Forty-five
years ago, on June 5, 1967, the world was writing Israel's obituary.
The armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and
Sudan, along with military contingents from many other Arab and Muslim
regimes, were all poised at tiny Israel's vulnerable borders, ready to
annihilate the Jewish state. The odds appeared immensely stacked against
Israel, and the likelihood of any outside military support, even from
the United States, seemed remote. Israel stood alone.
The
Arab Muslim street was shrieking bloodcurdling threats of mass
extermination for all Israelis, young and old, and the Arab leaders were
falling over themselves to see who could utter the most hideous promise
of massacre and slaughter. Hafez al-Assad, the father of Syria’s
present butcher of Syria said, “Pave the roads with the skulls of Jews.” The Muslim Arab cry Itbah Al-Yahud, an Arabic phrase meaning "Slaughter the Jews," was spewing from every Arab regime's controlled radio and television station.
Khaybar ya Yahod,
another Arabic battle cry -- referring to a seventh-century attack by
Islam's prophet, Mohammed, and his followers against the Jewish
community in Khaybar, in present-day Saudi Arabia -- was also being
shouted by huge Arab mobs. Mohammed's surprise attack, breaking a
ten-year treaty, resulted in the forced expulsion of all the Jewish men,
women, and children. In 627 AD, Mohammad also attacked the Jewish Bani
Quraysh tribe, beheading many of the men and boys and enslaving the
women and young children.
Egypt's
president, Gamal Abdul Nasser, who at the time was also president of
the United Arab Republic, a union between Egypt and Syria, made the UAR
position on Israel clear. Echoing the standard hate speech against
Israel, he said: "I announce on behalf of the United Arab Republic that
we will exterminate Israel."
For
many years, Arab terrorists from Egypt occupied Gaza, and terrorists
from the Jordanian-occupied the West Bank (which is the biblical and
ancestral Jewish heartland) had been mounting cross-border attacks into
Israel, killing civilians, including many children. And remember, this
was long before the so-called Israeli "occupation," which the Arab world
and its supporters always claim as the sole reason for Arab aggression
against the reconstituted Jewish state.
Beginning
in late May and early June 1967, Nasser sent 80,000 Egyptian troops and
900 tanks across the Sinai Desert to attack Israel, with air cover
provided by 400 jet aircraft. Soviet-made Syrian guns and artillery on
the Syrian-occupied Golan Heights were already pounding Israeli farmers
and villagers in the valley below and firing on Israeli fishermen in the
Sea of Galilee.
At
the same time, indiscriminate shelling of Jerusalem by the Arab Legion
from the Jordanian-occupied West Bank had killed scores of Israeli
civilians and wounded 1,000 despite pleas from Israel to Jordan to stay
out of the war. Meanwhile, disgracefully succumbing to Nasser's demands,
the United Nation's buffer force in Sinai that had been in place since
the earlier 1956 One Hundred Hours' War hastily left, even as Israel
pleaded with Secretary General U Thant to honor the U.N. mandate to keep
the peace.
Egypt
was also blockading Israeli shipping in the Straits of Tiran, leading
to the Red Sea, and Israeli ships were also prohibited from using the
Suez Canal. This was strangling Israel's economy. Faced with all this,
Israel struck back -- and won a stunning victory.
In
a surprise move, the Israeli Air Force attacked while the Egyptian
pilots were having breakfast and destroyed all 400 Egyptian planes on
the ground. The Israeli armored and infantry units, though outnumbered,
rolled up the huge Egyptian army, forcing it back to the Suez Canal;
drove the Syrian forces from the Golan Heights; and reunited divided
Jerusalem, liberating all the Jewish holy places in the Old City, which
the Jordanians had desecrated and destroyed. The Jordanians had taken
the ancient Jewish gravestones on the Mount of Olives and used them as
latrines for the Arab Legion. At the same time, some 58 synagogues, some
dating back centuries, had been blown up, their ruins used as stables
for donkeys, goats and sheep.
Many
people believe that the astonishing Israeli victory was a miracle. I
remember listening in England to Michael Elkins, the BBC reporter in
Israel at the time, who broke the startling news of the Israeli
victories on all three fronts; the Egyptian, the Syrian, and the
Jordanian. But equally, many people also thought he was exaggerating
Israel's total defeat of her enemies, preferring almost to the end of
the Six-Day War to continue believing the strident but false Arab
boastings that Israel was being destroyed.
Almost prophetically, an earlier Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, had stated that "…in Israel, in order to be a realist, you must believe in miracles."
Years
later, on February 5, 1996, Britain's conservative prime minister,
Margaret Thatcher, referring to united Jerusalem, stated: "We have to
remember that the Jewish people never lost their faith in the face of
all the persecution and as a result have come to have their own promised
land returned and have Jerusalem as a capital city again."
But as Ruth King from Americans for a Safe Israel (AFSI) wrote in her excellent blog, www.RuthfullyYours.com "... in order to seek peace with implacable Arab enemies, Israel has consecutively dismembered its patrimony and heartland."
She
was referring to the absurd and suicidal notion of "land for peace," in
which Israel gives away its historic land but never receives peace.
Israel has gained naught from such overtures to the Arab and Muslim
world except more terror from an implacable foe. Even immediately after
the June 1967 victory, Moshe Dayan gave away to the Muslim Waqf the
newly liberated Temple Mount -- a tragic error that haunts the Jewish state to this day.
Indeed,
as anyone who understands the Arab mentality knows, such offers of
reconciliation have been seen not as peaceful overtures, but rather as
abject signs of weakness and lack of resolve, merely emboldening the
jihadists and encouraging ever more relentless Arab terror and
aggression. The old saying "give an inch and they will take a mile"
comes to mind.
Meanwhile,
the Israeli hard-left Peace Now organization continues its destructive
campaign of vilifying the thousands of Jewish families who live in Judea
and Samaria -- a campaign funded in large part by the European Union,
which would make the biblical Jewish heartland judenrein.
The dirty little secret, that astonishingly still evades so many Israeli and world leaders,
is that in the world of Islam, wherever the Muslim foot has once trod
triumphal forever remains Islamic land. If it is lost, then it is
incumbent as a religious duty upon all Muslims to wage ceaseless war
until it is recovered. Thus, Peace Now cannot ever find a partner within
the Islamic world, for if one ever dared come into existence, it would
be given short thrift by the Muslim faithful.
And
for the same reason, there can never be peace from those Arabs who call
themselves Palestinians with the reborn Jewish state, regardless of the
breathtakingly generous offers of land given to them by successive
Israeli leaders. Nor, for that matter, will the Muslim world ever give
up the dream of reconquering all those once-Muslim-occupied lands lost
in Spain, Portugal, Sicily, parts of France, Greece, the Balkans,
southern Russia -- even up to the gates of Vienna.
Victor Sharpe is a prolific freelance writer and author of several books including the trilogy Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.
He writes for the American Thinker blog and appears regularly on the Victoria Taft Show on AM 860 KPAM.
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