Richard Becker on the myth that the Six-Day War was "preemptive"

Most of the mainstream media, along with Israel’s apologists in the United States, propagated the notion that the war was a rerun of the biblical “David versus Goliath” battle.  Israel was pictured as the heroic underdog, with God once more on its side. 

The misnamed, U.S.-based “Anti-Defamation League,” which has long served as propagandist for the Israeli regime, said that “Israel launched a preemptive strike against Egypt,” suggesting that it only did so to avert annihilation. 

None other than the extreme right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin later exposed the utter falsity of such claims.  Fifteen years after the war, in an Aug. 2, 1982, speech to the Israeli National Defense College, Begin said: “We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him [Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser].” 

It was not just Begin who exposed the myth.  Ten years earlier, Gen. Mattiyahu Peled, one of the Israeli commanders in the 1967 Six-Day War, told the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz: “The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only a bluff, which was born and developed after the war.” 

In 1997, Israel’s minister of defense at the time of the Six-Day War, Moshe Dayan, talked to the New York Times about the events leading up to the war on the Syria-Israel front.  He stated that the Israeli kibbutz (cooperative farm) residents in the area wanted to take over the rich farmland of Syria’s Golan Heights: “They didn’t even try to hide their greed for that land.” 

Describing Israel’s tactics on its border with Syria, Dayan told the Times: 

We would send a tractor to plow some area where it wasn’t possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot.  If they didn’t shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance further, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot.  And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that’s how it was. …  The Syrians, on the fourth day of the war [June 9, 1967], were not a threat to us.

By the 1967 war, Israel succeeded in achieving its long-held objective of expansion.  The remaining 22 percent of historic Palestine—the West Bank and Gaza—was conquered by Israel’s surprise attack, along with Syria’s Golan Heights and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. 

More than 35,000 Arabs were killed, many of them burned to death by Pentagon-supplied napalm bombs.  Thousands more were wounded. Most of the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian air and armor forces were destroyed in the opening days of the surprise attack.  The Israeli army drove more than 90,000 Syrians and Palestinians out of the Golan Heights, an agriculturally rich region north of the Sea of Galilee. 

Many of the Syrian villages and Golan’s main city, Quneitra, were bulldozed by the Israeli military.  Israeli settlers began arriving in Golan in July 1967.  In 1981, the Israeli Knesset (parliament) passed a law annexing the Golan Heights.  The continuing occupation of Golan, as well as the West Bank and Gaza, defies scores of United Nations resolutions.

~ Richard Becker, "Fifty years later: Myths and facts about the Six Day War," Liberation, June 7, 2017

(This article is based on a talk by Richard Becker at a PSL forum in San Francisco on June 3, 2017.)

Richard Becker on how the Six-Day War unleashed the Palestinian resistance movement

With the conquest of the remaining 22 percent of Palestine in 1967, it appeared that the fate of the Palestinian people had been sealed.  But in a seeming paradox, the Six Day War led to the rise of the Palestinian resistance movement and new wave of popular radicalization across the region. 

Until the 1967 war, organizations such as Fatah- Palestine National Liberation Movement, and the Arab National Movement [ANM] led by George Habash, had placed their main hope for the liberation of Palestine with the Arab armies.  The outcome of the war brought that period to a close.  In 1968, Fatah and two organizations which emerged from the ANM, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for Liberation of Palestine, took control of the Palestine Liberation Organization and launched mass resistance against the occupiers. 

Since then, the struggle has continued in many forms and the vicious Israeli repression funded by the U.S., has taken an enormous toll.  The dispossession of the Palestinian, the killings, systematic torture, the illegal settlements, the house demolitions, the destruction of olive and fruit groves, the theft of water, the lethal blockade and isolation of Gaza, the apartheid practice of the right of return, the apartheid roads, the apartheid everything – continue day after day. 

Since the 1967 war, according the Addameer prisoner rights organization, 800,000 Palestinian men, more than 40% of the adult male population, have been imprisoned.  Today, there are more than 6,300 Palestinians in Israeli prisons – every one of them held in violation of international law.  And there are 0 Israelis held in Palestinian prisons.  If that were the one and only fact one knew about the conflict there, one would know who is the colonizer and who is the colonized, who is the oppressor and who are the oppressed. 

The Palestinian liberation struggle continues under the most difficult conditions.  Many times since 1948, the Palestinians have been counted out, but they have never surrendered.

~ Richard Becker, "Fifty years later: Myths and facts about the Six Day War," Liberation, June 7, 2017

(This article is based on a talk by Richard Becker at a PSL forum in San Francisco on June 3, 2017.)

Anonymous Israeli man on how the Six-Day War impacted Israel

A: Until 1967, we had a wonderful country.

Q: And?

A: Since 1967... the country went to shit.

Q: Why?

A: Because we turned into a big headed people, great heroes.  We conquered all the Arabs.  We made them small.

Q: So it was better before?

A: Yes.  In my opinion, 100%...  Both sides are losing.

~ anonymous Israeli man, "Israelis: What do you think of the one state solution?," The Ask Project, 8:45 mark, February 16, 2022

Sheldon Richman on the 1967 Six-Day War

In six days during June 1967, the Israeli military devastated the air and ground forces of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan and occupied the Sinai, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, the West Bank (an area west of the Jordan River), including East Jerusalem.  The Six-Day War established Israel as the premier military power in the Middle East.  Israel's might was a product of American money and French armaments, in addition to dedicated personnel.  The war also established the idea of Israel as a U.S. strategic asset in the region. 

Before discussing the U.S. role in the war, it is necessary to briefly explain how and why the war was fought.  Its start is generally treated as a preemptive, defensive strike by Israel, necessitated by mortal threats from its neighbors.  The facts show otherwise.  Kennett Love, a former New York Times correspondent and a scholar of the Suez crisis, wrote that Israel drew up "plans for the new war . . . immediately after the old . . . The 1956 war served as a rehearsal for 1967."  That is important because it bears on the Arab reaction to the U.S. role, a reaction that has shaped subsequent developments in the region.

After the 1956 Sinai campaign, the Israeli-Egyptian border was quiet, partly because of the presence of the UN Emergency Force.  But that was not true of the border between Israel and Syria.  The specific causes of friction between the two countries were disputes about fishing rights in Lake Tiberias, Israeli settlement activity in the demilitarized zone established after the 1948 war, guerrilla incursions into Israel, and Israeli development of a water project involving the Jordan River.

Israel retaliated against the guerrilla activity with massive raids into Syria and sometimes into Jordan.  Syria, which had left the United Arab Republic in 1961, underwent a left-wing Ba'athist coup in 1966 and had good relations with the Soviet Union.  Syria pointed to the quiet Israeli-Egyptian border and the lack of Egyptian response to the attacks on Syria as evidence that Nasser was not up to leading the Arabs.  Nasser was accused of hiding behind the UN forces.  Actually, Egypt was absorbed in civil wars in Yemen and the British Crown Colony of Aden (soon to be South Yemen) at the southern end of the Arabian peninsula.  Intra- Arab rivalries were assuming greater importance in the mid-1960s, with Nasser frequently bearing the brunt of Arab criticism.

The Syrian-Israeli friction continued throughout early 1967.  Then, in April, Israel said it would cultivate the entire demilitarized zone between the countries, including land that Syria contended was the property of Arab farmers.  When the Israelis moved a tractor onto the land on April 7, the Syrians fired on them.  To retaliate, 70 Israeli fighters flew over Syria and shot down 6 Syrian war planes near Damascus.  There was no response from the United Arab Command, an essentially paper military undertaking organized by Nasser at an Arab summit in 1964.  (At the same meeting, the Palestine Liberation Organization had been set up--ironically, as a means of reining in Palestinian nationalism.)

Over the next several weeks, Israel threatened Syria.  Gen. Yitzhak Rabin said in an Israeli radio broadcast on May 11 that "the moment is coming when we will march on Damascus to overthrow the Syrian Government, because it seems that only military operations can discourage the plans for a people's war with which they threaten us."  The Israeli director of military intelligence, Aharon Yariv, added that Nasser would not intervene.  The Jewish state also directed massive military action against al-Fatah to stop infiltrations.  Meanwhile, Israeli leaders did all they could to have their country appear in mortal danger. 

The situation worsened when the Soviet Union told the Egyptians that Israel had massed forces on the Syrian border in preparation for a mid-May attack.  The United Nations found no evidence of such preparation, but on May 14 Nasser moved troops into the Sinai.  Yet U.S. and Israeli intelligence agreed that the action was, in Foreign Minister Abba Eban's words, "no immediate military threat," and several years later, in 1972, Gen. Ezer Weizmann admitted that "we did move tanks to the north after the downing of the aircraft."  Israel quickly and fully mobilized, prompting the Egyptians to ask the UN Emergency Force to leave the Sinai.  The request did not mention the two most sensitive locations of the UN force, Sharm el-Sheikh (where it protected Israeli shipping) and the Gaza Strip, but the UN secretary general, U Thant, surprised everyone by replying that a partial withdrawal was impossible.  Faced with a choice between the status quo and a complete UN withdrawal, Nasser chose the latter. When the United Nations offered to station its forces on Israel's side of the border, the Jewish state refused (as it had in the past).  President Lyndon Johnson, fearing that the Israelis would "act hastily," asked Prime Minister Levi Eshkol to inform him in advance of any Israeli action.  Israel replied that a blockade of the Strait of Tiran would be a casus belli. 

Meanwhile, Nasser told the Egyptian press that he was "not in a position to go to war."  Israeli military leaders believed him.  General Rabin said later, "I do not believe that Nasser wanted war.  The two divisions 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."  Ben-Gurion himself said he "doubt[ed] very much whether Nasser wanted to go to war."

It is in that context that the following events must be interpreted.  On May 21 Nasser mobilized his reserves.  On May 22, with the UN forces gone and under the taunting of Syria and Israel, Nasser blocked--verbally not physically-- the Strait of Tiran, which leads from the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aqaba and the Israeli port city of Elath.  The strait's importance to the Israelis was more symbolic than practical; no Israeli flag ship had used it in nearly two years, although Iranian oil was shipped to Israel through it.  Nevertheless, the closure was a worrisome precedent for the Israelis. 

Despite a blizzard of diplomatic activity in and outside the United Nations, tensions rose over the next days, until, on June 5, Israel attacked Egypt--thereby launching what came to be known as the Six-Day War.  (The Israeli government told the UN Truce Supervision Organization that its planes had intercepted Egyptian planes--a patent falsehood.)  In short order, Israel destroyed the air forces of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq.  Israel prepared a letter to President Johnson assuring him that Israel, in the shorthand of U.S. ambassador Walworth Barbour, "has no, repeat no, intention [of] taking advantage of [the] situation to enlarge its territory, [and] hopes peace can be restored within present boundaries."  But that soon changed, as signaled by a request from David Brody, director of the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League, that Johnson not mention "territorial integrity" in his public statements about the war.

On June 8, Egypt, having lost the Sinai to Israel, accepted the cease-fire called for by the United Nations.  The next day Syria also accepted it, but Israel launched additional offensive operations.  By June 10 Israel controlled the Sinai, the Gaza Strip, Sharm el-Sheikh, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and its capital city of Quneitra.  With the road to Damascus open, the Soviets threatened intervention if Israel did not stop.  The Johnson administration signaled its readiness to confront the Soviets by turning the Sixth Fleet toward Syria.  That was to be the first of two near-confrontations between the United States and the Soviet Union in Arab-Israeli wars.  Then, according to Johnson, the U.S. government began to use "every diplomatic resource" to persuade Israel to conclude a cease-fire with Syria, which it did on June 10.

The unseen side of the Six-Day War was Israel's nuclear capability.  Although Prime Minister Eshkol promised in 1966 that Israel would not be the first nation to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East, it had been developing a nuclear capability almost since its founding.  The locus of the program was the Dimona reactor in the Negev near Beershea.  Israel apparently received help over the years from the American firm NUMEC, the French, and the U.S. government, including the CIA.  It probably had operational nuclear weapons in 1967.  According to Francis Perrin, the former French high commissioner for atomic energy who had led the team that helped Israel to build Dimona, Israel wanted nuclear weapons so it could say to the United States, "If you don't want to help us in a critical situation we will require you to help us; otherwise we will use our nuclear bombs."

Israel never signed the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has not allowed inspection of its nuclear facilities since the late 1960s.  According to Mordechai Vanunu, a former technician at Dimona, the inspectors were consistently deceived in the early 1960s.  Israel had 12 to 16 warheads by the end of 1969, according to the Nixon administration.  A CIA report concluded that Israel also tried to keep other Middle Eastern countries from developing nuclear weapons by assassinating their nuclear scientists.

What was U.S. policy before and during the Six-Day War?  In the tense days before the outbreak of hostilities, Johnson moved the Sixth Fleet to the eastern Mediterranean.  On May 23, while declaring an embargo on arms to the area, he secretly authorized the air shipment to Israel of important spare parts, ammunition, bomb fuses, and armored personnel carriers.  After the war started, the United States vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for Israel to return to its prewar boundaries, and Johnson refused to criticize Israel for starting the war.

Author Stephen Green has written that the United States participated in the conflict even more directly.  Green contends that pilots of the U.S. Air Force's 38th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron of the 26th Tactical Reconnaissance Wing flew RF-4Cs--with white Stars of David and Israeli Air Force tail numbers painted on them--over bombed air bases in Egypt, Syria, and Jordan to take pictures for the Israelis.  They flew 8 to 10 sorties a day throughout the war, and the pilots carried civilian passports so they would appear to be contract employees if caught.  When the enemy air forces were destroyed, the RF-4C mission was changed to tracing Arab troop movements at night, which enabled the Israelis to bomb the troops the next morning.  The pilots also flew close-in reconnaissance sorties around the Golan Heights.  Apparently, none of the flights proved decisive, but they did enable Israel to achieve its objectives quickly.  Ironically, the Arabs accused the United States of providing tactical air support, which apparently was untrue.  In response to the accusations, President Johnson said publicly that the United States provided no assistance of any kind to the Israelis. 

A critical question is whether the U.S. government gave Israel a green light to go to war.  Israeli officials frequently consulted with U.S. officials in the days before June 5; they were looking for support, claiming that Israel had been promised access through the Strait of Tiran in 1956.  U.S. officials often told the Israelis that "Israel will only be alone if it decides to go alone"--a statement that was interpreted by some Israelis as a nod to go ahead.  That impression could have been confirmed by Secretary of State Dean Rusk's reported comment to a journalist, regarding the U.S. attitude toward Israel: "I don't think it is our business to restrain anyone."  Finally, Foreign Minister Abba Eban later wrote in his autobiography that when he visited Washington in late May, "what I found . . . was the absence of any exhortation to us to stay our hand much longer."

The Six-Day War was a diplomatic disaster for the United States.  That might have been foreseen, but President Johnson had other things on his mind.  He seems to have been motivated by a desire to win Jewish American support for the war in Vietnam and to advance the "strategic relationship," begun by President Kennedy, with Israel against the Soviet Union.

The cost in Arab alienation was great.  Johnson had assured the Arabs that Israel would not attack and that he would oppose aggression.  Yet he never called on Israel to withdraw from the conquered territories or to resolve the Palestinian question.  Rather, the United States gave Israel substantial help, including diplomatic support that facilitated Israel's conquest of neighboring territories by providing critical delays.

In no sense did the war bring stability to the Middle East, if indeed that was a U.S. objective.  Nasser summed up the consequences: "The problem now is that while the United States objective is to pressure us to minimize our dealings with the Soviet Union, it will drive us in the opposite direction altogether.  The United States leaves us no choice."

Nasser's prediction was borne out by events.  Within three years the Soviets were shipping military equipment to the Egyptians, including surface-to-air missiles to defend Egypt against Israel's U.S.-made F-4 Phantom jets.  Thousands of Soviet troops, pilots, and advisers were provided.  The Soviets also moved closer to Syria and the Palestine Liberation Organization.  The United States responded by giving more weapons and planes to Israel.

~ Sheldon Richman, "'Ancient History': U.S. Conduct in the Middle East Since World War II and the Folly of Intervention," Cato Institute, August 16, 1991, p. 11-14

Joseph Sobran on changing moral fashions in 20th century America

Catholics "arrived" as Americans from the Thirties to the Sixties - between Al Smith and Jack Kennedy.  They made their mark as citizens, politicians, celebrities, moralists, intellectuals, and whatnot.  They helped set the tone of public life in all sorts of ways: think Notre Dame football, the Legion of Decency, the Knights of Columbus, Bing Crosby, Bishop Sheen, Cardinal Spellman, Joe McCarthy, countless movies featuring crusty-saintly Irish priests.  Catholic intellectuals like John Courtney Murray made their debut in secular society.  It was rather fashionable to be Catholic: tony converts wrote books like "The Seven-Storey Mountain."  It was easy to get the feeling that if you weren't Catholic, you were really missing something.  The secular world treated Catholicism with great deference.  And Catholics had clout.

This was the wave Kennedy rode to the White House.  But then it ended suddenly - and for Catholics, traumatically.  Catholicism suffered abrupt deflation and even some rough debunking.  Instead of converts' pious autobiographies, the best-sellers were memoirs of angry apostates.  The Church lost both political clout and moral glamour in the secular world.  Hollywood either ignored or ridiculed Catholicism: Catholic morality and sensibilities simple ceased to count for anything.

For Catholics, this was a painful loss of public respect.  We'd been riding high and assuming it would go on forever.  But, all the same, Catholics were still acceptable as citizens.  Their fall from secular grace didn't mean their rights were in question; nobody doubted a Catholic could get elected.  Only some of the grander Catholic moral pretensions had been rejected.

At about the same time Catholics saw their prestige and power decline, Jews arrived.  Israel's victory in the Six-Day War helped make it acceptable - even fashionable - to be openly and proudly Jewish.  "Passing," Anglicizing, converting, etc., were contraindicated.  The Holocaust (a new word for most of us) moved to the center of our sense of recent history.  "Anti-Semitism" became the deadliest of cultural accusations.  More movies about Nazis were made in this period than in all of World War II (most films at the time, lest we forget, featured gross Jap-bashing: it was only in retrospect that we decided we'd been fighting for racial justice).  Jewish intellectuals, entertainers, politicians all stressed their "ethnicity" (another new word): frank "Jewishness" replaced religious "Judaism" as the ticket to respectability.  Yiddish slang entered the language.  Jewish sensibilities were accorded special deference, and even became morally defining for gentiles.

The Jewish Moment is winding down now.  Maybe it's for no better reason than that moral fashions change like all others.  Be that as it may, certain exaggerated Jewish moral claims are being deflated.  The Holocaust doesn't seem unique since the revelations about Stalin and Pol Pot.  Loose charges of Anti-Semitism are arousing resentment.  Above all, Israel has become a moral embarrasment; even its defenders find themselves forced to do less boasting and more excusing these days.

[...]

In short, Jews are going through a pretty normal period of adjustment - the bumpy side of assimilation, as I sometimes call it.  Protestants and Catholics have both survived having their self-absorption punctured; so will Jews.  They'll be less special but more normal.

~ Joseph Sobran, letter-to-the-editor to The New Republic, reprinted in the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, December 1990, pp. 11-12

Benny Morris on the Six-Day War

The ultimate consequence is that, paradoxically, the war both contributed to advancing towards peace with the Arabs as well as undermining the peace between Israel and the Arabs. 

On the one hand it contributed to peace because it was so decisive that it persuaded the Arab regimes that Israel couldn’t be beaten militarily, and it gave Israel the bargaining chips in terms of land it could give in Sinai for peace with the Egyptians.  On the other hand it gave rise in Israel to a messianic rightwing expansionism and ideology that had not really existed before 1967.  Once Israel took over the West Bank and more and more settlements were built, these became a major obstacle that worked against peace.

~ Benny Morris, visiting professor of Israel studies at Georgetown University and author of 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War

(As quoted in The Guardian, "The six-day war: why Israel is still divided over its legacy 50 years on," May 20, 2017.)

2008

Avi Shlaim: "Zionism lost its way" after the Six-Day War

[Although Shlaim agrees that it was a defensive war, he argues that – in the ease of the victory and in the national sense of joy – opportunities were lost, not least for a wider peace.]

Zionism lost its way in 1967, that’s the crucial thing.  The main aim of the Zionist movement before the war was the establishment of an independent Jewish state in Palestine.  But by the eve of the war that objective had already been achieved.  The victory in 1967 reopened the old question of the territorial aims of Zionism. 

And the two trends that emerged cut across party lines... the big division after 1967 was between those who accepted the division of Palestine as a solution and those saying the West Bank was an integral part of the land of Israel.  And in an Israeli society split down the middle, the government resolved the dilemma by deciding not to decide.

~ Avi Shlaim, author of The Iron Wall, an acclaimed study of Israel’s military policies

(As quoted in The Guardian, "The six-day war: why Israel is still divided over its legacy 50 years on," May 20, 2017.)

2000

Gideon Levy on the Six-Day War

From the military point of view, it was indeed a "glorious" war, which was seen as justified.  But it was also a war that generated a fundamental transformation in Israeli society.  It led to the growth of unbridled national arrogance, which exacted an awful price in blood over the past 50 years and turned the military victory into a moral defeat.  In retrospect, it should be called the 50 Year War, not the Six-day war, and judging by the political situation, its life expectancy appears endless.

I think most Israelis will be quite indifferent.  It is a society in denial.  It is a society totally preoccupied with private affairs.  No one but the settlers will celebrate.  But, also, no one will mourn.  In that respect, Gush Etzion is the right place to mark it, because only settlers will feel the day.  In Tel Aviv, people couldn’t care less and no artificial effort by the government can change that.

~ Gideon Levy, Haaretz, April 7, 2017

(As quoted in The Guardian, "The six-day war: why Israel is still divided over its legacy 50 years on," May 20, 2017.)

Murray Rothbard on the Six-Day War

Why the wave of adulation and admiration that greeted the blitzkrieg war of conquest by Israel against the Arab countries?  That greeted the conquest, that is, in the United States; most of the rest of the world was stunned and appalled.  Has a sickness eaten its way deep into the American soul?  Do we all simply love a winner — even if he wins by means of fire-power, surprise attack, and mobile blitzkrieg tactics?  Even if he wins, as Israel did, by napalming innocent women and children in Arab villages?  Have we lost all sense of moral principle, all sense of justice? 

Two major reasons have been advanced for the acclaim heaped by American public opinion on the state of Israel.  One is that it is a “bastion of anti-Communism in the Middle East.”  This is an odd argument, since, in the first place, none of the Arab countries is Communist or anything like it; all are governed by deeply religious Moslems.  Sure, the Arabs accepted military aid from Soviet Russia, but only after they found that they could not get such aid from the U.S., which was arming Israel instead. And, furthermore, the Arab countries are certainly no more socialist than Israel: Israel has been governed, since its inception, by an avowedly socialist party (the Mapai); it has a very large proportion of its economy in government hands; and it has a fantastically strong labor union movement (the Histadrut) which, as a virtual State within a State, controls and owns a large chunk of the economy of Israel in its own right.  And, what is more, there exist in Israel the famous kibbutzim, which are communes, in which communism (in its true sense of virtual absence of private property) is practiced on a scale far more intense than in any Communist country in the world (with the exception of China).  And while membership in the kibbutzim is generally voluntary, there are also many Israeli refugees literally enslaved to the kibbutzim, and who cannot leave them until they “pay back” the Israel government the passage money from Europe to Israel.  Furthermore, since their pay in the kibbutzim is very low, it is almost impossible for them to work out their term, and so they remain, often with great reluctance, in forced labor on the Israel communes. 

The other common argument is that Israel is “little,” compared to its Arab neighbors, and therefore deserves admiration as an underdog surrounded by giants, as Davids surrounded by Goliaths.  The “littleness” here is a complete misreading of world affairs; it would be just as absurd to hail Britain when she conquered India quite easily.  Are we to consider the British Empire as the “underdog,” since India’s population outnumbered England by a huge multiple?  Certainly not: clearly the technological level and relative standards of living were so disparate, that the “smaller” nation could easily conquer and dominate the larger.  The same is true for “little” Israel.  The rulers of Israel are not Middle Eastern, like their Arab neighbors; they are largely European, and furthermore, they are financed very heavily by wealthy European and American Zionists.  These, then, were Europeans who came, on the backs of and in collusion with, the British Empire (from the end of World War I to the end of World War II), with European technology, wealth and know-how, to seize the lands and homes of Arabs, and themselves to colonize Palestine.  To think of these Zionists and Israelis as “underdogs,” in the light of the true situation, is nothing less than grotesque — as can be seen by the swift wars of conquest fought by Israel in 1948, 1956, and now today.

~ Murray Rothbard, "'Little' Israel," 1967

(As appeared in Never a Dull Moment: A Libertarian Look at the Sixties, pp. 35-36.)

Six-Day War