Six Days (34 page)

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By mid-afternoon Israel was fighting the clock as well as what was left of the Jordanian army. It always knew that once the Security Council passed a ceasefire resolution, the time for military action started running out. Israel wanted the entire West Bank as well as Jerusalem by the time it stopped shooting. Both sides blamed each other for breaking the ceasefire, which King Hussein had accepted in the early hours of the morning. Certainly, Israel had a greater interest in continuing the fight. It pressed home fierce attacks against columns of Jordanian forces that were retreating down from the high mountains of the West Bank into the Jordan valley, the lowest place on earth, on their way out of the West Bank. Israeli warplanes – at least 100 according to the Jordanians – strafed and bombed them and, in some places, they were shelled by Israeli tanks. Without air cover, they were at the Israelis' mercy.

The Israeli air force flew 597 sorties against Jordan during the war, 549 of them for ground attack. Sharif Zaid Ben Shaker, the cousin of King Hussein, felt like he had been on the wrong end of most of them. He commanded the 60th Armoured Brigade which lost forty of its eighty tanks, mainly to air attack. ‘When you're strafed you have to jump out of your vehicle – I was in a Land Rover – and throw yourself into a ditch. They hit the wireless car behind me. They used a lot of napalm. A napalm bomb ricocheted on the asphalt near me, went about 200 yards and exploded. God was on my side.'

Even though King Hussein had long since dropped his desire for a secret ceasefire, broadcasting his acceptance of the UN resolution on Radio Jordan, the Israelis continued to press home their attacks. A few Jordanian units kept on fighting. Most were trying to cross to the East Bank or to melt away into the west. The US ambassador, Findley Burns, in Amman, feared that the Israelis were trying to destroy the Jordanian army completely. He was so concerned about what that could do to the stability of Jordan that he urged President Johnson to phone Prime Minister Eshkol to push Israel to respect the ceasefire. Burns was also acutely aware that almost every Jordanian believed the United States could stop the Israeli onslaught if it wanted to – and if it did not, he feared some of the thousand-plus Americans in Jordan could face ‘mob violence'.

Bethlehem, 1500

When the war started Badial Raheb, a young mother, was better prepared than most of her neighbours in Milk Grotto Street in Bethlehem. It is a narrow lane that runs along the side of the Church of the Nativity, which Christians believe was built on the place where Jesus was born. Her husband Bishara Raheb owned a bookshop. He followed the news closely. When he was in the house the radio was always on, especially Saut al Arab, the Voice of the Arabs from Cairo. Bishara discounted most of its bragging, bloodthirsty propaganda, but he hoped that the Arabs were strong enough to win the war that he was convinced was coming. Badial was not sure. It was clear to her that the Arabs were more than simply disunited. They were ready to betray each other, which was much worse. How could they fight Israel in such a state? She was worried. She had a four-year-old son, Mitri, and she was expecting another child. Together, Badial and Bishara prepared for the war, stockpiling food.

Jordan's Hittin Infantry Brigade pulled out of Bethlehem at midday without a fight. The Mayor of Bethlehem surrendered the town to a task force from the Jerusalem Infantry Brigade, which entered Bethlehem at three in the afternoon. By then the Rahebs had covered the windows of their house with cardboard. They wanted to make the place look empty, so they would be ignored by the invaders. The family retreated down to a basement room that was protected by a thick stone wall. The electricity and the water were cut but they had candles and there was a well. In their basement they could hear the sounds of war. The prospect of Israeli soldiers coming to their town was terrifying. People were talking about the massacre of Deir Yasin in 1948. Some of the Rahebs' neighbours who thought it would happen again left for Jordan. Badial started to feel very unsafe, even in their well-protected stone cellar. She decided to cross the road to take refuge in the Church of the Nativity. Getting to its door was agonising, even though it was no more than two dozen yards away. Her little boy Mitri had a leg in plaster from an accident just before the war. With them as well was Bishara's old aunt, well into her eighties and barely able to walk.

The ancient church was full. It was very dark. The electricity had been cut and the people were frightened to light candles, which might have attracted attention. As her eyes got used to the dark, Badial Raheb saw that hundreds had gathered there, so many that she struggled to find somewhere for her family to sit down.

Cairo

The Soviet military attaché was granted an audience with Field Marshal Amer at his headquarters, in the brand new defence ministry building in Nasser City, one of Cairo's newest suburbs. Sergei Tarasenko, an attaché at the Embassy, was with him as interpreter. The atmosphere around the ministry was not what Tarasenko expected – no checkpoints, no barriers and no guards. The first soldiers that they saw were at the entrance to the building. An immaculately turned-out officer opened the door for the Soviet party. Somewhere in the background there were three soldiers with a light anti-aircraft gun.

They went down in a lift what seemed to be a long way and were shown into a big room. Around ten senior officers were sitting there. Tarasenko was bemused. ‘I was expecting to see them extremely active, messengers running in all directions, to hear orders and reprimands shouted into the telephone or walkie-talkies. Instead there was complete stillness and quiet. The officers were sipping coffee and exchanging quiet remarks. Some of them were listening to small transistor radios.'

Amer's office was just off the big, quiet room. He was in an armchair next to a small table. Tarasenko's attention was caught by a six-inch split in a seam in the usually immaculate Amer's uniform. The Russians knew already it was going badly for Egypt. Now they started to think it could be even worse. Over Arabic coffee the military attaché asked Amer what was happening at the front. Amer, ‘with unsuppressed irritation', said the main item on his agenda at that precise moment was Nasser's decision to close the Suez canal, which Amer seemed convinced had turned the war into an international conflict. The Soviet military attaché started asking specific questions. Where was the front line? What happened to particular units? What was happening in Ishmalia? Amer did not answer the questions. ‘It was obvious that Amer himself had no idea of what was happening on the battlefields. My impression was that he had been taking drugs, or just switched off.'

Amer livened up only when he insisted that Egypt was now fighting the United States as well as Israel. The Israeli air force, Amer claimed, more preposterously than ever, had been destroyed by the air forces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. The war was being continued by the Americans, who were flying operations from their aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean. In the circumstances, Egypt expected the Soviet Union to offer its support. The military attaché asked for proof. Had they shot down an American plane? Or captured an American pilot? Amer was ‘almost rude'. He explained to the two Russians that it was all so well known and obvious that no proof was needed. Besides, the downed aircraft had all fallen into the sea and sunk. With that, he called the meeting to a halt.

Outside Amer's bunker, in the real world, Cairo had a quiet morning, after a night of air raids on factories and on the Cairo West military airbase. Rumours that a disaster had occurred in Sinai was spreading around the capital. Local journalists at the official Middle East News Agency were accusing the Soviets of betraying Egypt. Why hadn't they intervened? Why was the army surprised that the Americans and the British helped Israel? Some were suggesting that it would be just as bad if London and Washington's denials were true, because it meant that the Egyptian army had disastrously underestimated the Israelis. Even Nasser was being criticised. One reporter from his regime's favourite newspaper,
al-Ahram,
said Nasser had two choices left: to kill himself or leave the country.

‘Despair settled over the city,' according to Trevor Armbrister, one of the twenty-two American reporters in Cairo covering the war. Even the Nile was quiet. A few feluccas drifted downstream with their sails furled. Troops in combat fatigues with bayonets fixed guarded the bridges. Just past midday Armbrister and his twenty-two colleagues were ‘rounded up and taken to the Nile hotel, a dingy establishment facing the Corniche. As we milled around the entrance, a convoy of military vehicles rumbled by loaded with sand bags and artillery shells. We'd seen such convoys before, and the troops had always been singing. Now they were silent. The Egyptians made it clear that we were under house arrest. A blue-gowned Nubian called Mahatma guarded the hotel entrance, thrusting a thick black arm in front of anyone who attempted even to peer outside.' The hotel restaurant had been moved to the boiler room, ‘a smelly cavern abuzz with flies'. For lunch they were served some dried meat they thought had come from a camel. ‘Waiters in filthy galabias plopped six bottles of beer on the table. There would be no more until the war was over. The beer factory was closed.' They listened to reports from the BBC and Voice of America on shortwave radios and wondered how long their internment would last.

Gaza

After three days sheltering with his family in some farm buildings south of his home town of Deir al Balah, the 25-year-old Gaza schoolteacher Kamel Sulaiman Shaheen decided it was safe to take them home. A police station was behind their house in Deir al Balah. While they had been away, it had been occupied by the Israeli army. Shaheen heard a burst of machine gun fire coming from some open ground near the police station. Later he went out with some neighbours to try to see what had happened. The bodies of five executed Egyptian soldiers lay in the dust. Civilians picked up the bodies and buried them. Most of the time, Deir al Balah was under curfew. The Israelis conducted aggressive searches of houses. Sometimes they pulled young men away from terrified women and children, took them outside and shot them. Mr Shaheen helped bury five local men who had been killed by the Israelis. Thirty-five years later, now a headmaster a few weeks from retirement, he sat in his school in Deir al Balah and as the younger teachers listened he went through their names.

‘Mahmoud Ashur, Abd al Rahim Ashur, Ali Ashur, Ahmed Shaheen, who was my cousin, Abd al Marti Ziada … I saw their bodies. I heard about others but I didn't know their names. Many people were killed. They killed people who broke the curfew. It wasn't clear to people what the rules were. They made announcements in very bad Arabic … and went into alleys and very narrow streets, where people had thought it was safe to move … They were very hard and painful days. We had very little food, and no electricity or water.'

‘After six or seven days the Israelis started to arrest people rather than shoot them. We had been sheltering some Egyptian soldiers, given them civilian clothes. After a while they thought it was safe to surrender, so they gave themselves up.'

Jerusalem

Moshe Dayan broadcast to the nation. ‘We have united Jerusalem … We have returned to the holiest of our holy places, never to part from it again.'

A few hours after the Israelis had captured the Temple Mount, Rabbi Goren went up to General Narkiss, who was lost in thought.

‘Uzi,' said the rabbi, ‘now is the time to put 100 kilos of explosives into the Mosque of Omar so that we might rid ourselves of it once and for all … you will go down in history if you do it.'

‘My name will already be written in the history books of Jerusalem.'

‘You don't grasp what tremendous significance this would have. This is an opportunity that can be taken advantage of now, at this moment. Tomorrow it will be too late.'

Narkiss tried to shut the rabbi up by threatening him with jail.

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One of the paratroopers got to the top of the Dome and hung out a big Israeli flag. By the weekend Moshe Dayan ordered them to take it down. He also pulled Israeli troops out of the compound of the Haram al Sharif, though they stayed on its gates. Day-to-day administration of the site was handed back to the Muslim authorities. Jews would be allowed in, but not to pray. Later in 1967, in a speech to a military convention, Rabbi Goren called Dayan's actions a ‘tragedy for generations … I myself would have gone up there and wiped it off the ground completely, so that there would be no trace that there was ever a Mosque of Omar there.'

Israeli soldiers went from house to house in the Old City, searching for pockets of resistance. Haifa Khalidi was an eighteen-year-old Palestinian schoolgirl. She had been expecting a great victory. Like everyone she knew, she believed the Arab propaganda. When the shelling was at its loudest, she assumed that Israeli West Jerusalem was being destroyed. Some of her neighbours had looked out of their windows and seen soldiers in camouflage uniforms they thought were Iraqis. Haifa's mother, who remembered the Jews from before 1948, told her to get away from the windows, because the soldiers were Israelis. They banged on the Khalidis' front door, shouting in English, ‘Open up, we don't hurt innocents.' But before they could decide whether or not to let them in, there was an explosion as the soldiers blew the door open. ‘They came in to search the place. They saw we were educated so they were polite and behaved correctly. The soldiers spoke English with American accents.'

At nine in the evening, for the first time since the first morning of the war, Israeli civilians in Jerusalem were allowed out of their shelters. In three days of war fourteen Israeli civilians were killed and 500 wounded. No one has accurate casualty figures for Palestinians.

Jericho

Thousands of Palestinians were leaving like their friends and family had nineteen years before, fleeing in front of an advancing Israeli army. They walked down the steep road from Jerusalem, some of the women balancing suitcases on their heads, leading dirty, tearful, barefoot children towards the Dead Sea and the river Jordan. The bridge across the river had been blown by the Israelis. It was an old steel crossing, named by the British after General Allenby who captured Jerusalem for them in 1917. Jordan had renamed it the King Hussein bridge. Now it lolled down into the Jordan's muddy water. The long line of refugees crawled across the wreckage to get across to where they thought they would be safe.