Six Days of War

by Michael B. Oren

  An even greater cause of worry for the Israelis was the state of their alliance with France. This had cooled considerably since Ben-Gurion’s ouster and the advent of de Gaulle, since the end of the Algerian war and the implication of certain pro-Israeli generals in anti-Gaullist coups. Though seventy-two Mirage III fighter jets had been supplied to Israel in 1961, further deliveries had lagged as France sought to put Suez in the past and rebuild its Middle Eastern bridges. By 1965, Egypt’s General ‘Amer was being welcomed as an honored guest in Paris.55

  For Israel, then, the only answer to these concerns lay with the United States, and with its well-disposed president. “You have lost a very great friend. But you have found a better one,” Johnson reportedly told an Israeli diplomat after Kennedy’s assassination. That friendship was manifest in June 1964 when Levi Eshkol became the first Israeli prime minister to be officially received in the White House. “The United States is foursquare behind Israel on all matters that affect their vital security interests,” the president assured his guest, “just as it is [behind] Southeast Asia…” The two, of a similar age and farming background, got along famously. Baring his trepidation, Eshkol replied, “We cannot afford to lose. This may be our last stand in history. The Jewish people have something to give to the world. I believe that if you look at our history and at all the difficulties we have survived, it means that history wants us to continue. We cannot survive if we experience again what happened to us under Hitler…I believe that you should understand us.”56

  Johnson understood and gave Israel $52 million in civilian aid, but military support was another story. American M-48 Patton tanks had been sold to Israel—albeit indirectly, through Germany, with a counterbalancing tank sale to Jordan—and forty-eight A-4 Skyhawk fighters, due for delivery in December 1967. But Germany succumbed to Arab pressure to stop selling Israel arms while Egypt’s acquisition of long-range Soviet bombers meant Israel needed the planes at once. While American arms sales to the Middle East multiplied during the Johnson administration, from $44.2 to $995.3 million, Israel’s share was negligible. “The United States had much good will for Israel and desired Israel to have an adequate deterrent,” read a joint memorandum of February 1965, but Johnson refused to be Israel’s primary arms’ supplier.57

  That refusal reflected America’s traditional reluctance to identify itself totally with one side in the Arab-Israeli conflict or to get entrapped in a Middle East arms race. Beyond that, though, was Johnson’s preoccupation with the Vietnam War and opposition to it at home, both of them escalating.58 The U.S. simply could not commit itself in any other area of the globe, Johnson stressed, and to another confrontation with the Soviets. Appreciation of this fact brought meager solace to Eshkol, especially as the USSR seemed to have the wherewithal for supplying both the North Vietnamese and the Arabs.

  The Israeli prime minister, moreover, had domestic problems of his own. Ben-Gurion, still reeling from his resignation from office, realized finally that Eshkol was no mere understudy. Together with acolytes Peres and Dayan, he formed his own breakaway party, Rafi (Reshimat Poalei Yisrael—Israel Workers’ List), which performed poorly in the October 1965 elections. But if Rafi failed to take power, it succeeded in eroding Mapai’s majority and exhausting its leader, literally giving him a heart attack. Eshkol recovered only to be hit by an economic depression caused by the falloff of immigration and the end of Holocaust reparations from Germany. Unemployment skyrocketed to 12.4 percent while annual growth contracted to a single percent. For the first time since the grim days of 1948, a sense of national listlessness set in, particularly among Israel’s youth.59

  All this occurred while the security situation went from worse to insufferable. Over the course of 1966, Israel recorded ninety-three border incidents—mines, shootings, sabotage—while the Syrians boasted seventy-five guerrilla attacks in the single month of February-March.60 Those same months also brought a new government to power in Damascus—typically, through violence—as General Jadid and Air Force Commander Hafez al-Assad installed a Ba’thist regime even more radical than its predecessors. Comprised almost solely of Alawites, a heterodox sect abhorred by the Sunni majority, the regime was sorely lacking in popular support and obsessively afraid of Nasser. The panacea for these problems lay in manufacturing enemies such as Arab reaction and Western imperialism, though none more sinister than Zionism:

  The Palestine question [is] the main axis of our domestic, Arab, and international policies…The liberation battle can only be waged by progressive Arab forces through a popular war of liberation, which history has proved is the only course for victory against all aggressive forces…It will remain the final way for the liberation of the entire Arab homeland and for its comprehensive socialist popular unification.61

  The latest Ba’thist coup brought to a climax the process that had begun in 1964 when, insecure at home and in fierce competition with Egypt and Jordan, Syria’s rulers had tried to earn prestige by picking fights with Israel. The plan foundered, though, when the IDF thwarted Syria’s diversion plan and its attempts to dominate the DZ’s. Damascus then turned to the Palestinian raids that had the triple advantage of hurting Israel, shaming Nasser, and weakening Hussein. The possibility that the raids might confirm Israel’s assessment of an Arab buildup to war was irrelevant to the Syrians, to whom war seemed a no-lose situation, resulting in either Israel’s defeat or that of their Egyptian and Jordanian rivals. No harm, meanwhile, could come to Syria, protected by its unwavering alliance with the USSR.

  The Soviets had indeed invested massively in the Middle East, about $2 billion in military aid alone—1,700 tanks, 2,400 artillery pieces, 500 jets, and 1,400 advisers—since 1956, some 43 percent of it to Egypt. Nasser, “a noncapitalist revolutionary democrat,” in Soviet parlance, was seen as the Kremlin’s main hope for defeating the West in the aftermath of the Cuban missile debacle. Moscow would not be disappointed. While warfare raged in Southeast Asia, NATO was outflanked from the south and its oil supply threatened by pro-Soviet Arab regimes. In return for these services, Nasser and ‘Amer were in 1964 both designated Heroes of the Soviet Union, an award never before granted to foreigners.

  Yet the extent of Soviet largess in the region was also a source of dissent. Party and army leaders disagreed in their assessment of the Arabs’ qualities as soldiers and their openness to Marxist ideas. Some observers even linked Khrushchev’s ouster in October 1964 to disenchantment with his overgenerosity toward Egypt. His replacements, however—the triumvirate of Premier Alexei Kosygin, President Nikolai Podgorny, and L.I. Brezhnev, the Communist party secretary-general—proved no less giving. Invited to Moscow the following month, ‘Amer was told that “we will give you everything, even secret weapons,” to which he reportedly replied, “and we will keep those secrets.”62

  Soviet philanthropy reached an unprecedented high following the Ba’th revolution in Syria. In contrast to Egypt, where the Communist party was illegal and relations with Moscow accordingly complex, the new regime in Damascus included for the first time Syrian Communists. Aid poured in—$428 million in 1966 alone—refurbishing the country’s infrastructure and financing construction of a Euphrates River dam even costlier than Aswan’s. Russian became a second language taught in the schools. But Soviet-Syrian relations rested on more than ideology. Third World policy, once an unmitigated success for the USSR, had suffered serious setbacks with the overthrow of Sukarno in Indonesia and Ghana’s Nkruma, and with the spread of Chinese influence in Asia and Africa. Syria was compensation.63

  Moscow and Damascus appeared to concur on all outstanding issues, with the notable exception of Palestine. For all their invective against Zionism and relentless condemnations of Israel, the Soviets had always stopped short of advocating violence. War in the Middle East, so close to their southern border, and with the U.S. Sixth Fleet in the Eastern Mediterranean nearby, was not among the Soviets’ interests. Kremlin leaders had opposed Syria’s attempts to divert the Jordan and, instead, propose
d peace talks on the basis of the Partition plan. Slowly, however, by mid-1966, this reluctance had begun to wane. A joint communiqué issued after the visit of a high-level Syrian delegation to Moscow described Israel as “a military arsenal and a base for aggression and blackmail against the…Arab people,” and pledged full Soviet backing for the Arabs “in their just cause against colonialist Zionism.”64

  This shift in Soviet policy may have stemmed from internal struggles—Marshal Andrei Antonovich Grechko, deputy defense minister, was making a power play with Brezhnev’s backing, and needed to flex military muscle—or a desire to exploit America’s immersion in Vietnam. The outcome, however, was irrefutable that spring, as a fortified Syria expanded its support for guerrilla attacks against Israel. “We want a full-scale, popular war of liberation…to destroy the Zionist base in Palestine,” Dr. Nureddin al-Atassi, Syria’s figurehead president, told troops stationed on the Israeli border, “The time has come to use these arms for the purpose for which they were created.”65

  Thus challenged, the Israelis might have been expected to retaliate directly against Damascus. They had the military capability certainly, and even tacit support from the United States. But overriding these advantages was the danger of sparking a much larger confrontation, playing into Syria’s hands and provoking the Soviet Union. Like many of his generation, Eastern Europeans, Eshkol knew and feared the Russians. War with Syria was risky enough; with the USSR, it would be suicidal.66

  The precariousness of Soviet-Israel relations was underscored on May 25, 1966, when the Soviet Foreign Ministry informed the Israeli ambassador, Katriel Katz, of a Zionist plot to invade Syria. IDF troops, “the secret weapon of imperialism and colonialism in the Near East,” were massing on the northern border even as they spoke, he was told. Katz’s vehement denials—and Eshkol’s, to the Soviet ambassador, Chuvakhin, in Tel Aviv—could not dissuade the Soviets, nor could Israel’s assurances of respect for Syria’s territorial integrity. The crisis passed two days later with the Soviet news agency Tass trumpeting the “timeliness of the exposure…as proof of the Soviet Union’s solidarity with the Arab countries in their struggle against…foreign powers and domestic reaction.” But the message was also noted by the Israelis, who from that moment became particularly jittery about provoking the Syrians, even by so little as a reconnaissance flight.67

  For Israel, then, the only viable target for retaliation remained the West Bank. The IDF struck twice there, both times in the Hebron area—eight civilians were killed—and traded shots with Jordanian soldiers. These actions may have served some purpose in mollifying Eshkol’s critics, but they hardly deterred Damascus. Tank and artillery duels continued to rage along the border as the Syrians again moved their diversion work out of Israeli range, and intensified their shelling of Israeli settlements. Again, Rabin felt there was nothing to do but call in the IAF. Israeli planes went into action on July 7, downing a Syrian MiG.

  The Syrian response was not long in coming. When, on August 15, an Israeli border patrol boat ran aground on the demilitarized eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee, Syria sent planes of its own. The attack, intended to “prove to the Arab people…the untruth of the Israeli claim of air superiority,” according to Hafez al-Assad, backfired as two of the MiGs went down in flames. But Syrian gunmen nevertheless prevented IDF divers from dislodging the boat, which was extricated only with great difficulty at night.68

  Yet the Palestinian raids continued, with credit now claimed by some twenty-six guerrilla groups with names like Youths of Revenge and Heroes of the Return. Israel’s fury was once again directed at Jordan where, on April 30, IDF paratroopers blew up twenty-eight houses in the northern West Bank village of Rafat, killing eleven civilians. The reprisal failed to satisfy Rabin, however. He warned of the dangers of the weakening Hussein, and of the need to strike at the terrorists’ source—Syria—on the model of the Sinai Campaign. With the Egyptians in Yemen and the Arab world split, the timing would be ideal. “The reaction to Syrian acts, whether they be terrorism, diversion or aggression on the border, must be aimed at the perpetrators of that terrorism and at the regime that supports it,” Rabin told Bamahane, the army’s magazine, on September 9. “The problem with Syria is, therefore, essentially a clash with its leadership.”

  The remarks only angered Eshkol, who feared that such an assault on Syria would bring in the Soviets and unite the Arabs in full-scale war with Israel. The country’s cities could be bombed, he warned, and even the Dimona reactor. He sharply reprimanded Rabin; Israel must not be seen to be meddling in internal Syrian affairs. Rather than attacking Syria head-on, the prime minister counseled an indirect route: extending compulsory army service for men an additional six months, and prosecuting Syria’s crimes in the Security Council.

  Both actions boomeranged, however. Rather than reinforcing public morale, the extended service further corroded it, while the Council’s attempts to condemn the Syrians were repeatedly vetoed by the Soviets. In Damascus, the tone of Prime Minister Yusuf Zu’ayyin was unremittingly bellicose: “We are not resigned to holding back the Palestinian revolution…We shall set the area afire, and any Israeli movement will result in a final grave for Israel.”69

  Events were coming to a head, and not only for the Israelis. Egypt also looked with consternation at Syria’s campaign to drag the region into war. “Nasser may well fulminate against Israel but we believe there is practically no possibility that he will attack or provoke the Israelis within the foreseeable future,” read the State Department’s assessment to President Johnson.70 Improbable as it seemed, Israel and Egypt shared an interest in reining in the Syrians.

  In recognition of this convergence, Nasser agreed to the renewal of secret contacts with Israel, the first since the Suez crisis. The connection ran through Mossad chief Meir Amit and General ‘Azm al-Din Mahmud Khalil, head of Egypt’s nonconventional weapons projects, who reported directly to both Nasser and ‘Amer. Through an intermediary known only as “Steve,” the two met clandestinely in Paris and discussed arrangements virtually identical to those proposed in the 1950s: Israeli assistance in procuring international aid for Egypt in return for a lessening of anti-Israeli propaganda in Egypt and an easing of the Suez Canal blockade. The Egyptians also offered to release the Jews accused of spying in 1954, upon receipt of a $30 million Israeli loan. Khalil went so far as to invite Amit to Cairo in June 1966, but Eshkol quashed the idea, unwilling to trust Nasser with the head of Israel’s top-secret security force. Thereafter, the Egyptians, fearing that the contacts would be exposed and revealed to their Arab detractors, closed down the channel entirely. The Israelis would try to reopen it exactly one year later, in the throes of an even darker crisis.71

  Secret diplomacy might help mollify the Israelis, but calming Syria meant dramatic démarches. What Nasser proposed was a mutual defense treaty which, while enhancing Syria’s ability to lure Egypt into a conflict, would also enable Egypt to limit Syria’s maneuverability: the lesser of evils. Syria’s leaders, moreover, seemed amenable to the idea. Shaken by the loss of their jets, they were further stunned in September by a coup attempt by one Major Salim Hatum, a Druze, and the subsequent purging of the officer corps. An agreement with the most powerful Arab country was far from the worst way of shoring up the regime.

  The first move came in mid-October 1966 with an Egyptian military delegation to Damascus (“We are confident that we are making fast strides toward the realization of our common goal—the elimination of Israel and full unity,” declared its head, General Sa’ad ’Ali ’Amer) and a reciprocal visit by Zu’ayyin to Cairo. There, on November 2, Nasser told the Syrian prime minister that Israel’s technological edge and American aid made it almost invulnerable to Arab attack. Yet when Zu’ayyin protested that the Arabs would then have to wait 100 years, Nasser assured him: “You won’t have to wait 100 or even 50, you just have to know that you can’t achieve your goal except with a long-range gun.”72

  The Egyptian-Syrian defense treaty signe
d two days later restored all military and diplomatic ties between the two countries and committed them to come to one another’s assistance in the event of battle. Secret codicils to the agreement provided for Egyptian strikes against Israeli targets in the South, should Israel attack in the North. The Egyptian and Syrian air forces, proclaimed Syrian Foreign Minister Ibrahim Makhous, “are now flying in one sky.” The treaty also occasioned the breakup of the tacit alliance between Egypt and Jordan, founded as it was on common opposition to Syria. Damascus Radio and Cairo’s Voice of the Arabs harmonized in vilifying Hussein as “reactionary” and “an agent and stooge of imperialism and Zionism,” promising him “the same treatment given [assassinated Iraqi Premier] Nuri al-Sa’id.”73

  But if Nasser thought he could assuage the Syrians with talk of war in the not-too-distant future, events soon proved him mistaken. Eleven guerrilla attacks, most of them launched from Jordan, ensued in rapid succession—seven Israelis died and twelve were wounded. “The notepad is open and the hand is writing,” Eshkol told the generals who demanded reprisals, assuring them that none of the murders were forgotten and would shortly be avenged. But he also implored the United States to intercede with Syria and Jordan. “There is a public to think about,” he reminded Walworth (Wally) Barbour, the American ambassador. “I want you to know that the situation may lead to clashes. Sometimes we have to take action after rethinking more than once.” The prime minister rejected the assessment of the Chief UN observer, a Norwegian general with the improbable name of Odd Bull, that Hussein was doing his utmost to prevent hostile infiltration. According to Israeli intelligence, the king was merely detaining the terrorists and releasing them days later.74