Two weeks after the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, Aryeh Morgenstern visited the Lubavitcher Rebbe along with some colleagues from the Israeli Consulate. The Rebbe urged the Israeli government in the strongest terms to conquer Damascus. As usual, the Israeli government didn't listen. And once again it appears to have been Moshe Dayan who prevented it from happening.
An IDF reserve colonel Sariya Ofer was killed on Thursday night and
his girlfriend wounded in an attack in the northern Jordan Valley
region, an IDF spokesperson confirmed for The Jerusalem Post.
According Ofer's partner, MoniqueOmer, the couple, both in their 50's, heard noises outside their home, located near the West Bank moshav Shadmot Mehola.
Upon leaving the house to investigate, the man was attacked and
killed by what the woman said were two Palestinians wielding an ax and
iron bars.
The two attackers reportedly tried to grab the woman as
she fled from the scene and stopped a passing car on Route 90 to call
security forces, Israel Radio reported.
In a tragic coincidence, IDF reserve colonel Shariyah Ofer was killed
forty years to the day of his brother's death, Army Radio reported.
Combat
pilot Yitzhak Ofer was killed on October 11, 1973 when his aircraft was
shot down over the Golan Heights during the Yom Kippur War.
Five 'Palestinians' have been arrested, but it's still not officially a terror attack, because that would lead to calls to stop the 'negotiations.' Ya think?
The New York Times' Ethan Bronner reviews Yossi Klein HaLevi's Like Dreamers. This is from the first link.
Mr. Halevi, an American immigrant who has worked as a journalist and
analyst in Jerusalem for 30 years, has created a textured, beautifully
written narrative by focusing on seven men — and they are all men — Mr.
Porat among them, who served in the paratroop brigade that conquered the
Old City of Jerusalem in the 1967 war. The seven took distinct paths, a
few becoming settler leaders, others active on the left, and in the
arts and music. One sought common cause with Palestinian revolutionaries
and, after a trip to Damascus, ended up in an Israeli prison for 12
years. By accompanying these men across the decades we gain a close
understanding of many of the country’s internal debates.
...
[T]he men Mr. Halevi has chosen are compelling. One is Arik Achmon,
a secular liberal from a kibbutz who helped transform Israel’s failing
statist economy into a thriving capitalist one. Mr. Achmon helped found
the first private domestic airline in Israel. The story of how he stood
down the once-powerful Histadrut trade union federation to keep his
company alive illustrates the enormous changes that Israeli society has
undergone in the past three decades. A second character, Avital Geva,
one of the country’s leading conceptual artists who represented Israel
in the 1993 Venice Biennale with a fully functioning kibbutz greenhouse,
also illustrates a crucial sector of a dynamic society.
But the story’s real strength derives from Mr. Halevi’s portraits of
three settler leaders: Mr. Porat, Yoel Bin-Nun and Yisrael Harel. Their
movement has been central to contemporary Israel, yet little understood
abroad. Settlers are mostly portrayed as two-dimensional caricatures.
Their actions violate the world’s hope for a Palestinian state on the
land they are taking, and their ideology does not lend itself easily to
rational discourse. It is hard to know how to negotiate with someone
like Mr. Bin-Nun who, as described in the book, believed that the “Torah
was a blueprint for God’s relationship with a holy nation living in a
holy land,” or with Mr. Porat, who saw “no contradiction between
conquering the land and creating peace, because the return of the holy
people to the holy land was a precondition for world peace.”
Yet Mr. Halevi, a religiously observant Jew with centrist politics by
the standards of today’s Israel, brings us into these men’s lives and
thoughts, taking us along on their journeys and making of them fully
realized characters. We are with them not only for their internal
meetings and personal struggles but also for their interactions with
Israeli officials, who often claimed to reject settlements while
legitimizing them. It is clear that if the government had wanted to stop
them — if officials had seen the settlement project as an existential
danger rather than as a way to expand narrow borders, send defiant
messages and win close elections — it could have.
Defense establishment kept Golda Meir in the dark in the lead-up to Yom Kippur War
This was one of the posts I had planned to run on Friday, but did not get to run it.
This past week, some of Golda Meir's testimony to the Agranat Commission (which investigated the government's and the IDF's failure in the Yom Kippur War) was released for the first time. While the headline was that Golda told the Commission that had Israel pre-empted we might not have been resupplied by the US, this is the piece that is truly shocking.
"At the time that this
telegram was sent by you, did the intelligence services or anyone else
bother you with anything urgent? Any other information? The problem here
is that they [in the report] claim that it is only an exercise."
"...I would like to read to you what the
Military Intelligence Directorate received that day: 'We learned that
Syria has evacuated Soviet experts, and that planes have begun taking
them from Damascus to Moscow. The same sources informed us that even the
families of the Soviet diplomats have begun arriving in Moscow from
Damascus. The sources added that the Syrians explained the evacuation by
saying that Egypt and Syria were planning to wage a war against Israel.
For your information."
Meir: "I don't know."
Yadin: "The IDF chief of staff and the defense
minister told us that on Friday evening they had not received such a
telegram. Did you not get one?"
Meir: "No."
Later in that meeting, the commission
discusses certain intelligence information that was not handed over to
the Prime Minister's Office.
Meir: "It may be that the Military
Intelligence Directorate did not feel obligated to share information
with us, but it is very hard for me to understand how it wasn't shared
with the chief of staff."
...
"...Until the very last minute we were still trying to
follow Military Intelligence's conception, that everything that was
happening on the northern and southern fronts was a result of their fear
of an attack by us. To try at the last minute through the Americans to
tell the Russians, and have the Russians tell the Egyptians that we have
no such intention. ... We thought that at the last minute maybe we
could still save. ... For some reason based on what Keating told us
[Kenneth Keating, who was, for a time, the U.S. ambassador to Israel],
it would be at 6 p.m. At one point I said, maybe it was a misprint?
Maybe he meant that it would be at 16:00 [4 p.m.]. ... We thought that
they would still have time to get the message to the Russians and
subsequently to the Egyptians and Syrians, that we are not planning to
attack."
...
Agranat: "I am just trying to
understand the frame of mind. ... I understand that one consideration,
maybe the main one, was that they were afraid of us and therefore we
wanted to communicate the message: know that we have no intention of
launching an attack. But shouldn't the other consideration have been not
that they are afraid of us, but that they want to attack us and they
want to take us by surprise? Or was the assessment that there was a 'low
likelihood' as Military Intelligence calls it, meaning that it wouldn't
happen?"
Meir: "No, because though the Military
Intelligence assessment was as it was -- the conception. I am wary of
speaking in front of two former chiefs of staff, but I think that the
conception was that if the conscription army was on full alert, that
means the air force, and additional units were called up and are there
to assist -- that is enough force to stave off ..."
"On the day of October 5, the chief of staff said, and I
quote: 'We have taken all the preparatory measures. Over this holiday,
the IDF has declared a state of high alert; all vacations have been
cancelled on the lines.' ... That means that the conception was that
blocking [the enemy] is a conscription army on high alert."
It was also disclosed last week that Israel had listening devices on the Egyptian side of the Suez canal. Astoundingly, military intelligence chief Eli Zeirarefused to activate them (while leaving his superiors and the political echelon with the impression that they had been activated).
The week prior to the war was
critical. On October 1, a Monday, the Egyptian army began the "Tahrir
41" exercise, concealing their preparations for an actual attack.
According to Bar Joseph, the Military Intelligence echelon directly
subordinate to Zeira, including the head of research Brig. Gen. Aryeh
Shalev, collection department director Col. Menachem Digli and Unit 848
commander Ben Porat, demanded that the devices be activated and made
operational. But Zeira refused "both because he was afraid of what would
happen to them (the listening devices) and because he was convinced
that no war would break out."
For example, upon discovering that the Soviet
Union was evacuating nationals on the day before the war, Zeira
confessed that "in my view, the Soviet thing is the most problematic and
serious." But he still concluded by saying "I don't see the Egyptians
and the Syrians attacking us."
Col. (res.) Yossi Langotsky, who served as the
commander of the Military Intelligence Directorate's operational
technology unit (in charge of operating the listening devices) confirms
Bar Joseph's sentiments. "I can personally attest to the fact that
during the week prior to the war Digli and Ben Porat approached Zeira
several times and asked for his authorization to activate the devices,
but to no avail. To assuage Zeira's concerns over the safety of the
devices, Digli told him that 'after all, it is for emergency situations
and times of uncertainty like this that these devices were designed.'
There are no words to describe the height of Zeira's arrogance. Despite
the terrible implications of a possible surprise attack, he stuck to his
misguided conception and avoided activating the devices that were
designed precisely to protect against such a surprise," Langotsky says
angrily.
On the other hand, the officials to whom Zeira
was himself subordinate -- the IDF chief of staff and the defense
minister -- were convinced that the assessment indicating a low
likelihood of war relied entirely on intelligence collected by the
special devices.
"Hanoch Bartov, Elazar's biographer, said that
the IDF chief of staff was convinced, up until the start of the war,
and even shortly afterward, that Zeira had activated the special means
of collection," says Adam Raz, a doctoral student in the Political
Science Department of Tel Aviv University, who researched the topic.
"Ben Porat recounted a conversation he had with Elazar, in which he said
that between October 1 and 6 he had asked the Military Intelligence
chief twice if all the sources were being utilized, and the answer was
affirmative. Digli has also said in the past that Elazar had told him
after the war that 'when I asked Eli (Zeira) if, when he says that there
is a low likelihood, he is relying on those sources (the listening
devices) as well, and his answer was affirmative.'"
Later, Elazar explained to Ben Porat: "the
false information that I received about the activation of the means
confused me even more, because I knew what they were capable of. If
there was no intelligence of impending war coming from them (the
devices), that means that everything is okay. It is now very clear to me
that I was not told the truth."
When facing the Agranat commission, Elazar
testified that "the incident (failure to activate the listening devices)
was not decided by me nor was it brought to my knowledge… I learned
only after the war that the […] was not turned on in those days. That is
precisely what it was made for -- to give us warning. That was its sole
function, and in essence I did not know that it was turned off."
...
Zeira was asked by the Agranat
commission why he had decided on his own accord not to use the devices
rather than consulting with the chief of staff, while "his superiors
were led to mistakenly believe that the topic had been incorporated into
his assessments." Zeira's reply was that "it is not my nature to
delegate authority upward…I don't bring things that are under my
authority to my superiors, usually, and I don't tell them 'I know it is
my responsibility, but I am handing off the responsibility to you. You
decide.'"
Bar Joseph argues that the decision makers'
faith that the devices were operational but providing no indication that
a war was imminent carried fateful weight in the decisions that were
made. It is the reason they did not rush to deploy the army along the
Sinai and Golan Heights fronts and why they did not recruit the
necessary reserves units. That faith also painted the rest of the
intelligence that came in from the region in a different light.
"During the week before the war broke out, the
decision makers are confident that the listening devices are fully
operational. They don't ask if the devices are working but rather what
information they are yielding. They say so in their Agranat commission
testimonies very clearly, and explain that their confidence that they
would receive notice 48 hours in advance relied on them. Zeira knows
that they think the devices are working, and for reasons known only to
him he does not correct them. That is the most terrible part of this
story. In my opinion, it was not a mistake. It was calculated," Bar
Joseph says.
According to Langotsky, "Zeira first gave the
green light to activate the devices only on Thursday afternoon, and only
for a technical check. The check began overnight between Thursday
October 4 and Friday October 5. His instructions were to complete the
test and report the findings to him personally at his house no later
than 6 a.m. Friday morning, Yom Kippur eve." In other words, when Zeira
says to Dayan that it is "totally quiet" in the "chatter on the Egyptian
lines" it is, according to Langotsky, at least three hours after the
devices were shut off, following a mere technical check. Bar Joseph
claims that due to a malfunction, one of the devices continued to work
for several hours more, but since it was just a technical check and not
full operational eavesdropping, it did not really help.
But Dr. Haim Shine (whom I think I knew in the 1960's), who was seriously wounded in the Yom Kippur War, urges readers not to let Golda Meir off so easily.
For
many years I have refrained from using the word "failure" in regard to
the army's lack of preparedness for that war and the way the country's
leaders made decisions during those days. Immediately after I was
released from a long hospital stay, where I was treated for a serious
war injury, I told the late Menachem Begin what I had seen in battle. He
asked me never to use the word "failure" because mothers had lost their
children in the war, and we mustn't compound their pain with the term
"failure." When I read Meir's Agranat commission testimony, it became
clear to me that it was not a failure at all -- it was in fact a true
crime.
The writing was on the
wall, written in huge red letters, and the irresponsible and
shortsighted leaders simply refused to read. The writing is now written
in small black letters on gravestones in various military cemeteries.
Meir was never fit to
serve as prime minister in the first place. She didn't understand the
first thing about the most fundamental, existential issues facing the
State of Israel. She was a representative of the Mapai establishment
that ruled the country for generations, and refused to step aside. Meir
lacked the ability to stand up to the heads of the defense
establishment. Her opinion did not matter to them, and when it came to
classified information, they didn't even bother informing her.
Then-Defense Minister Moshe Dayan's well-publicized heroism and
then-Military Intelligence Director Eli Zeira's arrogance and
overconfidence turned Meir into a marginal character in the mechanism
that made fateful decisions.
After the war, efforts
were made to be lenient with her, in many ways due to pity or other
external considerations. I feel suspicion mixed with contempt toward all
the embarrassing arguments that we must give her credit for her conduct
in the days after the initial surprise of the war. Unfortunately, as
someone who was seriously wounded in that war, giving her credit feels
to me as artificial, worthless and dishonest.
That reminds me of another Prime Minister and Defense Minister we had more recently.... Isn't it sad that 40 years later we have learned nothing?
Yom Kippur will mark the 40th anniversary of the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War. While I knew that Israel had been warned via an Egyptian double agent that his country was going to go to war, I did not know that Jordan's King Hussein also met with Golda Meir and warned her that a war was in the works.
But a
particularly interesting meeting took place on Sept. 25, 1973 -- about
two weeks before the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War. The venue: an
intelligence facility in central Israel.
Because the meeting was
hastily arranged and held well inside Israel, it was considered an
extraordinary encounter. Hussein was the one who asked for the meeting.
He wanted to sound the alarm about the looming danger on Israel's
borders. The Syrians and Egyptians were planning an attack on Israel, he
warned. Their decision stemmed from the unraveling of the Rogers Plan, a
desire to undo Israel's hubris and a need to compensate for their
humiliating defeat in the Six-Day War. Hussein said Egypt and Syria
wanted to reclaim the territory they had lost six years earlier.
Hussein confided with
Meir that two weeks prior to the meeting he had met with Syrian
President Hafez Assad and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. They told him
that they were running out of patience and that they would like to
initiate a flare-up with Israel on two fronts. Assad and Sadat asked
Hussein if he would be willing to open a third, eastern front, but he
refused.
Hussein told Meir about
Syria's preparations and the military maneuvers it was planning. He
also shared information on the deployment of its armored units and the
locations of its aircraft. He expressed concern how things might unfold
and inquired whether Israel was duly prepared.
Meir said she would look
into the matter. Hussein also said that he had promised Syria that he
would send two armored brigades to the frontline to show Arab
solidarity.
The details that
emerged from those meetings were shared among American, Israeli and
Jordanian policymakers, with both Israel and Jordan updating the
Americans about the events leading up to the meetings and their
aftermath, as well as on what transpired behind closed doors. The
conversation that was held just prior to the war did not frighten Meir,
but she couldn't stop thinking about what she had been told.
Killed because he was about to expose preparations for the Yom Kippur War?
Nearly 40 years ago, an Israeli military attache in Washington was gunned down outside his Bethesda, Maryland home. The family was flown back to Israel with the body in Air Force 2. Then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger asked for daily updates into the investigation of the murder. But the murderer(s) was never found. The investigation was closed three years later and the FBI destroyed all the evidence. Why?
One possibility is that Alon was about to expose an agreement between Moshe Dayan and Henry Kissinger to have Israel absorb a first strike in the Yom Kippur War (Hat Tip: Shy Guy).
“This was a political assassination, the kind of case that I would have extensive files about. But we later discovered that the FBI destroyed all the evidence in the case,” later closing it – for lack of evidence, says [Fred] Burton. “How does evidence of a political assassination get destroyed three years after the event – after all, the FBI keeps evidence back from the days of Al Capone.”
That, in and of itself, he feels, is a clear indication that “something” was amiss.
That “something”, Burton claims, was the likelihood that Alon was about to “spill the beans” about what Burton believes to be one of the biggest secrets in Israeli history – a possible “deal” between Israel and the U.S. to allow the Arabs to attack first in an upcoming war, in order, Burton says, to test the efficacy of American weapons versus what the Soviets had supplied Arab countries.
...
Burton, however, bases this belief on information supplied to him by Alon's wife Devora, who told Burton of experiences that he believes are part of a classical counterintelligence operation.
“She received strange phone calls, what are called 'ruse calls,' to see if they were home,” as well as “wrong numbers” from people speaking Hebrew - a very unlikely scenario in Maryland, long before the internet made it easy to find people, says Burton. “There was a strange visitor from the phone company' who wanted to get into the basement to do work that could easily have been done from the street.”
The FBI opened an investigation into the murder, but a rather halfhearted one, says Burton. Meanwhile, Henry Kissinger – who, he believes, worked out the deal whereby Israel would let the Arabs attack first with then Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan – took what Burton said was an unusually active interest in the investigation. “
"Kissinger requested daily upates on the investigation. I can't recall another example of such a high level official being so involved in a murder investigation like this,” said Burton, adding that the fact that Alon's body was sent home for burial in the Vice-President's plane. “I couldn't find another example of that plane for such a purpose. This set off some bells in my head,” he said.
In the end, the FBI theorized that Alon was killed by a Black September agent, although the case officially remains unsolved. In the end, it appears that it really was a Black September agent who pulled the trigger (Burton believes that the Mossad eliminated Alon's murderer earlier this year).
But, he asks in his book, just what was a Black September operative doing in Maryland? That is another mystery that remains unsolved, since it was the one and only time that the terror group carried out an operation like that in the U.S.
Was the terrorist recruited by one of the interested parties to “shut Alon up?” It's not clear, but Devora and her daughter received generous “hints” of their own on why Joe was killed from some of the elites of Israel's political and military establishment, according to Rachel Alon-Margalit in the documentary film “Who Killed My Father?”
Rachel tells of a conversation her mother had with former President Ezer Weizmann, who, when Devora asked for his help after years of stonewalling by Israeli officials whenever she asked for information about the investigation, said “Devora, I can't tell you anything. If I open my mouth there will be an earthquake. Go home and take care of your daughters.”
Other officials left Devora with a similar feeling - that Joe had stumbled onto a great truth that he was somehow not supposed to know, and that this information may well have gotten him killed, according to the documentary.
In April, Burton released a book about the murder. In an interview by email at the time, he told Haaretz:
Who do you think was negligent in conducting the investigation, and why?
"In my opinion the FBI and the local police did their best under the circumstances of 1973. None of them was equipped back then with tools for solving an international terror operation. There were plenty of extremist organizations at the time in the U.S. - the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, and Palestinian radicals - that drew the FBI's full attention. The counterterrorism division I headed did not exist at the time. The information gaps and the lack of ability in terms of recruiting sources and agents were substantial and undermined every effort to solve the murder."
And what about Israel?
"Israel relied too heavily on the FBI to solve the case. It seems that in Israel, too, they were too busy hunting Palestinian terrorists. Let me remind you that the same month that Joe was murdered there was the Mossad fiasco in Norway [the killing of Ahmed Bouchiki, a waiter who was mistaken for the terrorist Hassan Salameh ]. The investigation into Alon's murder was neglected, and unfortunately the case simply petered out over the years. Solving the murder of a single person just wasn't top priority."
Well, maybe. At this link (in Hebrew), a senior IAF officer (unnamed) claims that Israel agreed to Alon's murder.
Here's a preview of the book. Let's go to the videotape.
More here, here and here (first and third links in Hebrew).
Some of you may recall that last fall I did a couple of posts that were based upon cabinet meetings held in the hours leading up to and during the Yom Kippur War. The JPost's weekend magazine has a stunning story about Marwan Ashraf, the son-in-law of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, who acted as an Israeli agent for several years starting in 1970.
The story is a book review of a new book called HaMalach (The Angel) by Haifa professor Uri Bar Joseph. The book is currently in Hebrew only. The book's thesis is that Ashraf was not a double agent as has been claimed by Eli Zeira, the IDF chief of military intelligence in the lead-up to the war, but that Zeira ignored Ashraf's warnings and did not pass them on to the political echelon until the morning that the war started. But what makes this book different is that it is based upon Mossad documents that had never been seen outside the Mossad before. Zeira is likely the perpetrator of the most massive intelligence failure in Israel's history.
There's one thing you won't find online which is in the paper edition. In the paper edition, there is a sidebar that reports that Bar Joseph - a political science professor at the University of Haifa - and Professor Arie Kruglanski of the University of Maryland, have written a paper in Political Psychology that explains that Zeira and his chief deputy - Lt. Col. Yona Bandman - were both sufferers of something they call "cognitive closure," which means that they had a high need for closure which caused them to fixate on an early conclusion that Egypt was unlikely to initiate war, and therefore ignored any signs that suggested otherwise.
The description fits all of this country's leaders since 1992 with respect to the 'Palestinians' desire for peace. Hmmm.
The picture at the top is the Egyptians crossing the Suez Canal on October 6, 1973.
This interview is with Anwar Sadat's nephew, who is actually an opposition party leader, who defends Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. I'll have a comment after the video.
Let's go to the videotape.
If the Egyptians had retreated - as Mubarak refused to do - they would not have ended up with their Third Army surrounded by Ariel Sharon's troops in the Sinai. That was how the war ended. Unfortunately, Sharon didn't finish them off.
Remember Henry Kissinger's comments about US ambivalence about Russian Jews being thrown in the gas chambers (God forbid)? Well, look how the Washington Post reported the story.
But the newspaper did not report that the tapes also featured Secretary of State Henry Kissinger telling Nixon, after a March 1, 1973 meeting with Meir, that “the emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy.” Meir had pleaded for Washington to pressure Moscow to let Jews emigrate. “And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union,” Kissinger continued, “it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”
“I know,” Nixon responded. “We can’t blow up the world because of it.” Earlier, The New York Times (“In Tapes, Nixon Rails About Jews and Blacks ”, December 10) had found Kissinger’s comment newsworthy.
Kissinger is Jewish and he escaped as a child with his family from Germany in the 1930s. The Post, like The Times, reported Nixon’s derogatory comments about Irish, Italians and blacks as well as Jews. But not the startling Kissinger-Nixon exchange about hypothetical Jewish genocide in the Soviet Union.
Payback for being the Washington Post's source about Nixon and Kissinger praying together during the final days of Nixon's Presidency? Perhaps.
As a teenager, I can recall vividly how hurt I was by the way Richard Nixon talked about Jews in the transcripts from his White House taping system. I had argued with my parents in the summer of 1972 that a vote for George McGovern was a vote to sell Israel down the creek, and therefore I argued that they (I couldn't vote yet) should vote for Nixon. My parents - both lifelong Democrats - hated "Tricky Dicky" and could not bring themselves to vote for him no matter who ran against him. In fact, when the Watergate scandal broke, my parents put a bumper sticker on our car saying "I'm from Massachusetts, don't blame me." (The only states Nixon did not carry in the 1972 elections were Massachusetts and the District of Columbia).
Nixon's anti-Semitic remarks never made sense to me in light of the unquestioned fact that he (a little later than we would have liked but at least he eventually did) initiated an airlift to Israel during the Yom Kippur War that arguably saved the Jewish state from annihilation. Now, an important new transcript from Nixon's White House taping system has been released, and it helps explain why that airlift took place: Nixon hated Jews but loved Zionists.
While previous recordings have detailed Nixon’s animosity toward Jews, including those who served in his administration like Henry A. Kissinger, his national security adviser, these tapes suggest an added layer of complexity to Nixon’s feeling. He and his aides seem to make a distinction between Israeli Jews, whom Nixon admired, and American Jews.
In a conversation Feb. 13, 1973, with Charles W. Colson, a senior adviser who had just told Nixon that he had always had “a little prejudice,” Nixon said he was not prejudiced but continued: “I’ve just recognized that, you know, all people have certain traits.”
“The Jews have certain traits,” he said.
...
A moment later, Nixon returned to Jews: “The Jews are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality.”
...
These tapes, made in February and March 1973, reflect a critical period in Nixon’s presidency — the final months before it was “devoured by Watergate,” said Timothy Naftali, the executive director of the Nixon Library.
Mr. Naftali said that there were now only 400 hours of tapes left to released, and that those would cover the final months before the tape system was shut down in July 1973 after Alexander Butterfield, who was a deputy assistant to Nixon, confirmed its existence to the Watergate committee.
Mr. Naftali said he intended to have those tapes — actually, given changing technologies since Nixon’s time, CDs, and available for listening online at the library’s Web site — released by 2012.
An indication of Nixon’s complex relationship with Jews came the afternoon Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister, came to visit on March 1, 1973. The tapes capture Meir offering warm and effusive thanks to Nixon for the way he had treated her and Israel.
But moments after she left, Nixon and Mr. Kissinger were brutally dismissive in response to requests that the United States press the Soviet Union to permit Jews to emigrate and escape persecution there.
“The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy,” Mr. Kissinger said. “And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”
“I know,” Nixon responded. “We can’t blow up the world because of it.”
I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm more shocked by Kissinger's words than by Nixon's. During the period that Kissinger was Secretary of State, I frequently stayed with an Aunt and Uncle of his for the Sabbath (I read the Torah in their community for the synagogue - it was too far to walk from home), and they always spoke of him as being a committed Jew. Committed to what?
Six months later, during the Yom Kippur War, Nixon rejected Kissinger's advice to delay an arms airlift to Israel as a means of setting the stage for an Egypt confident enough to pursue peace; Nixon, among other reasons, cited Israel's urgent need.
Kissinger would have jeopardized Israel's existence too. If he weren't German, I could speculate that he was a forebear to George Soros.
Meanwhile, 40 years later, Jews are looking for an apology from Kissinger.
The American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants called for an apology from Kissinger, who is still consulted by Democratic and Republican administrations and by Congress on matters of state.
"Henry Kissinger's comments are morally grotesque and represent a disgraceful perversion of American values," said a statement. "He owes an apology to all victims of the Nazi Holocaust."
Actually, he owes an even bigger apology to Soviet Jews. But I wouldn't allow him to make it, nor would I accept it. Let him rot in hell with the punishment he deserves.
Later in the transcript, Nixon makes a comment about Jews having inferiority complexes. Jeffrey Goldberg (you really could have waited until after Shabbos) says that Nixon was right about one Jew having an inferiority complex: Henry Kissinger.
In any event, Nixon wasn't the pure unadulterated evil my parents thought he was, but he was pretty close. Fortunately, he had a soft spot for Israel.
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
