had a ship in the area. The Israeli intellegence teams tracking the ship changed shifts and the new one had no up to date information on the mystery ship. An explosion - most likely an ammunition dump exploding - on a nearby beach made Israeli troops think that they were being bombarded from the sea. The terrible tragedy was the result of carelessness and miscommunications.

The most telling evidence that Israel didn't specifically target the Liberty according to Judge Cristol is that its planes were not sent out with munitions designated for sinking a ship. Had Israel's intent been to sink the Liberty to prevent it from detecting illicit Israeli activities it would have used 500 pound iron bombs.

Military historian Michael Oren has written an account explaining much of what went wrong, in The U.S.S. Liberty: Case Closed.

(Though Oren's perspective is not on the supposed massacre, but rather Israel preventing the United States from gaining advance information on its intent to attack the Golan Heights. He observes, though,

Like the other claims for Israel's alleged motive in attacking the Liberty, the one linking the assault to the Golan Heights campaign cannot withstand the scrutiny of the newly declassified documents. These confirm that Israel made no attempt to hide its preparations for an offensive against Syria, and that the United States government, relying on regular diplomatic channels, remained fully apprised of them. Thus, on June 8, the American consulate in Jerusalem reported that Israel was retaliating for Syria's bombardment of Israeli villages "in an apparent prelude to large-scale attack in effort to seize Heights overlooking border kibbutzim." That same day, U.S. Ambassador Walworth Barbour in Tel Aviv reported that "I would not, repeat not, be surprised if the reported Israeli attack [on the Golan] does take place or has already done so," and IDF Intelligence Chief Aharon Yariv told Harry McPherson, a senior White House aide who was visiting Israel at the time, that "there still remained the Syria problem and perhaps it would be necessary to give Syria a blow."

Like the Sinai massacre, this motive too, evaporates upon examination.)

The Sinai Massacre and the Liberty Incident will keep on showing up because Israel's enemies aren't simply interested in being critics, but in arguing Israel is illegitimate.

At Commentary's Contentions last week, Hillel Halkin writing in Israel's war for public opinion

When one debates what “legitimate” criticism of Israel does and does not consist of, such figures need to be kept constantly in mind. No criticism of Israel that further distorts the wildly inaccurate picture of it that prevails in most of the world can possibly be legitimate. Israel is fighting a war for public opinion that is, in the long run, part of the war it is fighting for its survival—and it is being routed. Those who care for it, no matter how much they disagree with its current policies, should think not twice but ten times before they say or do anything that can only make this rout worse.

How much more so for Israeli journalists who so willingly took up the Egyptian claims against their own country giving fodder to their enemies?

Blogdigger tags: Egyptian POW Massacre, Six Day War, Liberty Incident, James Bamford, Michael Oren, A. Jay Cristol.

Posted by SoccerDad at March 12, 2007 7:57 AM | TrackBack