Israel's 1967 attack against Egypt - Assignment Example

Israels 1967 Attack Against Egypt 28 October 2009 Discussion Considering all the events that happened prior to the actual June 1967 war, Israel was justified in attacking. The catalyst for that happened almost a decade earlier during the Suez Canal Crisis of 1956 when Egypt also blocked the Straits of Tiran to all Israeli shipping. The result was that Egypt being defeated militarily but came out a winner politically as Israel was forced to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula and in its place an international peacekeeping force was installed to serve as a buffer.

Another event that foreshadowed the 1967 War was the water dispute with Lebanon and Jordan who had constructed dams to divert the Jordan River from reaching the Sea of Galilee. There were a number of other provocations such as incessant guerrilla attacks against Israeli civilians but the trigger event was expulsion of the United Nations Emergency Force from the Sinai Peninsula as ordered by Gamal Nasser in May 1967. He had ordered the Straits of Tiran closed to Israeli shipping and had amassed 100,000 troops together with 1,000 tanks on the border but he was not a threat (wrmea.com). I think Israels preventive strike would fall under Classification No.

3 (Easier to Justify Preventive War) considering all prior events leading to it. Egypt had shown hostile intent and engaged in inflammatory rhetoric and took preparatory steps prior to taking hostile action by amassing troops on the border and expelling the peacekeeping force in the region. It might be helpful also for the sake of discussion to describe the mood in Israel at that time. The country was in economic recession, the full horrors of the Holocaust was belatedly realized by its citizens and Israels neighbors did not want to sign any peace agreements with it (Segev, 8) and had steadfastly refused to even recognize the existence of Israel as legitimate (Bard, 1).

Discussion-2 On this second case of former Pres. Bushs preventive war against Iraq in 2003, is not justifiable and belongs to Classification No. 2 (Difficult to Justify Preventive War) because at the time of the invasion, all he had were suspicions that Saddam Hussein had harbored secret nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs or WMD (weapons of mass destruction) without any proof whatsoever. This pretext was actually in pursuance of a bigger design and that is to control the worlds second largest proven oil reserves after Saudi Arabia.

While it is true that Saddam had refused United Nations inspectors into the country, all he had done was play bluff with the US and other world powers by pretending he had these weapons as a show of strength against potential enemy Iran (which he had fought earlier in the previous decade). There is another aspect that needs to be looked into and this was another suspicion that Saddam somehow had something to do with the September 11, 2001 twin tower attacks. There was this growing feeling in the administration at that time that a failure to act would result in another follow-up attack on US soil and so there must have been a connection with Osama Bin Ladins al-Qaida and Saddams Iraq (Landay, April 21, 2009).

The quest to find this link had led to those abusive interrogation techniques bordering on torture to justify the invasion of Iraq after it was found there were no WMD inside the country. Former Pres. Bush used the higher-order moral obligation argument to launch the invasion against Iraq in 2003. He had taken the view that the state is the unit-carrier of the moral rights of American citizens who have the right to be protected and defended against any future attacks. Works Cited Anonymous. The 1967 War and the Israeli Occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. From the Jews for Justice in the Middle East. Web. Retrieved 28 October 2009 from http://www.wrmea.com/jews_for_justice/1967war.html Bard, Mitchell. The 1967 Six-Day War. Jewish Virtual Library. From the American Israeli Cooperative Enterprise. Web. Retrieved 28 October 2009 from http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/67_War.html Landay, Jonathan S. Report: Abusive Tactics Used to Seek Iraq-al Qaida Link. On-line. McClatchy Newspapers (April 21, 2009). Web. Retrieved 28 October 2009 from http://www.

mcclatchydc.com/227/story/66622.html Segev, Tom. 1967: Israel, the War and the Year that Transformed the Middle East. New York, NY, USA: Metropolitan Books, 2007. Print.