Outing Israeli Crimes: June 1967

By Clare Brandabur
June 2007
Cosmos.UCC.IE

Body of Secrets: How America's NSA and Britain's GCHQ Eavesdrop on the World

James Bamford
London: Arrow Books,2002
ISBN 970099427742 (from Jan 2007) ISBN 0 09 942774 5

As we observe the fortieth anniversary of the Six-Day War of June 1967, there are few things to celebrate. One notable exception is the full exposure of the actual events of the Israeli aggression which have been carefully guarded secrets. In particular the frenzied attempts by the Israelis to sink the USS Liberty and kill its entire crew, attempts covered up at the time by order of the Johnson White House and covered up ever since by censorship and elaborate lies by Israeli and US authority figures.

Now, thanks to the remarkable book Body of Secrets by James Bamford, it is possible to learn not only what happened to the Liberty, but what it was Israel was so desperate to conceal from the eyes of the world, especially from the Russians and the Americans. What they were covering up, and what President Lyndon Johnson would help them continue to cover up, was war crimes and crimes against humanity, a continuation and intensification of the deliberate and calculated policy of the colonial settler state with respect to the indigenous people: genocide.

A good deal was already known about the genocidal practice of the Israelis in 1967 thanks to Arthur C. Forrest's The Unholy Land (1971). Forrest was sent by a consortium of North American church magazines to research rumors that the Israelis were not in fact allowing the refugees back into Palestine, in spite of their carefully staged claims to the contrary. Forrest quickly learned that refugees were still fleeing across the Allenby Bridge; that many had been attacked by Israeli planes using napalm; that the camp at Jericho which had held some 65,000 refugees from 1948, had been attacked and thousands driven across the River into Jordan by planes using machine gins and napalm; that survivors from the Jordanian Army said whole field hospitals had been napalmed. Of course Forrest was bitterly attacked for daring to criticize Israel, especially for revealing the truth about Israeli use of napalm against civilians and hospitals.

One of the horror stories being told in Amman was of the experiences of fleeing refugees being sprayed with napalm. At first I didn't believe it and shuddered at the thought of using some of the pictures of victims available in Jordan. 'If it were pictures of Vietnam you'd publish them wouldn't you?' a Palestinian said. (Forrest 16)

Forrest was shocked and dubious concerning these reports, so he went to visit survivors of these attacks in Jordanian hospitals. He spoke to Mr. Sami Oweida, the father of a family who had recently crossed the Bridge and whose surviving members were still being treated in hospital in Amman

We crossed the King Hussein [Allenby] Bridge, walking. Planes were going overhead [...] We tried to avoid big crowds, thinking the planes would bomb the crowds.

Then at that moment [about 4 PM] I saw a plane come down like a hawk directly at us. We threw ourselves on the ground and found ourselves in the midst of fire. (Forrest 17)

Forrest also quotes the report of General Sir John Glubb whose interpretation of the Middle East Crisis was published in July 1967 as follows:

The greater part of the Jordan army were destroyed by napalm [.] Glubb quotes from a signed statement by a team of doctors from the American University of Beirut.[...] 'A doctor reported that the Mobile Field Hospital, containing 350 patients, was incinerated with all its patients and staff by napalm,' Glubb says. (Forrest 16)

Forrest took photographs of some of the burned victims, one of which he later published in the United Church Observer, his Church paper in Canada, of a little girl recovering from napalm burns. "That, I was told, proved I was anti-Semitic. To condemn napalm in Vietnam is alright. To report its use by the Israelis is considered anti-Semitic" (Forrest 17).

When Forrest asked for permission to visit the three destroyed villages Yalu, Beit Nuba, and Emmaus, he was refused on grounds that "There isn't any Beit Nuba!" (15). Nevertheless Forrest managed to travel to the devastated area. From survivors whom he asked about the destruction of these villages in retribution for their resistance in 1948 he learned that Israeli bulldozers demolished houses over the heads of the elderly who perished in the rubble (15).

Now, thanks to James Bamford's outing of the secrets of the "Black Chamber" which housed the American NSA, (National Security Agency) and that of the British GCHQ, (Government Communications Headquarters), it is possible to reconstruct a more complete picture of the Israeli cover-up including its attack on the USS Liberty. The well planned war of 1967 was designed to take as much land as possible and to make it appear that the Arab armies had attacked Israel. This is the startling conclusion of a chapter in Bamford's, Body of Secrets (2002) which offers a more detailed explanation for the Israeli attack on the Liberty. Bamford provides a mass of detail about the "criminal slaughter" in which the Israelis were engaged at nearby Al-Arish (201).

From the first minutes of its surprise attack, the Israeli airforce had owned the skies over the Middle East. Within the first few hours, Israeli jets pounded twenty-five Arab air bases ranging from Damascus in Syria to an Egyptian field, loaded with bombers far up the Nile at Luxor. Then, using machine guns, mortar fire, tanks, and air power, the Israeli war machine overtook the Jordanian section of Jerusalem as well as the west bank of the Jordan River, and torpedo boats captured the key Red Sea cape at Sharm al-Sheikh.

In the Sinai, Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers pushed toward the Suez Canal along all three of the roads that crossed the desert, turning the burning sands into a massive killing field. One Israeli general estimated that Egyptian casualties there ranged from 7,000 to 10,000 killed, compared with 275 of its own troops. (201)

Bamford documents the attack by Israeli tanks on a UN convoy of Indian peacekeeper soldiers on their way to Gaza, and the subsequent attack on a UN headquarters in Gaza in which fourteen UN members were killed. "One Indian officer called it deliberate, cold-blooded killing of unarmed UN soldiers" (201). Bamford then details the slaughter of hundreds of Egyptian prisoners of war who were made to dig their own graves and then machine-gunned (202-205). Body of Secrets provides the most detailed account I have seen of the USS Liberty attack, gleaned in part from recently unearthed material from the records of the National Security Agency, in part from interviews with all available Liberty survivors.

It was not in Israel's interest nor in US interest to have its aggression against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan revealed to the world. Early in the afternoon of June 8, 1967, Israeli jets and missile boats opened fire on the USS Liberty, an American surveillance ship operating off the coast of Gaza. Struck by rockets, cannons and torpedoes, the vessel suffered extensive damage and over 200 casualties including 34 dead. Israeli forces were then engaged in the fourth day of what would soon be called the Six Day War, and, as Bamford shows, the Liberty was hit repeatedly by waves of Israeli airforce fighters loaded with 30 mm cannon ammunition, rockets, and even napalm, then assaulted from the sea by torpedoes (200-201). Though Israel claimed the attack was a "tragic mistake," the incident has never been officially revealed to the public.

In spite of earlier exposés like that of Arthur Forrest and interviews with survivors of the USS Liberty, few people in the West even today know what Israel was doing. In subsequent investigations, however, it has emerged that those directly connected to the attack on the Liberty rejected Israeli claims the ship was attacked by accident. In his biography of President Lyndon Johnson, for example, Robert Dallek says "The highest officials of the [Johnson] administration, including the President, believed it 'inconceivable' that Israel's 'skilled' defense forces could have committed such a gross error" Dallek. 430-31). If Israeli intention was to cover up their criminal napalm attacks on Palestinian civilians in order to drive them out of Palestine, it seems to have been a success. What Israel was covering up, by trying to sink the USS Liberty was the crime of genocide.

Arthur Forrest's book and Bamford's meticulous documentation are consistent with other witnesses to Israel's use of napalm against civilians in 1967. Norman F. Dacey, who had been chairman of Volunteers for Nixon, whose open letter to then President Richard M. Nixon was published in Lebanese newspaper Al-Anwar, January 17, 1972. In it Dacey told Nixon that he would henceforth campaign for Nixon's defeat, citing his disgust with US policies in the Middle East. "I have walked through Egyptian hospitals and seen row on row of beds of little children, their bodies burned black by American-made napalm, dropped from American-built planes in claimed 'defense' of Israel" (Dacey qtd in Ashiurakis 1974).

Other readers will find other parts of Bamford's huge book (715 pages) important for what it has to reveal about US and UK intelligence roles in relation to Cuba, to Viet Nam, Germany, Russia, and China. But I think it is fitting on this fortieth anniversary of the Israeli Occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights, to concentrate attention on what the book has to teach us about the Israeli assault of 1967 which, as the commentators are saying, changed the shape of the Middle East. The Palestinian refugees are more numerous and in some ways more desperate than before, as witness the conflagration that threatens to spread in Northern Lebanon, and the Israeli and American leadership remains just as intransigent as ever about the right of return of the refugees, though it was by their false promise to allow them to return that Israel gained acceptance in the United Nations.

But why, you might ask, would events of 1967 be relevant today? And why, therefore, are Bamford's revelations so critical? Because the same program of ethnic cleansing and progressive land confiscation is still proceeding apace, and this program is at the heart of all the other major conflicts in the region, most recently the tragic waste of the US/UK invasion of Iraq which was fueled by Israeli expansionism.

In addition to its ongoing murders of Palestinians (such as the massacre of Jenin refugee camp in 2002) and the present campaign of assassination and wholesale killing in Gaza, Israel also continues its genocidal plans for the destruction of Palestinian cultural institutions. In Imperial Israel and the Palestinians (2002), Nur Masalha documents recent Israeli plans for the destruction of Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, the two great mosques on the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem (122-23), and for the "final solution" to the Palestinian problem which they hope to put into practice with the help of their American accomplices-a plan of "transfer" for which they foresaw the destruction of Iraq as a necessary step. Masalha quotes Meier Lipschitz, an Israeli developer of Jewish-only housing, as saying

A war against Iraq is a real (religious) duty. If it is possible to make provocation, we must carry this out immediately. Such a golden opportunity in a convenient international situation falls into our hand once every hundred years... No one will busy himself with the triviality of transfer which we will carry out in parallel at the same time... Who exactly will be interested in the fate of two million Palestinians, who supported the butcher of Baghdad and are settled on the lands of the little king (King Hussein)? (184)

Masalha says the gist of this argument is that war against Iraq should be provoked if only so it could be utilized for the forcible mass expulsion of the Palestinians"(185).

James Bamford's book has a great deal more to teach us about US and UK secrets, the Cold War, and the Great Game. But on this anniversary of the second Nakbah, I hope I may be forgiven for foregrounding what Body of Secrets has to teach us about the true character of Israel as a colonial settler state which is inherently genocidal.

Selected Bibliography

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Dacey, Norman F. "Open Letter to President Nixon." in The Crime in Palestine. By Ahmed M. Ashiurakis. Tripoli, Libya: Dar Al-Farjani, 1974.

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