A Dutch UN observer in 1966-67, Jan Muhren, describes how he witnessed how Israel provoked their Arab neighbours in the
run-up to the Six-Day War on Dutch Nova TV. The former UN observer in Gaza and the West Bank has said Israel was not under siege by Arab countries preceding the Six-Day War, and that Israel provoked most border
incidents, which Muhren surmises was part of its strategy to annex more land.
Also shown in the report, Moshe Dayan admitted as much to Israeli journalist Rami Tal, in an interview only released after
Dayan’s death. Dayan corroborates Muhren’s eyewitness accounts that over 80% of the border incidents were Israeli
provocations.
This is an important historical corrective to one of the widely propagated founding myths of the state of Israel and its
continued justifications for military occupation and regional belligerency. It puts paid to the canard of an ‘existential
threat’ that the Israeli political establishment continues to claim — rather, right from the start, the reverse
has been true.
See also
Robert Fisk on 1967:
Lies and outrages … would you believe it?
