Hamas Insists the Americans Played A Role In Rescue Raid

The brilliantly executed rescue of four hostages by the Israelis has left Hamas deeply chagrinned. Another spectacular feat for Israel — and defeat for Hamas — simply cannot be accepted. So some have insisted that others — the Americans — must have played a role in the operation. It’s nonsense. The Americans have said that they been contributing some intelligence to the Israelis about where hostages were believed to be held — it’s not known exactly how much, or how useful it was — but insist there were no Americans involved in either the planning for, or the execution of, the rescue. This attempt by some Hamas supporters to suggest that America provided major help to Israel in the hostage rescue should remind us of Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser, who had been so sure of the swift victory over the Zionists that he had promised hysterical Cairene crowds would soon be theirs, only to find that on the first day of war, June 5, that his air force had been decimated, with 286 planes (out of a total of 420) destroyed on the ground by Israeli bombers. He immediately began to blame America and Britain for “collusion” with Israel — a collusion that did not exist. As Elie Podeh has written here:

In the early hours of June 6, 1967, Egyptian media began to spread the allegation that both the United States and Britain were taking part in Israel’s preemptive attack on Egypt and Syria. According to Radio Cairo, U.S. and British aircraft carriers provided an air umbrella for Israel and played an active role in the operations. In the following hours and days, the Egyptian media constantly repeated the same argument in a variety of forms.

Thus, for example, on the afternoon of June 6, Radio Cairo reported that British Canberra bombers had taken part in air strikes against Egyptian posts in Sinai and that U.S. aircraft had left the U.S. air base in Libya for Israel. The next day, Egypt’s leading newspaper, Al-Ahram, quoted by Radio Cairo, reported that British and U.S. pilots were flying Israeli planes under the guise of volunteers and that Israeli pilots used aerial photographs taken by U.S. spy aircraft. The Egyptian propaganda machinery then let launch a barrage of reports on the Anglo-American “aggression” with Israel.

One might have thought that almost fifty years later, this absurd tale of nonexistent American and British participation in the Six-Day War would have long been buried. But it lives on in Egyptian textbooks. Here is one paragraph that thirty-two years after that war ended was still to be found in those schoolbooks (and it may still be in them today):

The United States’ role: Israel was not [fighting] on its own in the [1967] war. Hundreds of volunteers, pilots, and military officers with American scientific spying equipment of the most advanced type photographed the Egyptian posts for it [Israel], jammed the Egyptian defense equipment, and transmitted to it the orders of the Egyptian command.

As Podeh notes in his Middle East Forum article, “the above quote is not a propaganda item; it is taken from an Egyptian high school history textbook published in 1999. This fictitious depiction repeats older textbooks, and is reproduced in new textbooks for lower grades. For more than thirty years, a fabricated narrative of the 1967 war has been transmitted by the Egyptian education system as a fact.”

The Americans have been providing Israel with whatever intelligence information they have managed to compile on the location of the hostages, a task which constantly changes because the hostages are regularly moved from place to place. But that is all. According to Jake Sullivan, “There were no Americans involved militarily.” No American boots on the ground, no Navy Seals, nothing of that sort. Just some help as to where some of the hostages might have been held. But that won’t stop Hamas and its supporters from accusing America of having done a great deal more.

Jake Sullivan was forthright, in an appearance on CNN after the hostage rescue, on who was to blame for the civilian casualties:

“The Palestinian people are going through sheer hell in this conflict because Hamas is operating in a way that puts them in the crossfire that holds hostages right in the heart of crowded civilian areas, that puts military emplacements right in the heart of crowded civilian areas.”

Do not be surprised if the Palestinians in their future textbooks describe the hostage rescue as a joint “American and Israeli operation,” during which “more than a thousand civilians, almost all of them women and children, were massacred in the greatest bloodbath of modern times.”

Nothing, remember, is too absurd for Hamas to claim, or for the world’s antisemites, from Francesca Albanese and Antonio Guterres to Roger Waters and Eric Clapton, to believe. So just keep sweeping back the tide of malignant nonsense. Brooms out, please!