Six Days (6 page)

The message received outside Israel was that Damascus was in the sights of the IDF. For Nasser, it became an article of faith that ‘the Israeli leaders had announced that they would undertake military operations against Syria to occupy Damascus and bring down the Syrian regime'. The Egyptians claimed to have seen an Israeli plan for a powerful force to occupy the heights overlooking the Sea of Galilee. Israel, they claimed, planned to withdraw only if peacekeepers from UNEF were brought in to replace them.

The Syrians also believed they were about to be invaded. President Atassi, the head of state, sent messages to Cairo asking for military support under the terms of their mutual defence pact. The Syrian leadership did not mind provoking Israel, but they did not want all-out war. They had been taught a hard lesson in the air battle of 7 April. Members of the regime, like the air force commander General Hafez al-Asad, knew all too well that those who seize power in coups tend to have their power taken away in counter-coups, especially if they lose a war. Well before the 7 April battle, Asad already seemed ‘extremely nervous and appeared to dread the prospect of a major incident'. Yet icy reality did not cool down their rhetoric. Israel was ‘caught in the pincers' of Egyptian, Syrian and Palestinian commandos. America could not protect ‘the foster child state of bandits'. The Grand Mufti went to inspect front-line positions and declared that religious leaders were ready to join the army in battle because Israel was ‘the enemy of Islam, Arabism and humanity'. Local rallies were held, where slogans were chanted and speeches made. It would, a newspaper editorial predicted, be ‘the last blow' against Israel.

At this point, as the British foreign office had it, ‘the Russians pricked the Egyptian donkey'. Moscow delivered a warning to Cairo that Israel was massing troops on the border with Syria and would attack within a week. On 13 May the President of the Egyptian parliament, Anwar El Sadat, was at Moscow international airport, being seen off by Vladimir Semyenov, the Soviet deputy foreign minister, and Nikolai Podgorny, chairman of the presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Sadat's plane was late. They spent the extra hour talking, mainly about Syria. ‘They told me specifically that ten Israeli brigades had been concentrated on the Syrian border.' He passed the message to Nasser who had also received it from the Soviet Embassy and the KGB. By the evening, General Muhammad Fawzi, the Egyptian army's chief of staff, had received a similar message from Major-General Ahmad Suwaydani, his Syrian opposite number.

Exactly why the Soviets delivered the warning is not clear. The Soviets seem to have believed they were passing on accurate intelligence. Perhaps they were misled by the Syrian regime, Moscow's ideological soul mate in a way that Egypt could never be. The Soviets wanted to protect their clumsy protégés, who as well as provoking Israel had now provoked Syria's Sunni Muslim majority with a newspaper article that was taken to be anti-Islamic. Tens of thousands took to the streets to protest. The Atassi regime was becoming so unpopular that it needed a good way to unite the country. The spectre of an Israeli attack was perfect.

A ‘medium-level' Soviet official told the CIA that the Soviet Union had stirred up the Arabs to try to make trouble for the United States. They hoped the US, already embattled in Vietnam, might become involved in another long war. Perhaps that seemed like a good enough reason among Soviet hawks – but there were limits to the mischief that the Kremlin was prepared to make. The consensus in the CIA, the State Department and the White House throughout the crisis was that the Soviets did not want war and did not encourage the Arabs to go to war either, nor did it promise to take military action if things started to go wrong. A KGB officer told a CIA informant: ‘I think this is difficult for the Arabs to understand, but everybody in the outside world believes that it is not worth it to have a world war over the question of Palestine.'

The message from Moscow to Cairo worried the Eshkol government. Was there a leak? ‘Limited' retaliation against Syria (an elastic concept – the Samua raid was ‘limited') had been authorised by the cabinet on 7 May. Secret plans existed and had been discussed in the prime minister's office and in the IDF General Staff. The real problem with the Soviet message to Egypt was that even though it was plausible, it was inaccurate. Israel was contemplating a big raid into Syria. But it had not concentrated a huge force on the border – Damascus had alleged fifteen brigades, which was not far off Israel's fully mobilised strength.

In Washington the White House, just like the Arabs and the Russians, had concluded that Israel was planning something big. President Johnson's information was that ‘the Soviet advice to the Syrians that the Israelis were planning an attack was not far off, although they seem to have exaggerated on the magnitude. The Israelis probably were planning an attack – but not an invasion.' Another official agreed. ‘It is probable Soviet agents actually picked up intelligence reports of a planned Israeli raid into Syria. I would not be surprised if the reports were at least partly true. The Israelis have made such raids before: they have been under heavy provocation: and they maintain pretty good security (so we might well not know about a planned raid). Intelligence being what it is, the Soviet agents may have not known the scale of the raid and may have exaggerated its scope and purpose.'

Jerusalem

Divided Jerusalem was a backwater between 1948 and 1967. Barbed wire, mines and machine gun posts marked the place where two hostile worlds butted against each other. UN Security Council resolution 181 that had partitioned Mandatory Palestine in November 1947 had declared that Jerusalem would be a separate entity under international control. Israel and Jordan ignored it, the big powers did not try to enforce it. The single crossing point was the Mandelbaum Gate, Jerusalem's Checkpoint Charlie. Only foreigners with special permission could cross between the Arab world and the Jewish state. Occasionally, after long bureaucratic campaigns, divided Palestinian families were allowed through for reunions. The two sides sometimes shot covetous glances – and bullets – at each other, but in Jerusalem no one was killed trying to escape from one side to the other. Plenty of people would have been quite happy if the people on the other side vanished. But they wanted to be in their world, not their enemy's.

The walled Old City was on the Jordanian side. Israelis were not allowed to visit any of the Jewish holy places. The Jordanians also had the Mount of Olives, which overlooks the Old City from the east. On its slopes is the Garden of Gethsemane, where Christians believe Jesus sweated blood on his last night before he was arrested by the Romans. A little higher up is the Jews' most important cemetery. The Jordanians paved the road with some of its gravestones. In the 1960s well-off Jordanians would motor over from Amman to have lunch at the brand-new Intercontinental hotel that had been built on top of the Mount of Olives. For them, Jerusalem was a beautiful symbol rather than a capital or a place to live. It was an easy drive of twenty-five miles or so from Amman, across the river Jordan, up past Jericho and through the Judean desert. They could eat looking down across the holy city at the mysterious and sinister Israelis on the hills opposite.

Jordanian Jerusalem was a quiet place. It was traditional, religious and poor. Helped by entrepreneurial Palestinian refugees, King Hussein was turning his capital, Amman, into a modern city. But after 1948 Jerusalem had lost its traditional hinterland in the rich farming land between the mountains and the Mediterranean coast. Palestinians grumbled not just because they were hard-up, but because they felt neglected and at times oppressed by Amman. A generation later, after more than thirty years of Israeli occupation, some Palestinians looked back sentimentally on what now seemed to have been golden years. One lamented: ‘We were masters in our own houses and of every inch of the good and holy earth of our Jerusalem. Yet we seem[ed] to be perpetual grumblers, unsatisfied and never content, always wanting more and better. We never appreciated the treasures in our possession.'

Israeli Jerusalem was even quieter. It was centred on the New City, the commercial centre around Jaffa Street and King George Vth Street that had been built up during the British Mandate. Also in West Jerusalem were the impoverished ultra-religious Jewish communities centred on Mea Shearim and a belt of leafy suburbs that had been the home of the Palestinian middle class, which had either fled or been forced out in 1948. Israel declared Jerusalem as its capital city, an action that the rest of the world did not recognise. It did not matter to the visionaries on the Israeli side that shepherds still grazed sheep near their parliament or that most of its members took every opportunity they could to get out of the city. What mattered were the actions that had been taken and the point that was being made. Just as the only appropriate land for the Jewish state was the one given to the Jewish people by God, its only appropriate capital was the city about which they had prayed during all the centuries of exile.

The fact remained though, that between 1948 and 1967 Jerusalem felt different, unfamiliar and a little uncomfortable to most Israelis. It was high in the mountains. It was cold, wet and miserable in winter – unlike the Mediterranean coast between Tel Aviv and Haifa where most Israelis lived. It was old, reeking of a history that belonged not just to Jews, but to others as well. For the Israeli writer Amos Oz who grew up in West Jerusalem in the 1940s and 1950s it was ‘the sad capital city of an exultant state', wintry even in the summer and ‘surrounded at night by the sound of foreign bells, foreign odours, distant views. A ring of hostile villages surrounded the city on three sides: Sha'afat, Wadi Jos, Issawia, Silwan, Azaria, Tsur Bacher, Bet Tsafafa. It seemed as if they had only to clench their hand and Jerusalem would be crushed within their fist. On a winter night you could sense the evil intent that flowed from them toward the city.'

In this half-city, Israel decided to hold a pageant and a military parade on 15 May 1967 to mark its nineteenth birthday. For a country that never had the chance to celebrate peace, Independence Day was always something special. It was a loud raspberry in the faces of the Arabs who had tried to strangle the Jewish state at birth and who, everybody knew, would try again if they were given the chance. Israelis in 1967 knew a lot about war. Many men under forty, even fifty, had done little else than fight. As teenagers they fought the British and the Palestinian Arabs. Thousands joined the British army in the Second World War. They had fought Arab regular armies in 1948 and 1956 and mounted raids in between. Well over a million immigrants had arrived since 1948, often after traumatic journeys from the ruins of Europe or from Arab countries, which kept the Jews' property though not the Jews themselves. The youngest survivors of Nazi concentration camps were still barely thirty.

The swinging sixties passed the Jewish state by. But for Independence Day 1967 there was going to be a special concert in the big stadium on the coast near Tel Aviv. Topping the bill were the Shadows, Nana Mouskouri and Pete Seeger. All over the country there were bandstands and dancing and fireworks. And in Jerusalem the army was putting on a parade.

The UN believed that holding a parade in Jerusalem would only heighten the tension between Israel and Jordan. General Bull, the commander of the UNTSO military observers, and the senior UN representative in Jerusalem, was ordered not to attend. Most foreign ambassadors politely rejected their invitations. The CIA was worried about it too. It warned President Johnson that the parade ‘would be a clear violation of the armistice of 1949; a nasty incident in the divided city may result'.

Two parades

On 14 May, twenty-four hours after the Soviet warning, the officers at the Egyptian army's operations command centre were thinking about lunch when they were jolted by entirely unexpected news. The supreme commander, Field Marshal Abd al-Hakim Amer, was putting the army on full alert for war. When Lieutenant-General Anwar al-Qadi, the chief of operations, asked why, he was told the Syrian border with Israel was about to explode. Amer issued the bellicose ‘battle order number one'. There were ‘huge troop concentrations on the Syrian borders'. Egypt was taking a ‘firm stand'. Al-Qadi was ‘astonished and alarmed'. He told Amer that the Egyptian army was in no state to fight Israel. The field marshal told him not to worry. Fighting a war was not part of the plan, it was just a ‘demonstration' in response to Israeli threats to Syria. On 15 May General Fawzi, the chief of staff, went to Syria. He could not find any Israeli troops. ‘I did not find any concrete evidence to support the information received. On the contrary, aerial photographs taken by Syrian reconnaissance on 12 and 13 May showed no change in normal military positions.'

Lt. Gen. al-Qadi was right. In May 1967 Egypt was no match for Israel. Economic problems meant that the defence budget had been cut earlier in the year. Training, never a religion, was now an even lower priority. In 1967 more than half the Egyptian army, including some of its best troops, were stuck in Yemen, where Nasser had intervened in the civil war. Yemen had the same corrosive impact on Nasser's army that the Vietnam war had on the Americans. According to General Abdel Moneim Khalil, one of Egypt's best commanders, ‘we incurred heavy losses in manpower, our military budget was drained, discipline and training suffered, weapons and equipment deteriorated, morale and fighting capability was seriously affected … It was a very bad way to prepare to fight the highly trained and well organised Israelis.'

By 1967 the Egyptian high command had been concentrating on Yemen for five years. It had not done any serious training or preparation for a war with Israel. At the end of 1966 the military planners realised how bad things had become, warning that no offensive operations against Israel should be contemplated while Egypt was still involved in Yemen. Chief of Staff Fawzi approved the report. But in May 1967 Amer ignored it. He assured Nasser that, if it came to it, the army could fight Israel.