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Remember the USS Liberty?
As much Israel discourse as there's been in the last 45 years, you never hear about the time the Israeli air force and navy attacked an American ship in broad daylight and killed 34 Americans, except from the most conspiratorially-minded places like /pol/ (and Brett Favre when he's being trolled by /pol/).
Why? This seems strange. One might think this is because it blends into the background of innumerable incidents that make up the Arab-Israeli conflict, and thus most people simply shrug and accept that, "yeah, shits really fucked over there," and leave it at that, but this involved Americans. You know, the people that matter. There's some dispute about what really happened and whether or not it was deliberate. It's not surprising that this would be controversial; it's surprising that this is not a real issue at all.
My tentative opinion is that it was a deliberate attack. The USS Liberty was a spy ship. It was not supposed to be as close to the coast as it was. Israel didn't want the State Department jeopardizing their OPSEC in the 6-day war, so they made sure the Americans had no eyes on the ground (or the water). It was probably the right decision tbh. US leadership decided that the incident wasn't worth making major foreign policy changes over, and so they went along with the Israeli cover-up.
Quite the opposite, I hear about it roughly six times a day. It's the most widely publicized attack on the US shipping since Pearl Harbor. Why? This seems strange, until you remember Joooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooos!
This is the third time I've heard about it in the last few weeks just on this site. It's a completely outsized amount of attention for a 50+ year old friendly fire incident. At this point it's time to let bygones be bygones about deliberate atrocities, never mind an accidental bombing in the fog of war.
The conspiracy theories are nonsense, too. There is no plausible rationale that would justify Israel taking the insane risk of deliberately attacking the United States, and "jeopardizing their OPSEC" 4 days into a 6 day war that was already being decisively won by Israel certainly isn't one.
They wanted to conceal that they were executing POWs and Liberty was a surveillance ship. Also, there is a possible false flag angle (remember the Lavon affair?).
This actually ties in well to that recent overkill conspiracy theory post. Surely the Israelis had to have known the US would figure out they did it, did Egypt even have any airforce left by that point in the war?
If Israel expected the US to figure out they were responsible, they would have to be absolutely confident in American subservience to them, that they would take such an attack lying down. But if they were absolutely confident in American subservience, why do they care if Americans hear about them killing some POWs? Wouldn’t it just be easier to count on American loyalty to look the other way on POW executions, as opposed to relying on Americans to look the other way on sinking their own ship?
Any way you slice it sinking a US warship is more likely to piss off the USA than executing Egyptian POWs. So doing the former to cover up the latter is nonsensical. Classic overkill conspiracy theory
It’s not necessarily overkill. If the Israelis were confident that A) committing deliberate war crimes would piss off the Americans and cause them to drop their support, and B) attacking an American spy ship would be chalked up as an accident due to fog of war, resulting in no real change to the status quo, they—or more realistically, a single officer—could have decided the risk was worth it.
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Afaik most of the survivors think that's what happened. You can suggest a better motive if you want, but these counterfactuals don't prove that they really thought it was an egyptian ship.
Most of the survivors were grunts with no understanding of geopolitics, why should their opinion carry any weight as to the cause of the incident?
Killing potentially 50+ US sailors to cover up something that countless US allies (and the US itself, if we’re just considering torture of prisoners) did regularly throughout the 20th century just doesn’t make sense.
Id be willing to wager that there are a lot of "grunts" who have a better grasp of geopolitics than the median State Department official.
After all its his ass that's on the line.
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