Six Days (24 page)

His mission was to take the high ground that ran along north of Jerusalem. If he succeeded Israel would control all the main roads to the north, east and west of the city, cutting off any chance of Jordan sending in reinforcements. But in the way were strongpoints at Sheikh Abdul Aziz, Beit Iksa and Radar Hill that had repeatedly thrown back Israeli fighters in 1948. He selected four routes for his tanks to use to climb the ridges. Instead of stopping to regroup at the foot of the hill, Ben Ari ordered them to drive straight on. It was harder to hit a moving target. Some of the routes were little more than goat tracks, heavily mined and under the Jordanian guns, but they had been carefully reconnoitred before the war. At first the fighting was hard and the going was tough. An Israeli tank commander who had done most of his training in the desert said ‘we were fighting two enemies and I don't know which was worse – the Jordanians or the terrain'.

The Jordanians fired down at the advancing Israeli tanks. Soldiers riding on them had to jump down to clear the mines. All ten Centurion tanks in one Israeli unit were disabled, along with many Shermans. But Ben Ari brought his armour up behind the Jordanian positions. His unorthodox idea of splitting his force into four worked. He thought they would break through on at least two routes. In the end, they did so on all four. Many Jordanian officers abandoned the fight. Afterwards, the Israelis found no one with a higher rank than sergeant among the Jordanian dead.

By dawn on the second day of the war, Ben Ari's men were north of Jerusalem, cutting the roads, as they had planned.

The road to Al-Arish, Sinai, 1700

At about five Lieutenant Avigdor Kahalani of Israel's 7th Armoured Brigade was rolling down the road to Al-Arish. He planned to be the first into the town. First they had to get through a pass known as the Jirardi Defile. A soldier jumped out in front of him. Kahalani was about to shoot him when he realised he was Israeli. The man flagged him down, warning that Egyptian tanks were ahead. Kahalani climbed up on a ridge to take a look. Suddenly the tank bucked. It was on fire and Kahalani was burning. He could not find the strength to push himself out. ‘The smell of burning and a wave of intense heat swept the tank … what's happening to me, I screamed, I'm coming apart.' With a final supreme effort he forced himself out and rolled out onto the engine cowling. ‘Mother, I'm burning, I'm burning, I'm burning…' He threw himself into the sand dunes, rolling around to put the fires out. Kahalani wanted to sleep, but then realised that tanks were tearing through the sand around him and shells were exploding. All his clothes except part of his underpants and shirt were burnt off him. The sock in one of his boots was on fire. He pulled himself into the loader's compartment on a Patton tank, which took him, badly burnt and by now stark naked, to a medic.

An anti-tank gun knocked out the Patton behind Kahalani's. Two others were stopped by mines. Sergeant Dov Yam, the commander of one of the tanks in the minefield, kept on firing his gun until another anti-tank shell hit his tank and blew off his hand. He ran back to the brigade commander's half-track and collapsed on a stretcher, muttering, ‘I think I did everything I could.' Major Ehud Elad, the battalion commander, took the lead, ordering his men to disperse further into the sands to try to outflank the position that was holding them back. Like all Israeli tank commanders in 1967, Elad believed he did his job best if he sat up in the turret, exposing his body but giving him an all-round view of the battle. ‘Driver, faster,' he shouted through the intercom. Then the men in the tank heard a thump. Elad's body dropped down into the compartment of his tank, his head blown clean off. Before they forced some tanks through the pass with a frontal assault down the main road, the Israelis lost the battalion commander, three company commanders and their operations officer. Behind them the Jirardi Defile was still blocked. It took four hours of hard hand-to-hand fighting in the trenches that protected it to subdue the Egyptians.

At Al-Arish Brig. Gen. Tal told his brigade commanders that during the first day of fighting, through Rafah and into Egypt, they had scored a decisive victory over the Egyptian 7th Infantry Division. Before the battle Tal ordered them to throw everything into the fight. Getting the breakthrough and psychological as well as physical dominance over the Egyptians was critical, ‘irrespective of the cost in casualties'. Now he told them to be more cautious, trying first what could be done with long-range gunnery, pushing only a battalion forward at a time. He did not want them taking on any more all-out battles without his express permission. Tal ordered Colonel Shmuel Gonen, the commander of the 7th Armoured Brigade, to swing south to attack B'ir Lahfan, a major Egyptian defensive zone.

Egyptian civilians were caught up in the fighting. Mrs Fathi Mohammed Hussein Ayoub was travelling to Al-Arish in the afternoon. Her car was hit, she thought by the Israelis, killing her four-and five-year-old daughters and her eight-year-old son. The driver was cut in two by the explosion.

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Field Marshal Amer at GHQ in Cairo had gone from paralysis to verbal incontinence. He made call after call to his divisional commanders, all of which were monitored by Israeli intelligence. He ignored General Muhsin, the commander of the field army, and General Murtagi, the commander in chief of the front, until he needed Murtagi to send reinforcements to Abu Agheila and Al-Arish. Amer could have revived Plan Qaher, which was supposed to deal with exactly the kind of thrust that Israel had made into the Sinai, but he seemed to have forgotten about it.

State Department, Washington DC, 1000

At the State Department in Foggy Bottom the spokesman Bob McCloskey gave a briefing to correspondents. He was asked whether the US was neutral in the Middle East war. McCloskey obliged. ‘We have tried to steer an even-handed course through this. Our position is neutral in thought, word and deed.'

It had seemed like a straightforward answer to a simple question. It was not. Israel's supporters were outraged. Jews at a union meeting hissed when they heard the US was calling itself neutral. The US, they believed, should support Israel. Mrs Arthur Krim, one of the president's close friends, told him that his administration looked as if it was washing its hands of the war at a time when Nasser seemed to American Jews to be a second Hitler. Mrs Krim suggested he made a ruling that the US would never re-establish diplomatic relations with a government headed by Nasser. David Brody of B'nai B'rith, the Jewish anti-defamation league, also used his access to senior officials in the Johnson administration to protest. He wanted a promise that the US would not force Israel to withdraw from any land it captured without first getting assurances of a real peace.

United Nations Security Council, New York

The Soviet delegation had heard that war had broken out before dawn, when Hans Tabor, the Danish ambassador who was taking his turn at the rotating presidency of the Security Council, called the Soviet estate at Glen Cove. Nikolai Fedorenko, the Soviet Ambassador to the UN, agreed to a meeting of the Security Council and drove to their mission in Manhattan with his arms control adviser, Arkady Shevchenko, where he was expecting to find instructions from Moscow. They waited close to their secure teletype machines. Nothing came through, so they went to their offices at the UN headquarters. The Egyptian ambassador, Mohammed el-Kony, who in Shevchenko's opinion was a ‘total mediocrity', was confident, telling them that ‘we deceived the Israelis. They bombed some of our false airfields, where we deliberately placed fake plywood airplane models. We shall see who wins this war.'

The Israeli ambassador to the UN, Gideon Rafael, knew how well his country's air force was doing. He had been told ‘the stimulating news' in a secret cable that Israel had destroyed 250 Egyptian planes by lunchtime. Tabor, the president of the Security Council, never understood how Rafael seemed so unworried at a time when everyone else thought Israel was in great danger. Rafael's instructions were to carry out a ‘diplomatic holding action. The strategic outcome of the fighting was a race between time and space. Our armoured divisions would cover the space as fast as they could and our diplomatic corps would provide the time for them to reach their objectives.' In case he needed relief Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban was on his way. As he was kissing his wife goodbye on his doorstep in Jerusalem a piece of shrapnel fizzed down to the ground near them. It took him three hours to get to the airport because tanks and troops were jamming the road. The only aircraft available was a small one designed for domestic flights. Late on Monday evening it took off from Tel Aviv and flew across the Mediterranean, almost as low as the attack jets that had bombed Egypt in the morning. By the time a queasy Eban decided it was safe to look out of the window, he saw dawn break over the Acropolis in Athens.

Millions of television viewers in the United States had been watching the Security Council debates. The superpowers' ambassadors – Goldberg from the US and Fedorenko from the Soviet Union – had become well known. Arthur Goldberg was a former union lawyer, Secretary of Labour and Justice of the Supreme Court. In private the Russians on the Soviet delegation called him ‘the slick Jew who could fool the devil himself', but they respected his eloquence and intelligence and regarded him as a ‘vigorous and formidable opponent'. Fedorenko had been a favourite of Stalin. He was one of the USSR's leading experts on China and spoke the language so well that he interpreted at meetings between Stalin and Mao. Andrei Gromyko, the long-serving Soviet foreign minister, disliked him. By the Soviet Union's prim standards, his hair was too long and his clothes, including the ultimate bourgeois affectation, a bow tie, were too flashy. He had been on the defensive since the crisis started, often avoiding members of the Security Council when they wanted consultations, emerging occasionally to deploy a sarcastic Russian wit to the TV cameras. When the Canadian delegate seemed to be off beam, Fedorenko told him he was behaving like the man in an oriental proverb: when you show him the moon, all he looks at is your finger.

Fedorenko's performance in the first two days of the war served Israel's purposes admirably. It was not really his fault. Unlike Washington, Moscow had not invested heavily in cutting-edge communications, so Fedorenko and his superiors in the Soviet Union did not know how well the Israelis were doing. Initially, all they had to go on were Egypt's boasts. The Egyptian high command was already in such a state of panic and paralysis that it was not telling its own foreign ministry what was happening, let alone the people who had provided the equipment Israel was destroying. The Soviets at the UN had to fall back on their standing instructions not to allow any resolutions against Egypt, Syria or Jordan. When at last instructions arrived from Moscow ‘they had a wait and see tone, while generally supportive of the Arab position. We were ordered to consult with the Arabs and condemn Israel in the strongest possible terms.'

Moscow also took military precautions. It put bomber and MiG-21 fighter units on alert in the evening. One of the officers concerned was convinced they were preparing for ‘real combat'. They were moved to an airbase on the Soviet–Turkish border and were scrambled several times in the next three days. Their plan was to operate out of Syrian airbases. Working indirectly, the Iraqi government asked Turkey the next day to grant overflight rights to Soviet MiG-21s. Permission was refused.

Fedorenko and his delegation were picking up rumours, but none of the hard information they needed. The Soviet Embassy in Cairo had some around the time that New Yorkers were having breakfast, but it was not passed on. For the first few hours of the war, the Soviets in Cairo had relied on the radio like everyone else. They realised that Cairo Radio's bragging reports were inaccurate, but assumed they were exaggerations rather than outright lies. Then a group of Soviet specialists came back from Egypt's biggest airbase, Cairo West. Sergei Tarasenko, who was an attaché at the Embassy, saw them come in looking exhausted, with torn and dirty clothes. Their senior officer came to the point. ‘Egypt hasn't got an air force any more, and Cairo West base has ceased to exist.' The bus carrying the Soviet technicians was just approaching the base when the first wave of Mirages attacked. They had time to pile out and take cover. After the first raid, a dozen aircraft survived. The Soviets said the pilots could have taken them into the air. But nothing happened and the next wave of attacks finished them off.

About the time that the Soviet technicians were getting back to their embassy, a call for a simple ceasefire was going nowhere. India protested about the ‘wanton strafing attack' in Gaza by Israel that had killed three of its UNEF soldiers. After India tabled its own resolution saying that the ceasefire needed to be followed by a return to the positions of 4 June, the Security Council decided to take a short recess to wait for news from the battlefield. The Israelis, who knew exactly what was happening, and the Americans, who knew almost as much, kept silent. Some of the delegates stayed in their seats in the chamber of the Security Council. Others drifted out to the delegates' lounge, where reporters milled around trying to find out what was happening. The Council did not reconvene until 10:20 p.m. New York time.

Ambassador Goldberg spent hours trying to get a meeting with Fedorenko. The Soviet avoided him until late in the afternoon. For the Arabs a bitter irony was in the making. Goldberg and the Americans had concluded that they would have to soften their position. A resolution calling simply for a ceasefire did not look to be enough to get past the Soviet veto. Goldberg wanted to reach Fedorenko to offer him a ceasefire plus a withdrawal of troops, an idea that Israel opposed vehemently. Through gritted teeth the Israeli representative told the Americans that its view of the proposition was ‘frigid'.

By the time Fedorenko met Goldberg, it was getting on for midnight in the Middle East. During the time that Fedorenko was mostly incommunicado, the first day of fighting had ended with Israel making big advances in the Sinai and towards Jerusalem. Goldberg offered him a new text including a demand for ‘prompt withdrawal, without prejudice to rights, claims or positions of anyone, of all armed personnel back to their own territories, and to take other appropriate measures to ensure disengagement of forces and to reduce tension in the area'. Fedorenko rejected it, because the reference to ‘own territories' meant that the Iraqis, who had been advancing into Jordan, and other Arabs who had sent troops, would have to bring them all home. Instead, he suggested a demand to pull soldiers back behind the armistice lines. Both of them went away to think about it.