Six Days (43 page)

Once the ceasefire held, the atmosphere along the canal was more relaxed, though still wary. Israeli soldiers who spoke Arabic sometimes shouted over to the Egyptians, bartering prisoners for watermelon. A rope was stretched between the two banks for prisoners who could not swim. Watermelon floats, so the Egyptians pushed them across.

Sinai

Amos Elon drove back north through an eerily silent desert after the ceasefire came into effect. Israeli salvage crews were going through the wreckage at the side of the roads. In the opposite direction were jams of huge supply convoys going south, further into Egypt. It felt odd to drive towards the back of Hebrew signs warning about mines and the approaching frontier. He did not reach Jerusalem until late in the evening. The city's lights were blazing. It had been three days since they had had a black-out. Later, Elon looked back on ‘a victory notable for its lack of hate, but marked by more than a trace of arrogance'. Elon may have felt no hate, but that was not how it seemed to Egyptian prisoners.

Ramadan Mohammed Iraqi was captured on the second day of the war. With several hundred other prisoners he was forced to lie down in a number of long lines. The Egyptians were convinced they were going to be shot. Ramadan always believed their lives were saved by a passing Israeli officer who saw what was happening and ordered their captors not to execute them. They were taken to Al-Arish airfield, where they were kept in aircraft hangars. Eventually they were transferred to a prison camp in Beersheba and then to another in Atlit, south of Haifa. Ramadan, like a number of other prisoners, says that they were moved in open lorries. Some civilians would throw stones at them, spit and yell abuse. Conditions in Atlit were especially bad. The prisoners were given very little food, mainly bread and onions. Some prisoners were shot by guards in the first few weeks, before they were registered by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Conditions improved slightly once ICRC visits began. There was more food and no more killing, except one man who was killed when the prisoners rioted in August. The prisoners were not allowed to leave their sheds between 4 p.m. and 9 a.m. They snapped when guards fired at a prisoner needing water who broke the rules by stepping out of one of the sheds at the wrong time. The prisoners broke out of the sheds, tearing at the wire and throwing stones at the watchtowers. The Israelis brought an Egyptian general who spoke to them through a loudhailer and told them that he had been promised that conditions would be improved. There was a little more food and they received parcels from the Egyptian Red Crescent containing new underwear and pyjamas. Ramadan Mohammed Iraqi was able to send messages back to his family through the ICRC during the seven months he was a prisoner of war. One says, ‘Don't worry, I'm alive, one day I'll be home.'

Jerusalem

It was the Jewish Sabbath. General Narkiss, Mayor Kollek and General Herzog, the new governor of the West Bank, went together to the Wailing Wall, where Sabbath prayers were being said by Jews for the first time since 1948. When the Wall was captured they discovered a urinal had been installed along part of it, which was immediately removed. Now they were eyeing the Moroccan quarter, an area of small, densely packed houses that stood between the Wall and the Jewish quarter. The quarter's history went back 700 years, when the Ayyubids and the Mamluks, who were the dominant powers in Jerusalem, set aside land for immigrants from North Africa. Many of the 150 families – more than a thousand people – who lived in its small houses and narrow alleys in 1967 had North African connections. The following Wednesday was an important Jewish festival. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis were expected to come to pray and to celebrate the victory. What Kollek called the Moroccan quarter's ‘small slum houses' would be in the way. Kollek, Narkiss and Herzog decided they had ‘an historic opportunity' to pull them down. They decided to send in bulldozers as soon as the Sabbath ended at sunset. Herzog later said some with some pride, ‘We hadn't been authorised by anyone and we didn't seek authorisation.' They were worried that if they did not act decisively it would become politically impossible to knock down the houses of so many civilians. ‘We were concerned about losing time and the government's difficulty in making a decision. We knew that in a few days it would be too late.'

Abd el-Latif Sayyed was a twenty-year-old trainee teacher who had been born in the Moroccan quarter. In 1967 eighteen people from his family shared a five-room house, which was around fifteen yards from the Wall. His maternal great grandfather, an immigrant from Morocco, had been granted it around 1810 by the Moroccan religious authorities in Jerusalem. Not long after dark they were given half an hour to leave. Abd el-Latif's family were very frightened. They guessed the house was going to be searched, but no one dared to ask the soldiers. They were too scared of the new occupiers to question their orders. The family assumed they would be allowed back in a couple of hours, so they left all their possessions in the house. At an aunt's house, about a hundred yards away, on the other side of the Moroccan quarter, they waited for the order to go home. They could hear bulldozers grinding and squealing. Nervously, they tried to work out what the noise was all about. They told each other that the Israelis were building a road, but as the night went on they became more and more concerned. When they tried to go out to take a look soldiers, who were patrolling the alleys, ordered them back inside.

Nazmi Al-Ju'beh had a much better view. From the roof of his grandfather's house he could see the bulldozers working away at the edges of the Moroccan quarter. Steadily, they started to flatten the buildings, then move deeper into the quarter. Lorries came to take away the rubble. It went on all night. Major Eitan Ben Moshe, an engineer officer from Central Command, who was in charge of the work, went about his job with gusto – and anger, because of the urinal the Jordanians had set up to desecrate the Wall, which he had already removed. A small mosque called al-Buraq, after the winged horse that brought Mohammed to Jerusalem from Mecca, stood near the wall. ‘I said, if the horse ascended to the sky, why shouldn't the mosque ascend too? So I crushed it until nothing was left.'

The next morning Abd el-Latif Sayyed went down to where his home had stood. All that was left among piles of bulldozed rubble was a palm tree that had stood in their back yard. The family's possessions were somewhere under the rubble. Nazmi's parents decided it was safer for them to return to their house outside the city walls. They moved at first light, picking up bales of bedding then walking, as usual, down a narrow passage and a flight of steps to get to the Moroccan quarter. They turned the last corner. In front of them, instead of the narrow, congested streets they had been walking through for years, was a broad and open space. At one end the Wailing Wall had been exposed. Hundreds of soldiers and bearded, black-clad ultra-orthodox Jews had linked arms and were dancing on the ruins of houses that had been bulldozed flat. His mother and father stumbled in shock. ‘I started to shout, where's Mohammed, where's Abed – these were my friends from the Moroccan quarter. The soldiers came and gave me candy and then arrested my two older brothers. One was a teacher and one was a lawyer. They were held for two days, with hundreds of other young men, at the Aqsa mosque, then at a military base. They were released after a week. We walked on, across the ruined houses of our friends.'

A middle-aged woman called Rasmiyyah Ali Taba'ki was found in the rubble, badly injured. Her neighbours assumed she had not heard the orders to leave. An Israeli engineer who was supervising the demolition tried to revive her, but she was already dead. Major Ben Moshe told an Israeli journalist that he found at least three bodies ‘of people who refused to leave their homes'.

On Sunday morning the site was visited by cabinet ministers. According to Chaim Herzog, ‘they were astounded. All they saw was ruin and dust. Warhaftig, the minister of religion, who was also a jurist, claimed our actions were against the law. At any rate, what was done was done.' Teddy Kollek was proud of the destruction of the Moroccan quarter and the creation of the great open air plaza that is there now. It was a decisive act to create new facts on the ground in the classic tradition of Zionism. ‘It was the best thing we did and it's good we did [it] immediately. The old place had a
galut
[Diaspora] character; it was a place for wailing. Perhaps this made sense in the past. It isn't what we want in the future.' His men worked fast. ‘In two days it was done – finished, clean.' Kollek claimed that all the evicted families were found decent alternative accommodation, something they deny. They received backdated eviction notices in 1968, along with an offer of compensation of 100 Jordanian dinars. Around half the families took the money. The rest, in a small gesture against the occupation, refused what was anyway a paltry sum.

Syria–Israel border

Rabin had ordered Elazar to press on to Kuneitra, the regional capital of the Syrian border province. But then, in the morning, perhaps having second thoughts about his sudden decision to attack Syria, Dayan ordered that all military operations were to stop. When Rabin passed the order on, Elazar claimed it was too late to recall an airborne brigade, which was already going into action. After Dayan repeated his order, Rabin called Elazar again, who said, ‘Sorry, following your previous order, they began to move off and I can't stop them.' Rabin knew that Elazar ‘didn't feel an ounce of regret'. But something in his tone made the chief of staff suspicious. After the war he discovered that when Elazar told him the airborne brigade could not be recalled, it was still waiting for orders miles from the border. Elazar's desire to move as far forward as fast as he could was shared by his commanders. Rabin admitted he did not try very hard to check whether Elazar was telling the truth about the airborne brigade or not, and whatever Dayan's later regrets about the wisdom of taking the Golan Heights, during the fighting he turned his blind eye to Israel's ceasefire violations.

The first Israeli troops entered Kuneitra at two in the afternoon. One of the commanders reported: ‘We arrived almost without hindrance to the gates of Kuneitra … All around us there were huge quantities of booty. Everything was in working order. Tanks with their engines still running, communication equipment still in operation had been abandoned. We captured Kuneitra without a fight.'

The riches left behind by the Syrians were too much of a temptation. After it fell to the Israelis, the entire city of Kuneitra was sacked. When Nils-Goran Gussing, the UN special representative, visited in July he observed ‘nearly every shop and every house seemed to have been broken into and looted'. Some buildings had been set on fire after they had been stripped. Israeli spokesmen told Gussing philosophically that ‘looting is often associated with warfare'. They claimed that because Syria had announced the loss of Kuneitra twenty-four hours before it was captured, fleeing Syrian soldiers had a whole day to loot the place themselves. Gussing listened politely and concluded that ‘responsibility for this extensive looting of the town of Kuneitra lay to a great extent with the Israeli forces'. Gussing's version seems most logical. There were only five and a half hours between the false announcement on Damascus Radio at 0826 and the fall of the city at 1400. Troops so panic stricken that they abandoned tanks without even turning off their engines were unlikely to have stopped to clear out the shops.

New York, 0850

From the outset, the fact that Syria had accepted the UN ceasefire on Thursday night was irrelevant to Israel. They planned to keep going until they had what they wanted, or until they were stopped by one of the superpowers. But time was running out for the Israelis. They knew it, and so did the diplomats at the Security Council, who were getting impatient with what looked like a blatant land grab. They sat into the early hours of Saturday morning, waiting for news from the Syrian front. The attack on Kuneitra was the last straw. Lord Caradon, the UK ambassador, believed there was a ‘clearly deliberate Israeli campaign' to attack the town after the council had twice asked it to respect the ceasefire. Like the French ambassador Seydoux, he saw ‘no justification' in taking Kuneitra, since the fighting had stopped elsewhere. A report of bombing close to Damascus was ‘still more deserving of condemnation'. Abba Eban, who was at the UN, tried to call Eshkol at his flat. Eshkol's wife Miriam answered. She told Eban that Eshkol was with the troops in the north. Eban said, ‘Tell Eshkol to stop the war. The United Nations is putting pressure on me.' Mrs Eshkol called her husband, who had a radio telephone in his car. According to her, Eshkol was in a fine mood. ‘He started telling me how beautiful the Golan is and so on and then he said, “You do hear me, darling?” I said yes, yes, yes. Listen. Aubrey [they always used Eban's original first name, rather than the Hebrew one he adopted] said you have to stop. Then Eshkol says, “I can't hear you.” So I said, you could a minute ago … so he said, that's it. I'll talk to you when I get home.'

Washington, 0900

Walt Rostow, President Johnson's National Security Advisor, had given up tennis for the Six-Day War. But, this Saturday morning, he knew they were working on a ceasefire in New York, so he thought it was safe to play. He was on the court when a message arrived from the White House. He had to get to work, fast. The Soviets had activated the hotline. If Israel did not desist, they would take military action. ‘They called me off the court. I was still in tennis clothes.'

The translation of Kosygin's message was with Johnson five minutes after the teleprinter had gone quiet. Without mentioning its advance into Syria, Kosygin said, ‘A crucial moment has now arrived.' Israel was ignoring the resolutions of the Security Council. The US must tell Israel unconditionally to stop military action in the next few hours. The Soviet Union would do the same. If not, ‘these actions may bring us into a clash, which will lead to a grave catastrophe'. If Israel did not comply, ‘necessary actions would be taken, including military'.