Emergency Plan
for Attacking Israel
(May 20, 1967)
Just prior to the Six
Day War in 1967, the United States
updated an emergency plan aimed at preventing Israel from
expanding its territory. In May 1967,
one of the U.S. commands was charged with
the task of removing the plan from the
safe, refreshing it and preparing for an
order to go into action. This unknown aspect
of the war was revealed in what was originally
a top-secret study conducted by the Institute
for Defense Analyses in Washington. An
institute expert, L. Weinstein, wrote in
February 1968 a classified document called “Critical
Incident No. 14,” about the U.S.
involvement in the Middle East crisis of
May-June 1967. Only 30 copies of his study
were printed for distribution at that time
and just recently the material has been
declassified.
According to Weinstein,
the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent a cable on May
20, 1967, asking that Strike Command, the entity
that was to have launched the attack on Israel
(and was subsequently replaced by what is
now Central Command), refresh the emergency
plans for intervention in an Israeli-Arab
war: one plan on behalf of Israel and the
other on behalf of the Arabs. The basis for
the directive was Washington’s commitment
to the
Israeli-Arab armistice lines of 1949.
The United States would not allow Egypt
or any combination of Arab states to destroy
Israel; it also would not allow Israel
to expand westward, into Sinai, or eastward,
into the West
Bank.
The United States had applied
this policy in pressuring the IDF to
withdraw from El Arish in Operation
Horev in 1949 and from Sinai
in 1956. A version of it would appear
in Henry
Kissinger's directives after the IDF encircled
Egypt's Third Army at the end of the Yom
Kippur War of 1973.
General Earle Wheeler,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, barred
the distribution of the plan to
subordinate levels. A preliminary paper was
prepared by June 5, the day the war erupted,
and became outdated even before it could
be used.
Two retired IDF major generals, Israel Tal and Shlomo Gazit, who was then head of research in Military Intelligence said, many years after, upon hearing the secret plan of the U.S. military, that Israel had no knowledge of this.
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Sources: Haaretz (April 23, 2007) |