Israel’s current war on Gaza and the Palestinians draws pessimism and hopelessness, reminding two veterans of its origin in another such war in the region in 1967, The Six Day War, which resulted In Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern joins host Robert Scheer on this episode of Scheer Intelligence to dissect the relationship Israel has maintained and exploited ever since that imperial conquest with support of the United States, and how the future of American foreign policy appears to once again be led not by informed individuals but rather by selfish and dangerous impulses.
Calling up the Six Day War, McGovern notes it was understood within the CIA as a preemptive war of choice: “The reality is that [Israel]... had carte blanche to do it [the Six Day War], that they were given forgiveness, if not permission, (by the US) before they went up on the Golan. And that's the situation that exists today with a president who shows himself as being joined at the hip with Bibi Netanyahu,” McGovern explained.
Back then, more than six decades ago, McGovern was in CIA headquarters, advising President Lyndon Johnson, and Scheer was a journalist reporting from the ground in Egypt, Israel and the newly occupied Gaza and West Bank in the immediate aftermath of the war. In this conversation, the two draw from their experience to show the deliberate, imperial force that has destroyed implementation of the UN-mandated creation of a Palestinian state to be created alongside the Jewish state.
They explain how the Six Day War, ostensibly fought to prevent an imagined threat from Egypt, which was in temporary control of Gaza, and Jordan in the West Bank, was resolved with an eventual peace agreement between Israel and those two Arab nations. But it became the excuse for Israel’s permanent conquest of the millions of Palestinians tilling the lands of Gaza and the West Bank who had posed no military threat to the survival of a Jewish state, a state justified by the European Holocaust, for which the Palerstinans held no accountability.
Recalling their own common childhood growing up in the Bronx during WWII, McGovern and Scheer remark on the deepest of ironies that it is Germany, the historical author of the Holocaust, that is now arresting its own citizens for opposing the dispersal and destruction of the Palestinian people who, like the Jews, have been assured in UN declarations of an equal claim to a state of their own.