Six Days (11 page)

Nasser was waiting at the airbase, as usual wearing an immaculate business suit, in high good humour and in the mood for banter. He looked at the king.

‘I see you are armed and in uniform.'

‘It means nothing,' said the king, ‘we've been dressing this way for more than a week.'

‘Since your visit is a secret,' Nasser replied, ‘what would happen if we arrested you?'

Hussein, who had travelled with his prime minister and his top generals but without bodyguards, smiled. ‘The possibility never crossed my mind.'

It was a little awkward. They got into a black Cadillac and swept off to the Koubbeh palace. Nasser and Hussein went into a small drawing room on the first floor and started to talk. Field Marshal Abd al-Hakim Amer joined them. He was in a bullish mood. He told Hussein that Egypt did not need anything from him. ‘We just want you to sit and watch what we are going to do with them. We are going to destroy them.' The king thought Amer's performance was absurd. He tried to convince Amer and Nasser that Israel was too strong and that they were risking a disaster. Don't worry, they told him. We know what we're doing. Nasser and Hussein were fatalistic. Both of them said, apparently sincerely, that whether the battle was lost or won, they could not shy away from the fight. Arab dignity demanded nothing less. (The CIA commented that ‘dignity has unquestionably become an overriding priority in the scale of Arab considerations'.) The king asked to see the pact Egypt had signed with Syria. ‘I merely skimmed the text and said to Nasser: “Give me another copy. Put in Jordan instead of Syria and the matter will be settled.”'

They relaxed. Nasser and Hussein agreed that he would take back with him the leader of the PLO, Ahmed Shukairy. He came in, the king recalled with distaste, ‘bareheaded, tieless, in a long-sleeved shirt and khaki pants, looking particularly unkempt'. In fiery speeches he had been hurling abuse at Hussein, ‘the Hashemite harlot' who threw Palestinians into his ‘towers'. Now he was ingratiating, all smiles, telling Hussein he was the real leader of the Palestinians. Nasser turned to the king. ‘Take Shukairy with you. If he gives you any trouble, throw him into one of your towers and rid me of the problem.'

At 3:30 p.m., Cairo Radio interrupted its programmes with a news flash announcing the pact. Jordanians and Palestinians in Hussein's kingdom were amazed and delighted. The king was mobbed as he drove back to his palace from the airport. The deliriously happy crowds were more convinced than ever that victory was certain. They hated the Israelis and believed Nasser's propaganda. Hussein, though, was not deluded by his new fans who were trying to lift up his Mercedes so they could carry it to the palace. Nasser had been the real winner. The deal he had made only granted the Hashemites a reprieve. The crowds loved him because Nasser had accepted him, not the other way around. ‘I knew that war was inevitable. I knew that we were going to lose. I knew that we in Jordan were threatened, threatened by two things: we either followed the course we did, or alternatively the country would tear itself apart if we stayed out, and Israel would march into the West Bank and even beyond.'

After he came back from Cairo, Hussein toured his units in the West Bank with his cousin Prince Zaid Ben Shaker. They started with the armoured brigade that Ben Shaker commanded, which was just inside the West Bank. Ben Shaker gathered all the senior officers. The king spoke frankly. ‘He told the officers, “I am convinced that we are not going to win this war. I hope we do not get involved in this war but if we do, all I ask you to do is your best, respect your traditions and remember that you are fighting for your country” … And he said that time and again in every formation in the West Bank. In the car when we were going from one place to another he'd say, “I hope to God that there won't be a war but I think there will be one.” He feared the worst from the very beginning.'

Fear

Strict military censorship meant that Israel's generals kept to themselves their overwhelming confidence about the coming victory. Cut off from official reassurance, Israeli civilians were desperately worried. Bloodthirsty threats were pouring out of Arab radio stations and on to the pages of the Israeli papers. Only twenty-two years after the end of the Holocaust, it is not surprising that Arab propaganda hit home. The official army minder attached to the British journalist Winston Churchill Jr told him that he was ready to kill his wife and baby daughter rather than let them fall into the hands of the Arabs. The crisis was especially frightening to Jews in the Diaspora, who looked at the map and saw tiny Israel surrounded by big, threatening neighbours. It all sounded appalling in Europe and the US, and helped strengthen already strong Western sympathies for Israel, which looked like a friendly democracy surrounded by a baying, murderous mob.

Translated, the Arab broadcasts are blood-curdling. No wonder many Israelis were scared stiff. Ahmed Said on Voice of the Arabs told his audience in a typical broadcast: ‘We have nothing for Israel except war – comprehensive war … marching against its gangs, destroying and putting an end to the whole Zionist existence … our aim is to destroy the myth which says that Israel is here to stay … every one of the 100 million Arabs has been living for the past nineteen years on one hope – to live to die on the day Israel is liquidated. There is no life, no peace or hope for the gangs of Zionism to remain in the occupied land.' Faced with what seemed to be horribly clear threats from their biggest neighbour, Israelis pulled together.

A doom-laden mood overtook Israel in May 1967. Black jokes about imminent annihilation circulated – ‘will the last one out at the airport turn off the lights – let's meet after the war … where? In a phone booth…' According to a kibbutznik on the border with Syria, ‘Suddenly everyone was talking about Munich, about the Holocaust, about the Jewish people being left to its fate. A new Holocaust did not seem as real a possibility to us as it did to the people of Europe; for us it was a concrete picture of an enemy victory, and we decided that, come what might, we would prevent it.' The youngest Holocaust survivors were still in their twenties, but they were not given any special treatment in a society that valued military strength above all else. Native-born Israelis were brought up in the 1950s and '60s to reject what they assumed was the weakness and passivity of Jews who did not fight when the Nazis came.

The government made secret preparations for heavy casualties. Thousands of coffins were ordered. Rabbis consecrated parks as emergency cemeteries. During May, more and more men were called up into the army. Children delivered the mail, newspapers and milk, dug trenches and, when they finally got to school, practised air raid drills. The Civil Defence Corps, fully mobilised by 26 May, pasted up instructions in the streets, stockpiled medical supplies and made sure the shelters were clean and in good order. Civilians were drafted into essential services if they were not in the army. The working week was extended from forty-seven hours to a maximum of seventy-one. Vehicles were called up into national service as well. Yellow labels printed with the words ‘mobilised equipment' were stuck on to their windscreens. Bread lorries, buses and their drivers were sent to the front to transport troops. Hitch-hiking became the most common form of transport. The insurance companies rallied around, extending driver's policies to cover hitch-hikers. In Tel Aviv, volunteer taxis ran along discontinued bus routes. In Haifa, secondhand car dealers offered vehicles and drivers. Some people started up shuttle services to and from military bases. Women with cars adopted shops and acted as their van drivers, picking up supplies from warehouses. By the Thursday before the war, 1 June, so few able-bodied men were left out of uniform that a visitor from the US thought Tel Aviv was like a ‘sunny, sparsely populated colony for the infirm. Even the taxi driver wore a leather glove concealing an artificial hand…'

In Israel tens of thousands of pints of blood were donated. In Arab Jerusalem it was more casual. Towards the end of May a local journalist heard an appeal for donations on the radio. When he went to give blood at the Red Crescent centre in the Old City it was empty. The staff were not sure why he was there. ‘Had there been an injury in the family? At which hospital was the patient? Forty-five minutes passed before Nabil could yield his patriotic pint.'

In Israeli factories clerks offered to work on the shop floors. People did unpaid overtime. Women took on jobs left empty by husbands and sons who were in the army. Taxpayers settled bills they had been trying to forget about, or even paid their taxes in advance. Other people just sent money to the government. Police officers who were not in the army gave back 10 per cent of their monthly pay. Foreigners who were studying at religious schools in Israel asked for military training. Religious Jews, who did not have to do army service and were often involved in furious rows with Israel's secular establishment, declared their own ceasefire for the duration, cancelling demonstrations against driving on the Sabbath in Jerusalem and against autopsies in Haifa. The rabbis told soldiers the obligations of the Sabbath were suspended.

Eshkol

On the morning of Sunday 28 May Israel's prime minister Levi Eshkol was exhausted. But there was no chance to rest. The next item on his agenda was a live radio broadcast to the nation. The people wanted reassurance and leadership. Eshkol tried to say all the right things, praising the strength of the army and the spirit of the country. But he fluffed his lines. The prime minister was reading from a script that had been written in a hurry. On his copy words had been changed around, crossed out and added on. Some of it was just military jargon. And he had not bothered to rehearse. When the red light went on he stumbled and stammered his way through the most damaging few minutes of his political life. It was a disaster. The irony was that Eshkol was correct. The IDF was in good shape. In Washington that day, both morning and afternoon White House intelligence situation reports stressed that ‘nothing had changed to alter the findings of the 26 May special report of the Watch Committee. There is no information which would indicate that Egypt intends to attack. At the same time, the Israelis could attack with little or no warning if they decided to.'

Eshkol's wife Miriam was listening to the broadcast. She ordered her driver to take her straight to the studios. Her husband was angry, ‘his advisers all running around like mice'. The broadcast was bad enough. For Eshkol, it was about to get much worse. At eight in the evening he was supposed to see the IDF high command. He was late. The generals had been listening to the radio and were very unhappy about what they had heard. As they waited the tension mounted. Brig. Gen. Ariel Sharon was angry about politicians who seemed to have run out of ideas. ‘We felt as if the burden was on our shoulders.' Sharon had been a famous soldier since the 1950s when he created Unit 101, an irregular unit that used brutal tactics, often killing civilians, in reprisal raids into Gaza and the West Bank. Now he was commanding a division that was poised to storm into the Sinai desert. When Eshkol arrived they were waiting in a conference room just off the main war room. Under harsh new strip lights that had just been put in, the generals' faces looked pale and grim. The air was clogged with cigarette smoke and the atmosphere was hostile and emotional. Nobody offered Eshkol any refreshments.

The generals gave him a roasting. They were furious, desperate for action, humiliated by the wait and utterly confident of the IDF's ability to win. Aharon Yariv, the head of military intelligence, started with a ‘tongue-lashing'. Then the others lined up to condemn Eshkol. Sharon said, ‘Our own actions have cancelled out the IDF's power to deter. We have removed our own principal weapon – fear of us.' Israel Tal demanded ‘a clear war … The government's decision is not clear enough. We are entitled to clear instructions.' Uzi Narkiss mocked the Egyptians: ‘They are soap bubbles – a pin will burst them … I don't know your views on the army. We here are all twenty years and more in the army and I want to tell you, this is a fantastic army. There is no need for concern.' Avraham Yoffe, called out of retirement to command a division, told the prime minister that he was stopping the army doing the job for which it was created. He and Brig. Gen. Matityahu Peled, the quartermaster-general, who told Eshkol he was insulting the IDF by not sending them to war, used aggressive, highly pejorative language comparing the government to leaders of Jewish communities in the Diaspora who were forced to beg like slaves.

Eshkol tried to get a grip on what was happening. ‘We need to take a deep breath … We need patience. I don't accept that the fact that the Egyptian army is sitting in Sinai means that we have to go to war … Will we live forever by the sword?' He tried to tell what he had done for the army. ‘You needed more equipment? Fine. You wanted 100 planes? You got them. You also got tanks. You got everything so that we could beat the Egyptian army. You didn't get it so that one day you could come and say: now we can destroy the Egyptian army – so let's do it.'

Eshkol wanted to crack the whip of civilian control over the generals. But the meeting was turning into a feeding frenzy. The atmosphere was ‘extremely hard, almost unbearable'. The men staring at Eshkol, with the exception of Yoffe, were in their late thirties and early forties. Eshkol was old, and looked it, and liked speaking Yiddish and Russian, the languages of his youth, as much as Hebrew. Most of the generals had been born in Israel. They had fought in all Israel's wars. Eshkol was in the way. In their minds he embodied the weakness of the Diaspora. It was desperately unfair, because he had arrived in Palestine as a young man and had spent his life building the Jewish state. But he looked weak, and in the generals' world weakness was worthy only of contempt. Threats were to be faced and enemies dispatched. Brigadier-General Elad Peled, who was one of the four divisional commanders, was at the meeting. ‘The mental generation gap was very important. We were the cowboys, frontier people. We looked at the older generation as people who were not free, they were not liberated … The minister of education asked me, “what if you're wrong? You're playing with the existence of the state.” I told him I am one hundred per cent confident about the result of the war.' Yitzhak Rabin said they should discuss a declaration of war. Eshkol refused. Yigal Allon suggested a breather. Eshkol got up and walked out, furious, stunned by what had happened. He interpreted it as ‘practically open mutiny'.