Re: [Marxism] [SUSPICIOUS MESSAGE] Last Secret’ of 1967 War: Israel’s Doomsday Plan for Nuclear Display

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

On 6/4/17 8:37 PM, Sheldon Ranz wrote:

Why was this e-mail headlined "a suspicious message"?



That's generated by U. of Utah's Mailman software that we have no 
control over.

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

Re: [Marxism] [SUSPICIOUS MESSAGE] Last Secret’ of 1967 War: Israel’s Doomsday Plan for Nuclear Display

[Sheldon Ranz via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

Why was this e-mail headlined "a suspicious message"?

On Sun, Jun 4, 2017 at 6:01 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

>   POSTING RULES & NOTES  
> #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
> #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
> #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
> *
>
> On 6/4/17 4:59 PM, Dennis Brasky wrote:
>
>> 1967 was NOT a war over the survival or existence of Israel
>>
>
> Yes, I know.
>
> https://louisproyect.org/2007/05/19/six-days/
>
> _
> Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
> Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/opt
> ions/marxism/sranz18%40gmail.com
>
_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

Re: [Marxism] [SUSPICIOUS MESSAGE] Last Secret’ of 1967 War: Israel’s Doomsday Plan for Nuclear Display

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

On 6/4/17 4:59 PM, Dennis Brasky wrote:

1967 was NOT a war over the survival or existence of Israel


Yes, I know.

https://louisproyect.org/2007/05/19/six-days/
_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

Re: [Marxism] [SUSPICIOUS MESSAGE] Last Secret’ of 1967 War: Israel’s Doomsday Plan for Nuclear Display

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

1967 was NOT a war over the survival or existence of Israel

http://mondoweiss.net/2017/06/provoked-fighting-survival/?
utm_source=Mondoweiss+List_campaign=df35f004dd-RSS_
EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_medium=email_term=0_b86bace129-
df35f004dd-309258102_cid=df35f004dd_eid=894828857e

"(a) The New York Times quoted Prime Minister Menachem Begin`s (1977 - 83)
August, 1982 speech saying: `In June, 1967, we had a choice. The Egyptian
Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that (President
Gamal Abdel) Nasser (1956 - 70) was really about to attack us. We must be
honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.’

(b) Two-time Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (1974 - 77 and 1992 - 95) told
French newspaper Le Monde in February, 1968: `I do not believe Nasser
wanted war. The two divisions which he sent into Sinai on May 14 would not
have been enough to unleash an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we
knew it.’

(c) General Mordechai Hod, Commander of the Israeli Air Force during the
Six-Day War said in 1978: `Sixteen years of planning had gone into those
initial eighty minutes. We lived with the plan, we slept on the plan, we
ate the plan. Constantly we perfected it.’

(d) General Haim Barlev, Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) Chief told Ma`ariv in
April 1972: `We were not threatened with genocide on the eve of the six-day
war, and we had never thought of such a possibility.’
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/15348

On Sun, Jun 4, 2017 at 10:35 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism
>
>
> NY Times, June 4 2017
> Last Secret’ of 1967 War: Israel’s Doomsday Plan for Nuclear Display
> By WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER
>
> Israeli armored forces advanced against Egyptian troops at the start of
> the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. Credit Shabtai Tal/GPO, via Getty Images
> On the eve of the Arab-Israeli war, 50 years ago this week, Israeli
> officials raced to assemble an atomic device and developed a plan to
> detonate it atop a mountain in the Sinai Peninsula as a warning to Egyptian
> and other Arab forces, according to an interview with a key organizer of
> the effort that will be published Monday.
>
>
_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] [SUSPICIOUS MESSAGE] Last Secret’ of 1967 War: Israel’s Doomsday Plan for Nuclear Display

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

NY Times, June 4 2017
Last Secret’ of 1967 War: Israel’s Doomsday Plan for Nuclear Display
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER

Israeli armored forces advanced against Egyptian troops at the start of 
the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. Credit Shabtai Tal/GPO, via Getty Images
On the eve of the Arab-Israeli war, 50 years ago this week, Israeli 
officials raced to assemble an atomic device and developed a plan to 
detonate it atop a mountain in the Sinai Peninsula as a warning to 
Egyptian and other Arab forces, according to an interview with a key 
organizer of the effort that will be published Monday.


The secret contingency plan, called a “doomsday operation” by Itzhak 
Yaakov, the retired brigadier general who described it in the interview, 
would have been invoked if Israel feared it was going to lose the 1967 
conflict. The demonstration blast, Israeli officials believed, would 
intimidate Egypt and surrounding Arab states — Syria, Iraq and Jordan — 
into backing off.


Israel won the war so quickly that the atomic device was never moved to 
Sinai. But Mr. Yaakov’s account, which sheds new light on a clash that 
shaped the contours of the modern Middle East conflict, reveals Israel’s 
early consideration of how it might use its nuclear arsenal to preserve 
itself.


“It’s the last secret of the 1967 war,” said Avner Cohen, a leading 
scholar of Israel’s nuclear history who conducted many interviews with 
the retired general.


Mr. Yaakov, who oversaw weapons development for the Israeli military, 
detailed the plan to Dr. Cohen in 1999 and 2000, years before he died in 
2013 at age 87.


“Look, it was so natural,” said Mr. Yaakov, according to a transcription 
of a taped interview. “You’ve got an enemy, and he says he’s going to 
throw you to the sea. You believe him.”


“How can you stop him?” he asked. “You scare him. If you’ve got 
something you can scare him with, you scare him.”


Israel has never acknowledged the existence of its nuclear arsenal, in 
an effort to preserve “nuclear ambiguity” and forestall periodic calls 
for a nuclear-free Middle East. In 2001, Mr. Yaakov was arrested, at age 
75, on charges that he had imperiled the country’s security by talking 
about the nuclear program to an Israeli reporter, Ronen Bergman, whose 
work was censored. At various moments, American officials, including 
former President Jimmy Carter long after he left office, have 
acknowledged the existence of the Israeli program, though they have 
never given details.


A spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington said the Israeli 
government would not comment on Mr. Yaakov’s role.


If the Israeli leadership had detonated the atomic device, it would have 
been the first nuclear explosion used for military purposes since the 
United States’ attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 22 years earlier.


The plan had a precedent: The United States considered the same thing 
during the Manhattan Project, as the program’s scientists hotly debated 
whether to set off a blast near Japan in an effort to scare Emperor 
Hirohito into a quick surrender. The military vetoed the idea, convinced 
that it would not be enough to end the war.


According to Mr. Yaakov, the Israeli plan was code-named Shimshon, or 
Samson, after the biblical hero of immense strength. Israel’s nuclear 
deterrence strategy has long been called the “Samson option” because 
Samson brought down the roof of a Philistine temple, killing his enemies 
and himself. Mr. Yaakov said he feared that if Israel, as a last resort, 
went ahead with the demonstration nuclear blast in Egyptian territory, 
it could have killed him and his commando team.


Dr. Cohen, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International 
Studies at Monterey in California and the author of “Israel and the 
Bomb” and “The Worst-Kept Secret,” described the idea behind the atomic 
demonstration as giving “the prime minister an ultimate option if 
everything else failed.” Dr. Cohen, who was born in Israel and educated 
in part in the United States, has pushed the frontiers of public 
discourse on a fiercely hidden subject: how Israel became an 
unacknowledged nuclear power in the 1960s.


On Monday, the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project of 
the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington — 
where Dr. Cohen is a global fellow — is releasing on a special website a 
series of documents related to the atomic plan. The project maintains a 
digital archive of his work known as the Avner Cohen Collection. 
(President Trump’s proposed budget calls for the elimination of all 
federal funding for the center, which Congress created as a living