Levi Eshkol

And so he took it upon himself, both when he ran for Senate in 1964 and and thereafter to become vocal, not on a continuous basis, but certainly advocating the United States to stand behind Israel, particularly in its struggle with Egypt and the Egyptian president, Jamal al-Nasr, provide them whatever assistance they need, including military support.

And then in And in December of 1967, the Israeli, in January 1968, the Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol came to the United States and asked President Lyndon Johnson if the U.S. would provide these top-of-the-line aircraft, F-4 Phantoms.

And Johnson said, well, eventually, yes.

And Robert Kennedy immediately, he met Eshkol himself in New York two days after the meeting with Johnson and immediately came out and said, well, I think we should send these jets.

And I guess still politicians all over the world.

I live in Australia.

I'm the prime minister of Australia now, Anthony Albanese, who in his young days when he was an MP was a supporter of the Palestinian cause.

Now he's the prime minister.

And so he took it upon himself, both when he ran for Senate in 1964 and and thereafter to become vocal, not on a continuous basis, but certainly advocating the United States to stand behind Israel, particularly in its struggle with Egypt and the Egyptian president, Jamal al-Nasr, provide them whatever assistance they need, including military support.

And then in So in December of 1967, in January 1968, the Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol came to the United States and asked President Lyndon Johnson

if

the U.S. would provide these top-of-the-line aircraft, F-4 Phantoms.

You also had Yitzhak Rabin, then a general, acknowledging that Nasser's concentrations were defensive in character and that the Israeli leadership at the time of the war knew this, an assessment he shared with his fellow Israeli generals such as Iser Wiseman, the commander of the Air Force, who also argued that Israel was not in any danger.

But the most damning admission of Israeli guilt comes from the sitting Israeli prime minister at the time of the Six-Day War, Levi Eshkol, who outright admitted that he didn't think Nasser was trying to wage war, only to immediately switch gears and help invent a fake story claiming Egypt attacked first so Israel would appear to be the victim in the fog of war and the UN wouldn't force a ceasefire.

Then, once Israel had achieved its military objectives, Eshkol and his government abandoned that lie.

It was then and only then that the Israelis ditched their original claim that Egypt struck first and embraced the now infamous narrative that they had launched a preemptive strike in self-defense.

Instead, it entrenched its occupation of the territories, almost immediately began filling them with its own civilian settlers in a brazen act of colonialism, and remained intransigent.

Another war was becoming increasingly inevitable.

In early 1969, Golda Meir took over as Israeli Prime Minister following the death of Levi Eshkol.

She notoriously had a propensity for intransigence and this ended up being her Achilles heel.

Was Ben-Gurion still president during the 1956 Sinai campaign? If it

wasn't Ben-Gurion, it could have been Levi Eshkol, who was the prime minister in 1967.

But I think Ben-Gurion was still the prime minister at this stage.

Okay, we're going to double check.