1948/56 wars: No inside information on these wars.
1967 6-day war : A shopkeeper friend of mine was sitting, as he often did, outside his shop in Singapore when a western tourist passed by and fell into conversation with him. The tourist turned out to be an American, a former pilot in the US air force, now retired and living in the Philippines. He revealed that during the 6-day war, most of the Israeli planes and tanks were manned by the Americans, he being one of the pilots, as the Jewish forces invaded Sinai, the Golan Heights and the West Bank.
During this war a US warship called Liberty was bombed by Israel. This deadly attack has never been fully investigated by the US. One can only surmise that Washington simply had to keep a lid on the incident because an investigation would have exposed America's participation in that war, that it was probably a case of friendly fire from planes flown by American pilots.
1973 Yom Kippur war: This war was apparently well planned by the Egyptians and the Syrians. According to a former officer in the Egyptian army whom I met in Scandinavia while he was on some course of study there, the plan to go to war was kept from the Russians who had supplied most of the modern weapons to the Egyptians, including the SAMS (the surface to air missiles). This officer, along with his colleagues, was ordered by Cairo to move the Russian advisers away from the Suez Canal where the SAMS had been installed. Then, according to the officer, the order to launch an attack came from Cairo not by telephone or radio but by a messenger travelling by road from Cairo to the Canal. The order was to first hold their anti-aircraft fire until the Egyptian air force had completed its mission to bomb enemy positions in Sinai and had returned to their bases. After that the SAMS were to shoot down all planes in the sky as the ground forces crossed the canal and took up positions on that side with their anti-tank weapons. Apparently this was a huge success, the Egyptians destroying 40 Israeli planes in the first day of the war as reported by well informed sources at the time. Subsequently, according to a former CIA operative now retired and also living in the Philippines (on the island of Leyte) whom I met when I was in that country, the Israelis lost hundreds of their tanks and were in danger of losing most of their air force. They faced certain defeat and extinction. But the Americans had already stepped in and were bringing in new hardware and pilots and tank crews. This CIA man himself had been sent there to help the Israelis.
To believe therefore that a tiny population of Jews could on their own defeat the mass of Arabs surrounding them is naive, especially after what we saw happen to them in Lebanon.
The following quotes are from Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia:
"In a 1993 interview for the Johnson Presidential Library oral history archives U.S. Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara revealed that a Carrier battle group, the U.S. 6th Fleet, already on a training exercise near Gibraltar was re-positioned towards the eastern Mediterranean to defend Israel."
"In his book Six Days veteran BBC journalist Jeremy Bowen claims that on 4 June, 1967 the Israeli ship Miryam left Felixstowe with cases of machine guns, 105 mm tank shells, and armored vehicles in "the latest of many consignments of arms that had been sent secretly to Israel from British and American reserves since the crisis started" and that "Israeli transport planes had been running a 'shuttle service' in and out of RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire". Bowen claims that Harold Wilson had written to Eshkol saying that he was glad to help as long as the utmost secrecy was maintained."
"On 9 June 1967, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser stated in his resignation speech (his resignation was not accepted):
What is now established is that American and British aircraft carriers were off the shores of the enemy helping his war effort. Also, British aircraft raided, in broad daylight, positions of the Syrian and Egyptian fronts, in addition to operations by a number of American aircraft reconnoitering some of our positions... Indeed, it can be said without exaggeration that the enemy was operating with an air force three times stronger than his normal force."