Six Days of War

by Michael B. Oren

  Animosity was indeed palpable from the moment the ISMAC reconvened on January 25. The Israelis suspected the Syrians of playing a double game: seeking a peaceful return of Arab farmers to the DZ’s, while continuing the “popular war” against Israel. Moshe Sasson, the Israeli delegate, characterized the meeting as “extraordinary” and “informal,” thus downplaying Damascus’s role in the zones. The Syrians were no less dubious. They described their purpose as “putting an end to Zionist aggression against Arab land,” and in no way guaranteeing the “security of the gang-state inside Palestine.” The gap between the two sides proceeded to yawn as Sasson proposed a bilateral pledge “to abide faithfully by their non-aggression obligations and to refrain from all other acts of hostility against one another.” Syria’s representative, Capt. ‘Abdallah, rejected this idea, and insisted instead on the adoption of practical measures to defuse the DZ conflict. Yet, when his turn came to table such suggestions, ‘Abdallah launched into a prolonged tirade against Israel and its policies. Thereafter, Sasson and ‘Abdallah could scarcely agree on an agenda, much less make progress toward resolutions.29

  Border incidents, meanwhile, multiplied. On March 3, a member of Kibbutz Shamir was seriously injured when his tractor struck a Syrian mine. Similar mines were found three weeks later outside the Israeli villages of Kfar Szold and Zar’it. Far more turbulent than the Syrian border, however, was the frontier with Jordan. There, the first months of 1967 saw some 270 incidents—an increase, Israel acknowledged, of 100 percent. On March 12, for example, an Israeli train from Kiryat Gat to Kibbutz Lahav was halted by an explosion on the tracks; leaflets found nearby proclaimed “Death to the Zionist invaders—Victory to the heroic Palestinians.” Four Palestinian saboteurs were arrested the following day, opposite the West Bank town of Qalqilya, carrying a load of explosives, and two were killed on March 26, trying to demolish a water pump east of Arad. Al-Fatah issued a series of thirty-four communiqués describing its actions in great detail and praising the courage of its martyrs.30

  Without actually taking responsibility for these attacks, Syria exuberantly praised them. “Our known objective is the freeing of Palestine and the liquidation of the Zionist existence there,” the regime reiterated on April 8, “Our army and our people will give our backing to every Arab fighter acting for the return of Palestine.”31

  This encomium, together with its resistance to UN mediation, led many Western observers to conclude that Syria was more than ever committed to war. Thus, the British embassy in Damascus, noting the threat to confront Israel “not defensively” but with a “massive offensive blow inside Occupied Palestine,” reported that “there is every indication that the present mood of the Syrian Government and the Syrian armed forces means this threat will be carried out, whatever the cost.” America’s Ambassador Hugh H. Smythe descried Syria’s “Stalinist” regime of “fear and frustration,” and warned that “the paranoiac fear of plots and aggressions, with its constant provocations of Israel, could lead…to a military adventure which can only end in defeat.”

  Syria’s sponsorship of Palestinian guerrilla attacks became so pronounced that American officials abandoned their long-standing opposition to Israeli retaliations. “The Syrians are sons of bitches,” exclaimed Townsend Hoopes, a senior Defense Department official, during a visit to the Israeli Foreign Ministry in March, “Why the hell didn’t you beat them over the head when it would have been the most natural thing to do?” Eugene Rostow put it more succinctly to Ephraim “Eppy” Evron, the minister at the Israeli embassy in Washington. “An attack from a state is an attack by a state,” he said.32

  Israel was indeed preparing the groundwork for a reprisal against Syria. As early as January 16, in a note verbale, Evron informed the White House that “the continuation of this aggressive [Syrian] policy will force Israel to take action in self-defense as is her international right and national duty.” But the problem remained far more complicated than that, again due to the danger of Soviet intervention, as Eshkol was poignantly aware. Then, on April 1, Palestinian guerrillas blew up the water pump at Kibbutz Misgav Am on the Lebanese border. For Eshkol, the former farmer and water engineer, this was a final straw. “I believe that we have to punish the Syrians,” he admitted in a private meeting with Rabin, “but I don’t want war and I don’t want fighting on the [Golan] ridge.” Rabin, whom Lior described as suffering from a “Syrian syndrome” of abiding hatred for Damascus, agreed. At the next Syrian provocation, Israel would send armored tractors deep into the DZ’s, wait for them to be fired on, and then strike back.33

  Thirty Seconds over Damascus

  The provocation was not long in coming. Palestinian guerrillas struck twice on March 31, planting charges under an irrigation pump and railroad tracks along the Jordanian border. As planned, the Israeli tractors advanced through the southern DZ, adjacent to the Ein Gev and Ha’on kibbutzim and, as anticipated, drew machine-gun and antitank fire from the Tawafiq position above them on the Golan. The IDF responded in kind. The exchanges were short, with little damage to either side. A similar clash seemed to be developing at nine o’clock on the morning of April 7, when two tractors entered the DZ near Tel Katzir, on the southern tip of the Sea of Galilee. This time the Syrians greeted them not with small arms but with 37-mm cannons. Almost instantly, both tractors were hit. Israeli tanks shot at the Syrian guns and the Syrian guns—81-mm and 120-mm mortars—bombed Israeli settlements.

  What began as a skirmish rapidly escalated into a miniwar. Cannon and machine-gun fire raked the Golan and the flatlands beneath it. By 1:30 in the afternoon, according to UN observers, 247 shells had hit Kibbutz Gadot; several of its buildings were ablaze. The UN tried to arrange a cease-fire, which the Syrians accepted, but only on the condition that Israel stop all work in the DZ. Eshkol, in Jerusalem, but in constant contact with Rabin in his forward combat position, rejected these terms—fresh tractors would be sent in—but then balked at the chief of staff’s suggestion that the IAF be activated to neutralize Syria’s long-range artillery. An hour passed; the Syrian bombardment intensified. Finally, Eshkol relented. IAF Vatour bombers, covered by Mirages, were soon rocketing Syrian bunkers and villages—in one, Siqufiya, forty houses were destroyed and fourteen civilians reported killed. The Israelis had barely begun their sorties when they were engaged by Syrian MiG’s.

  Syria’s air force had never fared well against Israel’s, and this time was no exception. Two of the MiG’s were downed over Quneitra, the Golan’s largest city, and the remainder pursued back to Damascus. There, in a massive dog-fight involving as many as 130 planes, another four MiG’s were destroyed. In a mere thirty seconds, Israel had established supremacy over Syria’s skies. The regime was at a loss to explain its predicament—“Citizens: we call your attention to the fact that enemy aircraft are flying in our airspace. Our air force is now engaging them”—and later claimed that “our heroic eagles” had shot down five Israeli planes. But the bitter truth could not be hidden; the entire capital had witnessed the clash. The Israeli Mirages indulged in a victory loop around Damascus, and cheers broke out in Rabin’s post. Israel had regained the initiative, the chief of staff claimed. The Syrians had been humiliated while the Egyptians remained inert.

  Rabin was not wrong: Like the Samu’ raid before it, the events of April 7 underscored the impotence of the Syrian-Egyptian defense pact. “How many times have I pleaded with our Syrian brothers not to provoke Israel?” lamented UAC chief ‘Ali ‘Ali ‘Amer in a private conversation with Shuqayri. “They know that we have not yet completed our military preparations…They know that we must choose the time and the place of the battle…We have begged them time and again and yet they continue shelling Israeli settlements, in sending al-Fatah cells to shoot up transport or to mine the roads, and all this hurts our military efforts.” Lamely, Nasser claimed that Israel’s aggression was an attempt to divert his attention from Yemen. The Golan, he explained, was out of Egypt’s range.34

  In a quick face-saving mo
ve, Nasser dispatched both his prime minister, Sidqi Suliman, and air force commander, Gen. Sidqi Mahmud, to Damascus. The two, the highest-ranking Egyptians to visit Syria since the UAR’s breakup six years before, engaged in much rhetoric, denouncing the usual bugbears of Zionism, American imperialism, and Arab reaction. Behind the scenes, though, the Egyptians labored to persuade their hosts to desist from further support of al-Fatah. If it persisted and precipitated war, they warned, Syria would stand alone.

  The Syrians remained noncommittal, however, and rejected their visitors’ request to station Egyptian jets near Damascus. Instead, they again managed to extract a pledge for Egyptian assistance in the event of war. Code-named Rashid, the plan called for simultaneous air attacks against Israel, Syria hitting the north of the country and Egypt striking its southern and central regions. Syrian forces would also advance across the Galilee, aiming for Haifa. It was only here, in the area of ground activity, that the Egyptians drew the line. “All I told the Syrians,” said Sidqi Mahmud upon his return to Nasser, “was that in the event of a concentration of Israeli troops on their border, I would raise the level of air activity inside Sinai and southern Israel in order to tie down the bulk of Israel’s air force…We never talked about moving Egyptian troops into Sinai.”35

  The April 7 fighting also resembled Samu’ in its impact on the inter-Arab struggle. Jordan was quick to exploit Nasser’s discredit and claimed that Israeli planes had not only attacked Syria but had also buzzed airfields in Sinai, yet still the Egyptians recoiled. “Our enemy…unfortunately knows…how serious President Abdel Nasser is when he said in his recent speech that the UAR would join the battle the moment Syria was attacked by Israel,” Amman Radio chided. “All Arabs know that the recent Israeli aggression against fraternal Syria lasted several hours.” Three of the downed Syrian planes had crashed in Jordan, the broadcast continued, and were found to be armed with wooden rockets; Assad was afraid to give them real ones. No less vituperatively, the Egyptians replied by accusing Hussein of colluding with Israel in the attack. “Jordan is becoming a garrison of imperialism, a camp for training mercenary gangs, a reactionary outpost for the protection of Israel,” hounded Prime Minister Suliman. Like his grandfather, the king was in league with the Zionists—“born agents, raised on treason…Hussein works for the CIA”—Nasser harangued.36

  From this violent tussle of words, Hussein no doubt came out the bloodier. His position, for one, was far more vulnerable than Nasser’s. Alienated from Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, unprotected by Saudi Arabia and the other conservative states, Jordan was poised to drop out of the Arab League, where Shuqayri had indicted Hussein on thirty-three counts of treachery. Not a single Arab ally would help defend Jordan from Israel, which, as Samu’ seemed to prove, would rather conquer the West Bank than take on Syria directly. Cornered, Hussein fought to break out of his deepening isolation. He effected the resignation of Wasfi al-Tall, his rabidly anti-Nasserist prime minister, and ordered a halt to anti-Egyptian propaganda.37 Then, on April 28, he made the extraordinary move of inviting Egyptian Foreign Minister Mahmoud Riad, a long-standing acquaintance of his, to the royal palace. Taken aback by this sudden volte face, Nasser nevertheless consented; Riad flew off to Jordan.

  The king’s message was simple: Syria was laying a trap, heating up the border to the point where Egypt would have to intervene. A war was coming in which Nasser would fall and Jordan be destroyed. Riad’s response was equally concise: Jordan must then allow Iraqi and Saudi troops to deploy on its soil, in accordance with the UAC plan. But Hussein said no, not before Nasser rid Egypt of UNEF and returned his army to Sinai. The meeting concluded thus with no change in either side’s position. Four days later, Radio Amman was back in full vitriol, excoriating Nasser as “the only Arab leader…who lives in peace and tranquility with Israel. Not one shot has been fired from his direction against Israel…We hope he is satisfied with this…disgrace.” Yemeni villages were certainly not “out of range,” the broadcasts recalled, when they were bombed with poison gas.38

  Relations between Arab rulers continued to deteriorate and so, too, did the situation along Israel’s borders. Rather than reducing tensions, the events of April 7 further aggravated them. Over the next month al-Fatah undertook no less than fourteen operations. Mines and explosive charges were planted not only on the Israeli side of the Syrian and Jordanian borders, but across from Lebanon as well. Attacks from the latter peaked on May 5, when Palestinian gunmen launched a mortar barrage from Lebanese territory, shelling Kibbutz Manara. Israel, for its part, continued plowing the DZ’s, and so invited Syrian bombardments. One such salvo, on April 11, sent 200 American tourists scrambling for the shelters of a kibbutz below the Golan Heights. But Syrian fire was not always a reaction to Israeli moves. At Kibbutz Gonen in the Hula Valley, farmers came under fire on April 12 while merely repairing a fence; one of them was shot in the head.39

  The calculus of Syrian attacks, whether direct or through Palestinian guerrilla groups, had become overwhelming for the Israelis. Public opinion, particularly in the border areas, demanded that vengeance be exacted for the bloodshed and not from Jordan but from its actual perpetrator, Syria. The Americans and the British, whether for fear of Hussein’s throne or out of genuine umbrage at Damascus, were pushing in the same direction. Abroad, Israeli diplomats were continuing to establish a case for retaliation. “Surely the Syrian government is under no illusion of being immune from Israeli attack should the terrorist incidents continue,” Israeli Ambassador Avraham (Abe) Harman told Battle, now the Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, in Washington. Even in public pronouncements, in Eban’s complaint to the Security Council, the legitimacy of reprisal was stressed: “The Syrian assumption that there will be no reaction to provocation is fundamentally flawed. Every country with a healthy international conscience will identify with Israel’s inability to reconcile itself to the dispatch of terrorists from Syria.”40

  A decision, however onerous, could no longer be avoided. Bearing its brunt were two men, radically different in age and background, yet complimentary in character. Compared to Nasser and ‘Amer, with their ambivalent relationship and political machinations, Israel’s prime minister and chief of staff made for a relatively simple, smooth running team.

  Improbable Duo

  Born near Kiev—the family’s original name was Shkolnik—in 1895, when czarist pogroms were commonplace, Eskhol had grown up in a milieu of violence, religious fervor, and Zionism. At age nineteen, he moved to Palestine, to the first kibbutz, Degania, beside the Sea of Galilee. There he proved himself a robust worker, surviving bouts of malaria and attacks by marauding Bedouin. But while he loved the soil and always regarded himself as its tiller, Eshkol found his real forte in politics, first as a representative of the kibbutz movement and then of the leading labor union. In contrast to Ben-Gurion, the visionary, Eshkol was the pragmatist, the realist. His years of public service had yielded lasting accomplishments, among them building the country’s infrastructure and freeing Israeli Arabs from the military administration imposed on them in 1948. His proudest feat, though, was the founding of Mekorot (Sources), the national water utility. It was Eshkol’s dream to crisscross the country with irrigation pipes, “like the veins of a human body,” and to see every inch of open land cultivated.

  Like Nasser, Eshkol was a man of simple tastes. The only flamboyance in his life was his young and attractive third wife, Miriam (he divorced his first wife; a second died). But while Egypt’s leader possessed a powerful charisma, Israel’s prime minister was utterly devoid of it. With his lackluster, nondescript face, plain glasses, and monotonic delivery, he appeared the classic bureaucrat—a character from Kafka’s Castle. Yet that gray exterior masked a warm and ebullient personality, a penchant for humorous aphorisms (“Want to make a small fortune in Israel?” he once asked, “Bring a big one”), and a passion for Yiddish. Ezer Weizman remembered him as “a lovable man, easy-going…Open, a grand conversationalist,” and even a
political rival such as Shimon Peres could praise him as “determined but not obstinate, flexible but not submissive; he knew that life without compromise is impossible.” He was famous for his dexterity in avoiding commitments—“Sure I promised, but did I promise to keep my promise?” was one of his favorite sayings. But that same elusiveness often made him seem indecisive. One popular joke had Eshkol, asked by a waitress whether he wanted coffee or tea, hedging, “half of both.”

  On no point was Eshkol’s reputation weakest than on military matters, a crippling flaw in a country in which the powers of prime minister and defense minister were traditionally wielded by one man. That man had been Ben-Gurion. From his bungalow on the desert kibbutz of Sde Boker, he harped on his successor’s alleged inadequacy on defense, specifically his neglect of the Franco-Israeli alliance and his buckling to American strictures on Dimona. But such charges were largely unfair. Eshkol had been instrumental in building the IDF into a modern force based on tank power and jets. As prime minister, he rarely refrained from authorizing retaliation raids—though too rarely, for some pacific-minded Israelis. What Eshkol lacked, however, was combat experience, having served only briefly with the British in World War I. He was deeply stung by Ben-Gurion’s criticism—“It was like a father throwing him out of Eden,” Miriam recalled.41

  The image of Eshkol as military lightweight nevertheless persisted, along with accusations that he was either too quick or too hesitant on the trigger. Eager to change that image, the prime minister lost no opportunity to don his signature beret and visit the troops in the field or, behind closed doors, to hold counsel with his chief of staff.