Oxymoron wrote:What the fuck does that mean? They had a Tank ratio of something like 5-1, 3-1 in Air force twice the manpower, and huge reserves. Who in their right mind can say they had no capability to destroy Israel? What utter nonsense.
They didn't because they sucked, and still do. However, Israel needed to carry out the first strike in any case in order to survive the war by itself this is why it had to initiate the armed conflict. This doesn't discount the posturing and general belligerence towards Israel by its overtly hostile Arab neighbors. While the accounts of history have changed the general and publicized history somewhat, it doesn't completely debunk the overall scenario what was happening at the time.
Ultimately Israel couldn't afford to have Arab posturing and hostility and had to act accordingly. Attributing it to malice is naive.
starman2003 wrote:Glickman is full of it, repeating the same lies. The arabs in '67 had no intention of starting a war nor any capability to destroy Israel. Claims that they did stem from empty rhetoric intended for arab audiences. Glickman flies in the face of history when writing the Israelis were defenders and the arabs "aggresssors." One of the worst distortions ever.
I don't think your comment can be counted as a proper response. Seriously, I don't find him to be lying at all - he is making an argument based on various sources and bases it on "the face of history", which is your only tangible retort.
I don't even think you read the point he was making with the article because the current (i.e., your) version is to portray Israel as the villain and sole aggressor and absolve the role of the Arab regimes entirely, while there was quite clearly a multifaceted conflict occurring where all parties are culpable. An excellent quote from the article:
"The eminent historian Bernard Lewis found it reasonable to wonder whether the Israelis were in some ways culpable for the events that led to war:
[...]As more information becomes available about the sequence of events leading to the opening of hostilities, it seems that the participants were like characters in a Greek tragedy, in which at every stage the various actors had no choice but to take the next step on the path to war.[/i]
History is prone to be the first victim in any case because unfortunately it is so politicized - your version becomes the only version while the opposing version becomes "lies". Fortunately historians uncover facts and make it much interesting, and human, at the end of the day. Launching hostilities might have been a stupid miscalculation on Israel's part but ultimately it turned the tide of the entirety of geopolitics in the Middle East in six days and strengthened its viability in the region, and the world, for years to come - but also fell victim of its own folly by inheriting an entire foreign population with which it still doesn't know what to do.
tl;dr: Read the article.