Did Israel deliberately attack the USS Liberty?

“Israel deliberately attacked the USS Liberty in 1967.”

Verdict: FALSE

On 8 June 1967, during the Six-Day War, Israeli jets and torpedo boats attacked the US Navy intelligence ship USS Liberty, killing 34 American sailors and wounding 171. It was a grievous error, and Israel said so at once: it had mistaken the ship for an Egyptian vessel near a war zone. Israel apologised and paid full compensation, nearly $13 million, to the wounded, the families of the dead, and the US government. Across ten American investigations and three Israeli inquiries, the conclusion was the same: a tragic case of mistaken identity, not a deliberate strike on an ally.

The Liberty was 14 miles off the Sinai coast near El Arish, monitoring signals in the fourth day of the Six-Day War, when Israeli command received reports that El Arish was taking fire from the sea. American communication failures meant the ship had sailed far closer to the coast than its standing orders allowed, and Israel had not been told it was there. Israeli aircraft attacked first, believing they had found the Egyptian vessel El Quseir; when the Liberty returned fire, torpedo boats followed with a strike that caused most of the deaths. The White House recalled Sixth Fleet aircraft it had scrambled only after learning Israel had already admitted the error.

Origin of the claim

The theory that Israel knew exactly what it was firing on did not come from the initial investigations. It came later, from survivors who could not square the intensity of a sustained, hours-long assault with an honest mistake. The most influential source is James M. Ennes Jr., a Liberty watch officer, whose 1979 book Assault on the Liberty argued the attack was deliberate and that Washington covered it up to protect the alliance with Israel. Ennes’s account became the founding text for the Liberty Veterans Association, formed by survivors in the 1980s, which has pressed Congress for a new investigation ever since. Their case rests on eyewitness impressions from the deck that day: a slow, low overflight beforehand, napalm, machine-gunning of life rafts. It is a serious case made by people who were there and were nearly killed, and it deserves to be answered with the record rather than dismissed.

The investigative record

That record is unusually deep. The US Navy Court of Inquiry (10 to 18 June 1967) found the ship’s flag was “very likely drooped and not discernible” in the light wind and concluded mistaken identity. The CIA’s report five days after the attack, dated 13 June 1967, found the strike “was not made in malice and was a mistake.” The Joint Chiefs of Staff fact-finding team catalogued communication failures without drawing conclusions about Israeli intent. Defense Secretary Clark Clifford’s July 1967 report went furthest against Israel, calling the failures “inexcusable” and citing “gross negligence,” but still found no premeditation. The Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees, the House Appropriations and Armed Services Committees, and a 1979 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence review that specifically examined and rejected Ennes’s intentionality claims, all followed with reviews between 1967 and 1991; none reversed the finding. The NSA’s own 1981 history attributed the attack to “miscalculations and egregious errors,” and the State Department released further CIA memos in 2004 confirming the assessment that “Israel did not know it was striking an American vessel.” On the Israeli side, the Ram Ron Commission convened three days after the attack found “a bona fide mistake,” a July 1967 preliminary inquiry found no malicious intent, and the IDF’s own 1982 internal history called it an “innocent error.” Diplomatically the matter closed on 17 December 1987, when Israel’s final reparations payment settled the last outstanding claim.

Who pushes it today

The claim persists mainly through the Liberty Veterans Association and a shelf of books built on Ennes’s original account, kept alive by survivors’ reunions and periodic congressional appeals that have never produced a new official inquiry. It also circulates well beyond the survivors themselves: in segments of the isolationist and antiwar press skeptical of the US-Israel alliance generally, and, more troublingly, among writers and websites for whom the Liberty is treated as proof of a deeper claim about Jewish or Israeli control of US foreign policy, the same conspiratorial framing that shows up in older material about Jews secretly running governments and media. That overlap does not make every Liberty veteran’s grievance illegitimate, but it explains why the incident gets far more traction online than the documentary record supports.

The strongest case for intent, and why the record still says accident

Fairly stated: the Clifford report’s language of “gross negligence” shows that even Washington was not fully satisfied with Israel’s conduct that day, and classification of key documents for years afterward, standard practice for signals-intelligence material, fed suspicion that has never fully gone away. The loss was real, and the anger of the survivors who still believe the attack was intentional is not manufactured.

None of it changes the finding. The initial reports on the ship’s speed, 30 knots, later corrected to 28, matched naval doctrine for a warship rather than a support vessel, which is exactly why Israeli pilots misidentified it in the first place, and every body that has actually examined the evidence, American and Israeli, spanning more than three decades of review, reached the same conclusion: mistaken identity, not malice.

Related pages

• USS Liberty incident (glossary)
• Six-Day War (glossary)
• Who attacked first in the Six-Day War?
• Who started the wars?
• IDF (glossary)

Sources

• Jewish Virtual Library: History and Overview of the USS Liberty Incident
• Jewish Virtual Library: Investigations of the Liberty Tragedy
• Jewish Virtual Library: CIA Intelligence Memos on the Liberty Incident (declassified, PDF)
• Jewish Virtual Library: the Six-Day War, background and overview