Actually, the real insult to their memory is this retro colonial settler 'entity', for which no one is under any moral obligation to recognize as the legitimate state of Jews, Israelis or anybody else outside a relatively small group of heavily armed fanatics whose top leadership is concentrated in the Northeast corridor of the United States. ......... As the Liberty sat within eyeshot of El Arish, eavesdropping on surrounding communications, Israeli soldiers turned the town into a slaughterhouse, systematically butchering their prisoners. In the shadow of the El Arish mosque, they lined up about sixty unarmed Egyptian prisoners, hands tied behind their backs, and then opened fire with machine guns until the pale desert turned red. 'I saw a line of prisoners, civilians and military', said Abdelsalam Moussa, one of those who dug the graves, 'and they opened fire at them all at once. When they were dead, they told us to bury them.'. Nearby, a group of Israelis gunned down thirty more prisoners and then ordered some Bedouins to cover them with sand.
In still another incident at El Arish, the Israeli journalist Gabi Bron saw about 150 Egyptian POWs sitting on the ground, crowded together with their hands held at the back of their necks. 'The Egyptian prisoners of war were ordered to dig pits and then army police shot them to death', Broin said. ' I witnessed the executions with my own eyes on the morning of June 8th, in the airport area of El Arish.'
The Israeli military historian Aryeh Yitzhaki, who worked in the army's history department after the war, said he and other officers collected testimony from dozens of soldiers who admitted killing POWs. According to Yitzhaki, Israeli troops killed, in cold blood, as many as 1,000 Egyptian prisoners in the Sinai including some 400 in the sand dunes of El Arish.
Ironically, Ariel Sharon, who was capturing territory south of El Arish at the time of the slaughter, had been close to massacres during other conflicts. One of his men during the Suez crisis in 1956, Arye Biro, now a retired brigadier general, recently admitted the unprovoked killing of 49 prisoners of war in the Sinai in 1956. 'I had my Karl Gustav [weapon] I had taken from the Egyptian. My officer had an Uzi. Th Egyptian prisoners were sitting there with their faces turned to us. We turned to them with our loaded guns and shot them. Magazine after magazine. They didn't get a chance to react.' At another point, Biro said, he found Egyptian soldiers prostrate with thirst. He said that after taunting them by pouring water from his canteen into the sand, he killed them. 'If I were to be put on trial for what I did,' he said, 'then it would be necessary to put on trial at least one-half the Israeli army, which, in similar circumstances, did what I did.' Sharon who says he learned of the 1956 prisoner shootings only after they happened, refused to say whether he took any disciplinary action against those involved, or even objected to the killings...(pp.201-203)
Into this sea of lies, deception and slaughter said the USS Liberty, an enormous American spy factory loaded with $10.2 million worth of the latest eavesdropping gear. At 10:39 A.M. the minaret at El Arish was logged at seventeen miles away, at bearing 189 degrees. Sailing at five knots, the Liberty was practically treading water.