Anti-Israel Partisans Set New Record For Decades-Old Trick Of Brazenly Rewriting History, Blaming Israel
Arab hostility toward Israel seems to oscillate between pathological aggression and victimized resentment, underscored the entire time by utterly shameless denial. So Hamas can violate the ceasefire for months by shooting at Israeli civilians and at Israeli soldiers. They can brag openly about those violations. They can declare over and over in the plainest terms that they have no interest in renewing a ceasefire. They can hold barbaric rallies and go so far as to mock Israel for keeping whatever ceasefire there is while they themselves are violating it. But after three days of Israeli self-defense UN officials are standing on stage telling international media outlets that Hamas was observing a super-secret ceasefire and Israel is responsible for its breakdown. It's jaw-droppingly brazen.
It's hard to blame the Palestinians for trying though. This has been a successful anti-Israel trick for more than half a century. Months and years of genocidal incitement, boasts about glorious Arab victory, derision of Israeli cowardice - and then, when Israel responds, a frantic run into the international community's skirts to moan piteously about Israeli aggression. It's not just that the West let this become a habit. Through international conferences where anti-Semitism is excused as "anti-Zionism," routine bait-and-switch anti-Israel diplomacy, and pervasive anti-Israel double standards - the international community has spent decades creating and nursing this pathological petulance. It's been this way since before Arab and Muslim countries realized they could excuse their genocidal rantings by reference to "The Occupation" (although in subsequent years they became so enamored with that bit of rhetoric that they invoke it even when it makes no sense - it's a reflexive verbal tic, a placeholder for "now I get to say something anti-Semitic about Zionist cabals").
How deeply entrenched is this tactic? It goes back at least as far as the Six Day War and probably to the 1950s. It's always the exact same pattern - vicious aggression, spectacular failure, historical revisionism (Lebanon II is the exception - since Hezbollah could claim victory they get to boast about how they deliberately maneuvered Israel into the war). The next few paragraphs are an overview of the broad sweep of anti-Israel diplomacy, mostly to show how tediously predictable this stunt is. If you don't have the patience for that you can just drop down to the link dump at the bottom. It's a small demonstration of the sheer mendacity it must be taking to rewrite the few weeks before Operation Cast Lead. But if you skip the middle you'll miss out on all the insanely frustrating historical parallels.
The 1956 Suez Crisis. In the early 1950s Egypt had begun intercepting Israeli ships that crossed through the Suez, confiscating their cargo and jailing their crews. This was a blatant violation of international treaties stretching back to the 1800s but for some reason repeated UN "concerns" went unheeded by Egyptian President Gamal Nasser. In 1955 Nasser began openly arming for war, making historically unprecedented arms purchases from behind the Iron Curtain. In 1956 he officially nationalized the Suez Canal and revoked its status as an international waterway. Armies from Israel, Britain, and France retaliated after having been given assurances that the US would not impose a ceasefire. The invasion was a military success but the Eisenhower State Department now found it diplomatically inconvenient. They forced a ceasefire by leveraging Marshall Plan aid and NATO status, steamrolled Britain and France at the UN, and securing UN resolutions to end the conflict - resolutions that for some reason were now to be enforced. To soften the cost of an Israeli withdrawal the UN promised to deploy peacekeepers to prevent Egyptian adventurism and to maintain the Straits of Tiran as an international waterway. US Secretary of State Dulles provided private assurances to Israeli diplomats that it would be "almost inconceivable" for UN observers to ever be withdrawn rapidly. In 1958 those sentiments were codified in a letter to Israel from UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold.
Fast forward to 1967. Through the beginning of that year Egypt had been making grandiose shows of military strength, moving convoys of infantry and armor through Cairo's busiest streets before sending them towards Israel. Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian radio stations were pouring out anti-Israel incitement, playing martial music, and whipping up their populations into a frenzy. Government-sponsored newspaper articles and TV programs called on Arab leaders to go to war with Israel. By early May Egyptian troops had crossed the Suez Canal and Nasser was threatening to close down the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping: an explicit and straightforward act of war. On May 16th Nasser ordered the UN to remove its peacekeepers from the Sinai so the Egyptian army could "prepare to go into action against Israel". The UN reacted by requesting a formal document to that effect, which Egypt immediately provided. The UN withdrew all its forces within 48 hours and Egyptian tanks rolled to the Israeli border. Bait. And. Switch.
Western powers responded with more pro-forma "concerns." At one point a high-ranking State Department official condescendingly lectured a senior Israeli diplomat about how - as a technical matter of international law - Egyptian troops could go anywhere and do anything within Egyptian territory. The UN absurdly suggested that maybe they could change the terms of the 1957 armistice and put peacekeepers on Israeli territory. Israel obviously refused this beneficence - it would have been useless since the "peace" those keepers were supposed to be "observing" was at the Suez Canal. Their presence on Israeli soil would only have made them de-facto human shields for invading Arab forces (contemporary anti-Israel academics now point to this incident as proof that Israel was looking to maneuver the region into war). Believing that Western powers would not defend Israel diplomatically and acting on Soviet intel that the Israeli government was too weak to retaliate, Nasser blockaded the Straits on May 22. Israeli Ambassador Abba Eban:
International apathy now created a vacuum in which the hope of peace could no longer breathe. If the flight of the powers from their commitments was implicit and private, the abdication of the UN was explicit and overt. The Security Council was not disposed to act... Nasser's arrogance was riding high... He spoke in a halting voice but in full Arabic literary form: "We are in a confrontation with Israel. In contrast to what happened in 1956, when France and Britain were at its side,Israel is not supported today by any European power... We are face-to-face with Israel. Henceforward the situation, my gallant soldiers, is in your hands. Our armed forces have occupied Sharm el-Sheikh. We shall on no account allow the Israeli flag to pass through the Gulf of Nasiter. The Jews threaten to make war. I reply, "ahlan wasahlan," welcome. We are ready for war: this water is ours."
Israel still tried to avoid war, dispatching diplomats to remind Western leaders that Israel had withdrawn from Sinai on the basis of Western security assurances. Reactions ranged from nonchalance to the surreal insistence that any Israeli reaction to Nasser's act of war would make the ensuing conflict Israel's fault. De Gaulle stated as much in as many words while President Johnson made fulfilling US commitments conditional on complete Israeli restraint. Money line: "I am well aware of what three past presidents have said, but that will not be worth five cents if the people and the Congress do not support their president now." Meanwhile Nasser gave a speech on May 26 in which he pledged to "destroy Israel." Iraqi soldiers arrived in Cairo to take part in the upcoming war. On May 30th Egypt and Jordan signed a defense pact putting Jordanian troops under Egyptian command:
The drama was moving quickly toward its climax. In the last week of May 1967, the Arab world was celebrating a unity of purpose of which Israel was the only possible target. Arabs everywhere were seeing visions of slaughter, vengeance, conquest, and exalted pride that they had never imagined at the beginning of the month. A people that had never lost the recollections of the era when its power and creative genius had dominated a great part of the world had become marginal in history... It now discerned a prospect of sudden recuperation. Arab nationalism in modern times has often been concerned more with pride than with any concrete interest. .. The Arab masses might hunger for bread, but the self-appointed elites that governed them were far more obsessed with dignity, honor, equality, justice, respect, prestige, status, and repute. The Arabic vocabulary is remarkably replete with these terms... Nasser was now invoking Higher Authority for his ambitions:... "God will surely help and urge us to restore the situation to what it was in 1948. It is the aggression which took place in Palestine in 1948. That is the issue."... On May 30 [he said] "Today we tell the Israelis we are facing you in the battle and are burning with the desire for it to begin. This will make the world realize what the Arabs are and what Israel is."
In the subsequent week the diplomatic initiatives - the ones that Israel had been told to wait on - collapsed. The Israelis finally took military action in response to Nasser's act of war. Jordan and Syria attacked Israel on Egypt's behalf. Israel responded. The Six Day War. Now for the coup de grace:
The USSR, France and India were drafting resolutions calling for a cease-fire and a withdrawal to the previous lines... The Egyptian ambassador had stated that "for several hours Israeli armed force [sic] and the Israeli air force have again committed a cowardly and treacherous aggression against my country."... Only a few days ago Egypt had proclaimed a blockade based on a "state of war" and had asked the UN to keep its nose out of the Middle East! War for one side and passive inertia for the other had never been proposed in the United Nations before... The important aim was to prevent the Security Council from adopting its traditional routine of "cease-fire and withdrawal to previous line." This had [already] been proposed... The Arab governments would thus enjoy a position of limited liability... If they won any territory, they would keep it. If they lost territory, they would regain it...[But] the Arab governments were in a real quandary... If Arab delegations at the UN now acquiesced in a resolution for a cease-fire and withdrawal, they would be telling their people a new and unpalatable truth. Victorious armies seldom plead for their own withdrawal, and they are never in a hurry to cease fire. As so often in the policy of the Arab world, rhetoric and pretense overcame concrete interests... [Nasser] spoke to King Hussein on an open telephone suggesting that both the Egyptian and the Jordanian governments should announce that their armies had been attacked by American and British forces! Their "reasoning" was that their populations would be less humiliated... than [if they] suffered defeat by the despised Jews whose "destruction" Nasser had been predicting with a loud voice a few days before.
Fast forward to this week. Hamas proclamations about wiping out Israel? Check. Genocidal anti-Semitic incitement to war? Check. Unprovoked aggression in expectation of divine victory followed by violations of international law? Checkity, check, check. UN fecklessness in response to an unprecedented arms buildup? Obviously and naturally. Nearly infinite Israeli restraint which gave its enemies the impression that Israel would never respond to provocations? It's the former that leads to the latter. Confidence bouyed by preceptions that the West has abandoned Israel? It only makes sense. Everything all the way down to a predictable bait and switch involving international monitors who were supposed to keep the peace after Israel was coerced into withdrawing from the Gaza-Egypt border? Absolutely.
The only difference is that back then decent people rolled their eyes when arrogant warmongers tried to portray themselves as innocent victims. It took anti-Israel academics like Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi decades to convince sophisticates that Israel was responsible for the Six Day War. Now - with CNN and Fox News credulously passing on easily debunked lies - it takes less than three days. That's the time it takes to rewrite history now. 72 hours. So why not just brazenly lie? It works.
References:
* Hamas Continues Long Tradition Of "Shaking" And "Threatening" And "Endangering" Ceasefire By Firing Dozens Of Rockets At Israeli Schools And Hospitals [MR]
* Gaza Palestinians Shake Shaky Ceasefire With Anti-Tank Missile, Rockets At Israeli Schools and Hospitals. Again. [MR]
* Hamas Brags About Violating Truce, More Rockets Fall On Israeli Schools And Hospitals [MR]
* Hamas: As A Reminder, We're Not Renewing The Ceasefire We've Been Breaking On A Daily Basis [MR]
* Hamas: No, Of Course We're Not Renewing The Ceasefire That We Never Obeyed In The First Place [MR]
* Hamas Mocks Shalit During Gigantic Rally: "I Miss My Mom And Dad" [MR]
* Hamas Leaders Spent Last Month Bragging About War, Mocking Israeli Restraint [MR]
* UN Palestinian Stooge: "It's Obvious" That Israeli Attack Violated 48-Hour Truce That No One Knew About Until Now [MR]
* The Orwellian Origin and Development of the Term "Anti-Semitism" [MR]
* Annapolis As A Rosetta Stone For How Anti-Israel Bait And Switch Diplomacy Works [MR]
* Beit Hanoun Meme Watch - (Interlude) Convergence of Bias - With This Simple Formula, You Too Can Produce Solid Anti-Israel Journalism [MR]
* BBC Slips, Proves Liberal Gaza Occupation Fetish [MR]
* Personal Witness [Abba Eban]
* Hamas: Of Course We'll Never Stop Attacking "Zionist Enemies Of God" [MR]
* Iranian And Palestinian Lunatics Brainwashing Toddlers To Embrace Genocide, "Kill Jewish Children" [MR]
* The Shalit Video [MR]
* Hamas Seems Pretty Serious About The Whole "Divine Victory Over The Jews" Thing (Plus: Jimmy Carter's Pro-Hamas Propaganda Seems Rather Untenable) [MR]
* Carter "Understands" Why Hamas Has To Bomb Israeli Schools And Hospitals [MR]
* UN Finally Notices Hamas Bombing Of Israeli Civilians, Rushes To Condemn Israel For Responding (Update: The EU Too!) [MR]
* Hamas Has A Trained and Armed Military of 7,500 Troops [MR]
* LA Times: Qassam That Critically Wounded 10 Year Old Boy Was Part Of Palestinian "Parallel Protests" [MR]
* Hamas Heavily Armed, Skeptical About Israeli Commitment To Self-Defense [MR]
* Hamas Thanks "The Media" For Glorious "Victory" In Gaza [Video] [MR]
* EU Again Backs Out of Monitoring Agreement, Endangers Israeli Security [MR]
* CNN Making Strong Play For "Most Biased Media Outlet" During Operation Cast Lead [MR]
* What The Hell Is Going On At Fox News? [MR]
Previously:
* Turns Out, Obama And Khalidi Are "Family Friends, Neighbors"
* Columbia Middle East Expert: You Know Who Saudi Wahhabists Remind Me Of? Methodists.
* NYT Opinion Column: Obama Should Reject Link Between Islam And Terrorism, Become "Post-Civilizational" President
