Six Days of War

by Michael B. Oren

  When it came to combat, Yitzhak Rabin was richly experienced. He had seen some of the heaviest fighting of the War of Independence, commanding elite troops in the battles in and around Jerusalem. Unlike most of his fellow officers, however, kibbutzniks and farmers, Rabin had grown up in Tel Aviv, the son of Labor Zionist activists who were often away from home. He was a native-born Israeli, soft-spoken and direct, but also surprisingly shy. He and Eshkol were practically mirror images of each other—the first attractive yet quiet, the second physically bland but personally vivid. For that reason, perhaps, and because they needed each other, the two men got along well. “Talkative, overflowing with simplicity and humor,” Rabin’s memoirs describe the prime minister, “a brilliant administrator, a pragmatist, and a master at assimilating every minute detail.” Eshkol reciprocated by deed, in 1966 asking the IDF chief to remain for a second three-year term after his first was completed. Together, they embarked on a large-scale armament program that gave precedence to the air force and armor, and a defense strategy predicated on deterrence.42

  Apart from occasional skids of friction—Rabin could be too popular for Eshkol’s tastes, and Eshkol too intrusive in defense matters—the relationship between prime minister and chief of staff remained felicitous through the first months of 1967. But then that relationship had never been tested in a crisis. In early May, however, as Arab attacks mounted on the northern border, the Israeli Cabinet authorized the army to launch a limited retaliation against Syria. Rabin reiterated his demand for a large-scale raid to thoroughly discredit, if not topple, the Ba’th regime. But Eshkol again opposed the attack, fearful of a Soviet backlash. The Kremlin had again condemned Israel for plots against the Syrian government, this time with the collusion of Western oil companies. Israel was a “serious threat to peace” and a “puppet used by foreign elements, Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Viktor Semyonov had scolded Ambassador Katz; if catastrophe ensued in the Middle East, the Zionists would be held responsible.43

  Rebuffing Rabin’s advice, Eshkol instead turned to Washington. He requested a public reaffirmation of America’s commitment to Israeli security, specifically through the accelerated sale of Patton tanks and Skyhawk jets. “Eshkol really finds himself in a serious dilemma,” Barbour wrote his superiors in support of the sale, “and would appreciate as much hand holding as possible.” But congressional constraints on arms transfers, tightened in light of Vietnam, militated against such a deal, as did Israeli resistance to on-site American inspections of Dimona. Though Johnson was not averse to bolstering Israel verbally, weapons were out of the question.44

  American resistance to military involvement with Israel was further illustrated when Eshkol told U.S. News and World Report that, in the event of war, Israel expected to receive help from the U.S. Sixth Fleet. The Arab world reacted acridly, canceling port-of-call visits for American ships in Beirut and Alexandria. An “imperialist base floating on the seas,” Syria’s al-Attasi had described the fleet, pledging that “the Arab seas and the fish in them will feed on their [the Americans’] rotting imperialist bodies.” The State Department was quick to announce that there was no such commitment on the part of America’s armed forces, intimating that in the event of fighting in the Middle East, the Sixth Fleet would remain neutral.45

  A final effort to find an alternative to violence was directed not at the U.S. but at what was, for the Israelis, an unlikely address: the United Nations. Gideon Rafael, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, appealed to secretary-general U Thant to speak out against Syrian support for terror. Though rarely known to criticize the Arabs, U Thant could no longer ignore the evidence of Syrian implication in the guerrilla attacks. At a press conference on May 11, he denounced those attacks as “deplorable” and “insidious,” as “menaces to peace” and “contrary to the letter and spirit of the Armistice.” Noting that the raids “seem to indicate that the individuals who committed them have had more specialized training than has usually been evidenced in al-Fatah incidents in the past,” he called on all the responsible “governments” to stop them.

  Seemingly a victory for the Israelis, this unprecedented censure of an Arab state by the top UN official in fact came to nothing. A proposed Security Council debate on the issue never materialized due to Soviet foot dragging and the fact that a full third of the Council’s members refused to recognize its current president, a Taiwanese. The Syrians roundly condemned U Thant’s statement, their UN ambassador, George Tomeh, claiming that it had “condoned Israel’s use of force.”46 With the Security Council paralyzed and the Arabs so incensed, the secretary-general refrained from taking his initiative any further. The matter was dropped.

  Rabin, meanwhile, aware of Israel’s failures in both the U.S. and the UN, resorted to defiant rhetoric, telling the IDF magazine Bamahane that “the [Israeli] response to Jordan and Lebanon is appropriate only for states that are not interested in terrorist attacks launched against their will. With Syria the problem is different, because the regime is sponsoring the terrorists. Therefore, the essence of the response to Syria must be different.”

  Eshkol, along with many cabinet members, thought that Rabin had gone too far in his threat, and again criticized him for it, but then the prime minister came out with exhortations of his own. “We have no choice,” he told a Mapai party forum on May 12, “we may well have to act against the centers of aggression and those who encourage it by means no less serious than those we used on April 7.” And the following day, on Israel Radio: “There will be no immunity for a state that encourages sabotage operations against us and Syria is the spearhead of such actions.” Further inflammatory statements ensued, and not only from Eshkol and Rabin, but also from generals David Elazar, commander of the Northern Front, and IDF intelligence chief Aharon Yariv, many of which were picked up and amplified by the foreign press. Ezer Weizman, writing years later in his memoirs, recalled, “High-flown speeches (on second thought, they may have been too high-flown) were the order of the day.”47

  The Israelis’ barbs caught the Syrians at a particularly sensitive juncture, when opposition from observant Muslims and middle-class merchants was increasingly threatening the Ba’th. Should Israel attack, President al-Atassi warned, “Syria will launch a popular liberation war in which all the Arab masses will take part.” Ibrahim Makhous, the foreign minister, told Ambassador Smythe of an alleged “imperialist plot” against Damascus, and of the “probability of a large Israeli offensive in the near future.” Zionist troops were already massing in the DZ’s, he claimed. But when Smythe suggested that regime rein in the guerrillas, Makhous balked. “Syria refuses to take responsibility for Palestinians fighting for their despoiled homeland,” he bristled. “Palestine is a sacred cause that will never die.”

  Rather than deterring Damascus from further aggression, remarks made by Eshkol and Rabin spurred it to redoubled support for al-Fatah. The organization struck again on May 9 and 13, with sabotage raids across the Syrian and Jordanian borders, respectively. A highly trained infiltrator, described as blond, Hebrew-speaking, and carrying a British passport, crossed the Sea of Galilee in a boat launched from a shore area under Syrian army control. Apprehended, he was found to possess a large amount of explosives and detonating devices to be used, he confessed, for assassinating Israeli leaders.48

  Israel’s efforts to forestall a major confrontation with Syria only succeeded in multiplying the chances for one. That same pattern would recur with another controversy brewing that May, surrounding Israel’s Independence Day parade.

  Held in various cities on a rotational basis, the 1967 parade was scheduled to take place in Israeli West Jerusalem on May 15, the first time in the country’s nineteen-year history that the Hebrew and Gregorian dates of its independence coincided. The presence in the Holy City of so many Israeli troops, though not technically a violation of the Armistice, sparked protests throughout the Arab world and from Jordan in particular. The UN also objected to the parade, as did the Western Powers, which prohibited the
ir ambassadors from attending.

  Eshkol dismissed this opposition, noting that Jordan, which in violation of the Armistice denied Jews access to the Western Wall and the Mount of Olives, had no say in what Israel did on its own side of the city. Yet, in an effort to limit tensions, Eshkol excised several militant lines from a poem scheduled to be read at the event by Israeli laureate Natan Alterman, and agreed to refrain from introducing heavy weapons into Jerusalem.49 Though Rabin bristled at these decisions, he ultimately complied. No tanks or artillery pieces would take part in the parade.

  After a period of dissonance in their reactions to the Syrian threat, the prime minister and his chief of staff had together avoided a minor crisis in Jerusalem. Neither man was aware, however, of the degree to which that avoidance would trigger a far vaster, bloodier, upheaval.

  Action and Reaction

  Egyptian leaders were also unsuspecting of any imminent catastrophe. One of them, Anwar al-Sadat, left the country on April 29 on a mission that had nothing to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict. Sadat was merely to pay courtesy calls on political figures in Mongolia and North Korea, and return by way of Moscow. “We expect nothing significant to emerge from these visits,” forecast the U.S. embassy in Cairo.

  Much of the Americans’ lack of expectations was due to Sadat himself, a unexceptionable figure who had never held any serious military post, serving innocuously as speaker of the National Assembly. But Sadat’s anodyne exterior—tall, dark, taciturn—obscured a record that included two prison terms for pro-German activity during World War II and conspiracy to assassinate an Egyptian official loyal to Britain. A co-conspirator in the 1952 revolution, he later maintained ties with the Muslim Brotherhood and opposed Egypt’s secret contacts with Israel. Perhaps because of this ideological stalwartness, his unflagging loyalty to the regime, Nasser trusted him. If nothing else, Sadat had the president’s ear.

  The Soviets understood this, and assured that Sadat’s itinerary included meetings with Premier Kosygin and President Podgorny, with Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, and his deputy, Semyonov. The talks proved to be far more than a mere exchange of pleasantries. In portentous terms, the Soviet leaders informed Sadat of an imminent Israeli invasion of Syria aimed at toppling the Ba’th. Though the Kremlin had already given a stern warning to the Israeli ambassador, between ten and twelve brigades were now massed on the Syrian border, ready to advance sometime between May 16 and 22. Podogorny told him, “You must not be taken by surprise, the coming days will be fateful,” and “Syria is facing a difficult situation and we will help Syria in that situation.” To substantiate their information, the Soviets cited the absence of tanks and artillery from the impending Independence Day parade in Jerusalem—concrete evidence, they claimed, that the weapons had been moved up north.50

  The reasons for the Russians’ warning would remain obscure, leaving room for a gamut of theories as to why they had tendered it at that particular juncture and what they sought to gain. Some speculated that Moscow invented the crisis in order to bolster Nasser’s stature and to cement the Soviet-Syrian alliance. Other hypotheses held that the Soviets sought to lure Nasser into a war with Israel, to destroy him and so clear the field for Syrian preeminence and the penetration of Communist cadres. The time was right to exploit America’s distraction in Vietnam, many experts postulated, to curb rising Chinese influence in the region, and to deal a smashing blow to Zionism. Still others went so far as to suggest that the United States had leaked the information on Israel’s attack plans in order to lessen Egypt’s pressure on the Gulf countries, or that Israel, itself, was the source, seeking a war of territorial aggrandizement. Former Soviet officials would later blame the misinterpretation of intelligence received from well-placed KGB agents inside Israel regarding the probability of retaliatory action against Syria. “The information was unconfirmed and required further investigation,” recalled Supreme Soviet member Karen Brutents, “But Semyonov couldn’t control himself and passed it on to the Egyptians.”51

  Lost in this conjecturing is the fact that there was little new in the Soviet warning to Sadat, that reports of intended Israeli aggression against Syria had been issued repeatedly over the previous year. Those admonitions, it was noted, reflected deep rifts in the Kremlin leadership and differing perceptions of Soviet interests in the Middle East—a middle road between avoiding all clashes in the region and plunging it into war. Fully expecting an Israeli retaliation against Syria, the Soviets were keen to prevent a battle that was liable to result in Arab defeat and superpower confrontation. Yet, at the same time, they wanted to maintain a heightened level of tension in the area, a reminder of the Arabs’ need for Soviet aid. Hence the stress on Egypt’s role in deterring the Israelis; hence the specific mention of ten to twelve Israeli brigades allegedly massed on the border. The tendency of Communist decision makers to be influenced by their own propaganda on imperialist and Zionist perfidy—“ideological myopia,” in the British Cabinet’s phrase—also played a part, magnifying the threat Israel really posed to Syria.52

  In the end, why, exactly, the Soviets acted as they did proved less important than the way the Egyptians reacted. Sadat returned to Cairo after midnight on May 14 and hastened to Nasser’s house. There he found the president and Field Marshal ’Amer already discussing the Russian report. Further details of the Israeli mobilization had also been furnished to the Foreign Ministry by Soviet ambassador Dimitri Pojidaev, and to Egyptian intelligence chief Salah Nasir through a local agent of the KGB. Then a similar message—the first of many—had arrived from Damascus:

  We have learned from a dependable source that, one, Israel has mobilized most of its reserves and that, two, it has concentrated the bulk of its forces on the Syrian border. The estimate force strength is 15 brigades. Three, The Israelis are planning a large-scale attack on Syria, including paratrooper drops, to take place between the 15th and the 22nd of May.

  ’Amer also boasted of having seen aerial photographs that confirmed the Israeli concentrations.53

  Syrian claims of impending invasions had become commonplace in recent months, and Nasser had summarily ignored them. But there could be no dismissing a warning of such specificity from so many Soviet sources, including the Kremlin itself. Viewed against the backdrop of the menacing statements of Eshkol and Rabin, and the absence of heavy weapons in Israel’s parade, the intelligence had the ring of truth. Nasser and ’Amer spent much of the rest of the night discussing the possible ramifications of an Israeli attack on Syria and possible Egyptian responses, including the removal of UNEF. At 7:30 A.M. they resolved that the general staff would convene in another four hours and decide on the army’s action.54

  That decision was not to be taken cavalierly. Egypt’s economic crisis had begun to take its toll on the army, whose ranks, in spite of budget cuts, had continued to swell. The deficit was felt in declining maintenance—eight pilots were now available for every functioning jet—and a halt to nearly all training exercises. But the military’s fault lines were not merely financial. Senior positions were meted out on the basis of family or political ties, not merit, while subalterns were purposefully chosen for their incompetence, so as not to threaten their commanders. There was little loyalty among officers and even less between them and the common soldier. “I always felt sorry for the abandoned Egyptians in the Sinai when large numbers of their officers took off for long weekends in Cairo,” recalled UNEF’s Gen. Rikhye. On the structural level, no framework existed for cooperation or even communication between air, ground, and naval forces. Orders followed wildly circuitous routes before finally reaching troops in the field, where initiative was virtually unknown. Ideology, rather than performance, was the yardstick for success. “We had great stacks of books and brochures on the glories of the July 23rd Revolution,” Gen. ’Abd al-Mun’im Khalil, commander of Egypt’s paratroopers, complained. “The books, kept in perfect condition and inspected constantly, served as the basis for determining a unit’s fighting ability. Officers jo
ked about them, but took them to Yemen anyway to show their loyalty.”55

  The army’s deficiencies had been brought to Nasser’s attention and in ways certain to reinforce his long-standing opposition to any war with Israel. Though his rhetoric remained as fiery as ever—“We want to fight to liberate and regain Palestine,” he assured Alexandria University law school students on May 10—Nasser took no concrete steps in response to the air battles of April 7. Egypt’s ambassador to Washington, Mustafa Kamel, consistently told Americans of Nasser’s commitment to keeping the Israel issue “in the icebox,” to the point that the White House was willing to reconsider its Egyptian aid policy. “While no one likes the idea of paying off a bully,” wrote Walt Rostow in an internal memorandum to the president, “Nasser is still the most powerful figure in the Middle East…and has restrained wilder Arabs who have pushed for a disastrous Arab-Israeli showdown.”56

  Unbeknownst to the Americans, however, was the existence of a countervailing force in the Egyptian military, one that assiduously pressed for war. Many generals believed that, shortcomings aside, the army had several times as many planes, tanks, and guns as the Israelis, and that numerical superiority alone would suffice to guarantee an Arab victory. Demoralized, economically depressed, Israel, they argued, was no longer the juggernaut the Egyptians once feared and should be struck before it launched its own attack against Syria or Jordan. Siqdi Mahmud gloated that Egypt’s “warning system and air defense are capable of discovering and destroying any air attack by the enemy, no matter how many aircraft were involved, or from what direction they come.” Under the umbrella of Russian missiles, Sidqi Mahmud believed, Egyptian armor could advance unimpeded. ’Amer was particularly bluff in his confidence. “Our armed forces are not only capable of repulsing Israel but of moving eastward,” the field marshal reported to Nasser in early May, “Egypt can establish a position from which to impose its own political conditions and to force Israel to respect Arab and Palestinian rights.”57