Coverage of Six day war anniversary

This week as the 40th anniversary of the "Six day war" is remembered, we can expect much anti-Israel bias, distortions, sympathy for the palestinians and much historical revisionism portraying Israel as the aggressor. You'll also be subjected to talk of 40 years of palestinian suffering at the hands of Israeli "occupation", as well as whining from palestinians about their land being "stolen". Little will be mentioned of the context in which the six day war occured, and who the real aggressors were. For example you won't be hearing much about the following facts:

Nasser and other arab rulers threats to anihilate the "Zionist presence in the arab homeland", or the fact that Egypt ordered UN peacekeepers in Sinai to leave and blocked Israeli shipping from the Straights of Tiran. You also won't be reading or hearing much about the fact that Syria for years had been shelling Israeli farmers from the Golan Heights. The MSM won't bother to remind its viewers or readers that Israeli PM Levi Eshkol sent a message to King Hussein of Jordan telling him that Israel would not engage in any actions against Jordan unless Jordan attacks Israel. Upon receiving information that Israel was losing the war, King Hussein gave the order to attack Israel. Jordan then shelled civilian suburbs of Tel Aviv, Israel's largest military airfield, Ramat David, West Jerusalem, hitting civilian locations indiscrimately, including Hadassah hospital and Mount Zion church. The Knesset and the PM's office were also targeted. Jordanian warplanes attacked the central Israeli towns of Netanya and Kfar Saba. The attacks resulted in the death of 20 Israelis and 1000 wounded.

A case in point regarding coverage of the six day war is this Time magazine piece, "In the Shadow of the Six-Day War" by Tim McGirk(hat tip Soccerdad). Not surprisingly it tells the story of the war from the palestinian point of view. The article profiles Omaar al-Nakhla, who's mother gave birth to him in a bush while attempting to flee to Jordan in the midst of the six day war.

Omar's childhood coincided with the rise of the Palestinian resistance. After the Six-Day War, the Palestinians lost faith in the ability of other Arab states to seize back the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Instead, they pinned their hopes on an Egyptian-educated former civil engineer, Yasser Arafat, whose Fatah organization began carrying out raids inside the conquered territories and later committed atrocious acts of terrorism. Like other boys in the camp, Omar would listen to TV news from Jordan and Syria about their heroes--Arafat and his Palestinian fighters. They dreamed that one day Arafat would lead them back to their lost villages.

But Arafat and his colleagues, exiled in distant lands, were losing touch with the Palestinian reality. By 1987 Omar and thousands of youths like him had grown impatient waiting for their saviors and launched their own uprising against the Israelis. The spark for the intifadeh, as it became known, was a Gaza traffic accident in which an Israeli driver killed several Palestinian laborers. Revolt spread all over the Palestinian territories, including Jalazon. "We burned tires in the road and threw stones," recalls Omar's friend Ismaeen, who wears a muscle shirt and has the dark, heavy-lidded eyes of an Egyptian pop star. Ismaeen boasts that from age 15 onward, he spent five years inside Israeli prisons. "For throwing stones?" I ask. "Well, stones and Molotov cocktails," Ismaeen says, grinning. Serving time in Israeli jail is a rite of passage for young Palestinians, though Omar says--with chagrin--that he himself spent only "a little time" in prison: a year.

Omar was one of 700 Palestinian youths from Jalazon rounded up during the first intifadeh. (At the worst of that struggle, which ran from 1987 to 1993, Israeli troops sealed off Jalazon for 45 days, cutting off electricity and shooting holes in water cisterns.) When he was released, Omar was swept right back into the violence. One day, he remembers, he was throwing rocks at Israeli solders: "I was shot in the hand. My friend next to me was hit in the chest. He died, and I survived. It could have been me."

The Palestinians' sense of identity--and their rage--was sharpened by the spread of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories after the war. (There are now some 250,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and an additional 182,000 in East Jerusalem, which Israel has annexed.) Crowning the hill above Jalazon is the Beit El settlement. Remove the barbed-wire fencing, the security gate and guard towers, and Beit El's tidy rows of red-roofed houses and gardens could be mistaken for an Arizona suburb. A friend of Omar's named Yousef, a crude map of Palestine tattooed on his wrist, says, "All I know is that the Jews took our village, chased us away, and now we see them living up on top of the hill in their beautiful houses with flowers and swimming pools." He adds, "One person up there in the settlement uses more water than an entire family down here."

...

"We want peace with the Jews," says Omar, "but we want to go back to our land."

So for Omar peace with Jews means dismantling Israel demographically, and Jews living as dhimmis under muslim rule.


Here is an article from Time magazine published after the six day war on June 16, 1967, "The Quickest War" (hat tip Soccerdad). Back then there was no confusion as to who was the aggressor and who was victim:

Historians may argue for years over who actually fired the first shot or dropped the first bomb. But the Realpolitik of Israel's overwhelming triumph has rendered the question largely academic. Ever since Israel was created 19 years ago, the Arabs have been lusting for the day when they could destroy it. And in the past month, Nasser succeeded for the first time in putting together an alliance of Arab armies ringing Israel; he moved some 80,000 Egyptian troops and their armor into Sinai and elbowed out the U.N. buffer force that had separated the antagonists for a decade. With a hostile Arab population of 110,000,000 menacing their own of 2,700,000, the Israelis could be forgiven for feeling a fearful itch in the trigger finger. When Nasser closed the Gulf of Aqaba, a fight became almost inevitable.

HonestReporting has a special report chronicling the events that led up to the six day war that supporters of Israel can use to fight back against the historical revisionism coming from the international media.