Meta-post on Psychological History series

Any feedback on my series, A Psychological History of Palestinian Arabs, is much appreciated. I'm trying to write it as quickly and thoroughly as possible but it is certainly not as well-researched or as well-annotated as a book or published article would be. Please point out any mistakes you may think I am making.

I'm really trying to get to the 1948 post, and all that I am writing now is meant to lead up to that point. (I am very surprised that I still haven't made it to the 1929 pogroms.) That would be the end of Part 1; the PalArab psychology changes dramatically from 1948 to today and that is a series of posts in itself, if people are interested.

So far, in default word processing formatting it is nine pages long, so it is already a long magazine article. I don't think that it will end up anywhere near book-length but the topic can easily fill a book. I anticipate the next post to cover the 1929 riots and political aftermath up until 1936, part 6 will be the 1936-39 disturbances and strikes, part 7 would cover World War II. I have a feeling that part 8 may go from 1945-47 and then part 9 would be the "naqba" itself. But things can change.

On the meta level, I am wondering if I am an "historian." I know when I am making conjectures, and anything that I write that is not based on solid fact bothers me, but from what I can tell "real" historians do exactly the same thing - making assumptions about the reasons events occur that can only be based on educated guesses. Historians clearly have biases as well, and their histories reflect their biases, something I am undoubtedly guilty of.

My method is that I try hard to find consistencies in behavior that can be explained by a mindset. This is harder to do than I had thought originally in this case, because the Palestinian Arabs at this point in my history had not yet coalesced into a "people" so there are a number of competing mindsets that need to be accounted for.

But, besides the fact that I am not being as careful in writing this as I would if it was for publication, am I doing anything different than historians? I do not have access to original source materials but I am relying heavily on contemporaneous newspaper articles and books that are online, as well as more conventional histories that are also online. (Google Scholar and Google Books helped tremendously for the first two parts; the Palestine Post archives will be my major source through 1948. I expect the Time magazine archives will be invaluable during the 1950s and 60s.) I have nothing but the highest regard for historians who discover and study original source material in the original languages, but I suspect that many of them are doing pretty much the same thing I am here.

Either way, I am learning a great deal that I was unaware of and I hope my readers are learning as well.

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A Psychological History of Palestinian Arabs - part 4

As the 1920s went on, the Arabs of Palestine underwent some changes.

While the majority stayed the same, not caring about the political issues of the day as long as they got their pay, the Mufti's power grew. He was able to use his political and financial influence, as well as his ability to manipulate Arab masses with a well-placed rumor.

At the same time, there was an explosion in illegal Arab immigration. A drought in Hauran started in 1927 and as a result over 35,000 Hauranites moved from Syria to Palestine over the next few years, many sending money back to families they left behind. They were not alone - despite an economic recession in Palestine that started in 1926, things were still better there than in the Arab countries, and tens of thousands of immigrants, mostly illegal, streamed in from Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Transjordan and the Hejaz area of Arabia, and even as far as Yemen. In all, one demographer estimated 100,000 illegal Arab immigrants into Palestine from 1922-1931, and possibly another 100,000 between 1931 and 1933.

This influx increased Arab unemployment and crime in Palestine. It brought more uncertainty and less security to the existing Arab residents. There were complaints about foreign Arabs willing to work for less than the already settled Arabs. These newly unemployed and disgruntled Arabs were more receptive to the Mufti's racist ideology, as well as to be on his side as he fought his own political battles.

Inevitably, contact between Jews and Arabs increased as Jews continued to immigrate to Palestine as well. The Arab leaders feared the possibility of persecuted Jews moving to Palestine by the millions and raised this issue as their single biggest concern to the British, constantly hammering away at that theme.

The Arab senses of honor and community started combining in a way that reverberates today. Not only is one's individual honor fantastically important in Arab culture, but also the honor of the Arab people as well. Just as personal disgrace is to be avoided at all costs, so is disgrace to the larger Arab community.

When these two factors are put together, it means that Arabs will almost never accept the blame for anything they do - to accept blame is to bring disgrace on the community. If there is someone else to blame for any problems, no matter how far-fetched, the natural Arab tendency will be to grab onto any possible tenuous thread that supports the ability to blame the Others and escape responsibility.

In this early example, the illegal Arab immigration that caused the economic problems was swept under the rug, and a new scapegoat had to be found. Jews were the obvious first choice for that role. Even Arabs who were happily employed as a direct result of Jewish capital would side with their brethren in any conflict - to break ranks was unthinkable. Arab projection meant that rather than blame their own immigration for their problems, Arabs would blame Jewish immigration, even though all data showed that Jewish immigration improved the economy and Arab immigration degraded it.

Arab leaders know how much the people abhor breaking ranks with the larger Arab world, and they take advantage of it. As long as their selfish actions can be construed as being for the Arab community, any public disagreements or dissent is self-censored. In private, Arab individuals can and do argue and criticize their leaders, but their ability to organize any real opposition is hampered by this fear of disgracing the community at large and embarrassing the Arab world in view of the West.

In 1920 there were no real Palestinian Arab leaders so ordinary Arabs could criticize that year's riots without fear of either retribution or of disgracing the Arab nation. But by the end of the decade the Mufti had enough power, partially conferred by the British, that he knew that he could use the Arab population as yet another tool in his power base without fear of serious dissension from the masses.

His main target was the Jewish population of Jerusalem.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

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US arming "moderate" Arabs? Another 1967 flashback

In 1966 and 1967, Jordan did not exactly see eye-to-eye with Syria and the PLO. By any measure, King Hussein was far more moderate and pro-Western than other Arab leaders, and the US naturally wanted him to stay in power.

Nevertheless, it is a bit disconcerting to see the first highlighted paragraph in the following news story from January, 1967:

So the US sent arms to prop up a "moderate" Arab ruler in danger from more radical Arabs, and five months later those weapons meant to be used against the terrorists were used against Israel.

And the terrorists the weapons were meant to be used against are the same people whom the US now considers "moderate" and in need of bolstering by sending support and allowing weapons shipments....

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"Daily Kos a right-wing Zionist cabal"

The amount of paranoia and perceived victimhood among the uber-left is a wonder to behold.

Because, of course, the Zionists control the merely ultra-left.

From the first phrase:

I have never been one for conspiracy theories..."

to the final conclusion:

Just WHO is really running the show at the Daily Kos?

To this civilian journalist, justice and peace activist, politically progressive Christian, it sure smells like a right wing Zionist cabal.

This rambling posting shows how messed up the "progressive" thinkers are.
But it is really, really funny.

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Why did the PLO threaten King Hussein in 1966?

It has been pointed out that the PLO was founded before there were any "territories" to be "liberated" and that this proto-terror organization never tried to fight to gain the West Bank as an independent state from Jordan.

This didn't mean that the Palestinian Arabs were happy with Jordan, though. The PalArabs who lived in the West Bank in those days, under Arab rule, were thirsting to fight Israel - and were upset that Jordan wouldn't let them, as this November 25, 1966 UPI report shows:



The PLO tried to take advantage of the situation (UPI, December 27, 1966):

The PLO, using religious imagery ("Hussein betrayed God, the Prophet and Palestine"), was complaining that Jordan didn't hate Israel enough. Because Jordan wouldn't allow Iraqi and Saudi troops into Jordan to help destroy Israel, the PLO threatened to overthrow King Hussein and replace him with someone who would.

But nowhere did they say they wanted a Palestinian Arab state in part or all of Jordan! If a Palestinian Arab textbook at the time would have shown "Palestine," no doubt, it would have shown Israel in its pre-1967 borders. People who lived in Jordanian-occupied Ramallah and Nablus didn't want to fight Jordan for independence, but Israel.

And if Israel was reduced to the size of a postage stamp, the Arab desire to wipe it out would not be diminished one bit.

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Validation for the Elder

It looks like my PalArab self-death count is fairly accurate:

In its annual report, the Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens' Rights said 345 Palestinians were killed in factional fighting in 2006.

In the first five months of 2007, another 271 Palestinians were killed in factional fighting, the commission said.

I don't know PICCR's methodology, and this annual report is not yet on their website. I don't know if they are counting clan clashes, "work accidents," "honor killings," terrorists crushed in tunnel collapses or kids who find their parents' weapons and kill themselves, all of which I count. My count was 277 as of the end of May.

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Doing nothing is the best policy (NY Sun)

One of the sanest Arabs on the planet weighs in on the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War:

Forty Years Later, Doing Nothing Is the Best Policy

BY YOUSSEF IBRAHIM

In this week's torrent of 40th anniversary recollections about the Six-Day War, one TV image cut straight to the chase: King Faisal of Saudi Arabia staring into a camera to say, "The essential point remains the total elimination of Israel."

The king's statement of principles was captured in "Six Days in June," an impressive two-hour documentary that aired Monday on PBS. It included footage from a September 1967 meeting of Arab heads of state on how to deal with Israel's crushing military victory. For all the noise about peace in the 40 years since, the Saudi monarch's silver bullet solution is still the basic Arab mindset, so much so that Faisal is still feted as a purist Arab — Al Arabi Al Assil.

For their part, Israeli leaders have come and gone since General Moshe Dayan walked up to reclaim Jerusalem's Western Wall, but none has improved on his formula — decisive force in the face of implacable enmity.

As do-gooders and militants reflect on what Israel should have done, what Arabs failed to do, what the United Nations ought to do, I vote for doing nothing.

Here is why immobility serves a higher purpose: Regardless of the peace treaties with Israel forged by President Sadat of Egypt and King Hussein of Jordan, the overwhelming majority of Arabs need more time to dismantle their war posture.

At this point, Israel's primary antagonists in this conflict, the Palestinian Arabs, are no longer an entity that can be engaged. Having dissolved into a myriad of warring gangs, there is no one to settle with. The best offer to Israel from the "democratically elected" Palestinian leadership of Hamas is a hudna — Islamist jargon for the kind of truce the Prophet Muhammad offered his enemies, a respite during which the non-Muslim party should decide to surrender or prepare to die.

On the broader Arab horizon, the best offer on the table is a revived Saudi Peace plan from one of King Faisal's successors, King Abdullah, which demands a right of return to Israel for all 5 million Palestinian Arab refugees. As generous as this seems to Palestinian Arabs, half the other Arab countries in the region insist that it should be coupled with a rolling back of Israel's frontiers to its pre-1967 borders.

Clearly, more time is needed for Arab minds to clear themselves of their confusion.

And still more time is necessary for those who would mediate peace to contemplate whether what has been achieved can be retained. Egypt's 1979 peace accord will not survive a day if the Muslim Brotherhood succeeds in its decades-old effort to topple President Mubarak's dynastic military reign.

If anything, the Brotherhood is significantly closer to that goal now than when its terrorist networks succeeded in assassinating Sadat in 1981. Like Hamas, Egypt's Brotherhood believes in the utter expulsion of what its literature refers to as the "Zionist foreign entity," and it may very well take power upon Mr. Mubarak's death, an imminent prospect for a man now in his 80s.

In Jordan, since the peace treaty of 1994, the anti-Semitic discourse has grown thicker than a coat of tar, leaving little room to imagine that peace with Israel could survive a change in leadership. There, too, the Muslim Brotherhood is perched on the treetops, waiting to pick over what it hopes will be a royal carcass.

And in Syria, Bashar Al-Assad's profoundly anti-Western, anti-Israeli, and pro-Iranian government, particularly when coupled with Hezbollah militants in Lebanon, leaves no room for peace with even the most dovish conceptions of Israel.

Indeed, it can be argued that, all around the Middle East, a no-action plan in the Arab-Israeli conflict will only help accelerate these rotting fruits' fall to the ground.

Moreover, no alternative is available. A lot of time is needed to see if there is any chance of ever going back to Iraq 2002, a place where even Saddam Hussein's rule of terror delivered more social cohesion than is evident today.

In Lebanon, a lot of waiting is necessary to find out whether it can recover even a modicum of the ethnic tolerance and civil discourse that existed prior to its 1975 civil war and the emergence of Hezbollah.

It is pointless even to think about structuring new accords with Arab societies that are relentlessly marching toward various stages of radicalism, Islamic or otherwise. It would not help, it cannot stop their macabre march, and it would not hold. A look at just the two biggest countries of the Middle East — Iran and Egypt — shows that recapturing the 1970s ethos of secularism and separation of mosque and state is an iffy proposition for the near future.

As for Israel, going forward with more unilateral evacuations, as in Lebanon and Gaza, has only liberated land for terrorist operations. But reoccupying either spot is unacceptable to the Israeli public.

All that's left is time, the great healer. The Middle East has had 40 years to appreciate the meaning of the 1967 war. A few decades more may convince all the parties that this is as good as it gets.

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Fatah and Hamas back at it

9 injuries and one death so far today as Fatah/Hamas fighting flared up again. A Fatah terrorist named Fuad Wael Wahbi was killed in Rafah; in retaliation Fatah broke into the house of a Hamas member and shot him, injuring him seriously. 3 children were also hurt.

Ha'aretz adds that this round may have started when Fatah discovered a tunnel built by Hamas apparently to kill high-ranking Fatah officials at a checkpoint used by Fatah VIPs.

Our PalArab self-death count for 2007 is now at 282.

UPDATE: Hamas lost Saturdays round. 283.
UPDATE 2: It turns out two were killed and 40 injured on Saturday. 284.

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Blaming bedwetting on the Jews

From PalToday (autotranslated):

A report issued by the assembly of the Palestinian right on the situation of children in Palestine that the larger percentage of Palestinian children suffer from chronic mental illness, including bedwetting and many other diseases due to the conditions they are experiencing psychological.

The report quoted a study prepared by a medical specialist that the Israeli practices which exceeded all limits bombing houses and tearing apart their occupants to stand behind the bad psychological situation of children.

He called the international and regional institutions and Arab intervention to rescue Palestinian children from the barbarity of the occupation and send delegations for close to reality and the establishment in Palestine of psychiatric clinics for the treatment of children.

I am amazed at how these experts just know that the unfortunate bedwetting is from fear of Jewish bullets, not Arab bullets.

Similarly, a new camp is being set up to help children get over the trauma of those Jewish overlords. From WAFA (autotranslated):

The Happy Childhood Center of the Municipality of Gaza today, the start of his summer holiday, the implementation of the first actors linger summer and lasts two weeks with two hundred children from 7-15 years.

A report by the Center for a copy of the "Wafa", the summer camp I fall into four summer camps organized by the Center during the summer vacation for schools, targeting investment of time for the long holiday in meaningful activities for the benefit of children, and alleviate the psychological pressure on the large to which children are exposed. the result of bombing and assassination, intimidation and the constant Israeli aggression on our people.

The camp programs and recreational activities and sports, cultural and artistic targeted, in addition to raising the sense of participants about good citizenship, and social support and reinforcement required for children.

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Playing with numbers

The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions counts about 18,000 Arab houses demolished by Israel in the 40 years since 1967. They aren't breaking down the circumstances behind the demolitions - like how many are from illegal building permits, how many from terrorists living in them, how many are on each side of the Green Line, how many Arab citizens are compensated for their houses, how many are because of unsafe living conditions, how many are from building on lands zoned for public utilities or parks, or any other meaningful statistics.

The implication, of course, is that every single home demolished by Israel is a kind of apartheid against Palestinian Arabs. There is a reason they don't break down the numbers - because the truth will not sound nearly as bad as the scary number "18,000" taken out of context.

So, let's try to provide some context with what little information we can find:

18,000 homes over 40 years comes out to 450 homes a year. So barely more than one house every day over 40 years is being destroyed in the entire country. Hardly what one would expect from systematic ethnic cleansing.

In 2005, Israel destroyed 1200 Jewish homes in Gaza alone, and I don't know how many were demolished in "illegal" settlements in the past few years but it is probably in the hundreds. Israel also destroys illegal Jewish homes within the Green Line and destroys illegal extensions on Jewish homes in Jerusalem. So for this decade, it appears that Israel has destroyed about as many Jewish homes as Arab homes.

According to the EPA, over 300,000 homes are destroyed every year in the US, mostly in inner cities. Assuming that the US is about 50 times bigger than Israel, this means that the US destroys about 13 times as many homes per capita as Israel every year.

In addition, Palestinian Arabs are building illegal homes much, much faster than Israel is destroying them. 6000 illegal Arab homes were built between 2001-2005, far dwarfing the numbers demolished by Israel for not having building permits.

But advocates for Palestinian Arabs at the expense of Palestinian Jews do not have the intellectual honesty to give any information out that might weaken their cases.

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More evidence of bias at Google News

I've talked about Google News before and how it has an unfortunate tendency to index hate sites and anti-semitic articles as "news."

For fun, I decided to submit my site as a news site and see what they would respond. Here's the reply back from Google:

Thank you for your note. We reviewed http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com and
are unable to include it in Google News at this time. We currently only
include articles from sources that could be considered organizations,
generally characterized by multiple writers and editors, availability of
organizational information, and accessible contact information. When we
reviewed your site we weren't able to find this evidence of an
organization.

We appreciate your willingness to provide your articles to us, and we'll
log your site for future consideration.

Thank you for your interest in Google News.

Regards,
The Google Team

That's all well and good, as long as they are consistent about it.

Well, they aren't.

Google News indexes a "peace" blog (Google says it is called "Baqa'a Refugee Camp, UK", while the blog itself calls itself "Desert Peace" and is based out of Jerusalem. )

Like me, he uses an alias; like me, he has no organization behind him. But unlike me, he is unremittingly critical of Israel and religious Jews, yet hardly has a bad word to say about Arab terrorists not Islamists.

"Desert Peace" is not generally a hate site (except against Orthodox Jews) and I wouldn't put it in the same category as the slime that comes out of some other Google News indexed websites like The People's Voice or Uruknet.

But if that site is considered a news site, why is mine not?

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The Lebanese army wakes up

Tens of thousands of rockets and tons of explosives to Hezbollah intended to be used against Israel can pass under the Lebanese army's eyes without a problem, but they suddenly become a bit more vigilant when the weapons will be used against them:

The Lebanese army seized a truckload of weapons coming from Syria intended for use in new battle fronts to ease pressure on Fatah al-Islam militants locked up in fierce fighting with army troops trying to crush the terrorists entrenched inside the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared.

The daily An Nahar on Wednesday said Lebanese authorities also discovered a depot containing more than 200 kilograms of explosives in house raids on suspected Fatah al-Islam militants in the northern Akkar province.

Meanwhile, Lebanese troops maintained their siege of Nahr al-Bared for a 17th day, fighting on-again off-again gunbattles with militants on Wednesday.

But wait - the plot thickens:

Security officials told the Associated Press the arms belonged to Hizbullah.

They said the shipment of Grad rockets and ammunition for automatic rifles and machine guns was seized late Tuesday at a random army checkpoint at Douriss near Baalbek, a Hizbullah stronghold in east Lebanon's Bekaa valley.

Six Hizbullah members in the truck were let go but the confiscated weapons were taken to the nearby Ablah army barracks, the officials said.

There was no immediate comment from Hizbullah on the weapons' seizure.

So were the weapons meant for Fatah al-Islam, for a sympathetic Islamist group allied with Fatah al-Islam, or for Hezbollah?

Since they are all supported by Syria anyway, and they all share the same Muslim supremacist ideology, these are distinctions without a difference. But here we have Hezbollah clearly implicated in smuggling arms to be used against the Lebanese army while Hezbollah is part of the Lebanese government - and yet no one has been talking about any possible Hezbollah connection to the Fatah al-Islam terrorists, until now:

The big question on everyone’s mind Ahmad Yasseen, a local analyst told Ya Libnan : “Is Hezbollah siding with the terrorists? “. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah last week warned the government not to enter the Nahr el Bared camp where the army is engaged with Fatah al Islam terrorists and trying to finish them off for the past 17 days. Nasrallah called entering the camp a “ red line” . Many anti Syrian March 14th politicians ridiculed Nasrallah for his “Red Line “. But the fact that Syria is the common denominator between Hezbollah and Fatah al Islam according to Yasseen , this has raised the question about Hezbollah position and whether it is siding with the terrorists to please Syria .

Many analysts have criticized Hezbollah for not offering to help the army in its war on terror. One analyst Ali Hussein suggested : “ Hezbollah has a lot of experience in dealing with such warfare and should offer the army a helping hand . The way the battles are going, the army does not seem to need any help but it would have been a good gesture from Hezbollah , in showing allegiance to Lebanon”

The naivete of the "analyst" in the last paragraph is particularly funny. To the Lebanese people, however, the fact that Hezbollah is still being treated with kid gloves despite its involvement in Lebanese terror is insanity.

Last summer, Hezbollah copied Hamas by kidnapping Israeli soldiers. This summer, will Hezbollah copy Hamas again by shooting rockets into Israel to try to stop a Lebanese civil war?

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"Not with my wife, you don't!"

A Palestinian Islamic militant shouts at a photographer for allegedly pointing his camera at his wife at the Ein el-Hilweh refugee camp in the southern city of Sidon, Lebanon Tuesday, June 5, 2007. (AP Photo / Mohammed Zaatari)

How does he know that that's his wife?

UPDATE: Dave at Israellycool notices that the wire service photographers love this guy. He has lots of pictures of Big Bicep Guy at his blog.

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Palestinian Arabs preferring occupation

The New York Times has taken notice of a MEMRI article describing how some Palestinian Arabs are saying an obvious fact t hat was previously unthinkable for them - that Israel's terrible "occupation" was better than what they can accomplish on their own:

Recently, a few Palestinian columnists have broken a political taboo by referring to the Israeli occupation as perhaps preferable to the current chaos.

For example, Majed Azzam wrote in the Hamas-affiliated weekly Al Risala in Gaza that Palestinians “should have the courage to acknowledge the truth,” that the only thing that “prevents the chaos and turmoil in Gaza from spreading to the West Bank is the presence of the Israeli occupation.”

Another Palestinian writer, Bassem al-Nabris, a poet from Khan Yunis, in the Gaza Strip, wrote in the Arabic electronic newspaper Elaph that if there was a referendum in the Gaza Strip on the question of whether people would like the Israeli occupation to return, “half the population would vote ‘yes.’ But in practice,” he continued, “I believe that the number of those in favor is at least 70 percent, if not more.”

“If the occupation returns,” Mr. Nabris added, “at least there will be no civil war, and the occupier will have a moral and legal obligation to provide the occupied people with employment and food, which they now lack.”

Not surprisingly, the NYT implies that it is only the security chaos and Hamas-Fatah battles that are the reasons for this attitude, but al-Nabris went much further:

[It did not begin] with the internal conflicts, but even earlier, in the days of the previous Palestinian administration, which was corrupt and did not give the people even the tiniest [ray of] hope. The fundamentalist forces which came into power [after it] also promised change and reform, but [instead, people] got a siege, with no security and no [chance of] making a living...

MEMRI clearly gets under the skin of Arabs and terror supporters, because it shows the Arab people in such a bad light. This article accuses MEMRI of cherry-picking articles to make Arabs look bad and of being Zionist, which is of course a crime to the critics. These critics (including Norman Finkelstein, Juan Cole and Ken Livingstone) seem to believe that the blood libel accusations, videos designed to encourage children to blow themselves up to reach an amusement park paradise, and Holocaust denial is not nearly as bad as MEMRI choosing not to translate Arabic weather reports. But not once do they accuse MEMRI of mistranslating.
(H/T EBoZ)

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Before the Six Day War

There are a lot of revisionist historians out there today making absurd claims about how Israel was the aggressor in 1967. History books rarely capture the atmosphere of the time, and understanding the fear and concern in the days before the war is critical to understanding it.

From a single small newspaper, the Columbia Missourian from May 28, 1967, here are all of the stories about the Middle East situation for just that one day, on pages 1-3 of the paper:

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