Fateful Triangle

Israel and Palestine: Historical Backgrounds194tension.” Two days after the Times killed Nasser’s interview it ran afront-page headline, based on distorted news agency versions of theinterview, which read: “Gaza War Threat Voiced by Egypt.” 39 Theaggressors themselves at the same time were attributing fabricatedbellicose statements to Nasser, taking earlier writings of his out ofcontext and grossly changing their sense, etc. The distortions of Westernpropaganda, which in this case reflect a remarkable degree of moralcowardice quite apart from the falsification of the facts, remainedeffective even after the outright aggression by Israel, France andEngland. In particular, it is still widely held that Israel’s aggression wasin fact defensive, at worst a “preemptive strike” in response to Nasser’sthreats. The incident is an example—one of many—of how facts can beoverwhelmed by a powerful propaganda system employing the “freepress” as its instrument.The Israeli occupying army carried out bloody atrocities in the GazaStrip, killing “at least 275 Palestinians immediately after capturing theStrip during a brutal house-to-house search for weapons and fedayeenin Khan Yunis” and killing 111 Palestinians in “another massivebloodletting” at the Rafah refugee camp in “disorders” after “Israelitroops stormed through the hovels, rounding up refugees for intelligencescreenings.” General E. L. M. Burns, Commander of the UN TruceSupervision Organization (UNTSO), commented that this furnished “verysad proof of the fact that the spirit that inspired the notorious DeirYassin massacre of 1948 is not dead among some of the Israeli armedforces.” The head of the Gaza observer force, Lt.-Col. R. F. Bayard ofthe U.S. Army, reported that treatment of civilians was “unwarrantedlyrough” and that “a good number of persons have been shot down in coldblood for no apparent reason.” He also reported that many UN reliefofficials were missing and presumed executed by the Israelis and thatthere had been extensive looting and wanton destruction of property.Classics in Politics: The Fateful TriangleNoam Chomsky