Seán Gannonreflects on how little has changed for Israel over the 40 years since the Six Day War
Israel's pre-emptive strike against Egypt's military airfields on the morning of June 5th, 1967, was devastating. It destroyed virtually the entire fleet of Egyptian fighters.
By nightfall, the Syrian and Jordanian air forces had also been neutralised, granting Israel the air superiority which sealed one of the most stunning military victories of the 20th century.
Pre-emption is a dirty word in the post-Iraq era but in 1967 Israel's action against Egypt was acknowledged for what it was - a desperate defensive operation against what the Irish Independent called the "hysterical bellicosity" of the Arabs and their avowedly genocidal ambitions. Nasser, the self-proclaimed agent of Israel's imminent "liquidation", had been for months promising a "total war which [ would] result in the extermination of Zionist existence", while his allies in Damascus, Baghdad and the PLO were threatening a "battle of annihilation" that would "wipe Israel off the map" and leave "practically no Jewish survivors".
Nasser's massing of 100,000 soldiers and 900 tanks on the Egyptian-Israeli frontier; his effective expulsion of UNEF's 3,400 strong Sinai-based buffer force; his May 21st general mobilisation of Egypt's reserves; and his military blockade of the Straits of Tiran two days later (an established casus belli in itself) left Israel in no doubt as to his ultimate intentions.
The announcement of mobilisation by Iraq, Kuwait, Sudan and Saudi Arabia, coupled with the PLO's placing of 8,000 Gaza-based fighters under Egyptian control and the May 30th conclusion of a mutual defence pact between Cairo and Amman, underlined the deadly seriousness of Israel's situation. And, having exhausted all diplomatic alternatives, Israel was left with little choice but to attack.
The legitimacy of Israel's action was generally unquestioned in Ireland where, shaped by a sympathetic media, public opinion was strongly supportive.
According to this newspaper, "this was not a war of conquest, as the Israelis saw it, but a war of survival" and it dismissed the Irish government's demand for an Israeli withdrawal from the territories prior to negotiations, saying that there was "little point in pretending that the war [ had] altered nothing, and that the victor should go so far as to change places with the defeated".
The Cork Examiner, as the Irish Examiner then was, agreed, arguing that "nobody outside the Communist bloc believed that [ Israel] was the aggressor" and that if the territories were returned they "would be used as the staging grounds for the mounting of a new offensive for which the Arabs are even now preparing".
Would Ireland, the Evening Herald wondered, "be as anxious to hand back the Hill of Tara if it had been used to shell Meath farmers as was the case with the [ Golan] heights ... [ or] a section of land like the Gaza Strip running into Co Louth and Co Dublin which was being used to mount extermination attacks on the rest of the country?"
Forty years later, Irish attitudes have altered, yet Israel's predicament is largely unchanged. Iran has replaced Egypt as the number one threat and its campaign to "eliminate Israel from the pages of history" rivals Nasser's in intensity and scale.
"Setting Israel on fire" tops Tehran's foreign policy agenda and it today spends in the region of $100 million per annum bankrolling Hizbullah, an organisation which has promised "an open war until the elimination of Israel and until the death of the last Jew on Earth".
It also provides extensive logistical, operational and financial support to all Palestinian rejectionist groups, each of which, including Hamas and its 8,000 fighters, is committed to the "obliteration" of the Jewish state through jihad. Gaza is once again the main base for anti-Israel operations, with almost 3,000 rockets and mortars being fired from its confines in the last 18 months alone.
Unprecedented amounts of weaponry, including over 30 tons of military-grade explosives, thousands of RPG launchers and assault rifles, and hundreds of advanced anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, are also being stockpiled for what is clearly a planned future "extermination attack" by Hamas and its terrorist partners. Meanwhile Syria, despite recent pronouncements about peace, appears to be preparing for war.
Also unchanged is Israel's willingness to trade the territories for peace. While the Arab states adopted the August 1967 Khartoum Conference's "Three NOs" approach to Israel ("no negotiation, no recognition, no peace"), Jerusalem unequivocally endorsed UN Security Council Resolution 242, which called for a withdrawal in return for a recognition of the "sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence" of the Jewish state and it remains committed to it today.
But as the Examiner noted in the aftermath of the war, it is not Israel's "occupation" of territory but "the refusal of the Arab countries to recognise that Israel has any sovereign existence that precludes any possibility of a peace treaty".
With regard to Iran and its agents, the same remains true today.
Seán Gannon is chairman of Irish Friends of Israel