OpEdNews - Page 3 of Article: When Napoleon Won at Waterloo

For those who don't know, or who have already forgotten: Altalena was a small ship that arrived off the coast of Israel in the middle of the 1948 war, carrying a group of Irgun men and quantities of weapons, it was not clear for whom. David Ben-Gurion was afraid of a putsch and ordered the shelling of the ship, off the coast of Tel-Aviv. Some of the men were killed; Menachem Begin, who had gone aboard, was pushed into the water and saved. The ship sank, the Irgun was dispersed, and its members joined the new Israeli army.

Twenty-nine years later, Begin came to power. All the careerists joined him in haste. And then it appeared, retroactively, that practically everybody had been on board the Altalena. The little ship expanded into a huge aircraft carrier until the Likud lost power and Altalena shrunk back to the size of a fishing boat.

The Second Lebanon War was a mighty Altalena. All the media crowded onto its deck. But the day after the war was over, we learned that this was an optical illusion: absolutely nobody had been there, except Captain Olmert, First Officer Peretz, and Helmsman Halutz. However, that can change any minute now, if the trusting public can be convinced that we won the war after all.

As has been said before: in Israel nothing changes, except the past.

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