LETTER: Israel sought expansion

Editor,

In his response to Mr. Jaafar’s guest column, Mr. Smith in his letter to the editor that appeared in The Statesman on Nov. 11 said that in the 1967 war Israel launched a preemptive strike as a response to the Egyptian President Nasser’s preparations for war.

I would like to make it clear that there was no threat at all on Israel from its Arab neighbors at that time. I want to quote from Israeli leaders on the 1967 war to prove to Mr. Smith and the readers that this war was merely a war of Israeli aggression. Israel simply sought territorial expansion in order to accommodate Jewish immigration and definitely to usurp east Jerusalem.

General Yitzhak Rabin, the head of the army and later the prime minister of Israel several times, said in Le Monde, Feb. 28,1968, “I do not believe that Nasser wanted war. The two divisions which he sent into the Sinai Peninsula on May 14 would not have been enough to unleash an offensive against Israel. He knew it, and we knew it.”

General Ezar Weizman, Israeli chief of operations and later president of Israel, said in Ha’aretz on March 29,1972, “There was never a danger of extermination. This hypothesis had never been considered in any serious meeting.”

Alfred M. Lilienthal, in his book, “The Zionist Connection” published in 1978, quoted General Yeshayahu Gavish, Israeli commanding general, as saying, “The danger of Israel’s extermination was hardly present before the six-day war.”

General Haim Barlev, chief of the Israeli General Staff and later the Israeli security minister, said in Ma’ariv, April 4, 1972, “We were not threatened with genocide on the eve of the six-day war, and we had never thought of such a possibility.”

In Al-Hamishmar on April 14, 1971, Mordechai Bentov, the Israeli minister of housing, said, “The entire story of the danger of extermination was invented in every detail, and exaggerated a posteriori to justify the annexation of new Arab territory.”

And finally, General Mordichai Hod, commanding general of Israeli air force, was quoted in “The Zionist Connection” as saying, “Sixteen years’ planning had gone into those initial 80 minutes. We lived with the plan, we slept on the plan, we ate the plan. Constantly we perfected it.”

Mohammad Almasri