Six Days of War

by Michael B. Oren

  Avoiding war and saving face were motives enough to convene the summit, yet Nasser had an even stronger incentive: the need to get out of Yemen. From a small contingent in 1962, Egyptian forces in Yemen had swelled to over 50,000, severely straining an economy already on the brink. ‘Amer and his coterie may have been growing rich on the war, but it had cost the country some $9.2 billion—about $.5 million for every Egyptian village—and thousands of casualties. Withdrawal, however, required negotiating an agreement with the Saudis, as well as with other hated “reactionaries”—a price that a war-weary Nasser was finally willing to pay.

  The largest gathering of Arab leaders since the Palestine war convened in Cairo on January 14, 1964. Over the next three days, Nasser would bully his way to achieving most of his goals, controlling the loose-cannon revolutionaries and coopting the conservative monarchies. But it cost him. A $17.5 million Arab League plan was approved for diverting the Jordan at its sources—the Banias and Hatzbani rivers—and so drastically reduce the quantity and quality of Israel’s water. Then, assuming that the Israelis would not watch passively while their country dried up, the conference also created a United Arab Command, both to protect the project and to prepare for an offensive campaign. With a ten-year $345 million budget, the UAC was charged with standardizing Arab arms and providing military aid to Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Plans were made for bolstering Lebanon’s defense with Syrian troops and Jordan’s with Iraqis, and for placing Iraq’s fine air force at the UAC’s service. Conditions were laid down for waging war: secrecy, unity, and total military preparedness.38

  The summit, hailed as “the first in the history of the Arab peoples to be agreed upon by all the Arab leaders,” spelled victory for Nasser. The UAC was placed under direct Egyptian authority, with Gen. ‘Ali ‘Ali ‘Amer as its commander, and as its chief of staff, Gen. ‘Abd al-Mun’im Riyad. Egypt had taken the initiative in the armed struggle against Israel but the showdown was to be delayed for two and a half years at least, until the UAC became operational, in 1967. With the Arab world now mobilized yet firmly under Nasser’s control, his motto for the conference—“Unity of Action”—appeared to have been actualized.39

  But the summit did not find an exit from the Yemen quagmire, nor did it palliate the Syrians. No sooner had Hafiz Amin returned home when his regime reiterated that “what we have to do is push the whole Arab people into entering the battle with all means…” and again accused Egypt of hiding behind UNEF’s skirts.40 The UAC was the means and Syria was anxious to exploit it. In his search for Arab unity and deferral of any conflict with Israel, Nasser had unwittingly created a framework for dissent and accelerated the momentum toward war.

  These facts gradually dawned on Nasser over the course of two subsequent summits, in Alexandria that September and in Casablanca, Morocco, one year later. The delegates approved the establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organization under Ahmad al-Shuqayri, a stout and voluble lawyer widely seen as Nasser’s stooge, and a Palestine Liberation Army to deploy along Israel’s borders. More substantively, the UAC budget was expanded by nearly $600 million and plans were drafted for “the elimination of the Israeli aggression” sometime in 1967. Arab leaders agreed to cease interfering in one another’s internal affairs, and to concentrate on Palestine’s redemption, the paramount goal.41

  But inter-Arab cooperation again remained largely on paper. Jordan opposed the stationing of PLA units on the West Bank or Iraqi and Saudi troops on any part of its territory. Lebanon was also loath to host foreign forces, and Iraq to lend its planes to the UAC. None of the Western-oriented armies wanted to standardize their arsenals with Soviet arms, and nobody wanted to take orders from Egyptian generals. Except in Egypt, Shuqayri was universally despised and the PLO in constant arrears, as the Arab states uniformly defaulted on their pledges.42

  And these were only the beginning of Nasser’s headaches. Deeper troubles would arise as Syria, taking advantage of Egypt’s predicament in Yemen, in the spring of 1964 began unilaterally implementing the Arab diversion plan. As predicted, the Israelis did not sit idly but responded with withering bombardments that wrecked the Syrian earthworks. “Every soldier in our army feels that Israel must be wiped off of the map,” retorted Syrian Chief of Staff Salah Jadid, and urged the Arab masses to “kindle the spark,” of war with Israel and support Syria’s efforts for liberation.43

  The Saudis, meanwhile, taunted Nasser by reminding him that his entanglement in Yemen prevented him from rescuing Palestine. A peace agreement for Yemen negotiated by Nasser and the Saudis’ King Faisal in August 1965 was ultimately ignored, and the former threatened to invade Saudi Arabia. As many as 70,000 troops, the cream of the Egyptian army, remained as bogged down as ever. Slipping, Nasser sought to rally by leading a boycott of West Germany after it recognized Israel—Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Libya, and Tunisia declined to join—and then of Tunisian president Habib Bourgiba, for heretically accepting the UN Partition plan.44

  Nearly two years of Arab summitry had produced scarce benefits for Egypt or indeed for any Arab state. There was no end to the Yemen war, no end to inter-Arab bickering. Instead of a common front against Israel there were joint offensive plans almost certain to provoke it—in short, all of the liabilities and none of the advantages of unity. Even the sole accomplishment of note, the creation of the PLO, was deeply qualified, as no less than seven Palestinian guerrilla movements—al-Fatah among them—renounced the organization as impotent.

  Still the Arabs’ imbroglio worsened. U.S.-Egyptian relations, severely strained by the end of President Kennedy’s administration, ruptured under that of his successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson. Along with Egypt’s long-standing policies toward the wars in Vietnam and the Congo, toward Israel and Yemen and pro-Western Arab monarchies—all of them fundamentally at variance with Washington’s—were now added attacks against Wheelus, America’s strategically vital airbase in Libya.

  The breaking point came in November 1964, in what U.S. ambassador in Cairo, Lucius Battle, called “a little series of horrors.” First, rioters in the capital attacked the U.S. embassy, burning down its library, then Egyptian forces accidentally shot down a plane owned by John Mecom, a Texas businessman and personal friend of the president’s. When Battle suggested that Nasser moderate his behavior to ensure his continued access to American wheat, the Egyptian leader let loose: “The American Ambassador says that our behavior is not acceptable. Well, let us tell them that those who do not accept our behavior can go and drink from the sea…We will cut the tongues of anybody who talks badly about us…We are not going to accept gangsterism by cowboys.”45

  So ended U.S. aid to Egypt. By 1965, Washington was working sedulously to undermine Cairo’s efforts to reschedule its international debt and to gain credit in world monetary funds. The shipments of American wheat that accounted for 60 percent of all Egyptian bread were suspended. Nasser was convinced that Johnson was out to assassinate him. While some of its colossal loss was made up by the $277 million economic and military aid promised by Khrushchev during his May 1964 visit to Cairo, nothing could remedy the country’s woefully chronic ills: a population of 29.5 million growing at 3.5 percent annually, poor (about $140 per capita per year, 40 percent inflation), unhealthy (average male life expectancy thirty-five years), and to a large extent (45 percent) illiterate. Brutal crackdown of dissidents, the arbitrary nationalization of property, a suffocating bureaucracy: This was Egypt in the mid-1960s, a police state. Even the High Dam at Aswan, Nasserism’s grandest symbol, proved toxic, spreading the dreaded bilharzia disease throughout the countryside.46

  This depressing picture was not Egypt’s alone, however. Rampant population growth, dwindling employment opportunities, low levels of health care and education were endemic to most of the Arab world.47 Patriarchal, capped by totalitarian regimes, Arab society was hardly ripe for progress. And even the basic goal of unity—retribution against the arrogant West and the noxious Jewish state it had forced upon them—continued to e
lude the Arabs.

  Disappointment and frustration helped impel al-Fatah’s marauders as they crossed into Israel on the first night of 1965. That action, though abortive, had a rippling effect throughout the region—scarcely perceptible at first but ultimately tectonic. Held in abeyance during much of the Arab Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict had resurfaced with a vengeance. The context was nearly complete.

  Out of the Icebox

  Failures though they seemed to the Arabs, to Israelis, the Arab summits of 1964-65 appeared nothing short of volcanic, the reification of their neighbors’ desire to eradicate them. IDF intelligence, which had previously denied that the Arabs would go to war over the water issue, suddenly changed its tone. “This desire had always been abstract—until now,” explained an IDF intelligence estimate from the period, “For the first time we know of a plan…with clear stages; a date has been set for the showdown. Thus, in 1967-8, we are liable to face a renewed Arab initiative. The practical expression of this may come in the form of another attempt to divert the Jordan, the encouragement of terrorist attacks…border incidents…closing the Straits of Tiran.” To restore its deterrence power, Israel would have to strike on more than one front and at a time not of her choosing, enabling the Arabs to counterattack overwhelmingly, IDF intelligence warned.48

  The downhill course toward war, from the Israeli perspective, was marked by Arab acts on the ground. The northern border erupted in November 1964 with Syria’s unilateral efforts to divert the Jordan headwaters and then to prevent Israeli cultivation of the DZ’s (see map, p. 285). The latter, it will be recalled, had been created by the Armistice Agreements in areas of Israel evacuated by the Syrian army. Divided into three main sectors totaling some 66.5 square miles, the DZ’s contained archipelagos of irregularly shaped plots—each had a nickname: the Legume, for example, and De Gaulle’s Nose—over which Israel claimed total sovereignty. Pressing this claim, the Israelis denied the Mixed Armistice Commission any jurisdiction over the DZ’s (Syrian representatives sat on the MAC) and declared them off-limits to Syrian farmers. But the Syrians just as adamantly opposed Israeli attempts to control the plots, and, from their emplacements atop the Golan Heights, fired on any tractors plowing them.

  At the epicenter of these tensions was the Sea of Galilee itself, which was wholly within Israeli sovereignty, but just barely. A 10-meter strip along the lake’s northeastern bank technically belonged to Israel, but, falling directly under the Syrian guns, was virtually impossible to defend. Syrian snipers regularly fired at Israeli fishing boats while Israeli patrol craft just as frequently violated a 250-meter demilitarized zone extending from the eastern shore into the lake itself.

  The two issues, land and water, were inextricably linked in the Israeli mind. By affirming their sovereignty over the DZ’s, the Israelis sought to deter the Syrians from diverting the Jordan. “Without control over the water sources we cannot realize the Zionist dream,” Eshkol had told the government, “Water is the basis for Jewish existence in the Land of Israel.” Tactically, too, there was a connection, as Israel exploited DZ incidents as pretexts for bombing the diversion project. Increasingly proficient at hitting long-range targets, Israeli tanks could zero in on Syrian bulldozers miles behind the border. But then the Syrians upped the ante.

  North of Tel Dan on November 13, near a DZ, an Israeli patrol came under Syrian fire. Israeli tanks, camouflaged nearby, opened up in return. Artillery atop the Golan Heights leveled a blanket of shells on Israeli settlements across the Hula Valley. With the enemy’s cannons out of range, Israel’s obvious riposte was to bombard them from the air, but Eshkol hesitated, fearful of starting a war and of jeopardizing Israel’s attempts to purchase American aircraft. “Is it a question of just a few more holes in the roof or no roof and walls at all?” he asked Yitzhak Rabin, now the chief of staff.

  Rabin favored hitting Syria and hitting it decisively. With the Arab world divided and the USSR unlikely to intervene, he explained, retaliatory action would not lead to war. The United States, moreover, busy as it was bombing North Vietnam, could hardly assail a similar strike against Syria. Convinced, Eshkol deferred to Rabin’s reasoning, and the IAF took to the air.49

  The ensuing three-hour battle resulted in four Israeli dead and nine wounded; settlements were seriously damaged. The Syrians’ losses were also extensive—at least two tanks and several earth-moving machines—but their deepest wound was psychological. Syria’s air force was simply no match for Israel’s. Though work on the diversion would continue through the spring of 1965, five miles from the border and out of tank range, it could never be completed as long as Israel ruled the skies. Syria’s answer was to procure more planes—some sixty Soviet MiG-2Is—and fast, while embarking on a new and less risky endeavor.

  Palestinian guerrilla raids, first used by Nasser in the 1950s, had proven a viable means of goring the Israelis while scoring points in Arab public opinion. Their operations were cheaply financed and, in face of charges of government collusion, plausibly denied, especially when mounted from neighboring countries. Nor was there any difficulty in recruiting fighters from the Palestinian organizations disgusted with Ahmad Shuqayri and his PLO sinecure. These rejectionist groups now shared Syria’s interests in fomenting tensions with Israel. Over the course of 1965, The Storm (al-‘Asifa), the armed wing of al-Fatah, received Syria’s support in carrying out thirty-five attacks according to Israel’s reckoning, 110 by Palestinian accounts.

  These operations again embarrassed Nasser, upstaging his leadership on Palestine and renewing the danger of an Israeli reprisal to which Egypt, now committed to the UAC, would have to respond—in other words, war. The guerrillas’ appearance came at the worst possible time, with Egypt’s army stalled in Yemen and its economy plummeting. Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Iran had banded in an Islamic League for the purpose of limiting Nasser’s influence. Denouncing the league as a joint plot of the U.S. and the Muslim Brotherhood, Nasser canceled his participation at the next Arab summit, scheduled to be held in Algeria. “We could annihilate Israel in twelve days were the Arabs to form a united front,” he strove to explain, “Israel can only be attacked from…Syria and Jordan.” Then, declaring his intention to “liberate Palestine in a revolutionary and not a traditional manner,” he quietly arrested all the al-Fatah activists in Egypt and in Gaza.50

  Nasser was not the only Arab leader threatened by Syria-sponsored terror. More immediately imperiled was Jordan’s King Hussein. Having successfully resisted the UAC’s plans for stationing Saudi and Iraqi troops on his territory, certain the Israelis would use the move as a pretext for seizing the West Bank, Hussein now faced a similar situation as a result of the al-Fatah’s raids. Over half of these originated in the West Bank, where Hussein had been resisting Shuqayri’s influence and Shuqayri was now forced to rival al-Fatah by forming his own guerrilla groups. The Jordanian monarch went to considerable lengths to stifle these activities, but there was a limit, he knew, to suppressing legitimate Palestinian resistance, and a limit to Israel’s restraint.51

  The Israelis had told him as much. Since 1960, when Ben-Gurion congratulated him on surviving an Egyptian-orchestrated bomb attack (“Your Majesty will continue to defy with courage and success all treacherous attempts to subvert law and order”), Hussein had been in occasional contact with Israeli representatives. Another assassination attempt, also traced to Egypt, was foiled by the Mossad intelligence service two years later. Like his grandfather before him, Hussein proceeded cautiously with these talks, conducting them in London and under the strictest secrecy. Though unreceptive to Eshkol’s offers of a full peace treaty, unwilling to break with the Arab consensus, he was open to practical measures, such as quiet cooperation on sharing the Jordan’s waters. The contacts helped conciliate the Israelis—and the Americans, their common ally—during the period of the Arab summits when Jordan’s anti-Zionist propaganda easily rivaled the Syrians’. But propaganda was one thing, terror another, and the Israelis warned Hussein that terro
rism had to stop.52 It did not, however, and in May 1965, after the killing of six Israelis, the IDF struck back.

  Three reprisals followed, on Qalqilya, Shuna, and Jenin, in the West Bank. These were small-scale attacks by IDF standards, aimed at water installations, an ice factory, and a flour mill. Nevertheless, they provided the rhetorical ammunition Shuqayri needed to castigate the “colonialist rule” of the Hashemites and to demand its overthrow as the first step toward Palestinian liberation. Hussein, vowing to “sever any hand raised against this struggling country and to gouge out any eye that glances at us with hate,” retorted by arresting some 200 “subversive” elements in Jordan and closing the PLO office. “The purpose of the PLO is the destruction of Jordan and everything we have achieved throughout these long years for our nation and for Palestine,” the king wrote to Nasser, but Nasser remained unsympathetic, unwilling to defend a “reactionary” monarch against Palestinian freedom fighters. The Syrians condemned both Hussein and Nasser—Nasser because he had failed to come to the Palestinians’ rescue, to cast off UNEF and initiate the “third round.”53 Al-Fatah’s strategy had thus far worked: Having provoked Israel into retaliating against Arab states, the Arab states were gradually goading one another to war.

  The Israelis observed this process unfolding with a growing sense of helplessness—in spite of their impressive victories in the North. Eshkol, for one, suspected that the Arabs would not wait until 1967 to strike. “Okay, okay,” he protested when presented with optimistic intelligence estimates, “but what if intelligence is wrong?”

  Haunted by the specter of an all-Arab assault, the IDF initiated Anvil (Hebrew: Sadan), a comprehensive defense plan designed to rebuff attacks on all fronts and then enable the army to take the offensive. But the plan would take another year, until July 1966, to implement, and meanwhile the country lay vulnerable. Horrified, Eshkol learned that the tank corps had only enough ammunition for three days’ fighting—he ordered it doubled to six—and one-third the number of planes necessary to take on Egypt’s air force alone. Adding to these anxieties was the capture in January 1965 of Eli Cohen, alias Kamal Amin Thabet, a Mossad agent who had insinuated himself into the upper ranks of Syria’s military establishment. With Cohen’s execution in May, Israel lost an irreplaceable source of information on Syria’s deployment in the Golan Heights and its bounteous support for al-Fatah.54