But along with strategic considerations, Dayan was also guided by a political interest in safeguarding his exclusivity over all military decisions. “Don’t interfere with security matters,” he warned Allon and the other ministers—Galili, Carmel—in favor of capturing the Golan. “In security matters there’s no democracy. If you try to interfere, I’ll quit.” Dayan would sanction only minimal action in the north: occupation of the Demilitarized Zones and, possibly, of the Banias springs. Yet he told Ben-Gurion confidentially that the Syrians’ “recklessness” was insufferable. Once the other fronts were decided, he said, Syria’s turn would come.23
Dayan’s position was predicated on maintaining an acceptable level of violence in the north, but at 2:00 A.M. on the morning of June 6, that assumption was substantively challenged. A massive artillery barrage fell from Kibbutz Dan and Kfar Szold at the tip of the Hula Valley to Ein Gev on the southern shores of Galilee. As many as 265 guns rained an estimated forty-five tons of ordnance per minute on the settlements; nearly a thousand shells pummeled the town of Rosh Pine alone. In an effort to deflect the Syrian fire, IDF engineers ignited barrels of smoke along the border, but the tactic proved only partially effective. Some 205 houses, 14 public buildings, and 45 vehicles were damaged; 16 people were injured and 2 killed.
Launching the salvos were two Syrian battalions—the 129th and the 168th—of 130-mm guns, in addition to four companies of heavy mortars and antitank weapons. “The enemy appears to have suffered heavy losses and is retreating,” reported Ca pt. Ibrahim Aktum, observation officer in Syria’s 11th Brigade, positioned atop Tel ’Azzaziat. “At this crucial and historical hour our forces have begun to fight and to bomb the enemy’s position along the entire front,” declared Defense Minister al-Assad. “These are just the first shots in the war of liberation.”
After the enemy’s air attacks of the previous day, Syria’s confidence was restored by the Israelis’ failure to respond to the shelling. Close to midnight, general headquearters in Damascus received a top-secret wire from its counter-part in Cairo: “Our forces are striking Israel and its army fiercely. We have destroyed most of the Israeli planes and our army is now advancing toward Tel Aviv…Report to us at once on the situation on the northern front and the enemy’s disposition.” Suweidani quickly called a meeting of the general staff and ordered Operation Victory—the conquest of northern Israel—implemented.
The offensive was to begin with a feigned thrust into the tip of the Hula Valley. The main incursion would follow in the south, close to the Sea of Galilee, with three full brigades.
The feint began at 7:00, when troops of the 243rd Infantry Battalion, accompanied by two companies of T-34 tanks, descended from the Banias toward Kibbutz Dan. The settlement’s inhabitants were nowhere in sight, and the Syrians believed the Israelis had deserted. In fact, they were merely in bomb shelters, and when the alarm sounded, they ran to defend the perimeter. “I came out and suddenly saw six tanks swooping down on us firing explosive shells straight at us, and then smoke and phosphorous,” recalled one kibbutz member, identified in the record as Yossi. “That was the signal for the infantry charge…I heard shouting and saw 70 soldiers lined up and charging us from 350 meters away…I fired everything I had point-blank and saw how they began to fall.”
Similar assaults were attempted on other Israeli targets, on Tel Dan and the IDF bunker at Ashmora, each with identical results. Seven Syrian tanks were destroyed, and twenty troops killed. An Israeli commander, Col. Yitzhak Halfon, also lost his life.24
The probe was repulsed while the main Syrian thrust never materialized. Unfamiliar with the terrain, the commanders of three brigades failed to arrive at the launching site. The bridges over the Jordan were found to be too narrow for the wide-bodied Soviet tanks, and the tanks lacked radio contact with the infantry. Other units simply remained in their camps near Quneitra, ignoring orders to move out. The failure of the attack effectively dissuaded Damascus from pursuing Victory further. Any lingering doubts were dispelled by the pounding of Syrian positions by Israeli artillery and jets. “The situation at the Syrian front was bad,” concluded an internal army report. “Our forces did not go on the offensive either because they did not arrive or were not wholly prepared or because they could not find shelter from the enemy’s planes. The reserves could not withstand the air attacks; they dispersed after their morale plummeted. By the evening of June 6, a large part of the reserves had wandered without orders back to base.”
Thereafter, citing “the most severe conditions—continuous aerial bombardment of every sort of ordnance, including napalm—and losses of 20 percent,” the Syrians revived their defensive plan, Operation Holy War. The decision did not deter them from mounting a virtual offensive, however. Damascus Radio claimed that Sh’ar Yishuv had been occupied [it was not even attacked] and five Israeli jets shot down. The Jews were fleeing toward Haifa,it said. Nor was the truth told to the Egyptians. “Our forces are conquering the Hula Valley and advancing swiftly toward Rosh Pina and Safad.” general headquarters relayed to Cairo. “By day’s end we shall surely be in Nazareth.”25
The shelling of Israeli settlements escalated meanwhile, reaching various levels of lethality throughout the day. Rabin was not impressed with the display, dismissing it as an attempt to refute the allegation, already gaining currency in the Arab world, that “Syria is willing to fight to the last Egyptian.” He favored several small operations to occupy the DZ’s and Banias headwaters and to capture POW’s later to be exchanged for Israeli pilots shot down over Syria. But the IDF’s priorities were still in the West Bank, Rabin concluded, and not on the Golan Heights.
That conclusion was hardly to the liking of David Elazar, the Northern Command chief. Born in Sarajevo, where he and Bar-Lev had been childhood friends, “Dado” had moved to Palestine at age sixteen and made the army his home. As an armored corps commander in 1956, he had earned a reputation for gallantry and aggressiveness. Handsome, charismatic, he had gained the affection of Israeli settlers throughout the north and, reciprocating that warmth, sought to protect them permanently from Syria.
According to Dado, the bombardment of Galilee and the attack on Kibbtuz Dan were merely preludes to a much larger, deadlier, offensive. Though many of his units were engaged in the West Bank, he felt he had sufficient forces to take the northern Golan, at least. Elazar had scheduled his attack for the morning of June 8—hazy skies were forecast for the 7th, complicating air cover—and was certain that the government would approve it.26
But while Dado planned, Dayan continued to oppose fighting on a third front and risking further provocation of the Soviets. Rabin stressed the need to eliminate the guns shelling Jewish settlements and to capture the Jordan headwaters; Meir Amit insisted that the Americans would support the campaign. But the minister of defense remained unshakable: Elazar and his Hammer operation would not get a green light.
Dayan’s clemency toward Syria did not, however, extend to Jordan. Angered by Hussein’s rejection of Israel’s earlier appeals for quiet, Dayan had little patience for the king’s latest requests for a tacit cease-fire. “First we finish the work he imposed on us,” he told Rabin, “then we’ll send him an appropriate reply.” The “work” he had in mind was the complete conquest of the West Bank high ground overlooking the Jordan Valley. IDF elements might also descend to Jericho and the Jordan River crossings, once the enemy’s armor was eliminated. Only in Jerusalem did Dayan continue to counsel restraint, rebuffing all suggestions that Israel capture the Old City.
He would reiterate his position that noon when he and Weizman joined Uzi Narkiss in visiting the newly relieved Mount Scopus. “What a divine view!”Dayan exclaimed, enjoying the stunning scene of the Old City with its golden dome and church towers. But Narkiss, anxious to receive permission to penetrate those walls, was in no mood for sight-seeing. Recalling how, two thousand years before, the Roman general Titus had tried and failed to destroy the Jewish connection to Jerusalem, Narkiss requested immedi
ate permission to occupy the Old City. “Under no circumstances,” was Dayan’s reply. The army could mine the area around the city, surround it, and prompt it to surrender on its own. Breaking through the walls, however, would spark an international backlash that Israel could hardly afford. “I want none of that Vatican,” said Moshe Dayan.27
The allusion to Rome was not unintentional, word having reached Israel of a papal proposal to declare Jerusalem an open city, inviolate from attacks by either side. The plan swiftly received blessings from Washington, which began to exert pressure on the Israelis to accept a cease-fire with Jordan and desist from entering the Old City. To do so now meant not only angering Christians worldwide but antagonizing the Americans as well.
But the army’s encirclement of the Old City had presented the government with a fait accompli. How could victorious Jewish soldiers gathered just meters away from Judaism’s holiest site not try to reach it? This question was weighing on the Ministerial Defense Committee when it next met at 2:00 that afternoon.
Eshkol, after much hesitation, arrived at an answer. Israeli forces would take the Old City, whereupon the government would convene the leaders of all the main churches and guarantee its respect for their shrines. Begin, recalling efforts to reach a cease-fire at the UN, warned, “we’re liable to remain outside the walls of Jerusalem as we did in 1948.” He proposed that the country’s leaders, military and civilian, march to the Western Wall and offer a prayer for the city’s sanctity. Yigal Allon agreed: Take the city and be done with it. Haim Moshe Shapira’s idea was that Israel would appeal to Christian and Muslim leaders to quietly persuade Hussein to surrender the city without further bloodshed. Most ministers reacted cynically to these suggestions; Galili, for example, demanded that the city be taken immediately, without fanfare, before international pressure could mount.
It was Dayan’s word, however, that again proved decisive, and Dayan still opposed breaking into the Old City. Since the IDF controlled the area militarily anyway, he reasoned, it would wait until the Sinai fighting was completed before committing itself to another urban battle. In a private conversation with Ben-Gurion, however, the defense minister offered another explanation: Israel should not seize the holy places only to have to give them up later under the threat of international sanctions. Having been sworn by Eshkol not to authorize unnecessary offensives, Dayan had more often than not served as a brake on Israeli activism. Yet his true thinking on Jerusalem and other battles remained a mystery. As one senior defense official, not without raillery, remarked to an American diplomat, “General Dayan will turn a blind eye on any attempt to interrupt the course of events.”28
Battling for Cease-Fire
Whether to capture the Old City, attack Syria, or occupy Sharm al-Sheikh immediately or wait an additional day—all such questions were subject to the all-important time factor. The war, the Israelis understood, would be decided not only on the battlefield, but 6,000 miles away in Washington and New York.
That understanding lay behind Abba Eban’s early morning departure from Tel Aviv, his assignment to forestall the adoption of a UN cease-fire resolution. Eban intended to present the Council with a comprehensive peace plan confident that the Arabs would reject it and so grant Israel additional hours, if not days, of fighting. But Eban was also looking beyond the end of the war, to the period of intensive diplomacy certain to follow. He was determined to avoid what he termed the “nightmare” and “political trauma” of 1956, in which a triumphant Israel was forced to concede its gains without exacting peace. “Here we were again breaking out of the closing circle of Arab aggression and here again plans would be laid to see that our neck was restored to the…noose.”
Eshkol, however, was hesitant. While he, too, hoped that a military victory could alter the context of Arab-Israeli relations existing since 1948, he found the mere mention of peace at this stage too risky. “We ask that you do not put forward diplomatic plans or peace proposals at this stage,” Dr. Ya’akov Herzog, Cabinet secretary, instructed Eban. “We must complete the military phase, and promoting far-reaching diplomatic trends may only increase pressure to stem the advance of our forces. Furthermore, by making such proposals to the UN, we are liable to hinder the chances for realizing them through direct contacts in the field…or through whatever bilateral channel may open during the talks.”29
Sleepless for nearly two days, Eban embarked on a tortuous journey. First, a hunk of Jordanian shrapnel narrowly missed him crossing his own front lawn, then military traffic delayed him for hours reaching his plane, a twin-engine domestic aircraft; all others had been mobilized. Flying at extremely low altitudes to avoid enemy radar, Eban landed at Athens and began searching for a connecting flight. Another stopover in Amsterdam followed before a visibly drained foreign minister finally landed in New York. He received no rest, but rather was whisked immediately to the Security Council.
Waiting for him anxiously was Gideon Rafael. The Israeli ambassador had spent the last twenty-four hours struggling hard against a cease-fire resolution, specifically one that restored the status quo ante bellum but without ending the status belli. “Nasser should never again reap a political victory from a military defeat,” he wrote Arthur Goldberg, “This is vital not only for Israel but also for the Western position in the Middle East.” Eban, arriving, insisted that the resolution contain no reference to the Armistice regime, and treated Goldberg to a prolonged lecture on the damage such allusion could cause to later peacemaking efforts. “Abba…don’t worry,” Goldberg, finally getting a word in, reassured him, “It’s finished, draft resolution and everything…Send Gideon over; I’ll give him the draft.”
But Eban had no time for text-viewing. Moments later he was called to address the Council where, reading from handwritten notes jotted in transit, he delivered a tour de force.
Declaring that Israel had “passed from serious danger to successful and glorious resistance,” Eban went on to chronicle the origins of the crisis, beginning with remilitarization of Sinai, the removal of UNEF, and Nasser’s blockade of Tiran. Rich in metaphor—“Israel…is breathing with a single lung,” he said, referring to the blockade, and then to UNEF: “an umbrella that is taken away as soon as it begins to rain”—his remarks were also high on drama. “Look around this table and imagine,” he asked with a glance at each ambassador present, “a foreign power forcibly closing New York or Montreal, Boston or Marseilles, Toulon or Copenhagen, Rio or Tokyo or Bombay Harbor. How would your government react? What would you do? How long would you wait?” Finally, all but ignoring Herzog’s caveat, he evinced Israel’s “instinct for peace” and called for a comprehensive peace plan for the Middle East. “Let us build a new system of relationships from the wreckage of the old! Let us discern across the darkness the vision of a brighter and gentler dawn!”30
Whatever the risks Eban incurred by again exceeding his instructions were more than offset by his genius at oratory. Broadcast throughout the world, hailed by the New York Times for his “mastery of phrase-making,” and the Chicago Tribune for delivering “one of the great diplomatic speeches of all time,” Eban profoundly impacted public opinion. This was already running markedly in Israel’s favor. Of the 17,445 letters received by the White House in the first forty-eight hours of the war, 96 percent were pro-Israel, 3 percent isolationist, and only 1 percent in support of the Arabs. A Harris poll showed that over half of all Americans believed that the Soviets had engineered the Middle East war as a means of strengthening the Communist position in Vietnam. The press, generally evenhanded on Middle East issues, could barely contain its excitement over Israel’s advances.
These developments did not escape the attention of Lyndon Johnson, a man acutely attuned to public sentiment. Ensconced in the Situation Room where Lady Bird, his wife, served him breakfast, together with Rusk, McNamara, and the Rostows, the president continued to scrutinize the war. He was thoroughly disgusted with the Soviet role in the crisis and with the Arabs’ Big Lie. The upsurge in pro-Israeli f
eeling throughout the United States also engaged Johnson, as did the requisites of the approaching election year. His inclination was to permit Israel to keep its conquests in Sinai at least, and use them as a bargaining chip in future negotiations. Clearly, Rusk asserted, “we can’t make Israel accept a puny settlement.” Walt Rostow put a finer point on it, questioning “whether the settlement of this war shall be on the basis of armistice agreements, which leave the Arabs in the posture of hostilities towards Israel, keeping alive the Israeli issue in Arab political life as a unifying force, and affording the Soviet Union a handle on the Arab world; or whether a settlement emerges in which Israel is accepted as a Middle Eastern state with rights of passage through the Suez Canal.”
The Israelis were, of course, amenable. In a secret message passed from Israeli Supreme Court Chief Justice Shimon Agranat to Goldberg, and from Goldberg to Johnson, Eshkol assured the president that he understood America’s difficulties in relieving the Tiran blockade and the threat to Israel’s security. He asked only that America help delay attempts to impose a Security Council cease-fire, that it support Israel’s demand for peace in return for evacuating captured Arab territory, and, most crucially, that it deter the Soviets from intervening. Other than that, Eshkol wrote, “We are prepared to handle the matter ourselves.” The administration seemed ready to honor that request, Israeli officials believed. “It turns out that Eban did not relate Johnson’s message accurately,” Ben-Gurion, drawing on his own sources within the government, concluded. “America wants us to finish off Nasser quickly.”31
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