Norman Finkelstein
Dr. Finkelstein’s most recent book is “'This Time We Went Too Far': Truth and Consequences of the Gaza Invasion" (OR Books, 2010).
A central premise of Knowing Too Much is that mainstream scholarship on the Israel-Palestine conflict has in recent years achieved impressive levels of objectivity and that consequently much of the propaganda from which Israel benefited has been dispelled. Nonetheless, full-fledged “pro”-Israel frauds masquerading as scholarship still receive mainstream validation. Elsewhere I have documented one such case.1 Here I document another one. These hoaxes provide, as it were, backhanded validation of the core thesis in this book: the foundations of the official Zionist narrative have been so completely shattered that attempts to restore Israel’s pristine image must rely on preposterous inferences and speculations.
In their book Foxbats Over Dimona: The Soviets’ Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War,2 Israeli writers Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez put forth a highly provocative thesis. The June 1967 war marked, according to them, the climax of a manifold Soviet conspiracy to destroy Israel’s nuclear-weapons program. Additionally, they allege that not only the Soviets but also the Arabs, Americans and Israelis have participated in a “cover-up” of this conspiracy for the past 40 years, until their own “laborious sleuthing”3 finally unearthed and made sense of it.
The central argument of Foxbats is fairly straightforward. Beginning in the early 1960s, the Soviet Union began to panic that Israel was on the verge of producing nuclear weapons at its Dimona reactor. The Soviets and their Arab client states lacked, however, a legitimate pretext for launching a preemptive strike. In search of a credible alibi, the Soviets plotted with Arab leaders to lure Israel into attacking first and then planned to destroy the Dimona reactor in a counterattack, which the United States would acquiesce in because Israel was the aggressor. This minutely orchestrated conspiracy worked perfectly until the climactic moment of 5 June, when the unanticipated destructiveness of Israel’s first strike eliminated the possibility of an effective reprisal. It was, in the authors’ phrase, an “inept conspiracy.”4
It would be hard to exaggerate the magnitude of their alleged revelations. It is not just that no evidence of such a conspiracy has surfaced in the vast documentary record on the June 1967 war and that it has eluded the attention of scores of trained scholars who have pored over this record. What is yet more remarkable, not one of the co-conspirators in this multitudinously ramified Soviet plot has yet stepped forward to bear witness to it. After the June war, the Egyptian leadership fell out in mutual recriminations over responsibility for the military debacle, but no one pinned blame on a Soviet plot. After President Anwar Sadat expelled the Soviet Union from Egypt in 1972 and denounced it while realigning with the United States, he did not use this ripe occasion to expose the Soviet plot, and neither did any of the Egyptians who subsequently wrote memoirs of the war. After the Soviet Union imploded in 1989 and a lucrative cottage industry sprang up of ex-Communists testifying to the countless perfidies (real and imagined) of the Soviet era, none of the conspirators stepped forward to expose this Soviet plot. And the authors never make clear what motives the United States and Israel might have had in perpetuating the cover-up.5
Nonetheless, it cannot be ruled out a priori that pieces of evidence might have turned up that compel a new assessment of the historical record. The authors do and do not make such a case. They acknowledge that they have not found a “smoking gun” such as a transparently incriminating archival document. Rather they claim to have amassed an “astonishing number of facts,”6 which if properly contextualized — this is the crucial point — provide ample proof for their overarching thesis. Insofar as the validity of their study stands or falls on this alleged new evidence, there appears to be no alternative except to go through the salient pieces they adduce one by one.
It might as well be said at the outset that I could not detect any substantive evidence in their study to support the claim of a vast Soviet conspiracy and cover-up. If one discounts the breathless prose that introduces each new “disclosure”; the hysterical italics used to embellish banal statements; the “special” techniques resorted to for decoding documents; the reliance on anonymous and otherwise dubious sources; the speculative propositions of what “could,” “may,” “might,” “must have” and “possibly” happened, which then mysteriously metamorphose later in the text into dead certainties; and the outright mangling and misrepresentation of source material — what remains of their allegedly tantalizing evidence can barely fill a thimble. The authors compare their “prodigious” labor of “setting straight the historical record” to a “10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, of which we receive a random five pieces in the mail every week.”7 To judge by the evidence adduced in their book, most of what they received was junk mail.
THE MOTIVE
The authors point to multiple motives behind the Soviet conspiracy. To begin with, “at least part of the Soviet leadership” allegedly wanted to liquidate Israel. To document this fact, the authors cite an “affidavit” presented to them by a “former Soviet officer” who claimed to have heard Defense Minister Andrei Grechko declare in 1967, “The 50th year of the Great October Socialist Revolution will be the last year of the existence of the State of Israel.”8 In addition, the Soviets were allegedly hoping for a “dramatic deed” to mark the Soviet anniversary. To prove this, the authors cite KGB operatives who allegedly “stressed the importance of ‘active measures’ for commemorating the anniversary.” Were this not proof enough of their sinister designs, the authors also quote an “unnamed Soviet diplomat at the United Nations” who “appeared to betray this preoccupation in an inverted form by ‘saying they would…not get involved in a war on their 50th anniversary’” (authors’ emphasis).9 This piece of evidence attests to a perfidious Soviet plot because Communists say the opposite of what they mean. Similarly, when Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko told Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban that, because “Israel does not aspire to surround and crush the USSR, the Soviet Union has no reason to fear Israel or to harbor hostility toward it,” Eban “must have taken it as a very serious warning” because Gromyko said it with a “grin.”10
The main Soviet motive, however, was allegedly to prevent Israel from acquiring nuclear weapons. It is not a matter of dispute that from the early 1960s the Kremlin, as well as the Arab capitals and even Washington, were alarmed by Israel’s nuclear program. The only pertinent evidence would have to show that this dread impelled the Soviets to plot an attack on Israel. The authors do indeed purport to have discovered a “sensational document” that “utterly surprised” them in a recently published “official collection of Soviet diplomatic papers.”11 They cite this incriminating portion of it:
Memorandum of the Department for Middle Eastern Countries of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR on Israel’s Intent to Possess Atomic Weapons
23 February 1966
Top Secret
On 13 December 1965, one of the leaders of the Israel Communist party, Comrade Sneh, informed the Soviet Ambassador in Tel Aviv about his conversation (9 December 1965) with the adviser to the prime minister of Israel, Gariel, in which the latter declared Israel’s intention to produce its own atomic bomb.12
The authors surmise (on scant evidence, but it hardly matters) that “Gariel” must have been head of Israeli intelligence agencies Isser Harel and proceed to assert that “the magnitude, motives, and consequences of Harel’s disclosures appear to be of historic proportions.” It is hard, however, to make out why. It is purported that, because “Gariel” said “developing an atomic bomb and intended to arm itself with such a weapon, the main news for Moscow must have been, not the Israeli intent, but the fact that it had not yet been realized and that a window of opportunity still existed to prevent its fruition” (authors’ emphases). But it would only have been “news for Moscow” if Israel’s intention had in fact been realized and the window had been closed; the intention itself was already common knowledge. Moscow seems hardly to have imputed “enormous significance” (as the authors claim) to the “news,” for their official reaction quoted later in the book was Soviet-era boilerplate: “Tell Comrade Sneh that in Moscow there is full confidence that Israel’s Communists and other progressive forces, who correctly assess the gravity of certain Israeli circles’ extremist policy, will in case of need be capable of recruiting broad masses in the country against such a policy.”13
The authors repeatedly stress that Soviet spies had infiltrated Israel’s nuclear program and that, between them and Soviet spy satellites, the Kremlin was fully apprised of the “actual nature of Israel’s ‘textile plant’ at Dimona” and “had excellent intelligence on Israel’s nuclear progress.”14 What then could be the “historic” import of “Gariel’s” declaration? Sneh was the head of the Israeli Communist party and was suspected by Israelis of being a Soviet spy. Why, then, would the Soviets attach any special significance to what Israel’s chief spy would openly declare to a suspected Soviet spy? The authors indirectly answer this question by speculating that Harel “might” also have been a Soviet spy.15 They do not speculate on whether Harel “might” have assassinated JFK.
Seemingly aware that their “sensational” document reporting the “disclosures” of “Gariel,” and the Soviet reaction to it, barely rises to the banal, the authors try a different tack. The fact that it says nothing is immaterial, they explain, because it could not have been otherwise: “It would be precisely the most important, forceful, and potentially fateful operational decisions that would not be recorded” in a Soviet document “so, whether and how the USSR’s leadership decided to respond, politically or militarily, to Harel’s disclosure cannot be expected to appear in any document — certainly none that is likely to be released anytime soon” (authors’ emphasis).16 But, on this premise, the wonder is why the authors did not just cite blank sheets of paper.
LAYING THE TRAP
A turning point in the plot allegedly took place in December 1966 at a Soviet Central Committee plenary meeting, although “remarkably the published version of this conclave’s resolutions made no explicit reference at all to the Middle East.” The absence of any evidence poses no problem for the authors because it was “an omission that more probably reflects secret decisions than an actual disregard of this high-priority issue in the deliberations.”17 (Mercifully, they do not put “secret decisions” in italics.) The plenum’s covert resolutions were then allegedly confirmed a few months later, when Soviet party boss Leonid Brezhnev “notified” Polish party boss Wladislaw Gomulka that a “decisive blow” was about to be dealt American interests in the Middle East, “even at the cost of sacrificing Nasser.” At any rate, this is what Gomulka’s interpreter recalled hearing several years later after this interpreter’s defection to the West, when he also said that, in June 1967, he “understood in retrospect” that “Nasser was tempted by the Soviets.”18
It is alleged that the Kremlin orchestrated each step in the build-up to the June 1967 war. In February 1966, a radical faction seized power in Syria. Although “there is as yet no direct evidence” of a connection between this coup and the Soviet conspiracy, the authors surmise that “the parallel timing indicates that…[they] were at least simultaneously undertaken as facets of the USSR’s same overall strategy.”19 Acting in cahoots with the Kremlin, the Syrians are then said to have leveled “accusations of aggressive designs” against Israel for the purpose of “precipitating a conflict that might be used to end Israel’s nuclear development.”20 Rather than being pretexts to justify belligerency, however, these Syrian accusations were, according to Israeli strategic analyst Zeev Maoz, firmly grounded in reality: “Israel’s policy had an important impact on the process that led to the Six-Day War. Israeli misconduct during the border conflict with Syria was to a large extent responsible for the process of escalation that evolved into the May-June 1967 crisis.”21 In November 1966, Egypt and Syria signed a defense pact, allegedly at the Soviets’ behest.22 Then “Jordan fell into line” after Israel was apparently duped — exactly how is not made clear — into launching a bloody retaliatory raid against a Jordanian village, and consequently, “King Hussein was constrained to go along with the Egyptian-Syrian line.”23
In April 1967, a border incident between Syrians and Israelis escalated into a major aerial battle during which six Syrian MiGs were downed, and Israeli planes circled over Damascus. The authors credit the theory that it was “initiated by the Soviets.”24 But, according to Moshe Dayan, this sort of border incident that climaxed in the dogfight was routinely instigated by Israel.25 In early May 1967, after a succession of ominous developments, it was widely anticipated that Israel was going to attack Syria. The Kremlin then privately relayed to various high-level Egyptian officials information it had obtained portending an imminent attack. The consensus among historians is that the Soviets got wind of the Israeli war plan, although they (or their informants) exaggerated its dimensions.26 The authors dismiss this interpretation as “the most far-fetched” and instead maintain that the “patently preposterous” and “blatantly bogus” Soviet message was yet one more step in the carefully orchestrated plot.27 They refute the broad scholarly consensus by minimizing the importance of one of the official Israeli threats,28 and by excising from their account the many more official threats as well as the wealth of other evidence showing that — in the words of Israeli historian Ami Gluska — “the Soviet assessment from mid-May 1967 that Israel was about to strike at Syria was correct and well founded” and that “Soviet Intelligence sources must have been aware of this fact.”29 It is also cause for wonder why the Kremlin would go through the trouble of fabricating this message and haphazardly conveying it in secret through multiple emissaries to senior Egyptian officials, if these Egyptian officials were themselves co-conspirators. The authors speculate that the actual target of the disinformation campaign was “lower echelons in both Moscow and Cairo, who had not been privy to the plan, as well as for external propaganda purposes.” It is unclear, however, why factotums and outsiders, all of whom remained ignorant of this complex and convoluted conveyance of privileged information, could have been persuaded by it.
The authors also purport to have unearthed new evidence demonstrating that the Soviet message to Egypt triggered the plot’s implementation.30 It is a postwar speech by Brezhnev to the Soviet Central Committee, copies of which were found in the East German and Polish party archives. The crucial portion quoted by the authors reads in full,
In mid-May — and to this I want to draw your attention — reports reached us that Israel was intending to land a military blow on Syria and other Arab states. The Politburo resolved to bring this information to the attention of the governments of the UAR and Syria (authors’ emphases).
Homing in on the italicized words, the authors declare, “Seldom does such significance hinge on a single phrase in any document.” For, according to them, it provides “verification of a Soviet ‘grand design’” that “included the elimination of Dimona.” One searches in vain, however, for the grounding in that single phrase of these whopping inferences. The reader might be excused for concluding that this passage confirms from a “startling” source the conventional wisdom on the impetus behind the Soviet warning. Beyond the “single phrase” revelation, the authors also allege that the Brezhnev speech contained many more “crucial factual disclosures” and “startling statements.” Alas, we will never know what they were, because the text was “almost certainly revised” before being distributed to other Communist parties. They further allege that another “key phrase” confirming the Kremlin plot, although not in Brezhnev’s speech, “was more likely included” in another text.
After the Soviet warning, Nasser in mid-May sent Egyptian troops into the Sinai. He then called for the removal of UN peacekeepers (UNEF) from the Egyptian-Israeli border and announced a blockade of the Straits of Tiran, closing the Israeli port of Eilat to shipping. The consensus among historians is that these last initiatives of Nasser caught the Soviets off guard. Indeed, in a passage of the secret speech that the authors quote, Brezhnev says these steps “came as a complete surprise.”31 According to the authors, however, two months earlier, in March 1967, the Soviet Politburo had adopted a most precise “plan, of which the eviction of UNEF and the blockade of Eilat were central features.”32 They know this — or, alternatively, that an Egyptian plan was implemented with “Soviet consent…if not instigation” and “Soviet collusion” — because
• At the end of March, Cairo newspapers reported that Gromyko would meet with Nasser to “discuss the problems of the United Nations peace-keeping forces in Gaza.”
• At the end of May, an “obviously embarrassed” Soviet official told the American ambassador in Moscow “after a long pause [that] he thought Nasser had acted on his own.” An Egyptian official who admitted “not to be in the know” and “dislike[d]” both Nasser and the Soviets, told this same U.S. ambassador that, although the Soviets did not publicly endorse Nasser’s moves, it was “not important because Soviets [are] supporting [Egypt] ‘in other ways.’”
• In his postwar speech, Brezhnev stated that “following the Egyptian moves” he attempted to “lessen the pressure of the Western powers” (authors’ emphasis).
It will be noticed that these scraps scarcely demonstrate that Nasser was implementing a Soviet or joint plot. To be sure, the authors do point to one other devastating proof of Soviet culpability:
It is noteworthy that Nasser cited party authority when he stated on 26 May 1967: “I was authorized by the Arab Socialist Union’s High Executive to implement this plan [moving forces into Sinai, removing UNEF, and closing the Straits] at the right time. The right time came when Syria was threatened with aggression” (authors’ emphasis and interpolations).33
Were it not for the authors’ singular decoding technique, who would have guessed that the “Arab Socialist Union’s High Executive” really meant “Soviet Communist Party’s Politburo”?
The “conventional narrative,” according to the authors, is that at the end of May “the USSR’s policy was aimed at deescalating the crisis.”34 But this mistake also springs from the inability of the untutored eye to read Soviet documents. When the Kremlin privately urged restraint on the Arabs, replying with a “resolute ‘nyet’” to an Egyptian first strike, and when the Kremlin privately exhorted Israel “not to increase the tension and not to escalate the situation to the point of letting the weapons talk,” its real purpose, according to the authors, was to “precipitate a crisis” by luring Israel into a first strike.35 In other words, the more the Kremlin counseled against war, the more it must be understood to have supported it. One is hard-pressed, however, to conceive a statement by a Soviet leader that by such a computation would not constitute proof of its nefarious designs. In another “sensational” revelation, the authors report that, at the end of May, a double agent working for Israel conveyed to his KGB handlers Israel’s intention to launch a first strike. (It is argued that Israel was hoping such a message would induce the Soviets to pressure Nasser into backing down.) The authors assert that this message “must have been music to the Soviets’ ears” and “may have provided the clincher” for them — even if, according to the available evidence, the Soviets urgently sought to avert war and, anyhow, according to the double agent, the KGB “might not have passed” his tip to Soviet leaders.36 It ought not to come as a surprise at this point that Nasser’s avowals at the end of May to Soviet leaders that Egypt “never will start first the armed conflict” (authors’ emphasis); to American leaders that he “would wait until the Israelis had moved”; to Jordanian leaders that he “was quite prepared…in the event the USG [United States government] intervened militarily against him to ask for Soviet assistance” — that these unremarkable statements become further evidence of the “grand design” after being plugged into the authors’ program.37
THE PLOT THICKENS
The centerpiece of the authors’ brief is their allegation that Soviet pilots flew state-of-the-art MiG-25s (Foxbats) over Israel’s nuclear facility at Dimona just days before Israel attacked. The authors have said that these Soviet reconnaissance overflights “encapsulate” the book’s thesis and constitute “Exhibit A” in support of it.38 Before scrutinizing the evidence marshaled, it merits first querying, what difference would it make even if the allegation were true? Presumably these Foxbat flights were the linchpin of the Soviet conspiracy. But how? It has already been noted that, according to the authors, through espionage the Soviets were kept fully apprised of Israel’s nuclear program at Dimona. The overflights could not then have provided vital intelligence, and the authors do not pretend otherwise. Instead, their importance is said to be that they were “a direct display of Soviet military prowess” and, accordingly, the “ultimate provocation” designed to “create such concern in Israel that it would surely launch a first strike.”39 It is hard to make sense of this point, insofar as the authors simultaneously maintain that the Kremlin so successfully concealed the Foxbat overflights that until now Israel itself had been totally unaware of them.40 What was not known, plainly could not have intimidated and provoked. Thus, it appears that, even if Exhibit A were true, its value as evidence of a Soviet plot would still be nil.
But is it even true? The authors focus on the whereabouts of a highly decorated Soviet flying ace named Aleksandr Vybornov.41 Piecing together an “extraordinary disclosure,” an “unprecedented assertion” and a “momentous contribution,” they claim to have irrefutably proved (“we now know”) that Vybornov was dispatched by the Kremlin to Egypt just before the June 1967 war to ready the “Soviet air intervention” once Israel took the bait, and that he also must have flown the Foxbat over Dimona “that in time brought the crisis to its climax.” The only problem is that no verifiable evidence places Vybornov in Egypt before the June war; all the verifiable evidence places him there only after the war.42
The references cited by the authors, as well as others not cited by them,43 state that General Vybornov arrived in Egypt after the June war as part of a high-level Soviet delegation to provide immediate military assistance. Such accounts square with the well-known fact that after the June war, in the ensuing War of Attrition, Soviet pilots stationed in Egypt did go on military missions. There is no credible evidence that Soviet pilots actively participated in the run-up to the June 1967 war or in the war itself.44
The authors nonetheless maintain that Vybornov must have been in Egypt before and during the June war because: (1) a 1993 article reports Vybornov explicitly stating that he “witnessed the Israeli attack on an Egyptian airfield”45; and (2) a pair of reputable sources — Lieutenant Colonel (ret.) David McFarland of the U.S. Air Force and Brigadier General (ret.) Amir Nachumi of the Israeli Air Force — both personally heard Vybornov speak about “his Egyptian exploits.” However, the 1993 article does not state or imply that Vybornov witnessed an Israeli attack on an Egyptian airfield. Of the two key informants who, according to the authors, “definitely” and “precisely” pinpointed Vybornov’s “Egyptian exploits” during the period “leading up to” the June 1967 war (authors’ emphases),46 McFarland emailed me that he did “not know the exact date,”47 while Nachumi emailed me, “I had spoken to Vybronov [sic] indeed….I do not recall anything said by him referring [to] the Six-Days War.”48
The authors left no stone unturned in their search for evidence of the alleged Soviet conspiracy. Every lead in every remote Russian provincial newspaper was tracked down for new clues and “disclosures.” Every potential witness, however indirect, was interviewed. Strangely, however, the authors never bothered to contact Vybornov. It is not as if he is inaccessible. He lives, not in a distant Russian town, but in retirement in Moscow, mentally lucid and vigorous. On 7 March 2008 at my request, a Russian translator put several questions to Vybornov, which he answered after first consulting his notes from the period in question. Here’s what Exhibit A of “Exhibit A” had to say:
Did Soviet leaders send you on a mission to Egypt before the June 1967 war?
No.
Did you fly a MiG-25 (Foxbat) airplane on a reconnaissance mission over the Dimona reactor or over any other place in Israel before the June 1967 war?
No.
Did any Soviet pilot go on a reconnaissance mission in a MiG-25 over the Dimona reactor or over any other place in Israel before the June 1967 war?
No.
Did you personally witness the destruction of an Egyptian airfield during the June 1967 war?
No. Nothing even close to this happened.
Did you go to Egypt before, during or after the June 1967 war?
I went to Egypt in July 1967 for one month and a half. I trained Egyptian pilots to fly the MiG-17, MiG-21 and Su-7.
The authors state that because “the Middle Eastern mission was not his main claim to fame,” Vybornov “would have little motive to fabricate its incidental mention in his résumé.”49 Their contentions that, before the June 1967 war, Vybornov went to Egypt in order to prepare an air assault on Israel and that he flew a Foxbat over Dimona must — in light of his categorical denials and their own reasoning — be false.50
Although they fail to adduce any evidence that, on the eve of the June war, Soviet-piloted Foxbats flew over Dimona, the authors nonetheless proudly proclaim, “When we presented our MiG-25 hypothesis to a former Israeli intelligence officer who specialized in the Soviet military, his response was: ‘Of course.’”51 The corresponding endnote cites an anonymous interview.
Once conclusively proven, the Foxbat overflights become a crucial nexus in the alleged Soviet plot. Here’s a typical passage:
Badran arrived in Moscow on the 25th, with the plan already in hand. Grechko’s order to carry out the second sortie over Dimona (as Vybornov specified, it had to be authorized personally and individually by the minister) was issued no later than the morning of 26 May, while Badran’s talks in Moscow were deadlocked. Several hours after the flight was completed and its report was flown directly to Grechko, Nasser was handed the letter that Kosygin dispatched the same day. The flight might have been mentioned in its text, which has never been published, or added orally by Pozhidayev (who was probably informed directly by Vybornov as well), or communicated through Badran. Nasser’s compliance with the Soviet request not to strike first by bombing Israel may well have been due at least in major part to this token of the Soviets’ continued determination to provoke Israel into a preemptive attack.52
The cast of characters and particulars are of less importance than the wondrous new speculations (“might have,” “probably,” “may well have”) that are conjured on the basis of “the flight” — itself a speculation lacking a particle of proof and almost certainly false, yet confidently asserted with the definite article. The absence of proof in the first instance of Soviet overflights also does not deter the authors from going on to assert that, although no “direct evidence has emerged yet,” nonetheless it is “reasonable to assume that the United States military was aware” of them. It also does not deter the authors from going on to speculate on whether “General Vybornov’s mission…has been suppressed to this day” by Israel.53 On one point, however, it would be unreasonable to quarrel with the authors: the Foxbats over Dimona “hypothesis” truly is Exhibit A of the book’s substance.
THE CONSPIRACY BACKFIRES
The Kremlin’s plot was foiled, according to the authors, because the unanticipated devastation wrought by Israel’s first strike preempted a joint Soviet-Arab retaliation. In yet another bombshell, it is alleged that a Soviet mole in Israel “with access to information at cabinet level” had obtained the precise date of Israel’s attack.54 It might be wondered why the Kremlin did not alert its Arab co-conspirators that Israel was poised to deliver a crippling blow and achieve a swift victory. The authors just barely take notice of this elementary question, while their response once again strains credulity: at the very last moment, the Kremlin botched its finely calibrated plot, failing to do the obvious — warning Nasser — due to bureaucratic “syndromes that have bedeviled not only the Soviet system.”55 The authors also allege that the Kremlin’s plans for the retaliatory strike included a massive naval invasion of Haifa,56 strategic bomber attacks and even a nuclear blast,57 although whether it set the “goal of eradicating Israel…remains unanswerable — probably forever.”58 In the real world, Soviet leaders were split over how to react to Israel’s surprise attack, some counseling (or rumored to be counseling) military intervention in support of the Arabs.59 The authors construe any Soviet statement after the attack counseling intervention as proof of the conspiracy, just as they construed any Soviet statement before the attack counseling restraint as proof of the conspiracy. But if the conspiracy phantasmagoria they concocted is stripped away, the handful of credible statements cited by them simply confirm what is already known.
The authors also allege that, although the Soviets were not directly responsible for the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty,60 “disclosures from United States and Israeli records” show that “the circumstances are covered with Soviet fingerprints”; indeed “there beckons a seductive but unsubstantiated scenario, in which the Soviets deliberately lured the Israelis into attacking the United States ship.”61 If Soviet culpability is not better known, it is because the United States and Israel have both been engaged in a cover-up.62 Disappointingly, the authors present no new “disclosures” on the U.S. cover-up of Soviet complicity in 9/11.
The shoddy material examined in this chapter attests to the flimsiness of the historical foundations on which apologists must now mount the case for Israel. Isn’t it only a matter of time before the entire fabrication collapses? The one and only intriguing question posed by their otherwise preposterous book is this: Did the authors really believe what they wrote, or was it a practical joke sprung on those experts who pontificate on — and through their partisanship or irresponsibility prolong the agony of — the Israeli-Arab conflict?
1 Norman G. Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (University of California Press, 2005; expanded paperback edition, 2008). The book I exposed was Alan Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel (Hoboken, NJ, 2003).
2Foxbats over Dimona: The Soviets’ Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War, by Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez (Yale University Press, 2008).
3 Ibid., p. 9.
4 Ibid., p. 7.
5 They speculate that “perhaps out of reluctance in Israel to acknowledge the close call it had faced, and in the United States to admit that it had done little to thwart the Soviet plan, the official narrative and academic convention in both countries discarded any reference to the deliberate Soviet instigation of the crisis” (ibid., p. 13). .” It will surely come as news in Israel, where its prospects on the eve of the June 1967 war have been typically compared to a “second Holocaust” and its subsequent victory called a “miracle,” that it has been in denial about “the close call it had faced.”
6 Ibid., p. 6.
7 Ibid., p. 9.
8 Ibid., pp. 24-25.
9 Ibid., p. 26.
10 Ibid., p. 32.
11 Ibid., pp. 35-36.
12 Ibid., pp. 36-37.
13 Ibid., p. 50.
14 Ibid., pp. 34-35, 43, 56, 75, 133.
15 Ibid., pp. 43-44.
16 Ibid., pp. 50-51; cf. p. 81.
17 Ibid., p. 72.
18 Ibid., pp. 79, 237 n4. Although the authors do not mention it, according to this interpreter, Brezhnev shouted his revelations about Nasser during a break at the opera “and obviously had difficulty finishing his sentence in a logical manner. Even though he was already slightly drunk, he poured several more cognacs into his stomach” (see Erwin Weit, Ostblock intern: 13 Jahre Dolmetscher fűr die polnische Partei- und Staatsfűhrung [Hamburg, 1970], p. 164). It would appear that many of the disclosures in Foxbats come from Russians in an inebriated state.
19Foxbats, p. 59.
20 Ibid., pp. 65-67.
21 See Norman Finkelstein, Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Love Affair with Israel Is Coming to an End (forthcoming), Chapter 2.
22Foxbats, p. 69.
23 Ibid., p. 76. For the Israeli retaliatory raid in the West Bank village of Samu, see Norman Finkelstein, Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Love Affair with Israel Is Coming to an End (forthcoming), Chapter 2.
24Foxbats, p. 74.
25 See Norman Finkelstein, Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Love Affair with Israel Is Coming to an End (forthcoming), Chapter 2.
26 Ibid.
27Foxbats, pp. 90, 102, 103.
28 Ibid., p. 90.
29 See Norman Finkelstein, Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Love Affair with Israel Is Coming to an End (forthcoming), Chapter 2.
30Foxbats, pp. 95-97.
31 Ibid., p. 105.
32 Ibid., p. 77; cf. p. 68. For the Egyptian troop movements, removal of the UNEF and the declared Straits blockade, see Norman Finkelstein, Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Love Affair with Israel Is Coming to an End (forthcoming), Chapter 2.
33Foxbats, pp. 77, 105-6, 109-10, 236n47, 244n27.
34 For this “conventional narrative,” see Galia Golan, “The Soviet Union and the Outbreak of the June 1967 Six-Day War,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Winter 2006, p. 10.
35Foxbats, pp. 113-16, 119-20.
36 Ibid., pp. 113-14.
37 Ibid., pp. 116, 142.
38 Ibid., p. 121, and Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez, “The Soviet Military Role in the Arab-Israeli Conflict: Research Update I—The Full Story,” Progressive Conservative, USA, October 24, 2007.
39Foxbats, pp. 11, 27, 120, 137. The authors also in passing speculate, citing no evidence whatsoever, that the purpose of the overflights was to test the missile defense around Dimona (ibid., p. 133).
40 Ibid., pp. 127-29. At the time, Israel assumed Egyptian-piloted MiG-21s had overflown Dimona.
41 Ibid., pp. 85-86, 131-33.
42 It was not possible to check sources such as “Report of a preliminary talk with Vybornov for a television production, provided to Isabella Ginor, who acted [as] a consultant, on 6 July 2006” (ibid., p. 239n43; cf. p. 248, nn31, 34). I did request from the authors information on many of their alleged sources and initially they were cooperative, but after I pointed out egregious misrepresentations in their citations they ceased corresponding.
43 George Mellinger, Yakovlev Aces of World War II (Osprey Publishing, 2005), p. 77.
44 The authors speculate on this point (Foxbats, pp. 174-75) with many “ifs” and “may haves” but provide no evidence apart from “rumors” and this “fascinating bit of hearsay”: an American seaman told the authors that he was told by his Russian coworker that he (the coworker) was told by one of his Russian “military buddies” that after “many glasses of refreshment” his (the military buddy’s) “Air Force friend admitted flying Egyptian planes during the Six-Day War. He did swear all his friends to secrecy, though.”
45 Ibid., p. 86; cf. pp. 131, 158. The article, V. Vakhlamov, “Aleksandr Vybornov,” Zhurnal As (1993), is posted at http://airaces.narod.ru/all3/vyborn_ai.htm. I am grateful to Erik Abramov for translating it.
46 In an email I queried the authors, “Did you ask Nachumi and McFarland whether Vybornov was referring to his ‘Egyptian exploits’ during the June 1967 war?” (February 23, 2008). The words quoted in the text are from their reply (February 24, 2008).
47 Email, dated February 25, 2008.
48 Email, dated February 25, 2008.
49Foxbats, p. 86.
50 After publication of their book, the authors announced yet another “extraordinary disclosure”: the current spokesperson of the Russian air force publicly acknowledged that “in 1967” a Soviet pilot executed a “combat operation in Egypt,” and “reconnaissance flights over the territory of Israel in a MiG-25RB aircraft.” However, the spokesperson did not state that the combat operation occurred during the June 1967 war, he did not state that reconnaissance flights occurred before the June 1967 war, and he did not state that these flights were over Dimona. The pilot himself reportedly denied all the allegations. David Horovitz, “Russian Confirms Soviet Sorties over Dimona in ’67,” Jerusalem Post, August 23, 2007.
51Foxbats, p. 133.
52 Ibid., pp. 136-37.
53 Ibid., pp. 107, 135.
54 Ibid., pp. 144-45, 157.
55 Ibid., p. 98.
56 They acclaim “memoirs” written by a Donetsk school administrator for a “local newspaper, followed by interviews with us, which he supported with photographs” (of his family?) as the “first published evidence” that the planned naval invasion was a “historical fact.” They also acclaim a 2003 interview in a Belarussian Defense Ministry newspaper with a former Soviet soldier, who alleged that his marine artillery company was attacked while crossing the Suez Canal, as “the first direct confirmation” and “striking corroboration,” albeit “short on specifics,” of a Soviet naval landing. (The soldier refused to be interviewed by the authors, but this reticence only proves that “the decades-long cover-up continues.”) To prove Leonid Brezhnev’s personal involvement in this naval invasion, they gesture to a description in his World War II memoir of a Soviet naval landing in the Black Sea that “corresponds neatly to the Soviets’ planned Mediterranean operation in 1967.” And, to demonstrate Brezhnev’s complicity in the grand plot, it is noted that he described the Israeli attack in June 1967 as “treacherous”—“an epithet traditionally used in Soviet parlance for the German invasion of the USSR in 1941.” Was Hitler’s attack also a Soviet conspiracy? (Ibid., pp. 150, 176-77)
57 Here’s a proof of the planned nuclear blast and of its cover-up:
An electrician’s mate on the nuclear sub K-125, then in Alexandria, claimed in 1992 that his captain was instructed: “If Israel drops an atomic bomb on Egypt or Syria — nuclear missiles should be fired on it [Israel] in order to obliterate it.” But when we contacted this former sailor a decade later, he retracted his version, claiming that a newspaper reporter had misunderstood him (she, however, recorded the interview and stands by its accuracy). He professed fears for the safety of his family, despite their present domicile in Israel — fears that, even if unfounded, indicate the extent of the Russian cover-up as impressed on the servicemen involved. (ibid., p. 140)
58 Ibid., p. 24.
59 Golan, “The Soviet Union,” pp. 14-15.
60 An Israeli joint air and sea assault on 8 June 1967 killed 34 American servicemen and wounded at least 173 on the USS Liberty.
61Foxbats, pp. 180-81, 185.
62 Ibid., pp. 134-35, 181, 184, 188; cf. p. 201 for Israel’s alleged cover-up of Soviet soldiers it took prisoner. Although “Israeli officialdom…flatly denied” holding Soviet prisoners, the authors know otherwise because two former Mossad chiefs issued the denials while “wearing broad grins.”
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