Hebrew Voices #56 – The Battle for the Six-Day War (Rebroadcast)

Michael Oren discussing the Six-Day War on Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon.In this episode of Hebrew Voices, The Battle for the Six Day War, Nehemia Gordon speaks with Michael Oren, the greatest living historian of modern Israel, to learn about the Six-Day War, the fight against Fake News, his adventures in the Zionist Underground, and how President Obama helped lay the foundations of a new Iranian empire. Michael Oren is an important member of the Israeli government who also holds a PhD in history from Princeton University.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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Hebrew Voices #56 - The Battle for the Six-Day War (Rebroadcast)

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Michael: The Six-Day War is one of the most dramatic episodes in human history.

Nehemia: It really is.

Michael: You’d have to work very hard to turn the Six-Day War into something boring.

Nehemia: Shalom, this is Nehemia Gordon and I am coming to you today from Jerusalem, from the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, and I am here with Deputy Minister of Diplomacy in the Prime Minister’s Office, Michael Oren. Michael Oren is the former Ambassador to the United States. He’s also the author of several books, actually, my favorite book on the Six-Day War called Six Days of War. He also wrote a book called Ally, about the relationship between the United States and Israel, and a book called Power, Faith and Fantasy.

Shalom, Deputy Minister of Diplomacy, Michael Oren.

Michael: Shalom, Nehemia.

Nehemia: You know, I’m a Bible scholar. I don’t have a big background in politics, so I contacted a Professor of Political Science at Tel Aviv University, and I said, “Who is this Michael Oren?” And can I read you what he said?

Michael: Let me hear.

Nehemia: This is from Michael Kochin, a Professor of Political Science at Tel Aviv University. He said, “Michael Oren is the greatest living historian to have written on Israel.”

Michael: Really?

Nehemia: Yeah. And he actually said that your teacher, Bernard Lewis, is the greatest living historian.

Michael: He’s 102, too.

Nehemia: Really? Wow! I just know I love your book. In fact, I read your book years ago, and before my nephew entered into the Golani Brigade I bought him a copy of your book so he’d understand what he was fighting for.

Now, I also contacted your former personal assistant, who happens to be my sister, and I said, “Give me the background on this man.” And I’m going to read you what she said. She said, “Michael Oren is a wonderful person who inspired me. He really is as great as he seems. Some people just seem great. He really is great.”

Michael: That’s right.

Nehemia: And look, I didn’t know that when I set up the interview, all I knew is I love this book you wrote on the Six Day War, which is a formative event in the history of the Jewish people and the Middle East. I want you to talk a little bit about the Six-Day War, which happened in 1967, as an existential war.

Michael: This book, when I wrote it – now 15 years have passed - came out at a time where the battle surrounding the Six-Day War was just beginning.

Nehemia: What do you mean, “the battle around the Six-Day War?” You don’t mean the fighting in the field?

Michael: No. The book opens with a general observation that all wars in history invariably become wars of history. It’s true of the American Civil War, it’s true of World War II, just about any war in history, the minute the guns fall silent, that’s when the pundits, the historians, the commentators begin arguing over whether the war was justified. Could it have been avoided? What was the behavior of the various participants, the combatants of the war? Was the outcome beneficial? Was it harmful? It’s true of any war.

But few wars are as contentious as the Six-Day War, because it was so short, because the outcome was so dramatic, and because it helped shape the Middle East, and because we’re still grappling with the long-term ramifications of that war. The war is particularly, particularly contentious, and the “war of the Six-Day War”, the historiographical war between one camp that says that Israel knew the war was going to come, that Israeli leaders wanted the war, they knew the Arabs were not a serious military threat, they knew that Israel would expand territorially, it was like a “bring it on” moment. And then, after the war, Israel made no effort whatsoever to reach peace with the Arabs, all it wanted was territorial aggrandizement.

And the other camp says that Israel had no idea that this war was coming. It did not anticipate it, did not plan any of these military actions. Israel did everything possible to avoid war. Even once the war broke out, Israel tried to limit the scope of the war. And then, in the immediate aftermath of the war, Israel reached its hand out in peace, and that hand was swatted away.

So, you have two very distinct camps fighting this war of history. And I wrote this book already when that contest had broken out, that conflict, if you will, had broken out.

And Israel, like the United States, like Great Britain and other Western-style democracies, all observe what’s known as the 30-year rule. The 30-year rule says that after 30 years, those once-secret diplomatic cables get declassified.

Nehemia: So if you wrote a history of the Six-Day War in 1995 it was pretty much outdated by…

Michael: Yes.

Nehemia: 2000. Wow.

Michael: And by the way, any country that observes the 30-year rule, the person who does the classification - it’s actually a position in the State of Israel - can determine that this document’s too sensitive, you can keep it classified for 50 years, for 100 years, indefinitely. It’s, by the way, one of the reasons I did not write a book about the 1973 Yom Kippur War, because so many of the documents are still classified.

Nehemia: Even now?

Michael: Even now.

Nehemia: But the Six-Day War was not so controversial in that way, and I would say 95 percent of the documents, at least, were declassified, and the rest have come to light since then. So, in most cases, I was the first person to set eyes on these documents in 30 years, and the image of this war that emerged was completely different than what I had learned as a kid, as someone who lived through this war, as a young person, what had come down to us through legends and sort of heroic stories.

Nehemia: You have a PhD in History.

Michael: Yes.

Nehemia: In other words, you’re not just the former Ambassador and a member of the Israeli Government, and the Deputy Minister, you actually have a PhD in history. So, you’re a professional historian as well as someone who’s been part of the history.

Michael: I’d like to think that way. My first book, which nobody reads… This book’s called The Origins of the Second Arab-Israeli War, Egypt-Israel and the Great Powers, 1952. This is a heavy-duty academic book based on my Princeton PhD. So the Six-Day War book I purposely wanted to make it an accessible book that a wider audience could enjoy, not just a professional audience, and what is lesser known about me is that I’m a novelist.

Nehemia: Oh, really?

Michael: I have published several novels. I’ll show them to you if you want.

Nehemia: Oh, I did not know that.

Michael: So, I took the tools of a historian and I took the sort of style of a novelist and I used it in the Six-Day War. And the Six-Day War is one of the most dramatic episodes in human history.

Nehemia: It really is.

Michael: There are very few stories… You’d have to work very hard to turn the Six-Day War into something boring.

Nehemia: So, your two novels are Sand Devil and Reunion.

Michael: And Reunion.

Nehemia: You know, one of the things to me that’s so dramatic as a Jew that really caught my attention for the Six-Day War, is I was reading in your book, and you mention how they dug 10,000 graves, the Israeli government did, anticipating… and at one point you said 14,000 graves it got to.

Michael: And they didn’t think it would be enough.

Nehemia: I was born after the Six-Day War happened, and it was just a fact that we’re so good at things that we defeated these much larger numbers, against the odds. And what you show in the book is that we could have easily lost the war.

Michael: Well, a government that’s digging 10,000 or 14,000 graves is not a government that expects to win a war very easily.

Nehemia: Right.

Michael: It’s not facing an enemy that it considers a pushover. That’s part of the evidence. When I went into these files, as the first person to do so in 30 years, it was a shock, because instead of seeing these sort of mythic Israeli leaders like Moshe Dayan, Levi Eshkol, the Prime Minister, I saw a government that was on the verge of panic, that felt that Israel was facing possible extinction.

Nehemia: So this is what I realized - the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War, as I hear this term over and over, “existential threat”, I didn’t fully understand it till I read your book and other books. Germany lost World War II, but Germany still continued to exist. The regime changed…

Michael: Excellent point. It’s very, very rare in history where any country faces an existential threat. Japan, for example.

Nehemia: Two nuclear bombs and they’re thriving now.

Michael: But still, no one tried to wipe Japan off the map. No one tried to throw the Japanese people into the ocean. That’s precisely what our enemies wanted to do.

Nehemia: And they openly said that.

Michael: And they still say it today. What does the Iranian regime say? They want to throw us into the ocean. They will wipe us off the map. Israel faces about six or seven existential threats every single day. It just shows you how deep the resilience of this country is. But the United States, I’m hard pressed to say whether it ever faced an existential threat. Perhaps during the Cold War, but it was never as immediate as having enemy armies massing on your border.

Nehemia: And there was mutually assured destruction in the case of the United States; the Arabs could wipe us off the map and there might be no consequences for them – or certainly in the 1960s that seemed to be the case. I read that we captured documents where Jordanians planned to massacre civilians.

Michael: Yes. It came up recently, just during the 50th anniversary. A prominent Israeli journalist came to me and said, “Is this true? Were there Jordanian documents?” and I was able through means that I’m not going to discuss here, acquire the Jordanian records of the war, which are really remarkable to read. And one of the documents actually fell into Israel’s hands…

Nehemia: During the war – it was captured.

Michael: During the war, is a Jordanian document that talks about capturing the Jerusalem corridor, the area between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and taking out the Israeli civilians and executing them. After the war, Israel sent an emissary, Yaakov Herzog, the brother of Chaim Herzog, the Israeli President, the uncle of the current head of the opposition here, to meet with King Hussein, and Herzog said to King Hussein, “What are these orders?” and Hussein claimed to have no knowledge of them. But they were there, and they also go to the existential nature of the conflict. The head of the PLO at the time was a rather loud-spoken individual named Ahmad Shukeiri, and when he was asked, “What would happen to the Jewish prisoners caught in this war?” He said, “Don’t worry, there won’t be any prisoners.”

Nehemia: Wow.

Michael: That’s what an existential threat means.

Nehemia: The reason this is so important is the apologists, especially on the Egyptian side of the war, because I think you pointed out that Syrians have never said anything about the war.

Michael: They actually don’t admit the war took place.

Nehemia: And literally, there’s no book published in Syria about the war.

Michael: The one book published by a Syrian about the war was published by a Druze officer outside of Syria, and he was later assassinated by the Assad regime.

Nehemia: The argument that I have heard is, “Well, you know, yes, Nasser said he would kill the Jews and drive them into the sea, but let’s not exaggerate - that was just sabre rattling.” And if you find that the Jordanians, one of the more moderate forces in the war from the Arab side, they had a specific plan to execute the Jewish prisoners in Jerusalem and in that area, that shows this wasn’t just some paranoid fantasy of the Jews. How do they say, “If they’re really out to get you, you’re not paranoid,” right?

Michael: Right, even paranoids have real enemies. Unquestionably, unquestionably. Keep in mind that Israel’s population in 1967 was very different than it is today. A very large percentage of the population, it’s only 2.5 million people, were survivors of the Holocaust, they were refugees from oppression in Arab lands, and when you said the term “existential threat” to them, it meant something very specific. They knew what an existential threat was. They had faced an existential threat.

Even my own parents - my father landed on Normandy beach in World War II, his brother liberated concentration camps. I remember as a kid watching my parents looking at the television set and being convinced that they would witness a second Holocaust within one generation, and that nobody would lift a finger to help the Jews.

Nehemia: I was reading recently about Ukraine, how there were four countries that signed a treaty that would guarantee their territory if they gave up their nuclear weapons, and they gave up their nuclear weapons and now, nobody’s really doing anything. So, Israel’s supposed to trust some foreign power to protect us? I mean, it’s not in the Israeli psyche to trust a foreign power to protect us. Would you agree with that?

Michael: Again, it goes to a sort of a deeper realization about Israel. Israel’s long-standing policy is always to have superpower allies. It began with Ben Gurion, that Israel should never be without a superpower ally. And our ally, if we’re in ’67, was France. And on the eve of the Six-Day War, France switched sides. On the aftermath of the Six-Day War, the United States filled the vacuum. The United States had been a friendly country, but it wasn’t an allied country. Israel fights the Six-Day War without a single American bullet. People don’t know that.

Now, on the seventh day, American policymakers woke up and said, “Oh, there’s this little superpower in the Middle East. It’s pro-American, it’s democratic, it’s just defeated several Soviet-backed armies, maybe we should be strategically allied with that.” And that alliance has since become the most multifaceted and deepest strategic alliance which the United States has had with any foreign power, perhaps in its entire post World-War II period.

Nehemia: Even more than the alliance with, for example, the United Kingdom?

Michael: Let me ask you a question. How many anti-ballistic systems is the United States developing with Great Britain?

Nehemia: Zero?

Michael: Okay. Every American fighter pilot, whether it be a fixed wing or helicopter pilot, wears an Israeli-made helmet. Is he wearing a British-made helmet? No. I can go on for hours about the extent of this alliance, whether it be joint maneuvers, special forces, weapons development, but particularly intelligence sharing, which is really unparalleled in the intelligence world, what we have with the United States. So, that begins on the seventh day of the Six-Day War.

Now today, we have a different challenge, but certainly starting with the Obama years, we’ve seen what is widely perceived not just in Israel, but in the world, as a retreat of American power, sort of a looking inward and isolationism. And many American allies have had to look at the situation and re-assess. And my strong opinion is that for Israel, there’s no alternative to the United States as our ultimate ally. For the United States, there’s no alternative to Israel. Really, there is no other country in the world which is going to be unreservedly pro-American. It’s never known a second of non-democratic governance. Not a second. It’s one of the five or six countries in the world which has an army which is more than twice the size of the British and French armies combined today.

Nehemia: That includes the reserves?

Michael: That includes the reserves.

Nehemia: Okay.

Michael: It includes their reserves too, though.

Nehemia: Oh, it does?

Michael: Yeah. And that country, that little Israel, just happens to be the most strategically sensitive and valuable crossroads anywhere in the world. Think about that. What that’s worth to the United States, that alliance. So, we have no alternative to one another. I mean, it may go up and down, the question is whether the United States is going to continue to play the same preeminent role in world affairs as it did in previous decades, and we became used to it.

Now, Israel has gone immense distances, traveled immense distances since 1967. We are no longer a poor country, we’re no longer a young country. At 69 we are older than more than half the countries in the UN. We will be a trillion-dollar economy. Israel is exquisitely well-positioned to reach that goal in the 21st century because of our technology. A recent research determined that Israel was the eighth most powerful country in the world. Now, that’s not just military power. It’s our universal healthcare, it’s longevity, it’s universities. There are many components to making you a strong country.

Yes, we have this unique alliance with the United States of America, but Israel in 2017 can begin to think in terms about, “Okay, how do we stand on our own two feet and not be dependent on any superpower anymore? And how can we diversify our portfolio and make strong connections with India, make strong connections with Africa?” I hope in the future we’ll forge very strong ties with Latin America, and really branching out to the world in a way that we have never seen before.

Nehemia: And our relationship with, let’s say, a country in Africa, has to be fundamentally different than our relationship with the United States. In other words, the African country isn’t looking at us, I don’t think, saying, “Oh, we share the common values of democracy…”

Michael: No, that’s true.

Nehemia: …”and a third of the Jewish population lives in our country.” Meaning, what they’re probably thinking is, “Hey, this could be a good trade partner…”

Michael: They’re thinking technology, particularly technology for agriculture and for water. They’re thinking electricity - 600 million Africans lack electricity. They’re thinking healthcare, and they’re thinking anti-terror, because they have Al Qaida, they have ISIS and they have Boko Haram, and we can help.

Nehemia: That’s something we have a little bit of experience with, to say the least.

Michael: We could talk about the Obama years and whether they were allies. The Obama administration, particularly the Secretary of State Kerry, was always saying that if we didn’t agree to the Obama administration’s peace plan, which was a two-state formula, then we would be isolated in the world. And we would be isolated as the Secretary of State would say, “on steroids”.

Now, that has proven to be precisely wrong. Israel, today, 2017, is inestimably less isolated than at any time in our history. Again, I talked about the eve of the Six-Day War, where the French switched sides. Israel had no allies. China was a hostile country. India was a hostile country. You may be too young to know this, but there was a thing called the “Soviet Bloc”.

Nehemia: Oh, I remember the Soviet Union.

Michael: Which was Russia plus 12 satellite nations. There was Africa – we never really had much relationship with Africa – Latin America, no relationship with South Africa. America was a friendly country but not an allied country. Israel in 1967 was isolated on steroids. So today, relations with China are flourishing, India’s one of our closest allies, the former Soviet Union and the bloc are gone, some of our best friends in Europe are former Soviet…

Nehemia: Really?

Michael: …satellite countries.

Nehemia: What would be an example?

Michael: The Czech Republic.

Nehemia: Oh, I didn’t know that, okay.

Michael: The Prime Minister was just in Hungary. When I was in college, you couldn’t visit these places if you were an Israeli. So, it’s a radical, radical change. So, that prediction, that prognostication that we were going to be isolated is completely wrong.

Nehemia: Let’s go back a little bit to the Six-Day War, and I’ve got some quotes from your book and some other talks you’ve given. Here’s a quote. You said, “Nobody foresaw the outcome of the Six-Day War. The War was won by a lot of scared people.” And then you quote General Uzi Narkiss to an IDF Review Board. He says, “It seems as if the security of the central sector was indeed based on miracles.”

Michael: The fear that the Soviet Union would intervene was massive.

Nehemia: What would that have looked like?

Michael: Well, for example, you notice the Six-Day War begins on the Egyptian front with very limited objectives, and no one predicted that the Egyptian army would pick up and run, and that the Israel Army literally got sucked into Sinai. There was no plan to reach the Suez Canal. And the Jordanian front - no one thought the Jordanians would open fire, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol had begged King Hussein not to open fire. And it was assumed that the Syrians would fire from the Golan Heights onto our settlements, because they had been doing so for years. And the last thing Israel wanted was a fight with the Syrians because they were particularly close to the Soviets, not just in terms of military supply, but ideologically, they were close to the Soviets. And so, on June 8, between the third and the fourth day of the War, the Israeli government voted unanimously not to attack the Golan Heights.

And the reason why the government voted not to attack the Syrians, even though they were shelling our northern settlements with thousands of shells, thousands, was the fear that the Soviets would intervene. Now, the Soviets back then had a big Mediterranean fleet. They were a blue water fleet, and they were steaming toward us.

Nehemia: And that’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. In other words, you had the war in Korea, where North Korea invaded South Korea and the US intervenes, and then China intervenes. Meaning, you could have had these powers sucked into this local war.

Michael: Vietnam, this is happening at the height of the Vietnam War. But the Soviet Union had demonstrated its commitment to intervene on behalf of its allies in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, a year after this. This wasn’t a far-fetched notion. I served in the paratroopers and I fought in Beirut in 1982, and one day, I’ll never forget it, the rumor went out that the Russians had intervened and that there were Russian paratroopers coming down, Soviet paratroopers. And I remember the feeling in my stomach, I just felt ill. We could fight the Syrians. We could fight the Palestinians. But fighting the Red Army was a different caliber.

Nehemia: And even if we’re better trained and better soldiers, I think the phrase is, “Quantity has its own quality.”

Michael: I think they were also very good soldiers, the Russian soldiers. Very good soldiers, they were tough. I mean, I served with some people in the Israeli Army who had served in the Russian Army.

Nehemia: Oh, really?

Michael: And their whole line was, “You think this is hard? You don’t know what hard is.”

Nehemia: Yeah, I’ve heard that from Russians too.

Michael: And the Red Army are a tough army, and they’re a million soldiers, and the IDF, with all due respect… and forget all the missiles and everything else they had. So there was always this fear. We’ve lost that fear of Russian interference, even with the Russians operating militarily about two hours from where we’re talking. They’re operating…

Nehemia: A two-hour drive?

Michael: Yeah, yeah, a two-hour drive.

Nehemia: By air it’s a lot less.

Michael: Oh, it’s a matter of minutes. Yeah, we don’t have that same fear because we have a friendly relationship with Russia today. We have divergent interests in Syria, we do, but the Prime Minister goes and speaks to President Putin and there’s no problem there. And also, one out of every seven Israelis speaks Russian, so that makes a big difference, too.

Nehemia: That’s interesting. So, the big topic these days is fake news, and reading your book I found three major examples of fake news emanating from the Arab side.

Michael: There was a lot. You’re hard-pressed to find real news.

Nehemia: Right. So for example, the Egyptians and the Jordanians, they were claiming in the early days of the War that the Israelis had been completely defeated. Israel didn’t mind. So you explained that the Egyptian leaders didn’t even know what was really going on, and their people were afraid to tell them, the people in the field.

Michael: Yeah, would you want to go up to a military dictator and tell him that his air force had just been destroyed?

Nehemia: It would be helpful to know what’s going on in order to know how to move forward. In other words, if they had not lied to their own people, like you give one account of one commander in, I think, Sharm El-Sheikh, in the Egyptian Army, who was ordered to retreat and he said, “But why? We’re winning.”

Michael: Right.

Nehemia: So, their own fake news undermined their position. Another example, and I’m going to read this quote. You wrote, “Nasser and Amer…” Amer was the top guy in the Egyptian Army, Nasser was the President. “Nasser and Amer agreed to maintain the fiction of direct Anglo-American involvement in the War, both to minimize Egypt’s dishonor and to prompt the Soviets to intervene.” So, in other words, they lied and said it wasn’t just Israel attacking them, it was America and possibly even England, and this was recorded by Israeli intelligence in actual phone calls.

Michael: Yes, between Hussein and Nasser.

Nehemia: That’s amazing.

Michael: It first was immensely humiliating for them, but these weren’t democratically elected leaders. They were sitting on top of volcanic public opinion. And if it was proven that these leaders allowed their forces to be humiliated by the Israel defense forces, it could cost these leaders their lives, and there could have been upheaval. And I interviewed Arabs, I interviewed particularly Palestinians for the book, and here at 30, 35 years later, they still believed that the United States and Britain had intervened.

Nehemia: They still believed that decades later.

Michael: I interviewed Palestinians who swore, swore that they saw American and British soldiers entering Jerusalem.

Nehemia: Seriously?

Michael: Yeah.

Nehemia: And just for the record, as the premier historian of the Six-Day War and a member of the Israeli government, the United States was not directly involved in the Six-Day War. In other words, there weren’t US soldiers roaming around in Jerusalem or Sinai.

Michael: No, the degree to which the United States was involved, the United States was spying on Israel.

Nehemia: On Israel.

Michael: Yeah, it was spying on Israel from the sea, from under the sea, and in the air. I’ve read the transcripts of some of those intercepts.

Nehemia: Okay, so now I didn’t want to talk about this, but you brought it up, the Liberty.

Michael: The Liberty incident. The Liberty incident was one of the incidents where America sent a spy ship, an NSA ship, into waters that were basically a war zone and didn’t tell anybody. And Israeli pilots and Israeli torpedo boats shot it up. Once they realized that it was an American ship, they stopped shooting, but it took a while for them to realize it. There have been thousands of documents relating to the Liberty that have been declassified. There’s no mystery here.

Nehemia: So, this is a fact that Israel thought this was an Egyptian ship that had just shelled Gaza, and they didn’t realize that this was an American ship. And you brought the really interesting story that Israel had asked for a military liaison, and they didn’t…

Michael: For a naval…

Nehemia: …from America.

Michael: For a naval liaison.

Nehemia: For a naval liaison.

Michael: And they turned it down.

Nehemia: They couldn’t get one.

Michael: They turned it down.

Nehemia: And you were actually a naval liaison in the Gulf War.

Michael: I was, I was. Yeah, that same unit that we have in the Gulf War didn’t exist in 1967.

Nehemia: So if the US had accepted the request, then that probably wouldn’t have happened.

Michael: But the United States didn’t even inform its own embassy or its own naval attaché that the Liberty was here. No one was informed.

Nehemia: And one of the things I had no idea about until I read your book years ago, was when they realized it wasn’t an Egyptian ship they thought maybe it was a Soviet ship, and they were really scared.

Michael: They were scared.

Nehemia: Levi Eshkol thought, “This is it.”

Michael: One of the first orders to stop firing is, “This could be a Russian ship, and we just shot up a Russian ship.”

Nehemia: And this could have been the Israeli Gulf of Tonkin incident, where Russia says, “Well, we’re going to invade Israel, they hit our ship.”

Michael: Who knew that the Soviets wouldn’t send a ship in to create a provocation and get shot up, and provide a causus belli? Nobody knew, this was the thick of war. Israel made its share of mistakes on the Liberty incident, Israel’s not free of mistakes, but it was precisely that. It was a friendly fire incident. And having been a soldier for many years, and having been in several wars, I’ll tell you that friendly fire incidents are tragically very common.

Nehemia: It’s the fog of war, right?

Michael: I have been the target of more than one.

Nehemia: In other words, Israeli soldiers were shooting at you, thinking you were the enemy, not realizing the lack of communication…

Michael: I mentioned being in Beirut in 1982, having my breakfast on a ridge with vehicles that were clearly marked with big orange panels, and my whole column was struck by Israeli jets. Killed about 25 guys, in broad daylight.

Nehemia: So, 25 of our guys were killed by our own people…

Michael: By our own people.

Nehemia: …in a friendly fire incident.

Michael: But that’s very common in war, and there’s a certain percentage of casualties in any war that are friendly fire. But that percentage is going down now, through technology, both the technology that’s available on the ground that sends out signals, even technologies that are on soldiers than can send out signals. But we didn’t have that back then.

But what was interesting, I asked a fighter pilot after the war, “Couldn’t you see those big orange panels on our vehicles? How could you not see them, it was broad daylight?” And he says, “Well, traveling at 600, 700 miles an hour, you don’t see orange panels. It’s too fast for the human eye to catch.”

Now, that becomes very important to understanding the Liberty incident, because the big question was whether the ship was flying the American flag. I became persuaded to my readers that it was flying an American flag, though every Israeli pilot reported not being able to see a flag. And they were asked specifically - because I’ve read the transcripts of the conversations with the pilots in the control - they were asked, “Do you see a flag?” and they say, “No flag, no flag.” You hear them saying that, “No flag.”

Nehemia: In other words, we had the actual transcripts of these conversations?

Michael: Yeah, and I’ve actually spoken to the pilots. So, they didn’t see a flag. I think there was a flag, but one of the pilots explained to me. He says, “Imagine being on an express train that’s going 700 miles an hour. And as it’s going 700 miles an hour, a flag goes by. Can your eye discern that flag going at 700 miles an hour, thinking about an express train, and determine that it’s an American flag? It can’t.”

Nehemia: I was on a Chinese train that went at 300 kilometers an hour, 180 miles an hour, and you really couldn’t see anything.

Michael: You couldn’t see anything. It’s all a blur.

Nehemia: Yeah. Anything close by, you couldn’t tell what it was.

Michael: Yeah, so that, to me, because I have personal experience with this, I understand that explanation. I mean, the obvious thing for the Liberty was for someone in the American intelligence community to tell the Israelis, “We’ve got a ship in your waters.” And that never happened.

Nehemia: Okay. And the third example of fake news that you mention in your book, and you don’t call it that, I’m applying today’s term, you talk about the abandonment of Quneitra by the Syrians who had announced that Israel captured Quneitra, and at first, it was a lie.

Michael: It’s endless lies, and interesting for an historian because so much of what the Arab governments put out publicly was either false or patently false, the exact opposite of the truth. How then, do you reconstruct a decision-making process on the Arab side?

Nehemia: So, how do you do that?

Michael: It’s easy on the Israeli side. You actually have the minutes of meetings. You see how decisions were made. So for the Arab side I used a system of sort of interlacing facts, so I’d put on a board and I’d get one person’s version and another person’s version. I’ll give you a case sample.

One of the great mysteries of the Six-Day War is why did the Egyptian army run? It’s true, Egypt didn’t have air cover after the first hours of the war, but we know from history that you can fight for a long time without air cover. Again, I mention my father who’d been in World War II, he fought against the Nazis from June 1944 to May 1945, and the Nazis fought hard, hard, hard. They didn’t have aircraft.

Nehemia: The Nazis didn’t have aircraft.

Michael: Yeah, America had almost unlimited air superiority. So you can fight, you could fight without aircraft. In the Six-Day War, we fought against the Egyptians, the Egyptians had hundreds of Spitfires, we had six.

Nehemia: That’s in the Six-Day War?

Michael: I’m sorry, in the 1948 War.

Nehemia: 1948, okay. The War of Independence.

Michael: You can fight without an air force.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Michael: The Egyptian army within 24 hours turns and runs. Now, the question is, who gave the order?

Nehemia: And you explain in the book, and I didn’t fully realize this, there were three basically defensive lines in Sinai, and Israel’s intention was only to penetrate the first line.

Michael: The first line.

Nehemia: Not to make it to the Suez Canal.

Michael: Because they ran so fast.

Nehemia: And you have on your wall a picture of Yossi ben Hanan, who’s dipping with his Kalashnikov in the Suez Canal. It was completely unexpected.

Michael: And Moshe Dayan said, “The first Israeli soldier to reach the Suez Canal, he would personally take out and shoot,” because that could be Yossi ben Hanan, my neighbor from Jerusalem, because Moshe Dayan remembered the 1956 War, where Israel did reach the Suez Canal, and President Eisenhower threatened to sanction Israel. No one wanted to revisit that trauma.

Nehemia: So, how did this happen, that the two other lines collapsed?

Michael: So, that’s the question, not just how did it happen, but when did it happen? So, I’m dealing with multiple Egyptian sources. Some are archival, that I was able to gain access to, some of them are memoires, some of them are diplomatic cables from other countries, including intelligence reports. And I take all this information, literally put it on the floor, spread it around me, and I see where the versions intersect, and at the intersection point you plot a line. And that is how you get the decision-making process. Now, it’s not 100 percent, but I believe on the Egyptian side I got it pretty much down, the actual series of events that led to the order going out to retreat.

Nehemia: And what happened?

Michael: Anybody who knows anything about military history, about the military, knows that the most difficult maneuver you can do in battle is not an offensive, but it’s a retreat. Retreats are always difficult. And the Egyptian retreat in 1967 is a model of how retreats should not be carried out.

Nehemia: Should not be carried out.

Michael: Yes.

Nehemia: Why is that?

Michael: Well, you want to be able to have an orderly retreat and fight another day. What did the Russians do in 1941? They retreated. What did the Confederacy do at the battles of Antietam and Gettysburg in 1862 and 1863? They retreat back into Virginia, and you have an orderly retreat. General Lee was a genius of the retreat, and you live to fight another day. And you want to be able to get back with the majority of your men and the majority of your equipment. The Egyptians run, and the tragic scene of the Egyptians running without shoes in the desert…

Nehemia: Why were they running without shoes?

Michael: Because you can’t run in the sand with boots. And they run on basically one road and that was clogged up with tanks. And these haunting images of the Six-Day War is just endless miles of wreckage. And what the Israeli troops did was to go around the road through the desert and come back on the other side, on the Suez Canal side, and shoot up the road. And eventually, thousands and thousands of Egyptians surrendered. And the problem was the nature of the retreat.

Nehemia: So, why did that happen? Why did they retreat like that?

Michael: There are the day-specific reasons and there are the deeper social reasons. The day-specific reason was that someone gave an order…

Nehemia: Why would they give that order? It makes no sense.

Michael: It didn’t make any sense, because Israel hadn’t really advanced that far into Sinai…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Michael: …when the order was given. They could have regrouped. They could have put up a more serious fight. A good example would be the Jordanians, who didn’t retreat, and exacted a very high price from the Israeli forces. And the deeper reasons had to do with divisions within the Egyptian society. There was an officer class which was not a professional officer class, they were people who bought their commissions with family connections.

Nehemia: Literally, they…

Michael: Yeah.

Nehemia: …paid to be an officer?

Michael: Like in the old British style, you bought a commission, or the family does, they weren’t real soldiers, many of them. Some of them were, but many of them weren’t. The soldiery was peasantry, largely illiterate. Many of the officers either were not present when the war broke out, or they ran away. The officers themselves ran first, and the soldiers woke up in the morning. We’re talking about the senior officers.

One of the most extraordinary books of the Six-Day War I’ve ever read was a book called A Discussion Among Soldiers. Now, after the Six-Day War in Israel, a very famous book, proven to be a controversial book, came out called Siyach Lochamim, a conversation among kibbutz soldiers. They talked about the book, in recent years it’s come under criticism because it was expunged by its editor, a gentleman by the name of Amos Oz. And some of the harder scenes were taken out, scenes that talk about civilians being abused or even killed.

Nehemia: You don’t mean it was expunged, it was censored, basically.

Michael: It was censored by the Kibbutz Movement itself.

Nehemia: Oh, by the Kibbutz Movement.

Michael: Now, even then, kibbutzniks who were having this discussion talk about the pain of being in a war, they’re not talking about glory, at all. But a very similar book was put out on the Egyptian side, and I thought this was remarkable, because they have a heavy censorship in Egypt, and I don’t know how this book got out, but a copy of it found its way into my hands.

And this is a conversation between junior officers, lieutenants, at the most part, captains, and it is just excruciating reading. What it looked like to be attacked by the Israeli army in ’67, to be on one of those Egyptian lines and see the Israeli army coming at you, and you look for orders and there are no orders. And you look for your commanding officer and he’s gone, and you’re abandoned. What do you do?

And then, all of a sudden when you read a book like that, you sort of understand how this retreat came about, because it was that type of route. In my father’s experience, my father fought in the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, which was a rout; the American army was routed, and one of the stories my father tells was being on a road. He was one of the few units that actually held their ground and fought, but he remembers seeing hundreds of soldiers running up a road, and a corporal and a colonel ran by him, and my father called out to him, “Colonel, why are you running?” And the colonel turns around, “Run, save yourself! Save yourself! The Germans are coming!” So, a retreat is very, very difficult, and panic can take hold.

Nehemia: That’s interesting you bring that up. You know, I have a Master’s in Biblical Studies, and we have these examples in the Bible of basically routs, of things that don’t make any sense. Why are the Assyrians retreating? Because they hear a rumor that the King of Egypt’s coming, and they just disappear in the middle of the night.

Michael: It doesn’t take much.

Nehemia: Yeah. And you have these accounts, and one of the words that appears a lot is the word that means panic. Panic takes root among the enemy forces and they run. It’s amazing that basically the same principles are at play throughout history. Obviously, it’s different - you don’t have battle formations of men lined up.

Michael: You have better communications today.

Nehemia: Right.

Michael: In the Gulf War of 1991, you mentioned that I was in the reserves and I was a liaison at that time, and we didn’t have a lot of information here. But on the first night of the war, when the first Scud missiles fell on Tel Aviv, my sister called me from New Jersey and said, “Do you know that Haifa’s been destroyed?”

Nehemia: Wow. That’s what they were reporting?

Michael: Yeah, that Haifa’s been destroyed. It’s the fog of battle. It’s classic fog of battle.

Nehemia: Wow. All right, I want to shift a little bit. My father was an Orthodox Rabbi in Chicago, and he told me once in the ‘80s how he went to this lecture and they asked the question, “Are you proud to be a Jew, or is it something you’re embarrassed of?” And he raised his hand and he said, “Before the Six-Day War it was not something we were proud of. Ever since the Six-Day War, a Jew is something you’re proud of.” And I’m hearing this in the ‘80s thinking, “What?” He’s talking about a reality I didn’t even know existed. I was always proud to be a Jew. You talk about how both in the United States and the Soviet Union it made Jews proud to be Jews and emboldened.

Michael: The conventional wisdom was that the Six-Day War enabled us to stand as American Jews with our backs straight, as if we had been stooped over before. There were American Jewish organizations that were either not pro-Israel and became pro-Israel only after the Six-Day War, and there was an organization called “AIPAC” which existed, but nobody had ever heard of it. And it completely transformed American Jewry.

But one of the biggest impacts was that the Six-Day War gave American Jewry the courage for the first time to examine the Holocaust. Now, this is going to shock you. When I was a kid, you didn’t talk about the Holocaust. You whispered about the Holocaust behind closed doors. And it was shortly after the Six-Day War when I was in my early teens, when I went to a local Jewish community center and I saw a man on a stage. His name was Eli Wiesel, and he was talking about the Holocaust. And I couldn’t believe there was a man on stage talking about the Holocaust. You just didn’t call attention to yourself if you were Jewish. You know, there was a joke that wasn’t so funny going around back then, of two Jewish ladies on a bus. And one Jewish lady says, “My son is getting a hemorrhoid operation,” And then she whispers, “at the Jewish hospital.”

Nehemia: Okay.

Michael: That gave you an idea of what you could say publicly and what you couldn’t say publicly.

Nehemia: Oh, oh, oh, she was more embarrassed that it was a Jewish hospital than it was a hemorrhoid…

Michael: Than he was getting a hemorrhoid… yeah.

Nehemia: Okay. So, that’s the mentality that’s hard for me to understand.

Michael: Yeah, because it’s changed, because being American now, today, according to polls, Jews are the most respected minority in the United States. American Jewish humor is Jewish humor. Words like “maven” have entered the American vernacular. When I grew up, a bagel was a Jewish food. Now it’s not a Jewish food.

Nehemia: Now you get it at Walmart in Texas.

Michael: It’s as much as a Jewish food as pizza is an Italian food.

Nehemia: So, it really had a fundamental impact on American Jewry. I mean, around a third of Jews in the world live in the United States. That’s a really significant thing.

Michael: It is significant... and it had that sort of multiplier effect - as American Jews became more proud of being Jews, they were able to advance in a political agenda that was very pro-Israel. And American Jews have always been very involved, politically. For the Soviet Jews, we’re talking about three million Soviet Jews who are languishing behind the Iron Curtain.

Nehemia: Up until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Michael: Yeah. When I got out of the paratroopers, this is 1981, I was immediately sent off to be a liaison with the Zionist Underground in the Soviet Union. I was in Moscow. I was in the Soviet Ukraine.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Michael: And I can only tell you how utterly bleak and hopeless it was. If you study Hebrew you get sent to Siberia, get sent to a work camp. Everybody I worked with in the underground knew that they were going to be arrested in a matter of time. I myself was arrested several times and interrogated at length by the KGB. You don’t want to go through this. And this is what it was to be a Soviet Jew and to live in the most oppressive conditions. And the Six-Day War gave courage. It gave courage and inspiration.

You talk to a Soviet Jewish activist like Natan Sharansky, and he says, “The big difference was the Six-Day War.” And the Soviet Jewry movement played a material role in bringing down the Soviet Union. It wasn’t just that Soviet-backed armies were defeated by Western arms in a matter of days, that’s the Six-Day War - it’s that with the Soviet Jewry movement comes pressure on the United States to cease wheat shipments to the Soviet Union, to put sanctions on the Soviet Union, all of which hastens the breakdown. The Jackson-Vanik amendment…

Nehemia: Here’s what I remember growing up. You’d drive by a synagogue and there’d be a massive billboard or poster and it would have a Jewish star wrapped in chains.

Michael: Yeah, that was “Free Soviet Jewry”.

Nehemia: And that I remember.

Michael: That happens immediately after the Six-Day War, but it also happens in the Soviet Union itself, where Jews come out.

Nehemia: So that pressure then, helped bring down the Soviet Union?

Michael: No question about it.

Nehemia: That’s incredible. So, the Six-Day War may be responsible for the freedom of tens of millions of people.

Michael: I’ll give you another way it comes together. Israel captures the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. The Sinai Peninsula is three times the size of the State of Israel. In 1979 we gave that territory back to Egypt in return for peace. As a result of that peace, Israel was able to beat a vast number of swords into plowshares.

Nehemia: Okay.

Michael: And that peace helped launch the modern Israeli economy. That modern Israeli economy was able to do the impossible between 1989 and 1999. A country of six million people absorbed a million immigrants.

Nehemia: The Jews from the former Soviet Union.

Michael: The Jews from the former USSR. That could not have been done…

Nehemia: Wow, I never thought of that.

Michael: …without all those plowshares.

Nehemia: So if they’d freed Soviet Jewry in 1979 the Israeli economy might have collapsed?

Michael: It might have collapsed.

Nehemia: That’s…

Michael: Mind-blowing, as they say.

Nehemia: I made Aliya in 1993, and I remember standing in line for something at the Ministry of Absorption, or something like that, and I stood in line all day. At the end of the day they came and made a list of everyone who had stood in line all day and they said, “Come back the next day.” And then, I stood in line the next day for most of the day and finally got to see somebody. I asked, “What’s going on? Is the bureaucracy that bad?” What I didn’t fully understand was the magnitude of what was going on - hundreds of thousands of former Soviet Jews coming over here.

Michael: And then, the multiplying fact - the fact that Israel is the start-up nation today, and a world leader in innovation, is also a direct impact result of the Russian immigration.

Nehemia: I’ll give you a really concrete example that somebody told me. The number of bookstores has multiplied with all these Soviet Jews. They’re a very literate population, they read a lot, they’re very educated, the ones who came, especially in the 90s.

Michael: They are the most educated per capita. This was the most educated population per capita in the world, but they were educated completely at the expense of another country.

Nehemia: What does that mean?

Michael: Think about what it costs to send a kid from kindergarten through a PhD. What does that cost?

Nehemia: A lot of money, yeah.

Michael: We got it all for free.

Nehemia: And I remember Gorbachev speaking about, “We can’t let out the Jews. We’ll have a brain drain.”

Michael: And they did.

Nehemia: And they did, okay.

Michael: But what a bonanza it was for the State of Israel, even in dollar terms, what it meant. A good chunk of the Knesset today speaks Russian. I have a wonderful story. My first contact in Moscow, I was scared to death. And we couldn’t take anything written with us, so we had to memorize all these addresses and telephone numbers and names in Russian, and I spent weeks preparing for this. And I got finally into Moscow and it was winter. And I was in an abandoned train station, and I had to make my first contact. I’d never used a Russian phone before. I didn’t quite get how the coin was going to work, and everything.

And my father’s mother’s maiden name was Edelstein. And the name I remembered was that of a young man named Yuli Edelstein, who was 23 years old at the time. He showed up at the train station. He says, “Don’t worry. Don’t worry about the KGB. I’ll take care of the KGB.” He was fearless and handsome, looked like a movie star. My first act as a member of Knesset, my first vote was to vote for Yuli Edelstein…

Nehemia: This same man.

Michael: …to be the speaker of the Knesset.

Nehemia: You shared a story once about a four-foot-nine Jewish woman in Russia.

Michael: Oh, she’s amazing.

Nehemia: Tell us that story.

Michael: Yehudit, Yehudit Nepunyache, she saved my life. She saved my life. She was the head of the underground in Odessa. And you’re talking about the most courageous people you could imagine, because there’s no way out. The only way out is through Siberia.

Nehemia: What does that mean? How would they get out through Siberia?

Michael: You’re not getting out through Siberia…

Nehemia: Oh, okay.

Michael: …you’re going to a labor camp. You’re going to the gulag, is where you’re going. And everyone spoke Hebrew. Their Hebrew was actually better than mine - I had come from Israel. And they learned Hebrew through short-wave and they shared books. And it was Pesach time, and I was coming to have a Seder in a house like you’d imagine during the Spanish Inquisition, where you close all the doors, you close all the blinds. In the dark, you have a Seder. This is in my lifetime here.

Nehemia: And this is in the ‘80s?

Michael: This isn’t 500 years ago. And we knew that there was a good chance that we’d get arrested. And to get to the house, we had to walk across, my partner and I, Yitzhak Sokolov, who was another American who had studied with me. We’d made Aliya together and he had gone into the Golani Brigade, I had been in the paratroopers. We came out and we went to Russia together. He was a very brave man, still is. As we came across the square, we couldn’t see, but there were KGB thugs with clubs who were waiting behind trees, and they were going to jump on us and break our skulls. And we were warned by our bosses back here that, “there’s a chance you won’t come back, you’ve got to know.”

Nehemia: And they said, “If you’re caught, you’re on your own.”

Michael: And you’re on your own. And we couldn’t see the thugs behind the tree, but Yehudit, who was watching us come across the square from her window ran down. She threw herself physically – again, she’s about four foot nine – at this immense thug, who picked her up in the air by her collar, and she started screaming. Every window in that square opened. She said something to him in Russian. Later, she told me what she said. “She said, ‘What will you do, hit me too?’” Like that - right in his eye. He dropped her and they all walked away. She saved my life.

Nehemia: Wow.

Michael: Now, we started the Seder, and then there was a huge, deafening knock on the door and the KGB broke in, and Yitzhak and I were taken away for an interrogation. And as we walked down the stairs the families that were gathered there with Yehudit stood on the landing and sang Hatikvah.

Nehemia: I’m going to cry. Wow.

Michael: Yeah.

Nehemia: That’s amazing. And for those who don’t know, that’s the Israeli National anthem which means “The Hope,” the hope of the Jew to return back to his land. You know, this brings up something that I heard you talk about once. You were talking about the Palestinians recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, and how they pulled this fast one, that we recognized that there would be a Palestinian state in the early part of the Oslo process, and they recognized Israel.

Michael: Yeah. I was working for the Rabin government. I was not a high-ranking official, but I looked at the Oslo Accords when they came out, and there was an exchange of letters between Rabin and Arafat, Arafat being the head of the PLO. Rabin recognized that the PLO was the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. Basically, Rabin recognized the existence of a Palestinian people. Arafat recognized Israel. It wasn’t everything because the Palestinians would never concede what they called the “right of return”.

Nehemia: Jews.

Michael: No, the right to return of the Palestinian refugees.

Nehemia: Oh, they’d never give up that, okay.

Michael: Right. And now, there are between six and eight million descendants of Palestinian refugees from 1948.

Nehemia: Even though in ’48 it was something like three-quarters of a million people, today, their descendants are six to eight million.

Michael: Six to eight, probably maybe even nine million. Now, if all those nine million come back, then you have a state called Israel but it has a Palestinian majority. So, recognizing Israel does nothing for us if you have the so-called “right of return”.

Nehemia: Of the Palestinians.

Michael: Recognizing Israel does not recognize the core of the conflict. What’s the core of the conflict? 50 years before the first settlement was built, years before the State of Israel was declared, the Arabs waged war against the Jews here. The actual war begins in the 1920s. And what is the problem here? It’s that according to the Arabs, we’re not a people.

Nehemia: The Jews are not a people…

Michael: We’re not a people.

Nehemia: …according to the Arabs.

Michael: I think the term “Jewish people” doesn’t even exist in Arabic. And if we’re not a people, what kind of historic rights can we have here? So, today you have Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority. The Palestinians in general say there was never a Temple, never a first Temple, never a second Temple. This was fake history. It’s not fake news, it’s fake history.

Nehemia: I want to understand this. So, you made this statement that the Palestinian identity is dependent on negating the Jewish history in Israel.

Michael: Deeply.

Nehemia: I had never heard that before. If it’s correct, it explains a whole lot of things. The Jewish identity is not dependent on the Arabs, meaning we have a multi-thousand-year history going back to the time of Abraham, and when I think of the Jewish people and the return to Israel, I think of the Arch of Titus, the Jews going out into exile as Roman prisoners, and I think of this mass return. In the Tanakh, in the Bible, it talks all the time about, “God says you should do this with all your heart and all your soul.” There’s only one thing that God says He’s going to do with all His heart and all His soul, it’s in Jeremiah, and it’s God saying, “I’m going to plant them back in their land.” It’s the only time God says He’s going to do something with all His heart and all His soul.

And the point is that there is this Jewish consciousness going back at least to the time of Jeremiah, that we’re coming back here. And now we’re back, and we have these people telling us we’re not a people and we have no history here? I mean, I don’t understand that.

Michael: I was with a senior Palestinian negotiator in 2009, and he looked me right in the eyes and said, “I can’t recognize Israel as the Jewish state. That negates my identity.”

Nehemia: Wow! Why?

Michael: Because the Palestinians were one of the peoples who were designated by the Europeans at the end of World War I. There were Syrians, there were Iraqis. What are the positive components of their identity? There may not be many. You know, the New York Times ran an article over a year ago, a very interesting article. It was missed by many. It’s about the opening of the Palestinian Cultural Museum north of Ramallah, a $24 million museum. They had a celebratory opening, a beautiful museum. There’s only one problem, and that is that the museum is empty.

Nehemia: And that’s not a joke.

Michael: That is not a joke. I’ll show you the article. But that’s telling you something. It’s telling you something. And look at the Israel Museum. The Israel Museum has so many exhibits they don’t know what to put up first. And it’s true - we do wake up in the morning and we say we’re Jews, we’re Israelis, not because we’re not Palestinians. That is not necessarily the case on the other side. And that is the core of the conflict.

You know, we recently had an incident on the Temple Mount where three Israeli Arabs killed two Israeli Druze policemen. And Israel did what any other country would do, it put up metal detectors to make sure that arms aren’t once again smuggled in to what the Palestinians and the Arab world, the Muslim world, regard as the third holiest site in Islam. I have to go through a metal detector to go to the Kotel, to go to the Western Wall.

Nehemia: I went to the Temple Mount the day after they put up the metal detectors, and I had to go through the metal detector coming from the Jewish side, coming from the Western Wall.

Michael: In Mecca, Medina they have metal detectors. And the Arabs, the Palestinians rioted, not because there were metal detectors but because Jews put the metal detectors there. It’s not because of the metal detectors, it’s because it was Jews.

Nehemia: I still don’t understand it. Like literally, I don’t understand - why does their identity have to be… I’ll give you the example that comes to mind for me. I’ve done a lot of study of the history of the Cherokee who were expelled from the State of Georgia in the 1820s or so. And I actually traveled the Trail of Tears. I traveled it in my car and went on some of the roads.

So, here’s the analogy. 100,000 Cherokee buy property in the State of Georgia and move back there, and the Georgians say, “You were never here. You’re not a people. You have no right to be here, even though you paid with cash for that land. And it’s racism for you to be in the State of Georgia.” Is that a valid analogy, as a historian?

Michael: I use it all the time. I say that the land of Israel is our tribal land, literally tribal land. And you would never say it to a Cherokee, you wouldn’t say it to a Sioux, a member of the Sioux Nation, that he or she couldn’t live in their tribal land.

Nehemia: In this Knesset, in this building there are Arab members of the Knesset, but they call Israel an “apartheid state”. I don’t understand that. That doesn’t make any sense to me.

Michael: It’s just that it’s fake news.

Nehemia: I get a lot of people who come here to Jerusalem and I’ll take them to the Israel Museum, and I show them the Shrine of the Book, the Dead Sea Scrolls. And what blows my mind is, pretty much any Israeli can walk up and read Isaiah from that Scroll. You know, you might need to learn a little bit about the shape of the letters, but you can read that Scroll. And sometimes I’ll say, “Now let’s go see the Arab Scrolls that are 2,200 years old,” and there aren’t any, not in the Land of Israel. You definitely have things in Arabia.

Michael: I mentioned before that we had some challenging times with the Obama administration. And President Obama on his first trip to the Middle East gave the Cairo speech in June 2009, and he gave the Arab narrative of the creation of Israel. He said that Israel came about as a result of the Holocaust. Now, Arabs want to say that because they say – and they do say – that a bunch of European Christians massacred a bunch of European Jews, and the survivors they dumped in Palestine. They made a European problem a Palestinian problem.

Nehemia: And that’s actually how the Palestinians see it.

Michael: Yes, they see it to this day, even though the fact is that the majority of the people here are actually refugees from Arab lands. But leave that aside. Eventually, President Obama understood that you could not have successful peace negotiations if that was your premise, because why make peace with an illegitimate interloper country, a trespasser?

And so, starting…I know the exact date - November 2011 - President Obama changed his position. Israel came about because of a 3,000-year Jewish connection to the land. If there had been a State of Israel there would not have been a Holocaust, right?

Nehemia: This is President Obama who acknowledged this?

Michael: He acknowledged this. And when he came here in March of 2013, one of the first visits he made was to the Dead Sea Scrolls. And he made that visit in order to underscore that the Jews had been here for thousands of years, because who wrote these Scrolls in Hebrew?

Nehemia: Right.

Michael: Who wrote those Scrolls in Hebrew? Not the survivors of the Holocaust.

Nehemia: Which interestingly are from Qumran, which is, according to the international community, the West Bank, and that would therefore make those Scrolls the heritage of the Palestinian people.

Michael: Or so they have claimed. They want them back.

Nehemia: They what?

Michael: They say that it’s written by ancient Palestinians.

Nehemia: But it’s in Hebrew.

Michael: I know.

Nehemia: All right.

Michael: You just reminded me, when I was a graduate student in Middle Eastern studies, I used to get a lot of glossy magazines, and there was a glossy magazine from Jordan, and the front of this magazine said the following. It said, “Ancient Jordanian tombs found in Amman.” Now, as a Biblical scholar, you know Amman is Rabbath Ammon.

Nehemia: The Ammonite capital.

Michael: And they showed pictures of these tombs. You could see inscribed on them very clearly in Hebrew, the name “Tuvia”.

Nehemia: It was a character mentioned in the Bible.

Michael: The Tobiads.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Michael: The Tobiads, a priestly family. These were Jews, but they were ancient Jordanian graves.

Nehemia: Right.

Michael: They weren’t ancient Jewish graves.

Nehemia: Right, that’s bizarre. Hey, let’s shift a little bit to another topic. Look, you were the Ambassador to the United States during the time of the Obama administration. What do you believe the true legacy of the Obama administration is going to be? Is it the destabilization of the Middle East? And 50 years from now, will they say, “The Iranian nuclear holocaust was caused by Obama?”

Michael: I’m not in the prophecy business - I’ll leave that to the people you studied in Biblical studies. And as an historian, I have enough problems predicting the past. I know what we can say right now is that the Obama administration managed to get the entire Middle East wrong. I mean, it got Libya wrong, it got Egypt wrong, it got Yemen wrong. It got Iraq wrong, it got Syria wrong, okay?

Nehemia: I remember Yemen was an example of how well things were going. Now, there’s been 10,000 children murdered in Yemen.

Michael: It literally got every part of the Middle East wrong. It got Israel-Palestine wrong. And the one place they claimed to get right is the Iranian nuclear deal. That Iranian nuclear deal has helped Iran extend its hegemony across all of Iraq into Afghanistan, into Yemen, and now through Syria and Lebanon with a Shiite arc that starts in Tehran and ends in Beirut.

And the Obama legacy was to let the Russians back into the Middle East. What begins in the Six-Day War, which is the United States pushes Russia out of the Middle East, and that was the great achievement of Henry Kissinger in 1973, was to push the Soviets out of the Middle East, the Obama administration comes ... and you’ve got a half-a-million dead in Syria. You can’t ascribe that all to the Obama administration, but nothing was done to help them.

And if you want to know what the Middle East looks like without America in it, just go to Aleppo. So, this one achievement is an achievement which could very well endanger Israel down the line, but it’s endangering Israel right now, because it has enabled the Iranians to extend their hegemony. And that, to me is a profound legacy.

Nehemia: And I’ve heard you say that – if I got this right – so, there are 100,000 rockets pointed at Israel in southern Lebanon.

Michael: About 130, but who’s counting.

Nehemia: 130,000.

Michael: Yeah.

Nehemia: And that’s more rockets than the French and the British have, is that correct?

Michael: It’s more rockets. It’s many times more rockets than Nazi Germany fired at England during World War II.

Nehemia: And that’s backed by Iran through their proxy, Hezbollah.

Michael: But it’s worse than that. It’s now Shiite militias that have taken up positions along our northern border, and Iranian soldiers are embedded in those militias. There was an Iranian attempt to establish ports and bases in Syria to make missiles… Before they had to like export the missiles to Hezbollah, today they’re trying to facilitate missile-making.

Nehemia: And they’re working on guided missiles, is that correct?

Michael: Precision guided missiles, yes. It’s a challenge for us, because we have Iron Dome, which takes out what’s called the “stand-off rocket” that goes up and comes down. But what if you’ve got a rocket that’s got a joystick that you can guide it into the Knesset, or guide it into the Dead Sea Scrolls?

Nehemia: What do you see as the relationship, going forward under President Trump, with the United States and Israel?

Michael: Again, I have to believe there is a hope. I think the big difference so far is that under Obama we were viewed as part of the problem, and not part of the solution. I think under Trump so far we’re being viewed as part of the solution and not part of the problem. That doesn’t mean we don’t have some policy disagreements. I mean, I could see a situation where we could keep the vision of two states for two peoples still alive, even though there is no Palestinian that subscribes to that.

Nehemia: So today, there’s a consensus more or less between the United States and Israel on something the Palestinians don’t actually agree to, even?

Michael: They do not agree to two states for two peoples, because Jews are not a people. They want a situation where we recognize the Palestinian nation state, but they won’t recognize the Jewish nation state. Now, that’s not the American position. So, you can keep that formula, but you can work to create what I call a “two-state reality”, in which Palestinians enjoy extensive autonomy. It’s not a state in the Max Weberian sense of it, but we could a lot together on the Iranian nuclear deal. Listen, we think the deal was a terrible deal, and any position that Trump takes against the deal, we’re going to support it. That would be in Israel’s interest.

It’s in Israel’s interest that the United States joins with us in rolling back what has become an Iranian empire in the Middle East, where Iran is attacking.

Nehemia: You’re saying they actually have an empire de facto that stretches from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean Sea?

Michael: And to the Persian Gulf and to the Indian Ocean, through Yemen.

Nehemia: That means the Persian Empire reestablished, essentially.

Michael: It is amazing.

Nehemia: Who would have believed that ten years ago?

Michael: I know, but it’s been the work of several administrations, not just one. I know that George Bush, when he gave the order to invade Iraq and to take down the Taliban wasn’t thinking that, “If I take down Saddam Hussein and I take down the Taliban I am getting rid of Iran’s two greatest enemies, and it will enable Iran to spread its influence.”

But what remains of Iraq today is essentially an Iranian satellite, and the Iranians are now moving into Afghanistan with the Taliban, and that is amazing. It’s now been widely researched that it wasn’t Saddam Hussein who helped Al Qaida, but the Iranians. That’s amazing.

Nehemia: What about Israel’s relationship with Russian now, and then maybe if the Syrian civil war ever ends?

Michael: As I said, we have a good relationship with Russia. It’s not uncomplicated. Again, we have a very large and very talented Russian diaspora here. The Prime Minister has an open phone to Mr. Putin, and we are talking about the possibility of energy cooperation, as Israel has found significant deposits of natural gas off our coast, and the Russians are interested in that and are cooperating.

On the other hand, we have the Russian Army operating about two hours north of here, and backing - you can’t say the “wrong side” - but from our perspective, the Russians are backing the worst side in the Syrian civil war.

Nehemia: Well, I mean they’re backing our enemies, Hezbollah, aren’t they?

Michael: Well, they’re backing Assad, and Assad is allied with Iran and with Hezbollah.

Nehemia: Wow, it’s a bad situation all around. What is something that some of the listeners, perhaps in the United States, can do? Is there anything that they can do to help Israel?

Michael: I think to understand that an Iranian empire in the Middle East poses a serious long-term, certainly, and perhaps immediate, threat to American security. And the Iranian regime aspires to global control. They say this, by the way.

Nehemia: You’ve mentioned that they actually are responsible for the death of more Americans than any other organization besides Al Qaeda.

Michael: Yes.

Nehemia: I don’t think most people realize that.

Michael: Yeah. The Marine barracks attack and the Khobar Towers attack.

Nehemia: Yeah, so they’re a sponsor of terror around the world.

Michael: They’re the world’s largest state sponsor of terror.

Nehemia: You’re not including ISIS as a state? Or actually, they’re a larger state than ISIS, I guess.

Michael: They’re significantly larger than ISIS.

Nehemia: Okay.

Michael: No, no, there are 70 million people.

Nehemia: Wow.

Michael: But they also back Hamas, Islamic Jihad.

Nehemia: So is there something that people can do? Can they contact their congressmen?

Michael: Indeed. Indeed, sure they can, and ensure that this becomes American policy - to roll back this empire. American policy, certainly during the Obama years, was to facilitate, if not directly then certainly indirectly, the extension of this Iranian sphere of terror.

Nehemia: It blew my mind - and you had quoted this - that President Obama said that Iran was a rational state.

Michael: Of course.

Nehemia: This is a state that denies the Holocaust. I mean, that’s a rational state?

Michael: It’s a rational state because the President said that Iranian leaders operate according to a cost-benefit analysis. That was not Israel’s reading.

Nehemia: Meaning, they have these eschatological concepts how they want to bring about some final war, and part of that is the destruction of Israel?

Michael: We’re also the greatest challenge to Iranian regional hegemony. Nobody can stand up to them like we can.

Nehemia: That’s true, as well.

Michael: Even though we’re a fraction of the territory that they control. So we are the problem for the Iranians.

Nehemia: You mentioned a project that Israel’s working on with the United States - David’s Sling?

Michael: Yes. So, David’s Sling is now a successful project. Iron Dome was an Israeli innovation that received American financial backing, very generous from the Congress, as well as from President Obama. But David’s Sling is one of our anti-ballistic projects that is a joint US-Israel undertaking, and it is a system that can interdict a guided missile.

Nehemia: And that exists?

Michael: That exists. It’s also been deployed.

Nehemia: Wow.

Michael: Now, think about it. Think about how technologically proficient you have to be. Iron Dome - if an enemy rocket’s coming at you and it’s coming down, Iron Dome meets it here.

Nehemia: So, in other words, it sees the trajectory and it meets it based on that trajectory?

Michael: But what if you have a rocket you have no idea what the trajectory is?

Nehemia: It could be zig-zagging.

Michael: It could be zig-zagging. It can be doing loops in the air. It’s a completely different technology.

Nehemia: And so, Israel has developed that. That’s amazing.

Michael: Iron Dome was the first anti-ballistic system to prove effective in combat. And this, hopefully we’ll never have to use, the interceptors are rather expensive, but we have to assume that our enemy has a certain number of precision-guided missiles.

Nehemia: Wow. You had quoted President Obama, and I’d never heard this – and it kind of, again, blew my mind – that he gave a speech in which he said that whether you like it or not, America’s a superpower.

Michael: I was there.

Nehemia: You were at the speech. And in contrast, Israelis wake up – and this is true – they wake up and they say, “Thank God America’s a superpower.” I was on a bus - I think it was the day of or the day after 9/11 - and I was coming from Mount Scopus and we were coming around the French Hill turn towards Pisgat Ze’ev, and they were talking about what had happened. And at the time, they didn’t know the details, but they said on the Israeli news that thousands of people were killed in the 9/11 attacks, and people burst into tears. And you contrast that with what was going on in East Jerusalem with people handing out candy.

And this goes back to your book, Ally, like there really is a deep connection between the United States and Israel, certainly from the Israeli perspective.

Michael: I think it’s also for the majority of Americans, too. I mean, it’s hard-wired, hard-baked into the American consciousness. It goes back to colonial times. It goes back to Plymouth Rock.

Nehemia: Well, “Make America great again” is something that Israelis, I think, are excited about, you know, that America will be a great country again and we’ll embrace that.

Michael: Two nights ago, I gave a speech for one of the largest delegations of Congresspeople to be here, ever. There were some 25 Democrats, 25 Republicans brought here by AIPAC. And I concluded my remarks with the following line. I said, “I’m a member of a certain party, I’m a member of a coalition in Israel, but I speak for the overwhelming majority of Israelis, but not only Israelis. I think I speak for the overwhelming majority of peoples of the Middle East when I say this. That we all have the same interest, and the interest is a strong… the greatest regent possible… united, self-confident America.” That’s a global interest, certainly an Israeli interest, certainly a Middle Eastern interest, but it’s a global interest.

And a world without that type of America in it is a very dangerous place. And we, as Jews, know what that’s like. We, as Israelis, know what that’s like, as people in the Middle East know what that’s like. And that’s a bipartisan message. I can’t say it more emphatically.

Nehemia: I heard a talk you gave, and you talked about an eight-point mission statement for Israel.

Michael: I don’t know if it’s eight points, it’s in eight lines. Actually, this was an assignment given to me by Prime Minister Netanyahu. Every once in a while we just sit around and talk, and he said, “Well, how would you approach the whole question of delegitimization? And I said, “Our fundamental problem is that the bad guys have a very simple message: Apartheid state. Occupation. Oppression. Racism. Ethnic cleansing. Anybody with a second-grade education can recite those words.

Nehemia: Even though it’s not true.

Michael: Even though it’s not true, it doesn’t matter. Not true.

Nehemia: Nobody cares about facts, but it’s a good emotional argument.

Michael: It’s an argument. Hatred. It’s bad. If I were to ask you in so many sentences to sum up the State of Israel, what would you say? Nu, Nehemia, what would you say?

Nehemia: I would say it’s the ancient homeland of my people that God gave us to live in, and my ancestors for 2,000 years prayed the prayer, “Next year in Jerusalem,” and I finally get to fulfill that.

Michael: Okay, so that may work for a large part of the Christian community. It may work for certain parts of the Jewish community.

Nehemia: Fair enough.

Michael: Is it going to work for a millennial at the University of Michigan? Does that speak to that type of audience? So, I took the Prime Minister’s assignment very seriously, that we had to get a mission statement. And quite naturally, the first people I went to were the Madison Avenue types.

Nehemia: Okay.

Michael: You know, how do you sell a product?

Nehemia: So, you literally went to the people who do advertising? Okay.

Michael: Yeah, yeah. And what do you think I got? I got “Start-up nation. Good beaches. Pretty girls. Great food.”

Nehemia: All those are true.

Michael: All those are true, okay, but that doesn’t speak. And what I learned over the course of this journey - it really became a journey for me - was that you cannot fight feelings with facts, that when a feeling meets up with a fact, almost invariably the feeling will win. And especially today, for today’s young people, you have to speak to something not here but here. You have to speak to the heart, or even lower, okay? You’ve got to speak to the gut.

So, I gave up on the Madison Avenue types and I went to the poets, and with a group of writers and poets, began to put together what you’ll hear. Now again, this isn’t perfect. This is what we managed to put together.

Nehemia: In other words, this is a way of explaining what Israel is about.

Michael: Okay, here it is. “Israel is home. It is open and inviting, creative and compassionate. It defends freedom and promises its citizens equal rights. It bridges east and west, ancient traditions and technologies that shape the future. It has a free press, a globally respected justice system and state-of-the-art healthcare for all. It is a pioneer in women’s and LGBT rights, and conservation of water reclamation, and sustainable sources of energy and food for developing nations. Israel has given shelter to refugees from 70 countries and humanitarian aid to disaster victims abroad. It is the improbable story of vision and perseverance in the face of unspeakable hardship, and it is the native land of the Jewish people for 4,000 years. The fulfilment of their yearning and their dreams, Israel is community. It is family. Israel is home.”

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Related Posts: Michael Oren on Trump's Recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's Capital Jews for Guns Nothing is Forgotten God is a Zionist Apartheid in Palestinian Jordan Netanyahu Schools the Pope Hebrew Voices Episodes Support Team Studies Nehemia Gordon's Teachings on the Name of God SHOW NOTES: Palestinian Museum Prepares to Open, Minus Exhibitions (New York Times Article) I will rejoice in doing them good and will assuredly plant them in this land with all my heart and soul." [NIV] (Jeremiah 32:41)
Michael Oren's Books Six Days of War (New York Times Bestseller) Power, Faith and Fantasy (New York Times Bestseller) Ally (New York Times Bestseller) The Origins of the Second Arab-Israel War (academic) Sand Devil (novel) Reunion (novel)
  • Paul Case says:

    Why does YHVH allow the hideous ‘two-state solution’, or Egyptian control of Sinay/Gaza, or continuation of Lebanon and Syria, or Iran threatening to ‘wipe Israel off the map’? The terrifyingly simple answer is that modern Israel is MORE apostate than the northern kingdom in Tanakh! The ‘last straw’ (and most glaring evidence) of any civilisation’s demise is promoting homosexuality as a good thing, instead of warning people that homosexuality (like promiscuity) is always HARMFUL to participants and society. Instead of being the global epicentre of righteousness, modern Israel has become the epicentre of evil! REPENT my beloved Yisrael!

  • Nick says:

    I wonder if Nehemia cringed as much as I did when he mentioned LGBTQ, seeing what they promote is nothing but a scam and money motivated on policy’s that are condemned in the Torah, it’s a crying shame that social media has taken this Godless perspective and crammed it down the throats of the worlds children people who can’t discern their right hand from their left. My prayer is that Israel now returns spiritually and restore the teachings and instruction of Yehovah’s Torah.

  • Kitty says:

    How could I even begin to comment on this amazing compilation of information? Wow!
    Even so much more impressive now in 2022 with all that has happened and is happening since it was first broadcast 5 years ago.

  • Kelvin Wilson says:

    Brilliant presentation of a largely forgotten or ignored history

  • simon says:

    Thank you for this interview. Very informative.

    Except the parts fear-mongering on Iran being an empire.
    Much more to be feared are the machinations of Saudi Arabia than Iran’s.

    200Million Shia Muslims do not an empire make compared to 1.5Billion Sunni Muslims that have been imbibing the cool-aid of Salafist + Wahhabi intolerance and hate funded by Saudi Arabia at a tune of $3.5Billion/year for the last 38yrs.
    NOT IRAN. Come to think of it, Iran was not involved in the Six Day War neither.

    Every time you hear of a suicide bombing, try and follow it through to its nuances, to the details of the bomber usually published 2-3weeks later in small articles in the back pages (IF pulished at all), you will find it is never a Shia Muslim, but always a Sunni Muslim.

    These differences are important, as much as Jewish Karaite vs Orthodox, as much as Messianic Jews vs Christians. It behooves us all to understand these differences and not acquiesce, not blind ourselves, for short term political gains.
    Current politics should play no role in this as things will turn and it will likely be regretful to Israel to not have faced the obvious threat on time instead of letting careerist politicians commingle with them for their own short term gains to the detriment of the long term interests of Israel.

    I have heard of Iranian Jews and the respect and dignity they live with in Iran, much more than Jews in Egypt. And, when was the last time anyone heard of Jews in Saudi Arabia?

  • Gregory Irby says:

    Fascinating interview! Wow, what a life you’ve lived Michael! Thanks for all this unbiased info! They say wisdom comes with age, but so does gray hair! I heard from ancient Chinese wisdom that little black beans will bring back the colour to your hair. So I prayed to God to restore the colour to my hair and I began eating little black beans. And hey, what can I say,… It’s working for me, now if it would just stop falling out… GOD Bless You Guys!

  • JCLincoln says:

    Liberty incident. It’s very interesting about ‘truth’. It doesn’t need anyone to agree with it. No matter any evidence to the contrary, truth is ‘watching the actual event’, then afterwards listening to all the incorrect rhetoric. God will show everyone the video and then wait for corrections ……….. no one will say a word.

    Lyndon Johnson wanted the Liberty sunk. Johnson wanted a reason to declare war on Egypt. The Israeli pilots turned back twice, before they were told that if they came back without attacking the Liberty, they would be shot down. I do have to congratulate the Israeli pilots however. With all the shooting, they succeeded in not sinking the Liberty. Thank you, pilots. No one may never know …… but God knows and He will vindicate you.

  • JCLincoln says:

    I wouldn’t say that pulling back from being expansionist (empire building) should be accused of being isolationist. (speaking of the U.S. pulling back from Obama’s policies)

  • Ted Craven says:

    I continue to suspect that the 2300 days in Daniel 8 point to the 1967 war. The 2300 day period seems to commence at the start of the vision where the he goat attacks the ram, which would corresponds to the Battle of the Granicus where Alexander attacked Persia in “May” 334 BCE. And the 2300 day period ends when the sanctuary and host are no longer trodden under foot. Add 2300 years to 334 BCE and you come to 1967. The ancient sources say the battle was fought in the month of Decius, which actually may have extended into June. So it could be that there were exactly 2300 years between Granicus and the Six Day war.

    Israel’s victory in the Six Day War seems have been made possible by an actual miracle. The war began when Israeli jets took off heading for the Egyptian airfields which were bristling with Soviet-supplied air defenses. These were very effective weapons. The North Vietnamese had them during the Vietnam War, and they took quite a toll on US aircraft. But just as the Israeli jets were launching, the Egyptian defense minister decided to make an air inspection of the battlefield and he gave the order to turn off all of Egypt’s air defenses to avoid being shot down by his own forces. So the Israeli planes arrived at airfields that were undefended and were able to destroy the Egyptian air force. In the desert it is very difficult to conceal troops and tanks. You must have some way to defend them. So when the Egyptians lost their air force, they were done. Israeli jets could and did attack the Egyptian army at will and there was nothing they could do about it.

    So yes, the 1967 Israeli victory was made possible by the superb planning, intensive preparation, dedication and courage of the IDF. But if the Israeli air force had taken heavy losses and failed to completely destroy the Egyptian air fields, these might not have been enough. The war could have gone very differently. But it was as if an invisible hand reached down from heaven and switched off the Egyptian defenses.

    It’s funny that Moshe Dayan’s name seems to reflect his place in history. Moshe is the name of the Hebrew leader that we refer to as Moses. Dayan means “judge”. And Moshe Dayan brought down a heap of judgement on Egypt (with help from YHVH) just as Moses did.

    It is also funny that the Gamal Nasser’s name sounds a lot like “nesher” which is the Hebrew word for “eagle”. And the eagle has been the traditional ensign of the enemies of Israel. There are lots of photographs of Nasser speaking in front of an image of large eagle that seems to bear a faint resemblance to Nasser himself. But in June 1967, the eagle’s wings were clipped and he went hopping back to his nest like a chicken.

    In that same vein, it is also curious that in Daniel 5:28, PERES is interpreted to mean “Thy kingdom is divided.” And Shimon Peres was one of the architects of the Oslo accords that attempted to divide Israel in exchange for peace.

  • Jen says:

    This is the BEST Hebrew Voices! Have listened 4x and I learn something each time. Chock full of inspiring HISTORY!

  • JCLincoln says:

    Lyndon Johnson ordered the USS Liberty sunk so it could be blamed on Egypt.

  • Jean Gordon says:

    Thank you. This was like a history class I wish I’d attended. I took 3 pages of notes like a student, and will listen again to improve my notes and understanding. I’m so glad I live in a world where Nehemia Gordon and Michael Oren are on the same side I am.

  • Kyla says:

    Nehemia, this needs to be broadcasted to the whole nation; put it on Twitter as #RealNews4You! I have learned so much from this interview that I was unaware of; thank you for re-broadcasting this. It would be very interesting to see what Mr. Oren would add to his comments now in 2018! I am going to buy his books.

  • Joe Norrie says:

    Thank you Nehemiah for that wonderful rebroadcast interview with Michael Oren. I enjoyed it except for the Israel motto that Mr Oren was working on. I am shocked that it is inclusive of LGBT rights. It is an Abomination.

    Israel, the covenant people of Yehovah are called to be a light to all nations. They will teach us about Yehovah and his precepts, statutes and judgments.

    The six day war is truly a testimony that Yehovah is with Israel. When I heard the interview the first time it reminded me of all of Israel’s victories in the Tanakh.

    It is my personal opinion that, Israel should try to be politically correct or try to be diplomatic on issues that are in direct violation of Yehovah’s Torah. Yehovah is with Israel and Israel should shema and not compromise.

    All Glory be to Yehovah, Elohim of Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov

    Shalom

  • Lynne decker says:

    Lovely broadcast community of religious solidarity

  • Phillip George says:

    or put this another way
    Britain liberated the middle east from Ottoman rule on rabbi Judah ben Samuel’s G_d given timetable.
    Britain [arguably Ephraim and Manasseh] = Brit. Ish = Covenant Man

    the Six Day War falls on Judah ben Samuel’s G_d given timeline.

    The Six Day War happens in that year after the Feast of First Fruits and thus the numbered year does not include the consecration Wave Offering. The first full and complete year then of Israel in Jerusalem is actually numbered from the spring of 1968.

    Hence this coming Shavuot for 2018 is the Jubilee of Jerusalem and also falls inside of Judah ben Samuel’s G_d given time line.

    For this reason I suspect YHVH will release the captive from mortality.

    Resolving Leviticus 23 and Deuteronomy 16. The shavuot count begins, IMHO, June 24.
    Josephus said the sun would be in Aries for passover.
    This means last year required ADAR II. Remember the precession of the Earth has been pulling the equinoxes forward against the Mazzaroth in the sky.

    For every year of the last 49 Israel did not celebrate Shmitah it seems they will now be required to ……… Thus Daniel’s Seventieth Week looks set for…. Yom Kippur 2018

    this seems to be the storm of biblical proportions. The day count, where everyday counts, begins three days into Summer.

    This Year Jerusalem, in Shamayim.

    • WatchwomanOntheWall2015 says:

      Ephrayim here. Not British. You should know that Ephrayim today represents all the Northern Tribes. We are Israel, the Lost Sheep. Some of us know who we are. Most of us call themselves Christian’s but are living under generations of Pagan culture which is cloaked with a form of true Christianity. TRADITION!
      There has always been a remnant.

  • Phillip George says:

    multiculturalism is an existential threat to the “western world” full stop.

  • Phillip George says:

    The USA faces an existential threat every day of the week.
    Multiculturalism is the evisceration of the Nation’s actual history.

    Multiculturalism is the destruction of Christendom. It seems designed to do that. Very cleverly projected.

    Is Jesus the Jewish Messiah? It is the existential question facing the USA.

    ps. If Moshe Dayan had have taken the Temple Mount you wouldn’t be facing the problems you are today. Magnanimity in victory was a mistake. Like unto King Saul’s. Multiculturalism didn’t work well for Saul, the anointed King of Israel.

  • DUANE GRIFFITH says:

    Wonderful interview, Mr Nehemiah, Mr Oren obviously is quite a man. Only thing I disagree on is the incident with USS Liberty. I’m no pro but have done a bit of investigating on it. Not going to bother with sources because I can’t imagine you caring enough to investigate it but all the info I got I will confess I got online. No doubt in my mind Pres Johnson requested it, wanted no survivors, would have blamed it on Egypt and we would have attacked. Whatever the scenario, it wasn’t an accident. He has to stick with the official narrative but that doesn’t take away his brilliance on everything else and I definitely learned from it. Will get his book.
    Thanks

  • JW Brakebill Jr. says:

    I enjoyed Michael Oren’s discussion, except for the motto for Israel at the end. I must ask, is not sanctioning/condoning of the LGBT community/lifestyle, not in direct violation of the Torah? While I freely admit it is not my place to be judgmental, and these lifestyles have existed since the dawn of time, is it not an ABOMINATION in Hashem’s eyes for the government to approve/legalize these perverted behaviors? Can the Jews be a people holy to Hashem if their leaders are going to accept unholy lifestyles that He opposes, and NOT purge evil from the midst of them? Is it not this type of stubborn rebellion against His ways, not the very reason “why” Hashem turned His back on the generations of old?

    • donald murphy says:

      I agree… we are not to learn heathen ways.

    • Milton Geza says:

      My sentiments exactly. Israel should not be like other nations and should not apologise for sticking to the tenets as spelled out in the Torah.

  • Penny Grayson says:

    Brilliant interview Nehemia! Worth listening to at least twice. Thank you for bringing this information.

  • Interesting, second listen… Now the unacknowledgeable elephant AND gorilla in the room. Israel (and of course by extension all other nations) cannot be permanent without alliance with YHWH. All of the other temporal alliances and battles are mere window dressing compared to that reality.

  • Mark says:

    Ok, this was very informative, however I cannot help thinking of a wise old proverb, “the more things change the more they remain the same”. Israel’s continuing reliance on the superpower of the day is an exercise in futility, regardless of how beneficial it may seem. Isa 31:1 “Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help and who rely on horses; they trust in chariots because the are many and in horsemen because the are very strong, and they did not turn to the Holy One of Israel and did not seek out yehovah. Isa 31:3 “Egypt is a man and not God,and their horses are flesh and not of spirit; and yehovah will stretch out his hand and the helper will stumble and he will fall the one helped, and they will perish all of them together”.

  • Sheila Price says:

    In answer to what we as Americans can do… we can pray for peace for Israel, pray for wisdom and Truth to be made known and for Israeli’s to receive the Truth… Trusting Yehovah enough to speak His name!

  • What is israel? It is the one more chance, in mercy, for the Jewish people to get the covenant with YHWH right! The “rights” of the “alphabet soup” community are a step away from that happy resolution to the sad years of the exile. They have the right, as do all others, to seek Yah with all their heart, in repentance to justice, mercy, and humility. Glad you are back israel; please think sustainability.

  • Margaret Sanders says:

    So, so, so good, Nehemia, thanks!!! Full of revelation, missing facts and better understanding of history and the current situation. listening again, and likely again….

  • Richard (Rick) Winkler says:

    Isa 2:3-4 …For out of Zion shall go the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations, and shall decide disputes for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.

    Until that glorious day leaders of nations better study war for without that understanding their entire people, nation and, their very history is at risk from others who covet their land and treasure. At the core of that understanding is the knowledge of the history of war.

    Thank you for bringing us this interview. It is one that I will listen to over and over again. Especially interesting is the US Liberty account. I have former shipmates who are still raw about this episode. Until now I had no way of explaining it.

    I will also share it on Facebook. This is information that everyone should hear. Whether they will listen to it or believe what they hear is another matter.