Netanyahu’s False Narrative
:doh:
But declassified high-level documents from Britain, France, Russia and the United States reveal that Egypt, Syria and Jordan were not going to attack Israel and Israel knew it. In fact, they did not attack Israel. Instead, Israel mounted the first attack in order to decimate the Egyptian army and take the West Bank.
Oops!!!!!
The article you cited was hugely biased. Focusing on only one issue.
The Israelis themselves openly admitted that they were not concerned about an attack. Their main concerns were three-fold:
1) Random shelling on Galilean villages from the Golan Heights by Syrians or by terrorists (mostly Palestinian) with the Syrians' assistance.
2) Constant incursions by Palestinian terrorists from the West Bank (which was then a part of Jordan). and
3) The closure of the Straits of Tiran by Egypt to Israeli flagged vessels (through which almost all of Israel's oil supplies were carried).
No. 3 was generally regarded as the event that made the war inevitable. So you can blame it on Egypt.
Israeli leaders were concerned about what Israel would become 25 years down the line, being squeezed on all fronts as described above, not about whether Egypt or Syria would attack them the following day:
a) Nasser's rhetoric was only making things worse.
b) Nasser and Syria had signed a mutual defence pact so Israel knew that it could not mount another mini-war against Syria as they had done only recently to deter shelling from Golan, without the certainty that Egypt would invade them on the southern front. So although everyone knew that Egypt didn't want to initiate a war, the fact that they were amassing all their forces on the Sinai border was a virtual guarantee that war was what they would get.
c) at that time, ALL the Arab states were clamouring for war. They were sending troops to Syria and Jordan to be in readiness and issuing rhetoric of their own,looking forward to the day when the error of 48 would be rectified.
d) At a late stage, Jordan, who were previously sympathetic to Israel and who previously did what they could to prevent terrorist incursion of the Palestinians into Israel (although it was not much) and didn't really help, suddenly switched and joined the mutual defence pact, stationing tank batallions in the West Bank which could within half an hour easily cut Israel into two which is only a few miles wide at its narrowest point. Nationalist fervour in all the Arab states made it plain that there had to be war. They all wanted it.
They got what they were asking for is all I can say. A few cabinet papers don't change what is already known.