Six Days of War

by Michael B. Oren

  “What’s to stop the Egyptians from taking the south? The Syrians from attacking our settlements?” he asked while reminding the cabinet that the Arabs outnumbered Israel three-to-one in tanks and aircraft. The prime minister seemed to have internalized the rifts in his government. He stressed the need to show the Arabs that “the Jews are not just standing here and bleating,” but also to explore all diplomatic options. He professed reluctance either to provoke a clash or to rely on international pledges. “We don’t want war, but if the Arabs bomb us—and it doesn’t matter what they bomb—we must respond swiftly and massively,” he stated, but then wondered if the retaliation could be put off until Israel acquired more weaponry.

  Eshkol seemed steeped in his quandary, but then Abba Eban rose to extricate him. The foreign minister agreed that the issue was not Eilat, but deterrence. “A nation that could not protect its basic maritime interests would presumably find reason for not repelling other assaults on its rights,” his memoirs affirmed. “Unless a stand was made here, nobody in the Arab world…would ever again believe in Israel’s power to resist.” Yet Eban opposed taking a military action that the United States was unlikely to support and the USSR would probably resist—a replay of the Suez crisis. He told the Cabinet of a request he had received from Washington: Israel would accept a forty-eight-hour consultation period during which the U.S. would consider mobilizing a multinational convoy to escort Israeli ships through Tiran. The plan went beyond Eisenhower’s pledge to support Israel in defending itself, he pointed out. “The historical weight of this moment—and there won’t be many like it in Jewish history—requires that we take this step,” Eban, with his signature eloquence, concluded. “If not, then for generations to come, we will not be able to explain to ourselves and to others why we failed to put it [the closure] to the test.”

  The American proposal was to be put for a vote, but not before Dayan had his say. Still wearing the uniform he had donned for a tour of the southern front where military policemen had found him and escorted him back to Jerusalem, Dayan spoke bluntly. He was opposed to “banging on the doors of the Powers” and granting the Egyptians additional time to dig in. “We’re not England here, with its tradition of losing big battles first,” he quipped. Nevertheless, he endorsed the forty-eight-hour delay, if only to placate the Americans, after which he recommended mounting an all-out air and ground attack against Egypt. “We should destroy hundreds of tanks in a two-to-three-day battle,” he proposed, and be ready for counterattacks from Jordan and even from Israeli Arabs.

  The meeting adjourned with a decision to postpone military action to give Eban time to garner support for Israel’s position in Western capitals, above all Washington. In the interim, the government would work to downplay the crisis—no major Knesset debates, no cancellation of official ceremonies—while exploring the possibility of creating a national unity Cabinet with the opposition. Preparations would be made for Operation Atzmon (the capture of Gaza as bargaining chip for free passage), and 35,000 more reservists would be called up, but otherwise “the waiting” would continue. Only if Egypt attacked first, bombing Israeli airfields or strategic targets, would Israel strike back and strike with all its forces.50

  Eshkol had steered a middle course between war and diplomacy, but his helmsmanship appeared to appease nobody. Several Mapai ministers, Aran among them, disapproved of Eshkol’s choice of Eban as his emissary, believing him ineffective and untrustworthy. In the Pit, meanwhile, Israeli generals were complaining of government indecisiveness. Plans were completed for launching Focus, for advancing into Sinai and, if necessary, on other fronts as well—to the Jordan headwaters in the north and the Latrun corridor leading to Jerusalem. The success of all these operations hinged on gaining the element of surprise which, in turn, hung on the word of Eshkol, which the prime minister hesitated to give.

  Rabin also had misgivings—deep misgivings. While he knew that Israel could not ignore a direct appeal from the American president, he also realized that far more than forty-eight hours would pass before Eban completed his mission. The news in the interim was frightful. Egypt’s 4th Division had completed its deployment in Sinai and the Straits had been mined. Arab leaders were lining up to volunteer their armies to, in the words of a convocation of religious clerics in Egypt, “wash away with Muslim blood the 19 year-old Arab disgrace in Palestine.”

  The weight of decision making was becoming too great for Rabin. A few hours after the ministerial meeting, he woke Eshkol from his afternoon nap to tell him that he had changed his mind: Israel must go to war. “Is there any way out of this?” the prime minister asked. Rabin answered grimly, “We will suffer many losses, but we have no other choice.” But Eshkol was still unconvinced. “The IDF will not attack before the political options have been exhausted,” he responded, and permission to strike was withheld. Rabin’s position was quickly becoming untenable. A new, morale-boosting song was making the rounds in Israel, with the refrain “Nasser waits for Rabin.” The reality, however, was radically different, as Rabin’s memoirs recalled: “If Nasser was waiting for Rabin, Rabin was waiting for Eshkol; Eshkol was waiting for his Cabinet; the Cabinet for Eban [and] Eban for President Johnson…”51

  The pace of the following hours was frantic. “The tension rose and rose and rose,” Lior recounted, “Messages poured in from around the world. Telephones rang incessantly…The clock raced.” The combined mass of these pressures converged on Rabin, along with the onus of personal culpability first imposed on him by Ben-Gurion. “Egypt will be fighting on a single front, but we will have to fight on at least two, perhaps three,” Haim Moshe Shapira reminded him. “Now we will be totally isolated, and we won’t receive arms supplies if we run short during the fighting…Do you want to bear the responsibility for endangering Israel? I shall resist it as long as I breathe!”52

  Whether it was Shapira’s words or reports of the gathering Egyptian threat to Eilat, by the night of May 23 Rabin snapped. “I sunk into a profound crisis brought on by my guilt…that I had led the country into war under the most difficult circumstances,” he later told an Israeli journalist. “Everything was on my shoulders, rightly or wrongly. I had eaten almost nothing for almost nine days, hadn’t slept, was smoking non-stop, and was physically exhausted.” His wife, Leah, seeing his condition, forbade him from embarking on a tour of the southern front. Instead, she called the army’s chief physician, Dr. Eliyahu Gilon, who diagnosed a case of acute anxiety and administered a tranquilizer.

  Rabin’s collapse was kept secret from the Israeli public, and would only be disclosed many years later and then ascribed to “nicotine poisoning.” That night, however, Weizman was summoned to the chief of staff’s house where he found his commander “silent and still” and extremely depressed. “I endangered the state…my mistakes,” Rabin stammered. “The biggest and most brutal war yet.” In a report filed six months later, Weizman claimed that Rabin offered him his post. The operations chief declined, though, citing the need to maintain the nation’s morale and to guide the government to a brave and inevitable decision. Rabin subsequently denied that the conversation ever took place, but the fact remained that the chief of staff was incapacitated, and his operations chief was de facto in charge.53

  Free of Rabin’s hesitations, Weizman expanded the army’s attack plans. Now, in addition to destroying Egypt’s air force and conquering Gaza, Israeli troops would advance westward to al-‘Arish and, time permitting, beyond in the direction of the Canal. The Central and Northern Commands were also prepared for counteraction should Jordan or Syria intervene. Operation Axe (Kardom), as it was called, would be launched on May 26, at the latest. “By tomorrow, the Israel Defense Forces would be ready and prepared for war,” Weizman told the general staff, and expressed complete confidence in the government’s approval. Well before midnight of the 25th, Israeli armor was rolling toward the border.54

  ’Amer’s “Dawn”

  Weizman would be sorely disappointed, however, for Eshkol had
no intention of approving Axe. Deeply disturbed by Rabin’s breakdown, afraid of trigging a war in the middle of Eban’s talks, the prime minister ordered a strict reduction of IDF activity in the south. He even restricted the number of reconnaissance flights over Sinai.

  While Eshkol held back, in Egypt, the pressure for a showdown mounted. “The streets of Cairo looked more like a carnival rather than a city preparing for war,” commented Mahmud al-Jiyyar, a high government official and close associate of Nasser. The city was now festooned with lurid posters showing Arab soldiers shooting, crushing, strangling, and dismembering bearded, hook-nosed Jews. Cairo Radio boasted, “The Gulf of Aqaba, by the dictum of history and the protection of our soldiers, is Arab, Arab, Arab,” and targeted the United States: “Millions of Arabs are…preparing to blow up all of America’s interests, all of America’s installations, and your entire existence, America.”

  Caught up in this frenzy, encouraged by the lack of response, Israeli or American, to the closure of Tiran, Field Marshal ’Amer continued to plan his offensive. “This time we will be the ones to start the war,” he confided to Gen. Murtagi during a tour of forward fortifications. Beyond air strikes at strategic targets and the detachment of Eilat, ’Amer now broadened his objectives to include the entire Negev. Orders for the new operation, code-named Dawn (al-Fajr) were to be issued directly from ‘Amer’s house, further circumventing Supreme Head-quarters. Al-Jiyyar observed: “I now understood that the streets of Cairo reflected the concept that had seized the leadership, namely that the destruction of Israel was a child’s game that only required the hooking up of a few telephone lines at the commander’s house and the writing of victory slogans.”55

  ‘Amer’s Dawn clearly violated Nasser’s strategy of drawing Israel into starting the war. Why, then, did Nasser not veto it? Egyptian sources are divided over this question—indeed over the degree to which Nasser even knew about the plan. Loyalists like Heikal insist that Nasser wanted a blueprint for attack and, while not directly involved in its drafting, implicitly approved it. Writers critical of Nasser, however, assert that ‘Amer, alone, devised the operation in blatant opposition to Nasser’s will. The truth, no doubt, lay somewhere between: Nasser was apprised of Dawn but lacked the political strength to override ‘Amer’s order. Also, the preparation of an Egyptian invasion of Israel had certain advantages for Nasser, as will be seen.

  In its initial phase, the only objections to Dawn were raised by senior officers, many of whom believed that the remilitarization of Sinai was merely an exercise, and who now realized that war was its intended outcome. Having already opposed the reoccupation of Sharm al-Sheikh as a needless provocation, Chief of Staff Fawzi considered Dawn disastrous. “Did the plan have any political objectives?” he asked in retrospect, and then answered himself: “How could it when the link between the military and the political echelons was missing?”56

  The application of Dawn was also wreaking havoc on Conqueror, Egypt’s triple-tiered defense strategy. Already lacking the troops necessary to man all the fortifications and trenchworks, the army was redirecting entire brigades to forward jump-off positions. The last-minute, contradictory orders only deepened the confusion created by the influx of tens of thousands of men—reservists, newly repatriated units from Yemen—many of whom arrived on cattle cars, without uniforms or guns, ragged and hungry. At the Qantara railroad junction, Gen. ‘Abd al-Fattah Abu Fadel, deputy chief of Egyptian military intelligence, saw “a great heap of men and boys lost because of the negligence and recklessness of the armed forces leadership,” and wondered, “Is this the status of our forces which will face our enemy Israel?”

  An estimated 20 percent of Egypt’s tanks, a quarter of its artillery pieces, and a third of its planes were unfit for action, and less than half of its troops reached their designated positions. Of these, many were now being ordered to undertake a mission they had never studied, into territory totally unfamiliar to them. “There were no provisions for communications, no directives for the artillery or for the administration [of the captured areas], no multi-staged plan,” recalled Fawzi. Yet when he protested to ‘Amer that “our forces know nothing of this plan,” the field marshal barked back: “Then train them!”57

  So vast was the chaos that even a hireling like Murtagi began to question the wisdom of Dawn. Like Fawzi, he, too, had thought the army’s purpose was more political than strategic, and was shocked to hear of the intended offensive. He pointed out the shortage of manpower, the dearth of preparations. “He [‘Amer] seemed surprised by my response,” the general remembered, but the field marshal remained wedded to his plan. Sidqi Mahmud, too, cast doubts on his pilots’ ability to carry out all the sorties assigned to them, complaining to ‘Amer, “An attack on Eilat…an attack on the Dimona atomic reactor…on the Haifa oil refineries…Do you think that I’m the commander of the American air force? I can’t plan an attack on Eilat and operation Leopard [bombing the Israeli coast] at the same time!”58 The response he received was silence.

  Still Nasser refused to intervene. The days after the closure decision were intensely busy for the Egyptian president. There were delegations to receive from Arab states—Syria’s prime minister, Kuwait’s foreign minister and the Iraqi vice president—and letters of support to answer from China, North Vietnam, and North Korea. There were daily meetings at Supreme Headquarters, and increasingly bombastic speeches to deliver. “We knew that closing the Gulf of Aqaba meant war with Israel,” he revealed to a convention of Arab trade unionists, “If war comes it will be total and the objective will be Israel’s destruction…This is Arab power.” Nasser also harped on “American gangsterism” and what he regarded as America’s obsession with Israel’s rights. “What is Israel?” he asked rhetorically, then answered: “Israel today is the United States.”59

  Though hardly new, Nasser’s reproofs of the U.S. had been sharpened by a speech President Johnson broadcast on May 23. This described the blockade as “illegal” and “potentially disastrous to the cause of peace.” The United States considered Tiran an international waterway, Johnson said, and reiterated America’s commitment to the “political independence and territorial integrity of all nations in the area.”Notes verbales sent by the White House went further: Egypt had committed “aggression” in the Straits, harming vital U.S. interests, and would face “gravest international consequences” by initiating violence “overt or clandestine…by regular military forces or irregular groups.” Rumors were circulating of an American plan to break the blockade by force, of Marines already training for an amphibious landing at Tiran. The 6th Fleet had gone on alert in the eastern Mediterranean.

  Nasser’s fear of U.S. military intervention would not be mitigated by a private letter he received from the White House in which Johnson denied harboring any animosity toward Egypt or to its president personally. “Your task and mine is not to look back, but to rescue the Middle East—and the whole human community—from a war I believe no one wants,” Johnson wrote, and proposed sending Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey on a mediation mission to Cairo. Nasser was unimpressed. This was the same Hubert H. Humphrey who, that very week, had called Israel “a beacon to all peoples in the Middle East and elsewhere.” Though Riad tried to allay his fears, noting Johnson’s expressions of support for the Armistice Agreements and the absence of any ironbound U.S. commitment to Israel, Nasser remained distrustful of Washington’s intentions, and fearful of U.S.-Israeli plots.60

  Nasser’s apprehensions were at least partly a reflection of the general state of U.S.-Egyptian relations, close to ruinous even before the crisis. The quiet diplomatic channels that had once helped siphon some of the venom from those relations in the past were now obstructed, the result of personnel changes in both Washington and Cairo. Egypt’s veteran ambassador, Dr. Mustafa Kamel, a 58 year-old bachelor, former law professor, and ambassador to India, was due to retire within days. Urbane and philo-American, Kamel believed Egypt’s future lay in economic development, not in ruling the
Arab world. He labored to maintain open lines to the White House, assuring staff members that Nasser admired the United States and was determined to keep the Palestine issue “in the icebox.” Even after the blockade of the Straits, Kamel went on insisting that the situation was not irreversible and that room for negotiation remained.

  Kamel’s departure from Washington was preceded by Lucius Battle’s from Cairo in March. His replacement, Richard H. Nolte, arrived only on May 21, the day before Nasser closed the Straits. On paper, at least, Nolte was an ideal ambassador: a naval aviator in World War II, a Rhodes Scholar with degrees from Oxford and Yale, knowledgeable in Arabic, and the director of the Middle East Studies Association. He believed that Nasser had gained the upper hand in Sinai, enabling him to claim a moral victory or to label Israel as the aggressor if it attacked. Yet none of Nolte’s training prepared him for the hands-on, high caliber diplomacy the situation now required. When asked by reporters for his reaction to the crisis, Nolte responded, “What crisis?”61

  In view of Nolte’s inexperience, the State Department had decided to reinforce the Cairo embassy with Charles Yost, a former ambassador to Damascus and close acquaintance of Mahmoud Riad. Until Yost arrived,though, Nolte was on his own, and had not even presented his credentials. Raid was quick with him: Egypt would stop all Israel-bound ships and cargoes and defend itself against any force that tried to defend them. Nolte reported that Nasser had decided on a course of war with Israel, a war for which he was well prepared and confident, not entirely without reason, of winning. “[The] current state of [the] Arab mind seems to be that of early 1948 rather [than] 1956,” he warned. “[The] Arab[s] believe [that] victory is no tentative possibility, but a reality.”62