The Everlasting Hatred (30 page)

It is certainly not because Israelis are individually more courageous. Arab-Muslim soldiers are as brave as any in the world. Militarily speaking, there is only one advantage that stands out for the Israelis; they fight more with their reason than with their emotions. And they fight more as a unit than do the Muslims.

An Israeli friend of mine was a young flight leader in the Israeli Air Force during the 1967 Six Day War. He related to me the extremely difficult battle plan they had to execute at the beginning of the war.

They had to coordinate multiple flights of fighter-bombers so that they all arrived on target at the same time. If timing and navigation were off, the whole war could have been a disaster. Israel's outgunned and outnumbered forces had to seize air supremacy at the very beginning to have any chance at all.

Multiple flights of jet fighters screamed toward multiple targets from multiple directions at supersonic speed. The planes
flew so low that some were taking in spray from the ocean and others were just above the sand dunes. They had to maintain absolute radio silence, so no timing coordination or course corrections with each other were possible.

This is my friend's account:

I glanced out of the cockpit to glimpse the Nile River streak by underneath. I pulled up lightly to get over a bridge. I was flying so low that I nearly hit the mast of an Egyptian fishing boat. Just three hours before, I was on my honeymoon. A helicopter picked me up off the roof of the hotel. I still remember waving goodbye to my beautiful new bride as she stood on the hotel roof in her negligee.

I went over the battle plan in my mind. The great pyramids of Egypt flashed by off my starboard wing. I looked over my shoulder—all the young pilots were in tight formation behind me. I glanced at my airspeed indicator—Mach .85. I reminded myself, “Must keep just under the sound barrier so as not to set off alarms.” We were counting on the populace thinking we were Egyptian fighters on maneuvers. “One thing for sure,” I thought, “at this speed and low altitude, they will never be able to identify the planes. We are gone before they know we are there.”

I checked my watch again. “Will we all arrive at the same time?” I wondered. “Will one of the squadrons hit a base early and alert the other bases to launch their fighters?” We had timed the strike to hit just after the Egyptians early morning patrols. “They would be having morning tea about now,” I thought.

“Oops! There is my landmark.” I instinctively pulled the stick back hard and went into a vertical climb to line up for attack. “Are we on time? Where are the other squadrons?” I rolled my fighter so that I could see. To my amazement, the other two attack units that had come in from different directions were all climbing in the vertical staring back at me. “Amazing! We had all arrived at the same precise moment.”

I pulled over the top and rolled into a screaming dive right down the center of Egypt's main fighter base just outside of Cairo. There before me was the pride of the Egyptian Air Force parked in neat rows on the airport tarmac. I lined up and delivered my two 500 kg bombs. Three MIG 21s exploded in fireballs. I whipped my plane around in a tight turn for another pass. My little Mirage fighter's delta wings dug in hard against the g-forces. A large Tupelov bomber filled my gunsight. I fired a quick burst from my two 30 mm canons and it exploded in flames. In minutes, every aircraft on the Egyptian base was destroyed. The Egyptian base was in such chaos that not one shot had been fired at us.

As we turned and streaked across the Sinai for home, I thought, “What a way to enter a war. Less than four hours ago, I held my bride in my arms. Now I have just completed the first mission of a desperate war that will determine the survival of Israel.”

My friend had not yet learned how great a victory the Israeli Air force had just completed. Virtually the entire combined air forces of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria were destroyed on the first day. Every airfield was hit at approximately the same time. Reconnaissance photos showed that at every airfield in Egypt, almost every warplane had been hit dead center. The absolute necessity of achieving air superiority was accomplished.

In six days the outnumbered Israeli Defense Forces destroyed the best of the combined Muslim armies of the Middle East.

There are some who would say this happened because of superior training. My friend believed that played a part—but he also believed that Israel's God must have been with them.

I interviewed a tank commander from the crack Golani Brigade about what happened in the first hours of the Yom Kippur war on the Golan Heights.

On October 6 1973, all Israeli soldiers that could be spared were home on leave for Israel's holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur. Only a bare minimum force was on duty. Suddenly, at dawn, the entire Syrian border erupted with artillery fire. Fourteen hundred top-of-the-line Soviet-built tanks charged forward. Another one thousand tanks were in reserve. The Syrians had a new anti-tank missile that wreaked havoc with the Israel's tanks.

The Israeli Air Force streaked in low to attack the Syrian ground forces, trying to stop the onslaught. Baruch watched in horror as plane after plane was blown out of the sky. The Soviets had designed a new Surface-to-Air Missile (SAM) for intercepting low-flying planes. Israel had no countermeasures for it. This same missile wreaked havoc with the Israeli Air Force both in the Sinai and on the Golan Heights.

By noon, the Golani tank force had been cut to pieces. Baruch
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commanded the last three remaining tanks. They took up position at a critical crossroad for a fight to the death. They knew that they were all that stood between the Syrian army and Galilee. The thriving city of Tiberius lay helpless in the path of the Syrian juggernaut. Syrians are infamous for their barbaric treatment of Israeli prisoners—Baruch shuttered at the thought.

When the Syrian commander could see only three tanks blocking his way, “He said it's too easy—this must be a trap.” So he ordered his forces to stop for lunch while they analyzed the situation. He reasoned the Israelis were for all purposes already beaten.

During the lunch break, reinforcements were able to rush to the front and furiously beat the Syrian forces. By a miracle of God, they got no further into Israel—though the fighting continued to be horrific. The tough Israeli tank commander, who had not been religious, attributed this whole episode to God's protective care over Israel.

The final victory in the Yom Kippur War was actually a greater miracle than the 1967 Six Day War, but the cost in lives and weapons was horrific.

The Yom Kippur war was not like the Six Day War or any of the previous wars with the Muslims. This time the Arab armies scored unprecedented and stunning initial victories. Israeli casualties were the highest yet seen. Hardened and confident combat units were so outnumbered and outflanked they were fleeing in disarray. Israel lost more than five hundred tanks and forty-nine aircraft in the first three days alone.

I interviewed Randy Cunningham, who was America's leading Vietnam ace at the time. He told me that he was one of the pilots in our Mediterranean fleet that shuttled aircraft from U.S. carriers to Israel to replace their heavy losses. He said that as soon as he landed, the Israelis started refueling and arming the plane while painting a Star of David over the U.S. insignia. That's how critical the situation was.

In the Sinai, the modernized Egyptian forces used new missiles and electronic defenses to blast their way to the eastern bank of the Suez Canal. Israeli counterattacks by three tank divisions were repelled.

Early on October 8, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan called Golda Meir and said, “This is the end of the Third Temple. The situation is desperate—everything is lost. We must withdraw. Arm the ‘doomsday weapons,' I am initiating the ‘Samson Option.'”
²³³

The Samson Option is a continuously practiced plan that will be put into action if the Muslim forces overrun Israel. If the plan is put into action, every Arab capitol will be vaporized in a thermonuclear mushroom cloud. Only now, ballistic missiles launched from land and submarines will deliver most of the warheads. Aircraft will be held in reserve for back-up strikes if needed.

The Muslim leaders realized after the Yom Kippur War that another strategy had to be adopted. The leaders surmised that Israel had to be weakened by reducing its borders to an indefensible size. Only then could they overwhelm the hated “Zionist entity” and annihilate it.

The Muslim world also realized that they had to work toward matching both Israel's nuclear arsenal and missile delivery systems. They wanted to become able to attack with all kinds of weapons of mass destruction—chemical and biological as well as nuclear. So missile development, along with nuclear development, became top priority for nations like Pakistan, Iraq, Libya—and now Iran and Syria.

In the meantime, Israel is facing a new kind of threat that is potentially more dangerous than the military threats of the past. The Arab world has succeeded in framing the debate over the Middle East as a struggle between “the downtrodden Palestinians” and the powerful, heavily armed Israelis. Somehow they have convinced the world that Israel, with six million citizens, is bullying the Muslim nations of the Middle East, which have some two hundred and forty million citizens. The Islamic world has also covered over the fact that there are over a billion Muslims worldwide that are sympathetic to the “Palestinian” cause.

The new weapons of conquest are carefully crafted propaganda slogans like, “Land for peace!” “The legitimate rights of the Palestinians!” “End the Israeli aggression!” “End the ‘occupation' of Palestinian land!”

These familiar pieces of propaganda have been all too readily taken up and spread by a Western media that have little concern for the facts of history in this region.

The shocking tragedy is that some Israelis, like the late Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Perez, played along with these myths, even they knew they were not true. They led Israelis, who were understandably tired of war, along with them into the folly of the Oslo Agreement. They decided that peace, no matter the risks, was worth a try.

More and more Israelis are willing to be deceived into turning over lands in Judea, Samaria, Gaza, and the Golan Heights to the Palestinians in exchange for their “promises of peace.” The vast number of recent Jewish immigrants does not have the same awareness of the dangers facing Israel from her neighbors as the
Sabras
(native-born Israelis) who have fought through most of the previous wars.

The Oslo Agreement set up a suicidal process that could lead to the destruction of Israel, according to independent objective military and intelligence experts.

Back in 1967, when the level of military technology and sophistication available to the Arab states was much lower than now, a Pentagon study found that Israel, at a minimum, needed control of the Golan Heights, the land east of Jerusalem to Jordan River, the central West Bank territory of the Jordan River, and part of the Sinai, including Sharm e-Sheikh.

More recently, intelligence expert Joseph de Courcy concluded, “The absolute minimum territory Israel requires to deter war is the territory it is controlling today.”
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This conclusion was drawn from an extensive report made by two prestigious military think tanks.

In the late 1970s, Israel agreed to give up the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in exchange for a peace treaty. Many military and
intelligence experts agree that further land concessions would leave Israel with indefensible borders and no effective conventional deterrent against attack.

Notice the emphasis on the word
conventional
. This is because Israel still has its non-conventional form of deterrence—nuclear weapons. And as we saw in Moshe Dayan's statement to Golda Meir, with these they have already formed a last-resort-battle-plan known as the “Samson Option.” With the totally indefensible borders into which they are now being pushed, Israel would be quickly forced into launching the Samson Option. Is this really what Western leaders want?

There is within our State Department an appalling ignorance of the true situation in this volatile area. The current American president, Barack Obama, whom I believe is at heart a Muslim, seems to believe that the only way to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian problem is to force Israel to give into all of the Palestinian demands without even face-to-face negotiations. This thinking willfully ignores that Palestinian leaders are among the most vicious terrorists the world has ever seen. They refuse to renounce their charters, which call for the annihilation of Israel, much less recognize Israel as a state that has a right to exist. They will recognize Israel only as “the Jewish entity.”

Israelis live in the toughest neighborhood in the world. They have no other option but to stay tough and hold on to defensible borders. The citizens of Israel are weary of war, weary of seeing their sons and daughters killed in the prime of their youth. Understandably, there has developed an almost “peace at any price” mentality in many. But Israelis have basically one option, stay tough and fight or pack up and get out of the Middle East. This may sound harsh, but the facts are harsh and clear. Any sign of weakness or lack of resolve only encourages the Muslims to
move toward destroying them. This is their irreversible goal. It is a fact that is not going to change, not even by “Obama charm offensives.”

The present territorial concessions Israel is being pressured into making have absolutely no chance of appeasing the Muslims. History shows clearly that Israel will never be small enough to satisfy the Muslims. Their real quarrel with Israel has never been about its
size
, but about its
existence
on what they believe is sacred Muslim land.