Six Days (7 page)

Troops were marched ostentatiously through the centre of Cairo on their way to the Sinai desert and the border with Israel. The public show of strength confirmed the CIA in its view that it was a response to Israeli threats to Syria. ‘Nasser is going all out to show that his mutual security pact with Syria is something which the Israelis should take very seriously … [He] must be hoping desperately that there will be no need for him to fight the Israelis. He probably feels, however, that his prestige in the Arab world would nose-dive if he stood idly by while Israel mauled Syria again.' The British, too, thought the movement of troops was ‘defensive-deterrent in character and were designed to show solidarity with [the] Syrians in the face of Israeli threats of action'.

In Jerusalem Israel's top politicians and soldiers were on their way to the Independence Day parade. They met up at the King David, the smartest hotel in West Jerusalem. Its grand public rooms overlooking the Old City were packed. Rabin updated Eshkol about the Egyptian deployments. More troops had been on the move during the night. Israel would have to mobilise some reservists. ‘We cannot leave the south without reinforcements,' Rabin warned. They were not too worried. Something similar had happened in 1960, when Egypt moved tanks into Sinai after trouble on the Syrian border. Israel deployed its own reinforcements and, honours even, the crisis blew over.

It was time to move. Eighteen thousand people were waiting for them in the stadium at Givat Ram in West Jerusalem. Two hundred thousand more were lining the streets. Some of them had been there since dawn. Eshkol, his wife Miriam and Rabin were driven slowly along the crowded streets to the stadium. They settled themselves in the reviewing stand to watch a modest march-past of 1600 troops. Colonel Israel Lior, Eshkol's military aide-de-camp, thought it looked like a scout parade. Independence Day was usually an excuse to show off Israel's strength. The streets would shake with the weight of armour. In deference to the international disapproval Israel had kept the tanks out of Jerusalem. Outside the stadium demonstrators waved cardboard tanks in protest.

Telephones were installed under the seats of the Israeli top brass at the parade. The phone under the seat of General Yeshayahu Gavish rang, with the latest news about Egyptian troops moving into Sinai. As soon as he could, he left and drove to his headquarters in Beersheba.

UNEF

Two days after it gambled by mobilising troops, Egypt dug itself deeper into crisis. A courier was dispatched from Cairo to Gaza with news for General Indar Jit Rikhye, the commander of the United Nations Emergency Force. In just over a decade in Gaza, the officers of UNEF had made themselves quite comfortable. When they were not on patrol or in their observation posts there were sand dunes and Mediterranean beaches, squash and tennis, a decent mess and a comfortable bar. UNEF even had a golf course laid out on its airstrip near the Mediterranean. It was not a classic seaside links. They played off strips of doormat, which were carried by their Palestinian caddies. Nonetheless, on the afternoon of 16 May, Rikhye, who was a general in the Indian army, was looking forward to a few holes. It was hot, sweaty and overcast. He was hoping there might be some breeze coming off the sea on to the first tee when the telephone rang. It was Brigadier General Ibrahim Sharkaway, who was chief of staff of the Egyptian team that liaised with UNEF. A special courier was on his way. General Rikhye was to stand by for a meeting at short notice. Rikhye was proud of his force of 1400 lightly armed peacekeepers. Originally they had been deployed to monitor the withdrawal of British, French and Israeli troops from Egypt after the 1956 war. After they left UNEF stayed on with a new role as a symbolic buffer force on the border. Egypt promised to keep its troops 500 metres behind the armistice line in Gaza and 2000 metres behind the old international border between Egypt and Palestine. UNEF operated in the space in between. Israel would not let it on its side.

Rikhye decided not to play golf. He should have done. It was his last chance on the Gaza links and the courier from Cairo did not arrive until ten in the evening. At Sharkaway's office, which was in a khaki-coloured building behind the whitewashed UNEF headquarters, Rikhye realised something big was happening. The courier was a brigadier general called Eiz-El-Din Mokhtar. He handed Rikhye a letter.

COMMANDER UNEF (GAZA)

To your information, I gave my instructions to all U.A.R. [Egyptian] armed forces to be ready for action against Israel, the moment it might carry out any aggressive action against any Arab country. Due to these instructions our troops are already concentrated in Sinai on our eastern border. For the sake of complete security of all UN troops which install OP's [observation posts] along our borders, I request that you issue your orders to withdraw all these troops immediately. I have given my instructions to our commander of the Eastern zone concerning this subject. Inform back the fulfilment of this request.

Yours,

Farik Awal (M. Fawzi)

Chief of Staff United Arab Republic.

Nasser and Amer first talked about getting rid of UNEF in 1964. In December 1966 Amer sent Nasser a coded message from Pakistan suggesting it again. They were being damaged by criticism from Hussein's radio stations accusing Egypt of sheltering behind UNEF's skirts, using it as an excuse not to take action to protect other Arab countries. Amer's suggestion was public enough to be picked up by British diplomats in Jordan. Still, for Rikhye, when the blow came it was ‘shattering … [war] would be inevitable.' He wanted to tell the two Egyptian brigadiers that they were heading for disaster. Instead, stiffly, he told them that he had to pass the message on to the secretary general of the United Nations, U Thant, before he could comment. Then, as common Arab courtesy demanded, they drank coffee together. Rikhye asked them if they realised what they could be getting into. ‘Oh, yes sir!' Sharkaway replied. ‘We have arrived at this decision after much deliberation and are prepared for anything. If there is war, we will meet in Tel Aviv.'

Rikhye went back to his headquarters to cable New York. Then he summoned his senior officers. It was well after midnight. ‘General, what's the occasion?' one of them asked. ‘Is there a war on?' Not yet, Rikhye answered, ‘but there will be one soon'.

The Syrians were delighted by what was happening. The British ambassador in Damascus thought they were trying to make sure that Egypt would ‘willy-nilly be dragged in' if Israel attacked. Dr Makhus, the foreign minister, who had been in Cairo, came home claiming that the slogan of the unity of progressive forces was now a reality. That was code for Syria's satisfaction that Egypt was now in the front line.

Charade

At first, the Israeli army was remarkably understanding about Egypt's actions. Its Syrian syndrome bristling, it was still focused on Damascus. On 17 May Shlomo Gazit, who was head of analysis in military intelligence, sat back at the dinner table in Tel Aviv after the plates had been cleared. Yes, he admitted to the American diplomats who were his hosts, the IDF had been taken by surprise. But it was ‘an elaborate charade'. It would only get serious if Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran and thus cut off the Israeli port of Eilat. That would mean war. The Israeli press picked up the army line that Nasser was playing a psychological game, to reassure and impress the Syrians. The service attachés from all the major embassies in Israel went looking for the concentrations of troops that Egypt had said were threatening Syria. They could not find any.

Abba Eban, Israel's foreign minister, warned that whatever the original intentions were, ‘an unwanted chain of events' was the real risk. Eban wanted to wait for London and Washington to work out a diplomatic strategy ‘before taking any unilateral action'. But other high-ranking Israelis were not that patient. For them, diplomacy had already failed. The Americans half expected Israeli military action and did what they could to head it off. Johnson wrote to Eshkol on 17 May telling him ‘in the strongest terms … to avoid action on your side which would add further to violence and tension in your area … I cannot accept responsibilities on behalf of the United States for situations which arise as the result of action on which we are not consulted.' A long-delayed aid package was authorised as a sweetener.

Propaganda

Long before most of his generation, Nasser recognised the power of the media. His radio stations trumpeted his actions across the Middle East. By far the most influential was Saut al-Arab, the Voice of the Arabs, which broadcast from Cairo to the rest of the Arab world via four Czechoslovak-made 150,000-watt transmitters. Whatever it turned its attention to could suddenly become disproportionately important. The British, for instance, were worried and irritated by a programme broadcast every night attacking its control of the Gulf. A correspondent for Reuters reassured Anthony Parsons, the British political agent in Bahrain, that it came from ‘one scrofulous room with five chairs and a table in a seedy building in Cairo'. It did not matter. The fact that it was being broadcast by Voice of the Arabs made it powerful.

In a country that was often chaotic, where important army units were under strength and badly trained, Cairo Radio was well funded and meticulously organised. Like Nasser, they had drawn lessons from their experiences in 1956, when the RAF had bombed their transmitters. A manual with detailed instructions about what they should do in time of war was updated every year. Contingency plans were in place if the ultra modern radio and television centre on the Nile Corniche was bombed. Five separate teams of engineers and announcers were ready to back each other up to keep the broadcasts going. Cairo Radio was the arm of Nasser's regime that was most ready for war.

Ahmed Said, the main political commentator of Voice of the Arabs, had the most famous voice in the Arab world after Nasser himself and the legendary Egyptian diva Umm Kulthum. In the Gulf, radios were nicknamed ‘Ahmed Said boxes'. By 1959 there were 850,000 radios in Egypt and half a million in Morocco. They were set up in cafés or in village squares. Dozens of people listened to each one. For the first time, Arab mass opinion was created.

The problem for the Arabs was that Ahmed Said and his colleagues were just too convincing. As war came closer in 1967, Said's broadcasts became even more jingoistic. His listeners believed an easy victory was coming. Said believed he was doing for the Arabs what the BBC did for occupied Europe during the Second World War: ‘You're asking people to fight, not to dance. I had to keep the soldiers going. Many of them had radios. And we were also asking the Arab world to be with us … We believed the broadcasts were our most powerful weapon … many of our listeners were illiterate, so radio was the most important way to reach them.'

Arabs often explain the broadcasts as exercises in sloganeering and rhetoric, not intended to be taken literally. But in 1967 most Arab listeners, even those with enough education to know better, were swept up in the excitement. The great mass of Arabs, especially the dispossessed Palestinians in their refugee camps, believed everything that Ahmed Said and his colleagues said. When reality crashed into their lives, their faith in their leaders only made defeat even more traumatic.

The gamble

Nasser was gambling for high stakes. It was, the Americans concluded, ‘a massive power play which, if successful, will be his biggest political victory since Suez, even if no shot is fired … if the Israelis do not retaliate, Nasser will have forced them to back down and will have won the first Arab victory over Israelis, and incidentally will have won another victory over US in Arab eyes … He is playing for keeps and we should make no mistake in this regard.'

The next day, Monday 22 May, Nasser doubled the stakes. Israel had not called his bluff when he mobilised the army and reinforced the Sinai. So Nasser went one stage further. He banned Israeli shipping from the Straits of Tiran, the entrance to the Gulf of Aqaba, effectively reimposing the blockade of the port of Eilat that had been lifted in 1956. Nasser chose an airbase in the Sinai desert as the place to announce the news. ‘The Israeli flag shall not go through the Gulf of Aqaba,' Nasser said. ‘Our sovereignty over the entrance to the Gulf cannot be disputed. If Israel wishes to threaten war, we tell her, you are welcome.'

The wire services circulated a photo of Nasser, looking as debonair as ever, surrounded by equally happy young flyers. Some of them were wearing their cockpit pressure suits. White teeth flashed across the grainy black and white still. The image Nasser desired was pumped around the world – the leader of the Arabs challenging the Jewish state, surrounded by highly trained young experts ready for action. Nasser looks excited, almost like a child intoxicated by the enormity of the line that he has just crossed.

Forty-two minutes after the report from Cairo, the White House dispatched a letter from Johnson to Nasser. Denying that the United States was unfriendly to Egypt, the letter tried half-heartedly to suggest that Washington understood some of Nasser's preoccupations. The most important part of the letter dangled the prospect of a visit by Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, ‘if we come through these days without hostilities'. Johnson did not want to waste space on pleasantries. He scratched out the words ‘with greatest respect' from the sentence before he approved it.

The announcement of the blockade embarrassed U Thant, the UN secretary general. He was in the air, travelling to Cairo on a belated peace mission when the news came through. By the time his Pan American airliner had taxied to a halt at Cairo International airport, the official welcoming party was swamped by a big crowd that rushed on to the tarmac, chanting slogans welcoming U Thant and glorifying Nasser. The press corps broke out of their pen to join them. The fastidious General Rikhye saw Mahmoud Riad, the Egyptian foreign minister, fighting his way over to them ‘through sweaty, heaving, arm-flinging bodies'.