Redevelopment plan for Beechview
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This from a dear friend and fellow memo reader who served his country admirably.
There is an increasing number of elected officials, who have sworn to protect and obey the Constitution and who have lost sight of their purpose and pledge, to act out in a contemptuous manner. By engaging in grandstanding they are sending a message to those who elected them that "dissing" America is their right and privilege.
I have always argued against limited terms because we are free to vote and it would only strengthen the power of bureaucrats.
That said, watching these liberal Democrats act like petulant children is sickening. My friend did not spend years in the service of our country so they could act like unpatriotic fools. (See 1 below.)
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One reaction begets another and there is much truth in what Genova writes. (See 2 below.)
Sign of the times? (See 2a and 2b below.)
and
Just another calm day in "Eiffelville:" Click here: PARIS AT WAR WITH THEIR REFUGEES - YouTube<https://www.youtube.co
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An interesting look back. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)This is sad, sad, sad, bad enough to see it with sports, but now it is in schools and congress….SICK!!!!
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
If they won't stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance,
In my opinion...they have no place in our Congress.
Any member of the house or senate that refuse to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance in the Chambers should be escorted out by the
Sergeant at Arms until they comply. If your allegiance is not with this country and our flag, just who is it with?
Why don't we ask someone like Minnesota's Muslim congressman Keith Ellison!
Let`s cut off their pay -- and all benefits. Give the ingrates two days to decide to retire or be impeached.
2)
the one you started inside of "us"
"YOU" created "US".
It really is just that simple.
2a) The folks who are getting the free stuff don't like
The folks who are paying for the free stuff, because
The folks who are paying for the free stuff can no longer
Afford to pay for both the free stuff and their own stuff.
And the folks who are paying for the free stuff
Want the free stuff to stop.
And the folks who are getting the free stuff want even more
Free stuff on top of the free stuff they are already getting!
Now... The people who are forcing the people who
pay for the free stuff have told the people who are RECEIVING
The free stuff that the people who are PAYING for the
Free stuff are being mean, prejudiced, and racist.
So... The people who are GETTING the free stuff have been
Convinced they need to hate the people who are paying for the
Free stuff by the people who are forcing some
people to pay
For their free stuff and giving them the free stuff
in the first place.
We have let the free stuff giving go on for so long
that there are now
more people getting free stuff than paying for the
Free stuff.
Now understand this.
All great democracies have committed financial
suicide somewhere
Between 200 and 250 years after being founded.
The reason?
The voters figured out they could vote themselves money from the treasury by electing people who promised to give them money from the treasury in exchange for electing them.
The United States officially became a Republic in 1776,
241 years ago.
The number of people now getting free stuff
Outnumbers the people paying for the free stuff.
Failure to change that, spells the end of the United States as we know it.
The Election of 2016 was "WON" by people objecting to the "free stuff"mentality.
..... let's continue to clean-out-the swamp.
A Nation of Sheep Breeds a Government of Wolves!
For all our sake PLEASE Take a Stand!!!
Borders: Closed!
Language: English as the Official Language
Culture: Constitution, God, and the Bill of Rights! I agree with this except the order is wrong! We
need to return to how it was when we gained our freedom, i.e., God first, then the rest of it! Let’s
get God back into our lives!
Drug Free: Mandatory Drug Screening before
Welfare!
NO freebies to: Non-Citizens!
2b) Trial to expose radical Islamic agents embedded in U.S.
Top First Amendment lawyers defend breathtaking infiltration of terror front
A former federal investigator enlists his son to infiltrate a Muslim front in the nation's capital that had routinely collaborated with the White House and federal law-enforcement agencies as a "civil rights" group.
The daring undercover operation results in the capture of 12,000 pages of incriminating internal documents along with audio and video recordings, attracting the interest of the FBI and congressional investigators.
The evidence is compiled in one volume that draws the praise of a member of Congress who declares: "Now we have proof – from the secret documents that this investigative team has uncovered, coupled with the ones recently declassified by the FBI – that [radical Islamic] agents living among us have a plan in place, and they are successfully carrying out that subversive plan."But the Muslim front group, funded by wealthy Saudi donors and other foreign sources, files a lawsuit against the investigators, charging its "reputation" was damaged. Lacking any grounds to rebut the overwhelming evidence that it actually is a Muslim Brotherhood front, the group amends it complaint then prolongs the case through frivolous motions until finally, after eight years, a trial is set to be scheduled.
While it might sound like a Hollywood script, it's the true story of a WND Books co-author and his son who have been sued by the Washington, D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations in a case that has moved to a trial likely to begin this fall in the nation's capital.
Help defend the First Amendment right to expose the Muslim Brotherhood's infiltration of America through your contribution to the legal defense of WND's author
No defense
CAIR filed suit in 2009 against former Air Force special agent David Gaubatz and his son, Chris Gaubatz, after their findings were published in "Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That's Conspiring to Islamize America."
Serving as an intern, Chris Gaubatz gathered some 12,000 pages of documents that were headed for a shredder at CAIR's national office in Washington, just three blocks from the U.S. Capitol building. The information published in "Muslim Mafia," co-authored by David Gaubatz and investigative journalist Paul Sperry, demonstrated CAIR's connection to the Muslim Brotherhood, the group that spawned al-Qaida and Hamas and stated in writing its intent to put America under Islamic law and the authority of the Quran.In the lawsuit, however, CAIR has never defended itself against the book's claims.
The release of the book was kicked off with a Capitol Hill press conference in which several members of the Congressional Anti-Terrorism Caucus cited the research in the book as a national security concern.
It was then-Republican Rep. Sue Myrick of North Carolina who hailed the book as proof of a "subversive plan" by the Muslim Brotherhood to, in the words of a Brotherhood document submitted in a terror-funding trial in which CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator, "destroy Western Civilization from within."
CAIR's motions in the "Muslim Mafia" case showed its aim was to squelch any further distribution of the documents and instill fear of the book among any potentially curious reporters.
Meanwhile, as attorneys representing the Gaubatzes were preparing to honor a court order to return documents obtained during operation, FBI agents served a warrant on a Washington, D.C., law office for the same documents, suggesting the agency wanted to see the papers and examine the recordings as part of its interest in CAIR and its Hamas terrorist links.
To defend its author, WND Books hired, among others, famed First Amendment defense attorney Martin Garbus, known for the Pentagon Papers case, and Daniel Horowitz, known for his high-profile clients and legal commentary on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News.
The legal team soon demonstrated that CAIR did not even legally exist as the Washington, D.C., corporation it claimed to be, operating a corporate "shell game," forcing CAIR to refile its lawsuit.
The FBI already had cut off ties to CAIR in January 2009 after the group was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case in Texas, the largest terrorism-finance case in U.S. history.
More than a dozen CAIR leaders have been charged or convicted of terrorism-related crimes.
FBI wiretap evidence from the Holy Land case showed CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad was at an October 1993 meeting of Hamas leaders and activists in Philadelphia. CAIR, according to the evidence, was born out of a need to give a "media twinkle" to the Muslim leaders' agenda of supporting violent jihad abroad while slowly institutionalizing Islamic law in the U.S.
A federal judge later determined that the Justice Department provided “ample evidence” to designate CAIR as an unindicted terrorist co-conspirator, affirming the Muslim group had been involved in “a conspiracy to support Hamas."
In addition, CAIR leaders have made statements affirming the aim of establishing Islamic rule in the United States.
The Islamic organization long had accused WND and others of "smearing" the Muslim group by citing a newspaper account of CAIR founder Omar Ahmad telling Muslims in Northern California in 1998 that they were in America not to assimilate but to help assert Islam's rule over the country. But WND caught CAIR falsely claiming that it had contacted the paper and had "sought a retraction," insisting Ahmad never made the statement. Three years later, the issue arose again, and WND found CAIR still had not contacted the paper.
CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper also has expressed a desire to replace the U.S. system of government with an Islamic state.
"I wouldn't want to create the impression that I wouldn't like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future," Hooper said in a 1993 interview with the Minneapolis Star Tribune. "But I'm not going to do anything violent to promote that. I'm going to do it through education."
Media hijack
Horowitz told WND on Wednesday that despite being named by the United States as a co-conspirator to Hamas and being designated a terrorist group by the United Arab Emirates, CAIR "continues to hijack the media, acting like they are a Muslim civil rights group."
"They filed this case in a jurisdiction very favorable to their group, and if they win, they will use the case to prove to the world that they are a legitimate group that represents American Muslims," he said. "If we win, they will be unmasked in a very public way."Horowitz explained that the case has gone on so long because CAIR has hid under different corporate names "to obscure a lot of their wrongdoing."
"We had to petition the court to tie them down to their real identity," he said.
Also, Horowitz noted that the court shot down CAIR's claim that its reputation was damaged by an undercover investigation that alleged it was a front for the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.
Horowitz has insisted that "exposing CAIR as a criminal organization does not give them the right to sue for being exposed in that manner."
"The case is a vendetta by CAIR against people who exposed their Muslim Brotherhood connection," he told WND in 2015. "They seem have unlimited foreign money, but we have an unlimited will to resist."
Horowitz said Wednesday that CAIR's tactics to prolong the case have included not cooperating with court orders to meet and confer.
"They have filed vicious personal attacks, once accusing me of being Islamophobic because I was 'David Horowitz,'" he said, referring to the widely cited conservative writer and activist who founded the think tank the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Horowitz said that at the trial, he expects to see complete exposure of CAIR's founding by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Evidence, he said, will trace CAIR's support for radical jihadists and its donations from foreign entities.
While CAIR repeatedly has denied it receives foreign support, the covert operation that produced "Muslim Mafia" obtained video footage that captured CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper boasting of his ability to bring in a half million dollars of "overseas money," including from Saudi Arabia.
The trial also will spotlight CAIR's post-9/11 solicitations of funds for 9/11 victims that actually went to Hamas-based groups, and its subversion of the FBI and law enforcement, employing, he said, "the Muslim civil rights persona the way a wolf wears sheep's clothing."
Horowitz cautioned that while CAIR doesn't have a case, the Saudi-funded group "can chill the First Amendment by making it so expensive to speak against them that no one can challenge them."
He warned that WND must continue to be vigilant: "In the end, CAIR can just keep getting more and more money from overseas and burn out opposition with lawsuits."
Legal fees paid by WND, besides those paid for by insurance, total hundreds of thousands of dollars before the the trial.
“WND has carried the burden of these costs not because it is a party named in the lawsuit,” explained Joseph Farah, founder, editor and chief executive officer of WND.
“Instead, we have done so because no one else stepped forward to do so – to defend the Gaubatzes personally, to take the fight to the Muslim Brotherhood front group CAIR, to defend any attacks CAIR might direct toward the integrity of our book, “Muslim Mafia,” and, more generally, to stand up for the First Amendment.”
Free-speech defender
Along with Horowitz, WND has hired the legendary First Amendment lawyer Garbus, who has represented the likes of Ronald Reagan, Nelson Mandela and Andrei Sakharov.
Garbus, who has appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court along with trial and appellate courts in more than 100 cases, told WND in 2010 he sees the "Muslim Mafia" case as a "continuation of a struggle being carried out throughout the world" to guard freedom of speech."I think a book has a right to be out there, and any attempt to stop the book, I think, would be violating the First Amendment," he said.
Garbus has been in the thick of numerous groundbreaking and highly controversial First Amendment cases over the past five decades, from Daniel Ellsberg's battle over the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War and Lenny Bruce's famous obscenity charges to radio host Don Imus' lawsuit against CBS after he was fired for his remarks about the Rutgers women's basketball team.
Other clients have included activist Cesar Chavez, actor Robert Redford, actor Al Pacino, director Spike Lee, writer Samuel Beckett and Czech playwright Vaclav Havel. Later, when Havel became president of the Czech Republic, Garbus was invited to help write the nation's constitution.
One of his many seminal cases was Ashton v. Kentucky, in which the Supreme Court ruled in 1966 that libel could no longer be criminally prosecuted.
Garbus believes Americans have an interest in exposure of the CAIR documents, because they are relevant to federal law enforcement officials' concerns about the group's ties to terrorist operatives that threaten the nation's security.
Garbus has said the Gaubatz lawsuit has similarities to his defense of legal author and CNN commentator Jeffrey Toobin, who allegedly violated a confidentiality agreement with Iran-Contra investigator Lawrence E. Walsh in the early 1990s when he published a book about his experience as a member of the prosecution team. Garbus won the case on First Amendment grounds.
'This book will shake you'
The highlights of "Muslim Mafia" include:
- New evidence that CAIR was launched to support the Hamas terrorist group and has transferred tens of thousands of dollars to a group convicted as Hamas' top fundraising arm in the U.S. – money that ended up aiding terrorist attacks on Israelis and Americans;
- Internal documents showing CAIR, despite claims of cooperating with law enforcement, actively works behind the scenes to mislead and deceive the FBI on behalf of terrorism suspects – and has even cultivated Muslim moles inside law enforcement who have tipped off FBI terror targets;
- CAIR is more closely tied to al-Qaida than previously reported;
- CAIR claims to represent all Muslim Americans; however, it has victimized some 100 indigent Muslims in a massive fraud and threatened them when they tried to go to the media; and internally, personnel complaints reveal CAIR discriminates against Shiite Muslims and Muslim women within its own headquarters;
- CAIR and its sister fronts are funded by foreign Muslim Brotherhood sources;
- CAIR leaders share the Muslim Brotherhood's ultimate goal to replace the U.S. Constitution with Shariah law:
- The Muslim Brotherhood investment in corporate America will be used to pressure U.S. companies into compliance with Islamic principles.
The book has been praised by retired Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, former U.S. deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, who has played a role in almost every recent major American military operation, serving in Grenada, Somalia and Iraq.“There’s a recent book that came out called ‘Muslim Mafia,'” he told a conference in 2010.
“Have any of you read this? Have any of you ever seen it? I encourage you to get this book – ‘Muslim Mafia.’ … This book will scare you. This book will open your eyes. This book will shake you. What this book says is frightening,”
Help defend the First Amendment right to expose the Muslim Brotherhood's infiltration of America through your contribution to the legal defense of WND's author
Rogues gallery of terror-tied CAIR leaders
As former FBI agent Mike Rolf acknowledges in "Muslim Mafia," "CAIR has had a number of people in positions of power within the organization that have been directly connected to terrorism and have either been prosecuted or thrown out of the country." According to another FBI veteran familiar with cases involving CAIR officials, "Their offices have been a turnstile for terrorists and their supporters."
The list includes:
 FBI agents arresting Ghassan Elashi in 2002. |
- Ghassan Elashi: One of CAIR's founding directors, he was convicted in 2004 of illegally shipping high-tech goods to terror state Syria and is serving 80 months in prison. He was also convicted of providing material support to Hamas in the Holy Land Foundation terror-financing trial. He was chairman of the charity, which provided seed capital to CAIR. Elashi is related to Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook.
- Muthanna al-Hanooti: The CAIR director's home was raided in 2006 by FBI agents in connection with an active terrorism investigation. Agents also searched the offices of his advocacy group, Focus on Advocacy and Advancement of International Relations, which al-Hanooti operates out of Dearborn, Michigan, and Washington, D.C. Al-Hanooti, who emigrated to the U.S. from Iraq, formerly helped run a suspected Hamas terror front called LIFE for Relief and Development. Its Michigan offices also were raided in September 2006. In 2004, LIFE's Baghdad office was raided by U.S. troops, who seized files and computers. Al-Hanooti is related to Sheik Mohammed al-Hanooti, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
"Al-Hanooti collected over $6 million for support of Hamas," according to a 2001 FBI report, and was present with CAIR and Holy Land officials at a secret Hamas fundraising summit held in 1993 at a Philadelphia hotel. Prosecutors added his name to the list of unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land case.Muthanna al-Hanooti
Although Al-Hanooti denies supporting Hamas, he has praised Palestinian suicide bombers as "martyrs" who are "alive in the eyes of Allah." - Abdurahman Alamoudi: Another CAIR director, he is serving 23 years in federal prison for plotting terrorism. Alamoudi, who was caught on tape complaining that bin Laden hadn't killed enough Americans in the U.S. embassy bombings in Africa, was one of al-Qaida's top fundraisers in America, according to the U.S. Treasury Department.
- Siraj Wahhaj: A member of CAIR's board of advisers, Wahhaj was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The radical Brooklyn imam was close to convicted terrorist Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and defended him during his trial.
"Muslim Mafia," citing co-author's Sperry's previous book "Infiltration" as well as terror expert Steven Emerson's research, reports that Wahhaj, a black convert to Islam, is converting gang members to Islam and holding "jihad camps" for them. With a combination of Islam and Uzis, he has said, the street thugs will be a powerful force for Islam the day America "will crumble."Imam Siraj Wahhaj
Wahhaj was a key speaker at CAIR's 15th annual fund-raising banquet in Arlington, Virginia, in 2009. - Randall "Ismail" Royer: The former CAIR communications specialist and civil-rights coordinator is serving 20 years in prison in connection with the Virginia Jihad Network, which he led while employed by CAIR at its Washington headquarters. The group trained to kill U.S. soldiers overseas, cased the FBI headquarters and cheered the space shuttle Columbia tragedy. Al-Qaida operative Ahmed Abu Ali, convicted of plotting to assassinate President George W. Bush, was among those who trained with Royer's Northern Virginia cell.
- Bassam Khafagi: Another CAIR official, Khafagi was arrested in 2003 while serving as CAIR's director of community affairs. He pleaded guilty to charges of bank and visa fraud stemming from a federal counter-terror probe of his leadership role in the Islamic Assembly of North America, which has supported al-Qaida and advocated suicide attacks on America. He was sentenced to 10 months in prison and deported to his native Egypt.
- Laura Jaghlit: A civil-rights coordinator for CAIR, her Washington-area home was raided by federal agents after 9/11 as part of an investigation into terrorist financing, money laundering and tax fraud. Her husband Mohammed Jaghlit, a key leader in the Saudi-backed SAAR network, is a target of the still-active probe. Jaghlit sent two letters accompanying donations – one for $10,000, the other for $5,000 – from the SAAR Foundation to Sami al-Arian, now a convicted terrorist. In each letter, according to a federal affidavit, "Jaghlit instructed al-Arian not to disclose the contribution publicly or to the media. "Investigators suspect the funds were intended for Palestinian terrorists via a U.S. front called WISE, which at the time employed an official who personally delivered a satellite phone battery to Osama bin Laden. The same official also worked for Jaghlit's group. In addition, Jaghlit donated a total of $37,200 to the Holy Land Foundation, which prosecutors say is a Hamas front. Jaghlit subsequently was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the case.
.jpg) Nihad Awad |
- Nihad Awad: Wiretap evidence from the Holy Land case puts CAIR's executive director at the Philadelphia meeting of Hamas leaders and activists in 1993 that was secretly recorded by the FBI. Participants hatched a plot to disguise payments to Hamas terrorists as charitable giving. During the meeting, according to FBI transcripts, Awad was recorded discussing the propaganda effort. He mentions Ghassan Dahduli, whom he worked with at the time at the Islamic Association for Palestine, another Hamas front. Both were IAP officers. Dahduli's name also was listed in the address book of bin Laden's personal secretary, Wadi al-Hage, who is serving a life sentence in prison for his role in the U.S. embassy bombings. Dahduli, an ethnic-Palestinian like Awad, was deported to Jordan after 9/11 for refusing to cooperate in the terror investigation. (An April 28, 2009, letter from FBI assistant director Richard C. Powers to Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz. – which singles out CAIR chief Awad for suspicion – explains how the group's many Hamas connections caused the FBI to sever ties with CAIR.) Awad's and Dahduli's phone numbers are listed in a Muslim Brotherhood document seized by federal investigators revealing "important phone numbers" for the "Palestine Section" of the Brotherhood in America. The court exhibit showed Hamas fugitive Mousa Abu Marzook listed on the same page with Awad.
| Omar Ahmad |
- Omar Ahmad: U.S. prosecutors also named CAIR's founder and chairman emeritus as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land case. Ahmad, too, was placed at the Philadelphia meeting, FBI special agent Lara Burns testified at the trial. Prosecutors also designated him as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood's "Palestine Committee" in America. Ahmad, like his CAIR partner Awad, is ethnic-Palestinian. (Though both Ahmad and Awad were senior leaders of IAP, the Hamas front, neither of their biographical sketches posted on CAIR's website mentions their IAP past.)
Nabil Sadoun
- Nabil Sadoun: A CAIR board member, Sadoun has served on the board of the United Association for Studies and Research, which investigators believe to be a key Hamas front in America. In fact, Sadoun co-founded UASR with Hamas leader Marzook. The Justice Department added UASR to the list of unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land case. In 2010, Sadoun was ordered deported to his native Jordan. An immigration judge referenced Sadoun's relationship with Hamas and the Holy Land Foundation during a deportation hearing.
- Mohamed Nimer: CAIR's research director also served as a board director for UASR, the strategic arm for Hamas in the U.S. CAIR neglects to mention Nimer's and Sadoun's roles in UASR in their bios.
Mohamed Nimer
- Rafeeq Jaber: A founding director of CAIR, Jaber was the long-time president of the Islamic Association for Palestine. In 2002, a federal judge found that "the Islamic Association for Palestine has acted in support of Hamas." In his capacity as IAP chief, Jaber praised Hezbollah attacks on Israel. He also served on the board of a radical mosque in the Chicago area.
- Rabith Hadid: The CAIR fundraiser was a founder of the Global Relief Foundation, which after 9/11 was blacklisted by the Treasury Department for financing al-Qaida and other terror groups. Its assets were frozen in December 2001. Hadid was arrested on terror-related charges and deported to Lebanon in 2003.
- Hamza Yusuf: The FBI investigated the CAIR board member after 9/11, because just two days before the attacks, he made an ominous prediction to a Muslim audience. "This country is facing a terrible fate, and the reason for that is because this country stands condemned," Yusuf warned. "It stands condemned like Europe stood condemned because of what it did. And lest people forget, Europe suffered two world wars after conquering the Muslim lands."
3) An Inevitable Conflict
The Six-Day War
by Efraim Karsh
Middle East Quarterly Summer 2017
Middle East Quarterly Summer 2017
May 14, 2017: Fifty years ago this weekend, a false Soviet warning of large-scale Israeli troop concentrations along the border with Syria touched off a chain of events leading to the 1967 Six-Day War. However, as Middle East Quarterly editor Efraim Karsh explains in this advance-release article from the Summer 2017 issue of Middle East Quarterly, another all-out Arab-Israeli war was already "a foregone conclusion.".
May 22, 1967. Nasser (left, 1st row) joins Egyptian air force pilots at Bir Gifgafa base before the Six-Day War. The total Arab rejection of Jewish statehood made an all-out Arab-Israeli war a foregone conclusion.
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It has long been conventional wisdom to view the June 1967 war as an accidental conflagration that neither Arabs nor Israelis desired, yet none were able to prevent. Had Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser not fallen for a false Soviet warning of Israeli troop concentrations along the Syrian border and deployed his forces in the Sinai Peninsula, the standard narrative runs, the slippery slope to war would have been averted altogether; had Israel not misconstrued the Egyptian grandstanding for a mortal threat to its national security, if not its very survival, it would have foregone the preemptive strike that started the war. In short, it was a largely accidental and unnecessary war born of mutual miscalculations and misunderstandings.[1]
This view could not be further from the truth. If wars are much like road accidents, as the British historian A.J.P. Taylor famously quipped, having a general cause and particular causes at the same time, then the June 1967 war was anything but accidental. Its specific timing resulted of course from the convergence of a number of particular causes at a particular juncture. But its general cause—the total Arab rejection of Jewish statehood, starkly demonstrated by the concerted attempt to destroy the state of Israel at birth and the unwavering determination to rectify this "unfinished business"—made another all-out Arab-Israeli war a foregone conclusion.
Pan-Arabism's Politics of Violence
Pan-Arab nationalists carried out a pogrom in Jerusalem in 1920, killing five Jews and wounding 211. In 1921, Arab riots claimed 90 dead with hundreds wounded. In 1929, more violence resulted in the death of 133 Jews and the wounding of hundreds more.
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No sooner had the doctrine of pan-Arabism, postulating the existence of "a single nation bound by the common ties of language, religion and history.... behind the facade of a multiplicity of sovereign states"[2] come to dominate inter-Arab politics at the end of World War I than anti-Zionism became its most effective rallying cry: not from concern for the wellbeing of the Palestinian Arabs but from the desire to fend off a supposed foreign encroachment on the perceived pan-Arab patrimony.
As Abdel Rahman Azzam, secretary-general of the Arab League, told Zionist officials in September 1947:
For me, you may be a fact, but for [the Arab masses], you are not a fact at all—you are a temporary phenomenon. Centuries ago, the Crusaders established themselves in our midst against our will, and in 200 years, we ejected them. This was because we never made the mistake of accepting them as a fact.[3]
On rare occasions, this outright rejectionism was manifested in quiet attempts to persuade the Zionist leaders to forego their quest for statehood and acquiesce in subject status within a regional pan-Arab empire. Nuri Said, a long-time Iraqi prime minister, made this suggestion at a 1936 meeting with Chaim Weizmann while Transjordan's King Abdullah of the Hashemite family secretly extended an offer to Golda Meir (in November 1947 and May 1948) to incorporate Palestine's Jewish community into the "Greater Syrian" empire he was striving to create at the time.[4] For most of the time, however, the Arabs' primary instrument for opposing Jewish national aspirations was violence, and what determined their politics and diplomacy was the relative success or failure of that instrument in any given period. As early as April 1920, pan-Arab nationalists sought to rally support for incorporating Palestine into the short-lived Syrian kingdom headed by Abdullah's brother, Faisal, by carrying out a pogrom in Jerusalem in which five Jews were murdered and 211 wounded. The following year, Arab riots claimed a far higher toll: some 90 dead and hundreds wounded. In the summer of 1929, another wave of violence resulted in the death of 133 Jews and the wounding of hundreds more.
For quite some time, this violent approach seemed to work. It was especially effective in influencing the British, who had been appointed the mandatory power in Palestine by the League of Nations. Though their explicit purpose was to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, the British authorities repeatedly gave in to Arab violence aimed at averting that purpose and to the demands that followed upon it. In two White Papers, issued in 1922 and 1930 respectively, London severely compromised the prospective Jewish national home by imposing harsh restrictions on immigration and land sales to Jews.
In May 1939, a White Paper imposed restrictions, closing the door to Palestine for Jews desperate to flee Nazi Europe.
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In July 1937, Arab violence reaped its greatest reward when a British commission of inquiry, headed by Lord Peel, recommended repudiating the terms of the mandate altogether in favor of partitioning Palestine into two states: a large Arab state, united with Transjordan, that would occupy some 90 percent of the mandate territory, and a Jewish state in what was left.[5] This was followed in May 1939 by another White Paper that imposed even more draconian restrictions on Jewish immigration and land purchases, closing the door to Palestine for Jews desperate to flee Nazi Europe and threatening the survival of the Jewish national project.[6] Agitating for more, the Arabs dismissed both plans as insufficient.
They did the same in November 1947 when, in the face of the imminent expiration of the British mandate, the U.N. General Assembly voted to partition Palestine. Rejecting this solution, the Arab nations resolved instead to destroy the state of Israel at birth and gain the whole for themselves. This time, however, Arab violence backfired spectacularly. In the 1948-49 war, not only did Israel confirm its sovereign independence and assert control over somewhat wider territories than those assigned to it by the U.N. partition resolution, but the Palestinian Arab community was profoundly shattered with about half of its population fleeing to other parts of Palestine and to neighboring Arab states.
Preparing for the "Second Round"
For the next two decades, inter-Arab politics would be driven by the determination to undo the consequences of the 1948 defeat, duly dubbed "al-Nakba," the catastrophe, and to bring about Israel's demise. Only now, it was Cairo rather than the two Hashemite kings that spearheaded the pan-Arab campaign following Nasser's rise to power in 1954 and his embarkation on an aggressive pan-Arab policy.
The Egyptian president had nothing but contempt for most members of the "Arab Nation" he sought to unify: "Iraqis are savage, the Lebanese venal and morally degenerate, the Saudis dirty, the Yemenis hopelessly backward and stupid, and the Syrians irresponsible, unreliable and treacherous," he told one of his confidants.[7] Neither did he have a genuine interest in the Palestinian problem—pan-Arabism's most celebrated cause: "The Palestinians are useful to the Arab states as they are," he told a Western journalist in 1956. "We will always see that they do not become too powerful. Can you imagine yet another nation on the shores of the eastern Mediterranean!"[8] Yet having recognized the immense value of this cause for his grandiose ambitions, he endorsed it with a vengeance, especially after the early 1960s when his pan-Arab dreams were in tatters as Syria acrimoniously seceded from its bilateral union with Egypt (1958-61) and the Egyptian army bogged down in an unwinnable civil war in Yemen. "Arab unity or the unity of the Arab action or the unity of the Arab goal is our way to the restoration of Palestine and the restoration of the rights of the people of Palestine," Nasser argued. "Our path to Palestine will not be covered with a red carpet or with yellow sand. Our path to Palestine will be covered with blood."[9]
(Left to right) Abdel Salam Aref of Iraq, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, and King Hussein of Jordan arrive in Alexandria for an Arab summit, October 1964.
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By way of transforming this militant rhetoric into concrete plans, in January 1964, the Egyptian president convened the first all-Arab summit in Cairo to discuss ways and means to confront the "Israeli threat." A prominent item on the agenda was the adoption of a joint strategy to prevent Israel from using the Jordan River waters to irrigate the barren Negev desert in the south of the country. A no less important decision was to "lay the proper foundations for organizing the Palestinian people and enabling it to fulfill its role in the liberation of its homeland and its self-determination." Four months later, a gathering of 422 Palestinian activists in East Jerusalem, then under Jordanian rule, established the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and approved its two founding documents: the organization's basic constitution and the Palestinian National Covenant.[10]
These events made Nasser yet again the undisputed leader of the Arab world, the only person capable of making the Arabs transcend, however temporarily, their self-serving interests for the sake of the collective good. He was nowhere near his cherished goal of promoting the actual unification of the Arab world under his leadership as he had seemingly been in 1958 when Syria agreed to merge with Egypt. Yet he had successfully hijacked pan-Arabism's most celebrated cause and established a working relationship with his erstwhile enemies in Amman and Riyadh. In a second summit meeting in Alexandria in October 1964, the heads of the Arab states accepted Nasser's long-term, anti-Israel strategy. This envisaged the laying of the groundwork for the decisive confrontation through the patient buildup of Arab might in all areas—military, economic, social, and political—and the simultaneous weakening of Israel through concrete actions such as the diversion of the Jordan River estuaries. The PLO was authorized to create an army of Palestinian volunteers, to which the Arab governments pledged to give support, and a special fund was established for the reorganization of the Lebanese, Syrian, and Jordanian armies under a united Arab command.
The Slide to War
Before long, this organized pan-Arab drive for Israel's destruction was disrupted by an unexpected sequence of events that led, within a few weeks, to the third Arab-Israeli war since 1948; and the event that triggered this escalation was a Soviet warning (in early May 1967) of large-scale Israeli troop concentrations along the border with Syria aimed at launching an immediate attack.[11] As pan-Arabism's standard-bearer, Nasser had no choice but to come to the rescue of a (supposedly) threatened ally tied to Egypt in a bilateral defense treaty since November 1966, especially when the pro-Western regimes in Jordan and Saudi Arabia were openly ridiculing his failure to live up to his high pan-Arab rhetoric.
Egyptian tank, Sinai Peninsula, 1967. On May 14, Egypt moved two armored divisions into the Sinai Peninsula, formally demilitarized since the 1956 Suez war. Three days after the start of the war, their army was crushed and expelled from Sinai.
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On May 14, the Egyptian armed forces were placed on the highest alert, and two armored divisions began moving into the Sinai Peninsula, formally demilitarized since the 1956 Suez war. That same day, the Egyptian chief of staff, Lt.-Gen. Muhammad Fawzi, arrived in Damascus to get a first-hand impression of the military situation and to coordinate a joint response in the event of an Israeli attack. To his surprise, Fawzi found no trace of Israeli concentrations along the Syrian border or troop movements in northern Israel. He reported these findings to his superiors, but this had no impact on the Egyptian move into Sinai, which continued apace. Fawzi was to recall in his memoirs,
From that point onward, I began to believe that the issue of Israeli concentrations along the Syrian border was not ... the only or the main cause of the military deployments which Egypt was undertaking with such haste.[12]
Within less than twenty-four hours, Nasser's objective had been transformed from the deterrence of an Israeli attack against Syria into an outright challenge to the status quo established after the 1956 war. With Fawzi's reassuring findings corroborated both by Egyptian military intelligence and by a special U.N. inspection,[13] and the Israelis going out of their way to reassure the Soviets that they had not deployed militarily along their northern border,[14] Nasser must have realized that there was no imminent threat to Syria. He could have halted his troops at that point and claimed a political victory, having deterred an (alleged) Israeli attack against Syria.
Egyptian Lt.-Gen. Fawzi found no trace of Israeli concentrations along the Syrian border or troop movements in northern Israel.
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But it is precisely here that the Arab-Israeli conflict's general cause—rejection of Israel's very existence—combined with the particular causes to make war inevitable as Nasser's resolute move catapulted him yet again to a position of regional preeminence that he was loath to relinquish. At a stroke, he had managed to undo one of Israel's foremost gains in the 1956 war—the de facto demilitarization of the Sinai Peninsula—without drawing a serious response from Jerusalem. Now that the Egyptian troops were massing in Sinai, Nasser decided to raise the ante and eliminate another humiliating remnant of that war for which he had repeatedly been castigated by his rivals in the Arab world: the presence of a U.N. Emergency Force (UNEF) on Egyptian (but not on Israeli) territory as a buffer between the two states.
As the U.N. observers were quickly withdrawn and replaced by Egyptian forces, Nasser escalated his activities still further. Addressing Egyptian pilots in Sinai on May 22, he announced the closure of the Strait of Tiran, at the southern mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba, to Israeli and Israel-bound shipping. "The Gulf of Aqaba constitutes our Egyptian territorial waters," he announced to the cheers of an ecstatic audience. "Under no circumstances will we allow the Israeli flag to pass through the Aqaba Gulf." The following day the Egyptian mass media broke the news to the entire world.
Nasser announced the closure of the Strait of Tiran to Israeli and Israel-bound shipping. Within days of the start of the war, Israeli gunboats passed freely through the straits.
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Did Nasser consider the possibility that his actions might lead to war? All the available evidence suggests that he did. Initially, when he briefly believed in the imminence of an Israeli attack against Syria, he could not have taken for granted that the Egyptian deployment in Sinai would have deterred such an action, in which case he would have been forced to come to Syria's defense. Moreover, the demilitarization of Sinai was seen by Israel as vital to its national security, which made its violation a legitimate casus belli. But then, Nasser was being rapidly entrapped by his imperialist ambitions. He began deploying his troops in Sinai out of fear that failure to do so would damage his pan-Arab position beyond repair. He continued to escalate his activities, knowing full well that there was no threat of an Israeli attack against Syria, because of his conviction that the continuation of the crisis boosted his pan-Arab standing.
It is true that the lack of a prompt and decisive Israeli response to the Egyptian challenge, together with the quick realization that there were no Israeli concentrations along the Syrian border, might have convinced Nasser that the risks were not so great and that war was not inevitable. Yet, when he decided to remove UNEF and to close the Strait of Tiran, Nasser undoubtedly knew that he was crossing the threshold from peace to war. "Now with our concentrations in Sinai, the chances of war are fifty-fifty," he told his cabinet on May 21, during a discussion on the possible consequences of a naval blockade. "But if we close the Strait, war will be a 100 percent certainty." "We all knew that our armaments were adequate—indeed, infinitely better than in the October 1973 War," recalled Anwar Sadat, who participated in that crucial meeting:
When Nasser asked us our opinion, we were all agreed that the Strait should be closed—except for [Prime Minister] Sidqi Sulayman, who pleaded with Nasser to show more patience ... [But] Nasser paid no attention to Sulayman's objections. He was eager to close the Strait so as to put an end to the Arab maneuverings and maintain his great prestige within the Arab world.[15]
Egyptian war preparations were carried out in front of the watching eyes of the world media.
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The die was cast. Having maneuvered himself yet again into the driver's seat of inter-Arab politics, Nasser could not climb down without risking a tremendous loss of face. He was approaching the brink with open eyes, and if there was no way out of the crisis other than war, so be it: Egypt was prepared. Daily consultations between the political and the military leaderships were held. The Egyptian forces in Sinai were assigned their operational tasks. In a widely publicized article in al-Ahram on May 26, the newspaper's editor-in-chief, Nasser's mouthpiece, Muhammad Hassanein Heikal, explained why war between Egypt and Israel was inevitable. A week later, at a meeting with the armed forces' supreme command, Nasser predicted an Israeli strike against Egypt within forty-eight to seventy-two hours at the latest.[16]
The coming of war is seldom a happy occasion. It is often fraught with misgivings and apprehensions. But if doubts assailed Nasser's peace of mind, he gave them no public expression. The Egyptian war preparations were carried out in a confident and ever-extravagant fashion, in front of the watching eyes of the world media. The closer Nasser came to the brink, the more aggressive he became. "The Jews have threatened war," he gloated in his May 22 speech, "We tell them: You are welcome; we are ready for war." Four days later, he took a big step forward, announcing that if hostilities were to break out, "our main objective will be the destruction of Israel." "Now that we have the situation as it was before 1956," Nasser proclaimed on another occasion, "Allah will certainly help us to restore the status quo of before 1948."[17]
Once again imperialist pan-Arab winds were blowing. "This is the real rising of the Arab nation," Nasser boasted while the few skeptics within the Egyptian leadership were being rapidly converted to belief in victory over Israel. In the representative words of Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt's foremost writer and winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize:
When Nasser held his famous press conference, before the June 1967 war, and spoke with confident pomp, I took our victory over Israel for granted. I envisaged it as a simple journey to Tel Aviv, of hours or days at the most, since I was convinced we were the greatest military power in the Middle East.[18]
By this time, the conflict was no longer about the presence of U.N. forces on Egyptian soil or freedom of navigation in the Gulf of Aqaba, let alone the alleged Israeli threat to Syria. It had been transformed into a jihad to eradicate the foremost "remnant of Western imperialism" in the Middle East. "During the crusaders' occupation, the Arabs waited seventy years before a suitable opportunity arose, and they drove away the crusaders," Nasser echoed Azzam's 1947 rhetoric, styling himself as the new Saladin: "[R]ecently we felt that we are strong enough, that if we were to enter a battle with Israel, with God's help, we could triumph."[19]
Nasser's former Arab rivals were standing in line to rally behind Egypt. On May 30, Jordan's King Hussein (left) arrived in Cairo where he immediately signed a defense pact with Egypt.
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Nasser's militancy was contagious. The irritating chorus of criticism had fallen silent. His former Arab rivals were standing in line to rally behind his banner. On the morning of May 30, Jordan's King Hussein, who at the beginning of the crisis still mocked Nasser for "hiding behind UNEF's apron," arrived in Cairo where he immediately signed a defense pact with Egypt. He returned to Amman later that day accompanied by Ahmad Shuqeiri, head of the PLO and hitherto one of the king's archenemies. The following day, an Egyptian general arrived in Amman to command the eastern front in the event of war. On June 4, Iraq followed suit by entering into a defense agreement with Egypt, and Nasser informed King Hussein that their pact now included Iraq as well. By this time, Arab expeditionary forces—including an Iraqi armored division, a Saudi and a Syrian brigade, and two Egyptian commando battalions—were making their way to Jordan.[20] The balance of forces, so it seemed to the Arabs, had irreversibly shifted in their favor. The moment of reckoning with the "Zionist entity," as they pejoratively called Israel, had come. "Have your authorities considered all the factors involved and the consequences of the withdrawal of UNEF?" the commander of the U.N. force, Gen. Indar Jit Rikhye, asked the Egyptian officers bearing the official demand. "Oh yes sir! We have arrived at this decision after much deliberation, and we are prepared for anything. If there is war, we shall next meet at Tel Aviv." The Iraqi president Abdel Rahman Aref was no less forthright. "This is the day of the battle," he told the Iraqi forces leaving for Jordan. "We are determined and united to achieve our clear aim—to remove Israel from the map. We shall, Allah willing, meet in Tel Aviv and Haifa."[21]
The Non-Accidental War
Yet for all his militant zeal, Nasser had weighty reasons to forgo a first strike at this particular time. His war preparations had not been completed: The Egyptian forces in Sinai were still digging in; the Arab expeditionary forces to Jordan had not yet been fully deployed, and coordination of the operational plans of the Arab military coalition required more time. Nasser also feared that an Egyptian attack would trigger a U.S. military response that might neutralize the new Arab political and military superiority over Israel, which had been gained by the most remarkable demonstration of pan-Arab unity since the 1948 war.[22]
Nasser believed the Egyptian air force might only incur a small loss before dealing a devastating blow to Israel.
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Nasser's fears of U.S. intervention were compounded by the nature of the Egyptian operational plan, which envisaged deep thrusts into Israel's territory. An armored division was to break out of the Gaza Strip and capture border villages inside Israel while another armored division was to cut off the southern Negev from the rest of Israel, thereby achieving the long-standing Egyptian objective of establishing a land bridge with Jordan.[23] Given Nasser's belief in the U.S. commitment to Israel's territorial integrity, such plans could hardly be implemented if Egypt were to take the military initiative. Their execution as an act of self-defense in response to an Israeli attack was a completely different matter, however.
This explains Nasser's readiness to play the political card, such as his decision to send Vice-President Zakaria Muhieddin to Washington on June 7. He had no intention whatever to give ground, and the move was aimed at cornering Israel and making it more vulnerable to Arab pressure and, eventually, war. Robert Anderson, a special U.S. envoy sent to Egypt to defuse the crisis, reported to President Lyndon Johnson that Nasser showed no sign of backing down and spoke confidently of the outcome of a conflict with Israel.[24]
Anderson was not the only person to have heard this upbeat assessment. Nasser's belief in Egypt's ability to absorb an Israeli strike and still win the war was widely shared by the Egyptian military and was readily expressed to the other members of the Arab military coalition. In his May 30 visit to Cairo, King Hussein was assured by Nasser of Egypt's full preparedness against an Israeli air strike: No more than 15-20 percent losses would be incurred before the Egyptian air force dealt a devastating blow to Israel. The other members of the Jordanian delegation heard equally confident words from Abdel Hakim Amer, Nasser's deputy and commander of the Egyptian armed forces.[25] When the Egyptian foreign minister Mahmoud Riad asked Amer about the armed forces' state of readiness, he was told that "if Israel actually carried out any military action against us, I could, with only one third of our forces, reach Beersheba."[26]
The most eloquent public exposition of this euphoric state of mind was provided by Heikal's May 26 al-Ahram article on the inevitability of war. "Egypt has exercised its power and achieved the objectives of this stage without resorting to arms so far," he wrote:
Israel has no alternative but to use arms if it wants to exercise power. This means that the logic of the fearful confrontation now taking place between Egypt, fortified by the might of the masses of the Arab nation, and Israel, bolstered by the illusion of American might, dictates that Egypt, after all it has now succeeded in achieving, must wait, even though it has to wait for a blow. This is necessitated also by the sound conduct of the battle, particularly from an international point of view. Let Israel begin. Let our second blow then be ready. Let it be a knockout.
The Egyptians saw their air force destroyed on the ground within three hours of the outbreak of hostilities.
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As it were, the war that broke out on June 5 was not quite the knockout that Heikal had in mind. Instead of dealing Israel a mortal blow, the Egyptians saw their air force destroyed on the ground within three hours of the outbreak of hostilities and their army crushed and expelled from Sinai over the next three days. As Syria, Jordan, and Iraq attacked Israel, their armies were similarly routed. By the time the war was over, after merely six days of fighting, Israel had extended its control over vast Arab territories about five times its own size, from the Suez Canal, to the Jordan River, to the Golan Heights.
Small wonder that Nasser would doggedly shrug off responsibility for the defeat by feigning victimhood and emphatically denying any intention to attack Israel. This claim was quickly endorsed by numerous Western apologists eager to absolve him of any culpability for the war, in what was to become the standard Arab and Western historiography of the conflict.[27] Some went so far in the attempt to exculpate Nasser as to portray him as a mindless creature thriving on hollow rhetoric and malleable in the extreme:
retired members of the old Revolutionary Command Council wander in and out of meetings and give their opinions; Nasser butts in and nobody pays much attention to him; he takes journalists seriously and revises his intelligence estimate on the basis of their remarks; he is influenced by the casual conversation of diplomats.[28]
Aside from doing a great injustice to Nasser—the charismatic dictator who had heavy-handedly ruled Egypt for over a decade and mesmerized tens of millions throughout the Arabic-speaking world—this description has little basis in reality. As evidenced both by Nasser's escalatory behavior during the crisis and by captured military documents revealing elaborate plans for an invasion of Israel, the Egyptian president did not stumble into war but orchestrated it with open eyes. He steadily raised his sights in accordance with the vicissitudes in the crisis until he set them on the ultimate pan-Arab objective: the decisive defeat of Israel and, if possible, its destruction.
Conclusion
The June 1967 war was a direct corollary of pan-Arabism's delusions of grandeur, triggered by the foremost champion of this ideology and directed against its foremost nemesis. It was the second all-out attempt in a generation to abort the Jewish national revival, and it ended in an even greater ignominy than its 1948 precursor. Then, only half of Palestine had been lost. Now the land was lost in its entirety, together with Egyptian and Syrian territories. In 1948, the dividing line between victor and vanquished was often blurred as the war dragged on intermittently for over a year. In 1967, owing to the war's swift and decisive nature, there was no doubt as to which side was the victor.
The magnitude of the defeat thus punctured the pan-Arab bubble of denial and suggested to the Arabs that military force had its limits. If the 1967 war was fought with a view to destroying Israel, the next war, in October 1973, launched by Nasser's successor Anwar Sadat, had the far narrower objective of triggering a political process that would allow Egypt to regain the territories lost in 1967. Israel's remarkable military recovery in October 1973 after having been caught off-guard further reinforced Sadat's determination to abandon pan-Arabism's most celebrated cause and culminated in the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of March 1979.
While one can only speculate about Sadat's ultimate intentions (he was assassinated in October 1981 by an Islamist zealot), there is little doubt that his successor, Hosni Mubarak, viewed peace not as a value in and of itself but as the price Egypt had to pay for such substantial benefits as increased U.S. economic and military aid. So did the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which perceived its 1990s peace agreements with Israel as a pathway not to a two-state solution—Israel alongside a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza living side-by- side in peace—but to the subversion of the state of Israel.
In Arab eyes, then, with the partial exception perhaps of Jordan's King Hussein, contractual peace with Israel has represented not a recognition of legitimacy but a tacit admission that, at least for the time being, the Jewish state cannot be defeated by force of arms. And while militant pan-Arabism is unlikely to regain its pre-1967 dominance in the foreseeable future due to the ravages of the recent Arab upheavals, the advent of a new generation of Palestinians and Arabs for whom the 1967 defeat is but a dim memory, one more historical injustice that has to be redressed by any means necessary, makes the prospects of Arab-Israeli reconciliation as remote as ever.
Efraim Karsh, editor of the Middle East Quarterly, is emeritus professor of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at King's College London and professor of political studies at Bar-Ilan University where he also directs the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.
[1] See, for example, Charles W. Yost, "How the Arab-Israeli War Began," Foreign Affairs, Jan. 1968, p. 317; Ernest C. Dawn, "The Egyptian Remilitarization of Sinai," Journal of Contemporary History, July 1968, p. 213; Maxime Rodinson, Israel and the Arabs (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), pp. 198-200; Richard B. Parker, The Politics of Miscalculation in the Middle East (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 97-8; Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (New York: Norton, 2001), pp. 236-7; Michael Oren, "Making Sense of the Six Day War," MEF Wires, May 6, 2002.
[2] Walid Khalidi, "Thinking the Unthinkable: A Sovereign Palestinian State," Foreign Affairs, July 1978, pp. 695-6; Hisham Sharabi, Nationalism and Revolution in the Arab World (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1966), p. 3.
[3] A.S. Eban to the Executive of the Jewish Agency, "Conversation with Abdul Rahman Azzam, 15thSeptember 1947," Sept. 29, 1947, Zionist Archives (Jerusalem), S25/9020; David Horowitz, State in the Making (New York: Knopf, 1953), pp. 231-5.
[4] Norman A. Rose, ed., Baffy. The Diaries of Blanche Dugdale, 1936-1947 (London: Vallentine, Mitchell, 1973), p. 23 (June 29, 1936 entry); Chaim Weizmann to Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr, Baghdad, June 29, 1936, Chaim Weizmann to William G.A. Ormsby-Gore, London, June 28, 1936, The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann. Series A, Vol. 17, Aug. 1935-Dec. 1936 (New Brunswick and Jerusalem: Transaction Books and Israel Universities Press, 1979), pp. 290-2; Ezra Danin, "Conversation with Abdullah, 17.11.47," Zionist Archives, S25/4004; Sasson to Shertok, Nov. 20, 1947, Zionist Archives, S25/1699; Golda Meyerson's oral report to the Provisional State Council, May 12, 1948, Israel State Archives, Provisional State Council: Protocols, 18 April-13 May 1948 (Jerusalem: Israel Government Publishing House, 1978), pp. 40-1.
[5] Report. Presented to the Secretary of State for the Colonies in Parliament by Command of his Majesty, July 1937, Palestine Royal Commission (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office; rep. 1946), pp. 296-7.
[6] "Cmd. 6019: Palestine, Statement of Policy," May 1939, Her Majesty's Stationery Office, London, 1939.
[7] Nejla Izzedin, Nasser of the Arabs: An Arab Assessment (London: Third World Centre, 1981), p. 327; Miles Copeland, The Games of Nations (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970), pp. 56-7.
[8] John Laffin, The PLO Connections (London: Corgi Books, 1983), p. 127.
[9] "President Gamal Abdel Nasser's Pre-Election Speeches in Asiut, Minia, Shebin el Kom, Mansura," Information Ministry, Cairo, 1965, pp. 28-9, 68.
[10] Ahmad Shuqeiry, Min al-Qimma ila-l-Hazima (Beirut: Dar al-Awda, 1971), p. 50; Yezid Sayigh,Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993(Washington, D.C. and London: Institute for Palestine Studies and Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 98.
[11] Anwar Sadat, In Search of Identity: An Autobiography (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), pp. 171-2; al-Ahram (Cairo), May 23, 1967.
[12] Muhammad Fawzi, Harb ath-Thalath Sanawat, 1967-1970 (Cairo: Dar al-Mustaqbal al-Arabi, 1980), pp. 71-2.
[13] Abdel Muhsin Kamel Murtagi, al-Fariq Murtagi Yarwi al-Haqa'iq: Qaid Jabhat Sinai fi Harb 1967 (Cairo: Dar al-Watan al-Arabi, 1976), p. 64; Indar Jit Rikhye, The Sinai Blunder (London: Cass, 1980), pp. 11-2.
[14] On three occasions the Soviet ambassador to Israel was invited by the Israeli authorities to visit the border area but declined to go. Sydney D. Bailey, Four Arab-Israeli Wars and the Peace Process(London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 190.
[15] Sadat, In Search of Identity, p. 172. Sadat's version was confirmed by Zakaria Muhieddin, second vice-president in 1967, who also participated at the meeting. See Muhammad Hassanein Heikal, 1967: al-Infijar (Cairo: al-Ahram, 1990), pp. 514-9; Richard B. Parker, "The June War: Some Mysteries Explored," Middle East Journal, Spring 1992, p. 192.
[16] Nasser's speech on the anniversary of the Egyptian revolution, July 23, 1967, in Walter Laqueur, ed., The Israel-Arab Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 248.
[17] The New York Times, May 27, 30, 1967.
[18] Ibid., May 27, 1967; Abdel Latif Baghdadi, Mudhakirat (Cairo: al-Maktab al-Misri al-Hadith, 1977), vol. 2, p. 271; al-Usbu (Cairo), Jan. 24, 1976.
[19] Nasser's speech to Arab trade unionists, May 26, 1967, in Laqueur, The Israel-Arab Reader, pp. 215-8.
[20] Samir A. Mutawi, Jordan in the 1967 War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 11-2; Moshe Dayan, Story of My Life (London: Sphere Books, 1978), p. 314.
[21] Rikhye, The Sinai Blunder, p. 21; Baghdad radio, June 1, 1967.
[22] See, for example, Nasser's speech, July 23, 1967; Robert Stephens, Nasser: A Political Biography(London: Allen Lane, 1971), p. 489.
[23]. "Milhemet Arbaat Hayamim, 1967" (an internal IDF document based inter alia on intercepted Egyptian intelligence sources), June 1967, Israel Defense Forces, Southern Command. The existence of operational plans to occupy Israeli territory was also confirmed by Egyptian military sources. See, for example, Muhammad Abdel Ghani al-Gamasy, Mudhakirat al-Gamasy: Harb October 1973 (Paris: al-Manshurat al-Sharqiya, 1990), pp. 70-1, 73-4.
[24] William B. Quandt, "Lyndon Johnson and the June 1967 War: What Color Was the Light?" Middle East Journal, Spring 1992, p. 221, fn. 68.
[25] Hussein of Jordan: My "War" with Israel (London: Peter Owen, 1969), p. 55; Mutawi, Jordan in the 1967 War, p.110; Sadat, In Search of Identity, p. 174; Heikal, 1967: al-Infijar, pp. 1062-3.
[26] Mahmoud Riad, The Struggle for Peace in the Middle East (London: Quartet Books, 1981), p. 23.
[27] See, for example, David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), p. 211; Col. Trevor N. Dupuy, Elusive Victory: The Arab-Israeli Wars, 1947-1974 (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), p. 229; Donald Neff, Warriors for Jerusalem: The Six Days that Changed the Middle East (New York: Linden Press, 1984), p. 196; Michael Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East (New York: Random House, 2003), pp. 58-9; Frank Brenchley, Britain, the Six-Day War and Its Aftermath (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), p. 17; Henry Laurens, "1967: A war of miscalculation and misjudgment," Le Monde Diplomatique, June 2007.
[28] Parker, The Politics of Miscalculation in the Middle East, pp. 97-8.
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