U.S. rulers plotted with Israeli puppets for war of aggression against Arab masses

Workers World, now in its 50th year of publication, is reprinting articles from past issues. This article was written after the 1967 war between Israel and a group of Arab countries. WW’s youth group, Youth Against War & Fascism, had just organized a demonstration at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in New York protesting U.S.-Israeli aggression. Today, 60 years since the Israeli state was brutally planted on Palestinian land, it continues to do Washington’s bidding in the Middle East.

The Washington-Israeli scheme to consolidate the gains of Israel’s aggression against the Arab states has become increasingly clear in the last week. The plot is simple. While U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Arthur Goldberg rambled on about “cease-fires” and “peaceful solutions for all parties concerned” and piously appealed for “the territorial integrity of all Middle East countries,” Israel’s armed forces pushed deeper into Arab territory. These sanctimonious mouthings at Security Council meetings were intended to mask the U.S. commitment to Israeli aggression and prepare the way for Israel to bargain and legitimize the fruits of its aggression.

The Israeli government, its bankers, politicians and military brass, acted as agents for U.S. imperialism’s vast and strategic Middle East oil empire that oppresses the Arab masses.

While President Lyndon Johnson double-talked about finding diplomatic solutions to the United Arab Republic’s blockade of Israeli shipping, Israeli officials were telling a different story in Tel Aviv.

Washington gave Tel Aviv the green light

In an article in Israel Digest of June 2, 1967, headed “America’s Unambiguous Stand,” it was related how Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, following his briefings with Foreign Minister Abba Eban, who had just returned from secret meetings in Washington, told the Knesset (Parliament), “The Israeli government was deeply impressed by the unambiguous stand of the U.S. in favor of the safeguarding of passage in these international waters.”

Though couched in diplomatic language, it was clear to the Israeli leaders that the U.S. government would sponsor Israel in a war against the Arab states.

If further evidence were needed that Israel had the green light from the U.S., it was revealed in an interview in U.S. News and World Report of April 17 following the prime minister’s trip to the U.S. Eshkol was asked if Israel would expect U.S. help in a showdown. He answered, “When we asked for more arms we were told ... don’t spend your money. We are here. The Sixth Fleet is here.”

Dayan’s Vietnam training

The U.S. commitment had been put into specific terms a number of months earlier when Maj. Gen. Moshe Dayan was invited by the U.S. to visit Vietnam. The “hero” of the 1956 Sinai invasion took a leave of absence from his post as a member of the Knesset to make this very special and significant trip. What made his trip so ominous is that prior to his leaving for Vietnam, this soldier-politician posing as a “journalist” held secret briefings with the top U.S. advisers to President Johnson: Walt Rostow, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Gen. Maxwell Taylor—the architects of the U.S. aggression against Vietnam. On his return from Vietnam, Dayan once again went into top-level briefings with McNamara, Under Secretary of State Nicholas B. Katzenbach, and the top Army brass.

This information was reported in an article in the May 1967 Jewish Currents by Louis Harab, in a review of Dayan’s book, “Diary of the Sinai Campaign.”

According to the article, Dayan was supposed to make recommendations to the top U.S. brass on how the war in Vietnam could be won. He interviewed U.S. generals in battle zones and accompanied units in operation. It is difficult to understand how this military puppet could give any advice to his imperialist masters who “wrote the book” on waging aggressive wars against oppressed people struggling for liberation. The truth is that he went to Vietnam, not as a journalist, not as a teacher, but as a student with notebook and pencil in hand. He was in Vietnam to learn the ways of waging wars of aggression against liberation struggles, to observe the destructive effects of napalm and anti-personnel weapons and how terror bombing affects the civilian population.

Is it not a testimony to the collusion and conspiracy of the U.S. and Israel governments that less than a year later Dayan, as Israeli Defense Minister, was putting his grisly lessons into practice on the Arab people?

While Johnson cynically talked about “neutrality” and “territorial integrity,” Washington was in a state of jubilation over the results of the Israeli aggression. Their pupil had learned his lesson well.

U.S. bank ‘aids’ puppets

In the midst of all this military scheming prior to the invasion, another event underscores the master-servant relationship. In March of this year, Walter Sauer, vice president of the U.S. Export-Import Bank, turned up in Tel Aviv. (The U.S. Export-Import Bank is a “bankers’ bank”—a consortium of large U.S. banks that together have a gigantic money pool to implement U.S. foreign rule.)

According to the Jerusalem Post Weekly of March 20, 1967, a few months before the Israeli invasion, Sauer had private meetings with Eshkol; the governor of the Bank of Israel, David Horowitz; and Finance Minister Pinchas Sapir. These meetings were to discuss Israel’s economic “slowdown,” as the Jerusalem Post called it, which was in reality a severe economic depression. Number 1 on the agenda was the discussion of how Wall Street financing could bail them out.

What is ironic about the Israel crisis is that it was precipitated by its relations with the U.S. They were in hock to U.S. businesses, who sold them military hardware (Douglas A-4 Skyhawk jet bombers, Hawk missiles, M-48 Patton tanks and other arms) and then loaned them money through interest-bearing Israeli bonds and other loans to pay the bills.

With military spending and payments on the national debt being the two largest items in its budget, Israel was running a debt to the imperialists of over $400 million a year, a substantial amount for a small state. What further aggravated the crisis is that Israel buys $220 million yearly in U.S. goods but exports only $65 million, a whopping four-to-one unfavorable balance of trade. In the past, Israel was able to meet some of this deficit by the reparations it received from West Germany, but the last payment was made in March. Finance Minister Sapir, typical of Wall Street stooges, blamed the workers for the crisis: “We have eaten and consumed more than we produced ... as if somebody else would foot the bill.”

Sauer, who holds the second-highest position in the Export-Import Bank, indicated his pleasure with this sentiment. At a luncheon held in his honor, he voiced his support for the government’s economic policy and said he was impressed with the economy, which “seemed far better than the impressions one received in the U.S. press.”

While the loyal servant of the Wall Street bankers was favorably impressed and it was clear that he would recommend further loans, Israeli workers were less than impressed with what Sauer called an “economic slowdown.”

Israeli workers riot for ‘bread or work’

On March 14, the New York Times reported that “rioters protested growing unemployment in Israel, stoned City Hall tonight, smashing windows and damaging the vehicles in the parking lot. ... The disturbance followed an orderly demonstration of several thousand workers ... organized by union committees in the Tel Aviv area. Some marchers said they were unemployed, but most attended as contingents from factories. They chanted ‘Bread and work’ and ‘We are against dismissals.’”

They were protesting about the 100,000 workers (over 10 percent of the work force) who are out on the street, as well as thousands more who are on short workweeks of two and three days. They were protesting against the government plan to use a wave of unemployment as a club to lower wages and worsen working conditions. Waves of strikes had broken out all over Israel—postal workers, milk delivery workers, garbage collectors and many others in the civil service.

What made the situation even more ominous for the workers was that a further swell of unemployment was expected as the citrus shipping season ended. Army conscripts were being demobilized and students graduated. Workers were so militant that they broke down the barriers that separated them from City Hall and fought the police, who used truncheons and shields to ward them off.

Hardest hit by unemployment are the Sephardim or “Oriental Jews” who emigrated from North Africa and the Middle East. Last to be hired, first to be fired, these Jewish immigrants work at the most menial and difficult tasks. From Yemen, Morocco and Iraq, they poured in, financed by the fund drives of the United Jewish Appeal in the U.S. Many of the dark-skinned Jewish immigrants who make up nearly 65 percent of the population are now destitute. They are segregated in Israeli villages and are subject to racial prejudice.

The procession of events culminating in the military action indisputably confirms that Israel was in a state of near collapse. The collusive friendship between the U.S. and the leaders of Israel was to wage all-out war against the Arab people.

The old-fashioned capitalist remedy for an ailing economy was prescribed for the wavering Israeli body economic–one injection labeled “military buildup,” to be followed by another labeled “military aggression.” The “remedy” had desirable side effects that ameliorated other weaknesses of the body politic, inducing the exhilarating fever of nationalism and chauvinism, which they hope will minimize the chronic ailments of unemployment and blunt the class struggle in Israel.

But the Israeli ruling class did not invade the Arab countries and precipitate a world crisis simply to stave off their own crisis. If they had tried such an act without the go-ahead from their masters in Washington, Ben-Gurion, Eshkol and Co. would have been stopped in their tracks by the imperialists.

Nevertheless, the internal crisis of the Israeli exploiting classes made them more than eager to go to war for Wall Street against the Arab revolution. Tel Aviv was thus able to create a war hysteria and demand unity of all the exploited Israelis so that Moshe Dayan could put into practice all the lessons patiently learned under the tutelage of Washington’s genocidal high command in Vietnam.