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Israeli Army Retweeting 1967 War As It Happened

An anonymous reader writes "This is a new one, twitter as a form of historical reenactment: 'Israel's army is giving a "live" blow-by-blow account of the 1967 Six Day War, tweeting each air strike at the exact time it occurred 46 years ago ... @IDF1967 "is an official Israel Defence Forces account that is aimed at re-tweeting the events of the Six Day War in live time", ... The account was tweeting key events in the battle against the armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria that took place from June 5 to 10, 1967 and includes pictures and videos, the army said. The tweets are mostly in Hebrew, with some translated into English. "In response to repeated provocations by Egypt, the State of Israel and the IDF are going to war. We will not sit idly as the enemy forces tighten the noose around our necks," the opening tweet said around 8.00am (1500 AEST) on Wednesday when Israel landed its first preemptive air strike 46 years ago.'"

17 of 317 comments (clear)

  1. Liberty by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    So when are they going to reenact the attack on the USS Liberty?

    1. Re:Liberty by cavreader · · Score: 4, Informative

      The USS Liberty attack demonstrates why you shouldn't send your SIGINT assets into a volatile war zone. The incident was collateral damage and the Israeli's did apologize. Also at the time the US-Israeli relationship was nothing like it is today. They were not enemies but Isreal was not a US client. In 1956 the US forced France, Isreal, and Britain to call off their attempts to take over the Suez Canal. At the time the Russians were supporting Egypt and continued fighting might have dragged the US into a direct confrontation with Russia. In the 1973 war the US government did not resupply Isreal until after the Israeli's broadcast their intentions to enact their "Samson Option" in the clear so all parties could intercept the message. The Samson option meant they were loading their nukes on their F-4's and Jericho missiles. Nixon agreed the next day to re-supply the Israelis.

  2. Eyeroll by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Interesting piece of propaganda

  3. Worthless propoganda by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Since when did Slashdot become horribly biased in supporting Israel?

    I assume the tweets will come strictly from an Israeli perspective.

    Can we have a counter channel with a play-by-play according to the other sides? Then it would actually be historically interesting, and not pure one-sided YAY WAR, YAY ISRAEL propaganda.

    When I read an international news story from an American outlet, I also try to read the Al Jazeera version in an attempt to extract the truth from somewhere in the middle. This is kind of like that.

  4. Re:now they are nazis by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What do you mean, "now".

    Here are six mass graves discovered this week, in Jaffa, full of Arab native civilians "cleansed" from their city in 1948.

    'The remains belong to people of different ages, including women, children and the elderly, some of which bear signs of violence.'

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2334205/Mass-grave-uncovered-containing-dozens-Palestinians-killed-1948-war-founded-Israel.html

    --
    "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
    Never been known to fail..."
  5. Re:now they are nazis by CrimsonAvenger · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Oddly enough, the article doesn't say anything about anyone being "cleansed" from their city in 1948.

    What it does say is that:

    A local fisherman Atar Zeinab, 80, said that as a teenager during the final months of fighting in 1948 he helped to collect the Arab dead in the area south of Jaffa.

    They were then brought for a quick burial in the cemetery, the areaâ(TM)s main graveyard.

    'I carried to the cemetery 60 bodies during a period of three or four months,' he told AFP. 'We used to find the people in the street and most of the time we didnâ(TM)t know who they were.'

    He said that the danger of being hit by flying bullets or grenade fragments was such that bodies were dumped one on top of the other in existing family crypts in the cemetery, contrary to Muslim custom.

    'We carried them early in the morning or in the night. We put women, children and men in the same place... nobody prayed for these people.

    Note that there is no mention as to who did the killing, though the "danger of being hit by flying bullets or grenade fragments" suggests ongoing fighting between the Jews and Palestinians (which means that any particular death was just as likely to be to a Palestinian bullet as a Jewish bullet)....

    --

    "I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
  6. Attack on the USS Liberty by sumdumfuk · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I wonder if that broadcast will include the attack on the US Liberty in which they killed 34 American Sailors and was covered up for MANY years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident

  7. Re:Cool, why not reenact WW2? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    That's done already! https://twitter.com/RealTimeWWII

  8. Fog Of War by devnullkac · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It would be most interesting if the tweeting team managed to dig deep enough into the historical documents to recreate the fog of war that blankets all such events, announcing and then retracting as reports arrived at HQ (or whatever).

    Full realism would be uninteresting since no real HQ would tweet everything it thought it knew at the moment it knew it. But then, perhaps using declassified documents, we could recreate what it would be like to work at the top levels of a Twitter-based government with Top Secret initial and revised reports and guesses bouncing around, seeing how little time people really had to make decisions that put thousands or millions of lives at risk.

    --
    What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
  9. I have to wonder.... by Ogre332 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    how the Israelis would feel if someone created a Twitter account along the lines of "@Treblinka1942" and ran a play by play of the daily events there?

    --
    Shut up brain or I'll stab you with a Q-Tip. - Homer Simpson
  10. Re: The First in a Series! by topherkersting · · Score: 5, Funny

    And the French Army simply retweets.

  11. Re:Article is Flamebait by Charliemopps · · Score: 5, Insightful

    >Why post this Slashdot? Because its on Twitter?

    Because it's an interesting use of technology. Pretending difficult issues like the Israel/Palestine thing do not exist may prevent arguments on slashdot but it's certainly not going to do the world any good. Flamewars on this site are the least of the middle-Easts concerns.

  12. Re:now they are nazis by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Is there a logical or rhetorical fallacy you won't ignore, in the pursuit of your defense for the outlaw nation?

    Yeah, on both sides. Did you know that the Jews globally lost more property than they gained in 1948? After Arabs lost the war, Jews everywhere in the Middle East were essentially evicted and all their stuff was confiscated, depriving them of wealth amounting to almost three billion dollars (1948 dolllar value, try adjusting *that* for current value) and lands larger than the 1948 Israel.

    But the people murdered by Stern and Irgun were innocent. Those who lost homes and property were not even indirectly responsible. It's like claiming Catholic farmworkers should be exploited because there are priests who molest children.

    It's funny that countries such as Jordan and other, despite supposedly being the same ethnic group, don't actually want these troublemakers.

    Yeah. Like why England and Finland weren't asking to accept the whole nation of Croatia in the 90's. Hey! There the same ethnic group. Your racism is vile. "Troublemakers"? They were just born there, descendents of Ancient Greece, Phoenecia, Rome, Egypt, Sumer and - dare I say Judea. But that's "causing trouble".

    "Mass aerial bombardment"? And do you actually have anything to support this claim?

    Operation Cast Lead

    I may be wrong, but isn't it the case that Israel actually provides the water to the West Bank and to Gaza at their own expense, essentially at a loss?

    "Here, we stole your aquifers. Aren't we forebaring and even magnanimous in trickling some back, after diverting it to water illegal colonial settlements? Gosh. What's a little matter of war crime, compared to our virtues?"

    --
    "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
    Never been known to fail..."
  13. Re:now they are nazis by cold+fjord · · Score: 4, Informative

    >None of this can be justified in any way by the alleged rhetoric of some ill-defined "arabs" saying something that - if you are understood correctly - would amount to: "If you leave your property that you own, and your orchards and shops, then after you are refugees, you might be able to squat on the couple of Kibbutz those Poles stole from your parents, instead!"

    You are on the wrong side of history, and pretty much all of the nonsense you refer to is coming from you. The Arabs in Palestine were following the orders of the Arab leaders to evacuate. They had been making it clear that a genocide was coming, and who wants get pulled into a genocide? If the Israelis hadn't been able to defend themselves and stop the many attacking Arab armies, it is very possible that any Arabs that had remained behind and ignored the commands to leave would have been killed along with the Jews.

    Time Now for a Declaration of Mideast Peace; Doomed Arab Refugees

    In ''Semites and Anti-Semites'' (New York, 1986), Bernard W. Lewis quotes (page 270) from the memoirs of Khalid al-Azm, Prime Minister of Syria in 1948-49, listing the factors that led to Israel's success:

    ''Fifth: the summons of the Arab governments to the population of Palestine to leave the country and take refuge in the neighboring Arab countries . . . this collective flight served the Jews and strengthened their position without effort. . . . Since 1948 we have been demanding the return of the refugees to their homes when we ourselves were the ones who induced them to leave them. . . . We doomed a million Arab refugees, by calling on them and insisting that they abandon their land, their homes, their work and their occupations, and we made them unemployed and homeless.''

    Azzam's Genocidal Threat

    An October 11, 1947 report on the pan-Arab summit in the Lebanese town of Aley,[9] by Akhbar al-Yom's editor Mustafa Amin, contained an interview he held with Arab League secretary-general Azzam. Titled, "A War of Extermination," the interview read as follows (translated by Efraim Karsh; all ellipses are in the original text):

    Abdul Rahman Azzam Pasha spoke to me about the horrific war that was in the offing saying:

    "I personally wish that the Jews do not drive us to this war, as this will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Tartar massacre[10] or the Crusader wars. I believe that the number of volunteers from outside Palestine will be larger than Palestine's Arab population, for I know that volunteers will be arriving to us from [as far as] India, Afghanistan, and China to win the honor of martyrdom for the sake of Palestine You might be surprised to learn that hundreds of Englishmen expressed their wish to volunteer in the Arab armies to fight the Jews.

    "This war will be distinguished by three serious matters. First—faith: as each fighter deems his death on behalf of Palestine as the shortest road to paradise; second, [the war] will be an opportunity for vast plunder. Third, it will be impossible to contain the zealous volunteers arriving from all corners of the world to avenge the martyrdom of the Palestine Arabs, and viewing the war as dignifying every Arab and every Muslim throughout the world

    "The Arab is superior to the Jew in that he accepts defeat with a smile: Should the Jews defeat us in the first battle, we will defeat them in the second or the third battle or the final one whereas one defeat will shatter the Jew's morale! Most desert Arabians take pleasure in fighting. I recall being tasked with mediating a truce in a desert war (in which I participated) that lasted for nine monthsWhile en route to sign the truce, I was approached

    --
    much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
  14. Re:now they are nazis by stephanruby · · Score: 4, Informative

    Ah the 1948 war, where the arabs told the other arabs living in said regions that if they flee, they'll be able to live on the land of the jews that they those arab armies were going to ethnically cleanse.

    Ah yes, you're referring to this

    The new state of Israel spread the story that all these Palestinians had left under orders from Arab leaders, citing "Arab broadcasts" telling people to move away so that Arab armies could "operate without interference.” There has never been any evidence for this story. Both US and British intelligence services were monitoring all broadcasts during the period, and not a single "Arab broadcast" telling people to leave was recorded. In fact, several Arab broadcasts were recorded telling the population to stay put. Israeli forces, meanwhile, were using threats, violence, and murder to force many Palestinians out of their homes.

    It is no longer the official line of the Israeli Foreign Office that Arab leaders ordered Palestinians to leave Palestine.

    Besides, I never even understood the reasoning behind this justification to condemn all Palestinians for an alleged radio broadcast supposedly sent from a different Arab country. If you're a civilian and not part of the military, since when does fleeing a region about to become a battlefield even considered a crime? Are you suggesting that non-military people should just stay there, Arab or not, while two armies are supposedly converging on each other?

  15. Once again, Zionists hoisted on their own petards by Uberbah · · Score: 4, Informative

    Israel's justification for starting the 1967 war is the Eygptian blockade of the Straits of Tiran. Which, for some reason, also entitled them to seize a great deal of surrounding land, most importantly the West Bank.

    Except that means that any and all attacks from Hamas or Hezbollah in response to Israel's total blockade of Gaza are completely justified, according to Israeli rules. Just as Israel's possession of a couple hundred nuclear weapons means that they should be threatened with economy-destroying sanctions and military strikes, if Iran is threatened with the same in case they someday decide they want a nuclear weapon.

  16. Re:now they are nazis by Uberbah · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You are on the wrong side of history

    You're projecting, with the usual bullshit handwaving and the usual canards to justify the unjustifiable. The formation of Israel was impossible without massive land theft from the native population, from a bunch of immigrants just off the boat from Europe.

    Then there's the other bullshit in the form of headscratching that the victims of land theft and ethnic cleansing feel some sort of animosity towards their oppressors. Do you also spend a lot of time yelling at the Sioux for being pissed that the Black Hills were stolen from them? Still calling Nelson Mandela a terrorist because he resisted Apartheid?

    Zionism is amoral sociopathy. A sense of entitlement to other people's land and property is bullshit, whether it was the Spaniards, the Pope, or the Germans doing it to Jews, and it's bullshit when Zionists do it to the people who have lived in Palestine for centuries.