Six Days (5 page)

‘I told them I could not absorb or tolerate a serious retaliatory raid. They accepted the logic of this and promised there would never be one.' Burns and O'Connel saw tears in the king's eyes as he told them that the attack was ‘a complete betrayal of everything I had tried to do for the past three years in the interests of peace, stability and moderation at high personal political risk. Strangely, despite our secret agreements, understandings and assurances, I never fully trusted their intentions towards me or towards Jordan.' Bitterly, the king ended the conversation by saying ‘this is what one gets for trying to be a moderate, or perhaps for being stupid'.

The ambassador had ‘never seen him so grim or so obviously under pressure. It was apparent that he had to use the utmost in self control to keep his emotions from erupting openly.' He asked that Hussein's request to keep his contacts with Israel secret should be respected. The king's grandfather, after all, had been assassinated for doing exactly the same thing.

The king concluded that his throne was in serious danger and that Israel still wanted the West Bank, just as it had in its early years of independence. Hussein knew that many Israelis believed that Israel would not be secure until its eastern border ran down the river Jordan. He told the diplomats that he had always thought it was possible to live with Israel. But now the only option he had left was irrevocable hostility. Highly emotional, the king even talked about mounting his own attack on Israel, a threat the Americans, knowing the weakness of the Jordanian army, did not take seriously.

The morning after the raid he summoned all the ambassadors accredited to his court to his palace in Amman. He told them it was the latest instalment in Zionism's long history of aggression and expansionism. Samua, he said, could not be seen as a mere reprisal. It was ‘the first battle' in Israel's campaign to swallow the West Bank. He told them that if they did not ‘restrain the aggressor' by moral and if necessary physical force, the crisis would drag in all their countries too. Britain and America believed Hussein when he said that he was doing everything he could to stop infiltration. One of the alleged organisers of the attack on the Israeli border patrol had been arrested before the Israeli reprisal happened. The United States was so concerned about the raid that even after it supported a resolution in the UN Security Council condemning Israel's actions, National Security Advisor Walt Rostow still thought they had not reacted strongly enough. The US airlifted urgent military aid to Jordan, a move the White House decided was necessary to save King Hussein's throne. They feared that if they did not send aid Hussein would call in Egyptian troops or even Soviet advisers and equipment.

Hussein was very focused when it came to matters of his own survival. Not only had he witnessed his grandfather's assassination; since becoming king he had faced a series of plots and would-be assassins of his own. Now the latest threat, he believed, was coming from Israel, his increasingly mighty neighbour. Hussein had learnt from his grandfather that he would always have to do business with Israel. In return, Israel had humiliated him. He was determined that he was going to survive, along with his regime.

Since 1948 Jordan had two distinct halves. The East Bank, mainly desert, was Hussein's power base. He could rely on the support of the leaders of its Bedouin tribes whose men were the backbone of his army. But since 1948 there had also been more than half a million Palestinian refugees. Another 700,000 Palestinians lived on the West Bank and in the Old City of Jerusalem. Educated Palestinian urbanites tended to look down on East Bankers as country bumpkins. Hussein put members of aristocratic Palestinian families in his cabinets. But the king and his close advisers, rightly, were deeply suspicious of the great mass of Palestinians. They were seen as a potential fifth column, ready to be seduced by the violent criticism of Hussein and the Hashemite dynasty that came from the regime of Gamal Abdul Nasser in Cairo. Anyone found listening to Nasser's radio station Saut al-Arab, the Voice of the Arabs, could be arrested.

Hussein did not think Israel planned to march on Amman and take him prisoner. Instead he feared that its actions would stir up trouble on the West Bank that would be exploited by ambitious army officers. If a coup established a radical, pro-Nasser regime in Jordan, Israel could use it as an excuse to step in. The CIA believed his analysis was realistic. Whichever way it went, the result would be that Hussein would lose his throne, and his dynasty, the Hashemites, would lose their last hold on power. Mecca, Medina and the rest of the Hejaz were lost to Ibn Saud after the First World War. In a coup in 1958 the Hashemite king of Iraq, Hussein's cousin and friend, was slaughtered along with most of his immediate family. Hussein Ibn Talal, ruler of Jordan, descendant of the prophet, did not want to be the last Hashemite king.

As Hussein feared, Palestinians on the West Bank seethed with anger after the raid. The people of Samua refused offers of emergency food, tents and blankets. Instead they demanded weapons. One of them asked a reporter from the
Los Angeles Times
when he reached the village: ‘What do they expect us to fight with – with women? With children? Or with stones?' It felt like a return to the early 1950s, when Israel carried out a long series of brutal and almost wholly counter-productive raids on the West Bank. Two days after the raid, demonstrators took over the centre of Hebron, the big Palestinian town close to Samua. The governor sent the fire brigade to turn their hoses on the crowd, only for them to be sent back to their fire stations by the local police chief, who said they would make things worse. A policeman who brandished his revolver at demonstrators was beaten up. Slogans were chanted against King Hussein, against America for protecting Israel, and against Syria and Egypt for not sending planes to protect them. Demonstrations spread to East Jerusalem and Nablus. The king slapped martial law on all the Palestinian towns. He could feel his throne shaking under him.

The government was accused of covering up the number of casualties and the size of the defeat. Jordanians were proud of their dead, but officers felt humiliated and shamed. A senior security official told the Americans that air force officers were especially bitter because they had been forced to go into action with ‘completely inadequate equipment' – the ageing, subsonic, British-built Hawker Hunters. They thought they had been handed a choice – stay on the ground or commit suicide in the air. During the raid four Jordanian Hawker Hunter aircraft engaged Israeli Mirages in dogfights. One of them was shot down, after a long, low-level dogfight in which the pilot impressed the Israelis with his skill. At his funeral, army officers criticised the king violently. Instead of protecting the border, he had ‘squandered' money on his own pleasures and cared more about hanging on to his throne than about the defence of his country. It was impossible to live in peace with Israel. Some of the officers thought Jordan should move against Israel now, whatever the consequences. King Hussein was told about the fury of his officers. He believed that only traditional Bedouin loyalty was keeping the army on his side.

Hussein's troubles pleased his enemies in the radical Arab regimes in Egypt and Syria. No message of support came from Cairo. Damascus was relieved it had got off so lightly. The Israelis regarded the guerrilla groups as Syrian proxies. The British ambassador in Damascus thought it was more complicated than that: ‘Even if the Syrian government do control one or more of these bodies, I doubt whether their control is sufficiently close for there to be day-to-day coordination between terrorist operations and military action on the border.' Still, no one in Damascus would deny that they encouraged and supported Palestinian attacks – and Israel had chosen not to attack them. The army chief of staff General Suwaydani ordered the cultivation of what Syria said was Arab land in the demilitarised areas. Let the Israelis shoot at us, he said. We'll shoot back harder. Samua did not stop cross-border raids, although the Jordanians tried even harder to stop infiltration through the West Bank into Israel. The violence escalated. The Israeli army was itching for a fight and every Zionist bone in Prime Minister Eshkol's body opposed making any concessions to Syria whatsoever over the disputed demilitarised zones. Added to that was growing political pressure, especially from the border settlements, to take tough action. It all came to a head on 7 April 1967.

Leading the country to war

Israelis who lived at Kibbutz Gadot, very close to the Syrian border, were standing in their yard, watching the action on the hills above them. All afternoon the air force had been bombing Syrian positions. A big battle had been brewing for the best part of a week. Now it was on.

Two Israeli tractors started work at 0930. Within fifteen minutes tanks, howitzers and heavy machine guns were exchanging fire. The battle increased in intensity. Israeli aircraft dive-bombed Syrian positions with 250 and 500 kg bombs. The Syrians shelled Israeli border settlements heavily. Israeli jets retaliated with an attack on Sqoufiye, a civilian village, destroying around forty houses. UN observers believed Syrian casualties were much heavier than the five Damascus admitted.

At 1519 shells started to fall on Kibbutz Gadot. One landed near the children's house (children on kibbutzim lived communally, visiting their parents at set hours and sleeping separately in their own accommodation). Adults ran in to the building, grabbed the children and took them to the shelters. The children's shelter was equipped for a long siege. It had cots, a kitchen for making food and lots of toys. Suddenly, it was very crowded, because the adults who had brought the children in were stuck there too. They started singing to try to take the children's minds off the crash of the shells outside. In 40 minutes 300 shells landed within the kibbutz compound. One mother had to be physically restrained from running out into the open during the bombardment to find her child. When they emerged from the shelter, with all the children safe, they saw their homes in ruins. Offers of help came in from all over Israel, everything from cows for the dairy to a loan of labourers from the atomic reactor in Dimona to help them rebuild.

Israeli Mirages routed the Syrian MiG-21s. Two were chased most of the way to Damascus and were shot down over the suburbs. The Israelis roared low over the capital to rub the Syrians' noses in what they had done. Four other Syrian MiG-21s were shot down, three of them over Jordan. The British air attaché, who examined the wreckage, was struck by how close they were to each other. He concluded that ‘either the Israeli aircraft had carried out an almost unbelievably skilful operation and shot down three aircraft almost simultaneously whilst still in formation or that the Syrian pilots had abandoned their aircraft, again while still in formation, rather than face up to the Israelis'. The absence of obvious bullet holes in the wreckage encouraged his view that the Syrians, who all ejected safely, had chosen discretion over valour. Privately, the Jordanians claimed the Syrians had admitted as much in hospital, complaining that they did not stand a chance against well-trained Israeli pilots with better ground control. Syrian military weakness was clearer than ever. At the height of the battle, Mezze Airfield, one of its main bases, was wide open to attack from the air. Its army garrison was standing to, with five tanks and five armoured personnel carriers. But its twenty-four MiG-17s were lined up on the tarmac and only four of its six 54 mm anti-aircraft guns were manned.

The next morning young Palestinians in Jerusalem showed ‘a stunned awe at the Israeli competence and Arab helplessness in the face of it…' and they asked ‘where were the Egyptians?' Cairo had done nothing for Jordan after it had been humiliated at Samua. Now Syria had been humiliated, a country with which Egypt had a mutual defence pact. This time, Nasser had no choice. Something would have to be done.

Israel basked in a mood of national self-congratulation. Film of the MiGs being shot down from the Mirages' gun cameras played in newsreels in the cinemas to appreciative audiences. The army heavily reinforced the northern border, moving in thirty-five tanks, mainly Centurions, and at least fifteen 105 mm guns. In a corridor in the Israeli Knesset, Moshe Dayan, the former chief of staff and now member of parliament, bumped into General Ezer Weizman, the former head of the air force and now number two in the IDF. ‘Are you out of your minds?' he said to Weizman. ‘You're leading the country to war!'

After the 7 April battle Syria and the guerrillas it sponsored tried even harder to provoke the Israelis, who obliged them by rising to every provocation. Wearily, the British ambassador in Damascus commented that ‘the Syrians are clearly in the wrong in not preventing infiltration. On the other hand, Israeli reaction to what after all are relatively little more than pinpricks, has been quite out of proportion.' Rabin and Eshkol used interviews and broadcasts granted for Independence Day, which was coming up, to warn Damascus to expect more of the same and worse. The British government believed Israel's threats were ‘the starting point of the chain of events that led to war'. The CIA picked up the threats and told President Johnson to expect a move against Syria. The Egyptians drew the same conclusions. Israel ‘is contemplating an attack on Syria … preparing world opinion for it and asking for assistance'.

The toughest threat was reported by the news agency United Press International (UPI) on 12 May: ‘A high Israeli source said today Israel would take limited military action designed to topple the Damascus army regime if Syrian terrorists continue sabotage raids inside Israel. Military observers said such an offensive would fall short of all-out war but would be mounted to deliver a telling blow against the Syrian government.'

In the West as well as the Arab world the immediate assumption was that the unnamed source was Rabin and that he was serious. In fact, it was Brigadier-General Aharon Yariv, the head of military intelligence, and the story was overwritten. Yariv mentioned ‘an all-out invasion of Syria and conquest of Damascus' but only as the most extreme of a range of possibilities. But the damage had been done. Tension was so high that most people, and not just the Arabs, assumed something much bigger than usual was being planned against Syria. Israel's English-language newspaper, the
Jerusalem Post,
took the threats and warnings as an authoritative ultimatum. A year later, Abba Eban, the foreign minister – who had been one of the first to weigh in against Syrian-sponsored ‘marauders' that month – commented caustically: ‘There were some who thought these warnings may have been too frequent and too little coordinated … if there had been a little more silence the sum of human wisdom would have remained substantially undiminished.'