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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?).
I agree it isn't as clear cut as obviously being an accident, given some credible Americans who say otherwise and claim to have heard the intercepts, however that explanation does not make sense. Attacking your own allies ship to cover you are executing POWs is going to be a much bigger deal and much more likely to lose their support. In other words if the US government covered for the Israelis deliberately killing their own sailors and intelligence operatives to make them look good, they would certainly have covered up Israelis executing POWs.
To me that is one of the biggest holes in the deliberate attack theory. There really isn't much nastiness they could have been doing that America would have cared about more than dead Americans and attack on their ship.
They must have hoped to pass it off as an Egyptian attack, I guess.
Not plausible. The Egyptian air force was wiped out in the opening engagement of the war, and the Israelis informed the Americans that they had attacked the ship just two hours after the attack took place.
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Against an American Intelligence ship? The one they were concerned was intercepting their communications? If they can intercept your comms about torturing/executing POWs they can probably intercept your communications from your pilots saying Hey, this is a US ship (as indeed it was claimed happened, for evidence that it was a planned attack). And after passing over the ship multiple times so they can see what planes are being used?
The Israelis (if it was deliberate) must have been aware that the US would almost certainly be able to identify the culprits. The only thing that then makes sense is that they were pretty confident the US would not abandon them/attack them over it. But at that point intercepted comms about POWs should also not really be a concern.
None of the theories of why they would attack deliberately really hold up in my opinion. Which doesn't mean they didn't, just that whatever reason there was in that scenario might be lost to time. There are enough other discrepancies that do undermine the "obviously it was a simple mistake" narrative, to at least not make it certain.
The ship could have blown up and killed everyone on board instantly along with any evidence of intercepted communications.
But they didn't try to shoot down the US plane that did intercept communications either. Sinking the ship wasn't enough on its own. Which the Israelis should have known. It's a huge, huge risk. And there doesn't seem to be anything worth that risk they got out of it, that we know of.
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