As a response to Egypt’s military deployment along the border of the Sinai region, Israel launched a pre-emptive strike on Egypt’s air force on June 5, 1967. The strike took out almost all of the country’s air force and enabled Israel to invade the Sinai peninsula.

 Simultaneously, Israel also took out air bases belonging to Jordan and Syria, crippling the Arab front. By the end of the war, Israel had annexed the Sinai peninsula from Egypt, West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria.

• from THE HINDU, June 11, 2017

Since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, most nuclear-weapons talk has been about non-proliferation and coercion. Under the terms of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, signed in 1968, non-nuclear powers agreed to forgo nuclear weapons in exchange for the assurance that they could develop nuclear energy, and for a promise from nuclear powers to pursue disarmament in good faith. Since then, no nuclear nation except South Africa has dismantled its arsenal, which is why non-nuclear states continue to press nuclear states to make good on the promise they made in 1968.

Of the eight nations other than the U.S. that have nuclear weapons, three (the United Kingdom, France, and Israel) are American allies; two (India and Pakistan) are friendly; and three (China, North Korea, and Russia) are adversaries.

• 27, THE NEW YORKER, January 30, 2017, from an article by Jill Lepore entitled AUTUMN OF THE ATOM

I have a problem with the excessive amount of holidays in Belize, but the one this weekend served a purpose for me because it allowed me to stay up later on Monday night than I would usually do. I was able to catch the meat of a documentary on Al-Jazeera which examined an incident in international waters on June 8, 1967. Al-Jazeera entitled its documentary, The day Israel attacked America, or something like that.

I have friends who I believe are serious Belizean nationalists who are in love with the third millennium Israel because my friends are religious and Biblical fanatics. But in 2017, the Israelis are no lost, feeble tribe wandering in the wilderness: Israel today is a dangerous nuclear power which has been a very close ally of Guatemala’s from the birth of Israel in 1948.

The unprovoked Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, an American intelligence-gathering (or spy) ship, took place shortly after the beginning of a war known as the Six Day War, wherein supposedly underdog Israel defeated Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, grabbed the West Bank and the Golan Heights, and expanded Israeli territory substantially. The Israelis claimed they had been attacked by Egypt, but skeptics believe the attack on the Liberty was because the American spy ship had gathered evidence that it was Israel which had started the war. The Six Day War essentially turned out to be an Israeli land grab, although the Western and International media portrayed it as a case of harmless David Israel protecting its tiny self from her aggressive Goliath Arab enemies – Egypt, Syria, and Jordan.

In their attack on the Liberty, using jet fighters and motor torpedo boats, the Israelis killed 34 Americans, injured 171 more, and badly damaged the American ship, almost sinking it. The Israelis claimed it was a mistake. When United States President Lyndon Baines Johnson, the most powerful man in the world, began to protest too strenuously after preliminary evidence contradicted Israel’s claim, prominent American Jews threatened Johnson with what is called “blood libel”: they threatened to accuse LBJ of being anti-Semitic, which would probably have been fatal for his projected 1968 re-election run.

Israel and the Israeli lobby in the United States are so powerful that they intimidated President Johnson, and the Liberty incident was swept under the rug. None of the mainstream American media would ever air such a documentary as Al-Jazeera did on Monday night. This is just the way the power realities of the world operate.

At its core, the Guatemalan claim to Belize is an attempted land grab. In the early 1970s, the Guatemalan and the Salvadoran governments conspired to invade Belize so as to acquire “elbow room” for their large populations. Belize, a self-governing colony, was still under the protection of Great Britain at the time, so the conspiracy came to naught. But, this is 2017, and it is the United States which calls the shots for Belize and Central America now. When Washington summons Belize Prime Minister, Right Hon. Dean O. Barrow, to the American capital for “official talks,” as the Americans did over the weekend, then Right Hon. Barrow has to report for duty. It is what it is.

Those who swear by the Bible say that Adam and Eve, our First Parents, messed up and ruined their descendants because the serpent convinced them to seek knowledge instead of settling for total faith. Call me one of those descendants who got ruined, because I always want to know what time it is. Everything we have learned about the history of the world tells us that the planet earth is a dangerous place, and those who have information and knowledge are always in a better, stronger place than those who do not.

The longer I live, the more I appreciate the greatness of the Right Hon. George Cadle Price. Younger generations of Belizeans do not know how uncertain our journey to political independence became in the middle and late 1970s. After 1974, the United Democratic Party (UDP) came on like gangbusters in Belize’s politics. Between October and December of 1974, Mr. Price’s People’s United Party (PUP) lost the aura of invincibility it had enjoyed since its 1950 foundation.

It appeared to me in 1973, when the UDP was founded, that the overriding purpose of the Opposition change from the National Independence Party (NIP) was to replace Philip Goldson as Opposition Leader with the attorney Dean Russell Lindo. The change from the NIP to the UDP was orchestrated by the Opposition’s campaign financiers and power brokers, which included prominent New York Belizeans at the time. The change did not come from the Opposition rank-and-file, and it was primarily for this reason that my faction of the UBAD Party rejected it.

After its 44 years of existence and its five terms of office at the national government level, the UDP may have moved a bit from the right towards the center. In the middle and late 1970s, the fact of the matter was that the UDP was a heavily pro-Washington, absolutely anti-communist party. And the UDP’s popularity in Belize City surged sensationally. In the December 1977 Belize City Council election, for instance, the UDP destroyed the PUP slate.

I think that after Mr. Price became PUP Leader in 1956, the PUP power base began shifting from Belize City, where the party had been organized in 1950, to the sugar cane belt in the Corozal and Orange Walk Districts. When you factor in the reality that Hurricane Hattie in 1961 contributed to a significant migration of Belize City’s majority Creole population to the United States, you can see where the “Latinization” charges by Mr. Price’s opponents, justified or not, began falling on fertile ground.

How would the UDP have approached the Guatemalan claim to Belize, a racist claim the United States has never denounced, had the UDP won the 1979 general election? One thing is for sure: Belize would never have gone on to independence in 1981 under Dean Lindo’s UDP. To begin with, Dean Lindo’s UDP was openly, stridently pro-Israel, and this newspaper has always pointed out to you that it is very difficult to be pro-Israel without being pro-Guatemala.

Belizeans of faith need to make themselves as knowledgeable as possible about the deal our UDP Ministry of Foreign Affairs cut with Israel a few years ago. I would recommend to those of you who want to enter the modern reality where nuclear Israel and its deadly Mossad are concerned, to read a work by Paul McGeough entitled Kill Khalid.

Many people say that the Israelis and their Mossad are how they are because they are reacting to the horrifying trauma of Adolf Hitler’s attempted genocide of the Jewish people. It is not for me to defend Guatemala’s allies. I would, in closing, point out, however, that what happened to our African ancestors during the Middle Passage and slavery, was worse than the Holocaust. When Africans gained control of nuclear weapons in post-apartheid South Africa, Africans voluntarily chose to relinquish that control. At least, that is how the story was told to the I.

Power to the people.