Also opposed to the June 19 decision was Menachem Begin, whose Gahal (later Likud) party rejected the very notion of territorial concessions. “In my opinion, the concept of autonomy [in the West Bank] will lead to a Palestinian State,” he told the Cabinet. The Jewish component of Israeli identity had been stimulated by the conquest of the Biblical homeland—Bethlehem, Jericho, Hebron—and Begin, always attuned to that strian, envisioned creating a Greater Israle. Ten years later, though, as prime minister, Begin would welcome Anwar Sadat, Nasser’s successor, to Israel, and thereafter agreed to return all of Sinai to Egypt and to institute Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza. He would resign, his spirit sapped by another Arab-Israeli war—in Lebanon—and die a recluse in 1992.
Seated beside Allon and Begin in the Hebrew University amphitheater were members of the IDF general staff. Among them were those more sympathetic to the “politicians’” stance, generals such as Uzi Narkiss and Yeshayahu Gavish, both of whom went on to become active in public affairs, and Israel Tal, later known as the father of Israel’s own battle tank, the Merkava (Chariot). None, however, would have the impact on Israeli policy made by the military leaders associated with the “security” school.
David Elazar, for example, was adamant about retaining the Golan Heights he had lobbied so hard to capture. When, shortly after the 1967 war, Palestinian guerrilla attacks resumed from Lebanon and northern Jordan, Dado swore to “make life unbearable” for those countries. “IDF actions are more conductive to quiet than extended constraint is,” he said. Forbidden by the government of Golda Meir from launching a preemptive strike on the massing Egyptian and Syrian forces in 1973, Elazar, as chief of staff, was blamed for Israel’s early setbacks in that war and ordered to resign. Literally brokenhearted, he died two years later.
Another outspoken opponent of territorial concessions was Ezer Weizman. Leaving the army for politics, he naturally gravitated to Begin’s government, in which he served as defense minister. Yet, like Begin, Weizmand agreed to Israel’s total withdrawal from Sinai. He later switched allegiance to the Labor party and refashioned himself a champion of peace. Elected as Israel’s honorific president in 1993, he held the post for seven years, before resinating amid financial scandals.
Finally, there was Ariel Sharon, later to gain fame for his performance in the 1973 war and notoriety as the defense minister who promoted Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Held indirectly responsible for the massacre of Palestinian refugees by Israel’s Lebanese allies the following year, he resigned his post but remained a rigorous foe of forfeiting land, even in return for peace. Yet the same Sharon who promoted the construction of dozens of new settlements in the West Bank and Gaza also uprooted Israeli settlements in Sinai, prior to returning it to Egypt. In 2001, after his election as prime minister, Sharon formed a national unity government with Shimon Peres and other Laborites committed to the near-total withdrawal for the territories.11
Israelis were divided over the degree to which the context had changed, whether peace was possible or whether another war lay ahead. In the course of the following decades, many would vacillate between one conclusion and the other. But of all the leaders gathered on Mount Scoups that day in 1967, only one, Moshe Dayan, succeeded in espousing both ideas simultaneously.
“I’m waiting for the phone to ring,” Dayan was widely quoted as saying, implying that Israel would be willing to return territories if the Arabs came forward for talks. But in the Cabinet debate on the June 19 resolution, Dayan argued that there was no use discussing the terms for peace since the Arabs would never accept Israel. He protested the decision, saying, “We cannot withdraw from Sinai and the Golan on the basis of a single vote!” Dayan promoted Jewish settlement of the West Bank, but was not averse to establishing a Palestinian state there or to preserving Jordans’s status as protector of its Muslim shrines. In Sinai, he opposed settlement building but pushed for the construction of Yamit, the peninsula’s largest Jewish town. He stressed the need for Israel “to sit tight and keep ruling” the territories, but in 1970, proposed an Israeli pullback for the Suez Canal as the first step toward nonbelligerency. Six weeks after the end of the Six-Day War, according to the British embassy’s count, Dayan voiced no less than six different opinions on peace.
Unpredictable, enigmatic, Dayan would generate further controversy in the 1973 war when he suffered a breakdown similar to Rabin’s in 1967, and was forced by popular pressure from the defense ministry. He returned three years later as Begin’s foreign minister, and in that capacity spearheaded the negotiations—at first secret and later, at Camp David, overt—with Sadat. Then, angered by Begin’s alleged foot-dragging on the Palestinian issue, he quite the government to form his own party dedicated to unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank. The effort was cut short in 1981, however, by Dayan’s death from cancer.12
Caught between the “politicians” and the “security men,” grappling with the protean positions of Dayan, was Israel’s prime minister, Eshkol. He had been overshadowed by the military men and haunted by his alleged indecisiveness in the weeks preceding the war. The man who had stood up to the entire general staff, who had bargained with Johnson and called Kong’s bluff, whose determination to wait three weeks had won much of world opinion and given his army much-needed time to prepare—that man sat unheralded among the Mount Scopus guests.
Eshkol, too, distinguished between Israel’s “security” and “political” interests. The former, he maintained, could be satisfied by creating demilitarized zones and forward IDF posts in sensitive areas of the occupied territories, and the latter, by peace treaties with Egypt and Syria on the basis of the prewar borders. Peace could also be reached with Jordan according to the UN Partition lines, and by compensating and resettling the Palestinian refugees.
The linchpin of Eskhol’s plan was the Palestinian’s willingness to set up a “protected” and potentially independent regime in the West Bank. But his vision could both be realized. Of the eighty West Bank notables interviewed by Israeli fact-finders that summer, few could agree on the nature of Palestinian self-rule, while Palestinians outside the territories violently opposed the concept. Hussein, fearing the threat the proposed state would pose to his kingdom, worked to undermine Eshkol’s efforts, and Nasser rejected any arrangement that failed to restore all the occupied territories, including Jerusalem.13
Nonetheless, Eshkol refused to give up. He continued to seek Palestinian partners in the West Bank and Arab leaders willing to negotiate directly. He persisted in the belief, as he told Lyndon Johnson, that “the Six-Day War may have possibly, for the first time, stirred in the Middle East the beginnings of a process leading to peace.”
The meeting between the president and the prime minister, their first in four years, took place at Johnson’s Texas ranch in January 1968. Eshkol stressed the changes that the war had wrought in the region, and the opportunities it had opened. “Our policy is direct negotiations leading to peace treaties. We take this line not because of any obstinate adhesion to any particular formula, but because we believe that face-to-face contact and reasoning together will create a new psychological reality.” He continued to evince the dichotomous self-image of Israeli strength and helplessness, praising the IDF while complaining that “one defeat in the field can be fatal for our survival…Israel could be exterminated in one day”…still “Samson the nerd.” But, at base, Eshkol remained nothing but magnanimous:
Mr. President, I have no sense of boastful triumph nor have I entered the struggle for peace in the role of victor. My feeling is one of relief that we were saved from disaster in June and for this I thank God. All my thoughts now are turned toward getting peace with our neighbors—a peace of honor between equals.
Just over a year later, Eshkol was dead, the victim of heart failure brought on—Col. Lior persistently believed—by the stresses of the Six-Day War. Strangely, one of the primary sources of that tension, Moshe Dayan, rushed to the foot of the prime minister’s deathbed
, cried “Eshkol!” and burst sobbing out of the room. Indeed, all of Israel was stunned. The Ha’aretz editors, who had once demanded Eshkol’s resignation from the Defense Ministry, praised his “ability to run the state with a staff of refinement rather than the stick of wrath,” and his “roots as a Jew, an Israeli, and man experienced in the ways of life far beyond politics.” Another daily, Ma’ariv, acknowledging his leadership in the 1967 war, speculated that, “perhaps only Eshkol, whose personality combined audacity, obstinacy, and weakness, could have weathered the most serious crisis Israel ever faced.”
Reactions in the Arab world were less laudatory, of course. Cairo Radio welcomed the demise of a “leader of the gang that built Israel on the body parts of Arab victims,” while an Iraqi spokesman eulogized “the cleverest personality ever to conduct war crimes in our captured land.” In a communiqué issued from Damascus, al-Fatah claimed credit for killing Eshkol with a surface-to-surface missile. Arafat declared, “our primary goal now is the liberation of Palestine through armed force, even if the struggle continues for tens of years.”14
Three No’s or Three Yeses?
For all appearances, Arab opinion on Israel had only been hardened by the war. There could still be “no peace with Israel, no survival of the influence of imperialism and no existence in our land of the Zionist state,” according to an official Egyptian broadcast. “The Arab masses will never let any responsible Arab person remain alive who would dare negotiate with Israel.” The depth of the animosity, the anger, and the shame was expressed by Hazem Nuseibah, a Princeton graduate, a Palestinian who had once served as Jordan’s foreign minister. “If the United States believes that because of the enormity of our catastrophe we will forget Palestine and there will be peace in the Middle East, you are making a major mistake,” he told Findley Burns. “There will be no peace in the Middle East.”
Arab politics, too, appeared to have emerged from the war every bit as implacable as before. On the day that Israel decided to exchange the Golan Heights for peace, the Syrian regime executed twenty officers for sedition, and offered to collaborate with Baghdad in overthrowing King Hussein. Salim Hatum, the former mutineer still living in Amman, was offered amnesty and lured back to Damascus, where Intelligence Chief Jundi personally tortured and killed him. “Nasser is an arch intriguer and a bogus leader,” King Faisal told Britain’s ambassador to Jidda. “If I’d been in the Jews’ place, I’d have done exactly the same thing to him,” swore the Saudi monarch who, in 1975, would be shot dead by his own nephew.
The Arab world remained the same, or so it seemed on August 29, when Nasser stepped onto the hot tarmac in Khartoum. The president had arrived in the Sudanese capital for the first pan-Arab summit since 1965, and Nasser’s first meeting with Arab leaders since the disaster three months before. Thousands of people thronged the streets to greet him, but Nasser, nervous and pale, still reeled from the summer’s events. “I cannot forget those first few days in June,” he admitted to his ministers before departing. “I felt a great and indescribable pain. No doubt those days affected all of us, psychologically, materially, spiritually.15
Nasser’s goal was to regain the lost Arab territories. Any diplomatic solution, he knew, would have to involve cooperation with the United States, but as yet unwilling to accord Israel even oblique recognition, much less peace, Nasser still needed a military option. He had to rebuild his army, and for that he turned to the USSR.
The Soviets, however, were hesitant. Too much of their weaponry had been lost or had fallen into Western hands, and they feared that renewed fighting now, with the Arabs still weak, could result in nuclear war. Visiting Cairo on June 22, President Podgorny agreed to meet Nasser’s requests for hundreds of jets, tanks, and advisers, but in return he demanded a port for the Soviet fleet and—more unpalatable for Egypt—a political solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. “Are you asking for more aircraft with the intention of ultimately annihilating Israel?” inquired Podgorny, and Nasser curtly replied, “any discussion on political concessions is only a reward for aggression and that is illogical both politically and mentally.”
The request for arms was reiterated the following month in Moscow by president ‘Aref of Iraq and Algeria’s Houari Boumedienne, acting as Nasser’s emissaries. Brezhnev again demanded a quid pro quo of a land-for-nonbelligerency arrangement. “Let Israel withdraw and then interpret the resolution the way you want,” the party chairman advised them. “Then, when you become strong, do whatever you want.” The deal would involve neither peace nor recognition, but again Nasser held firm, declaring, “That which was taken by force will be returned by force,” and “the price [of nonbelligerency] will turn our defeat into a double defeat.” In the end he got his way: The Soviets agreed to rearm Egypt completely and without preconditions.16
With his replenished arsenal, Nasser was able to wage a three-year war of attrition against Israeli forces in Sinai, and so sustain his claim that the June War was merely the first stage in a more protracted struggle. But while Egyptian and Israeli guns pounded one another across the Suez Canal, the superpowers, both in and outside the UN, strove to reach a modus vivendi on the Middle East. Nasser could not ignore those efforts. “To my mind the solution of peace, whether Soviet or American, is the way of surrender,” he said. “The only way open to us is the road to war.” Pursuing that path, he explained to Arab foreign ministers in July, would necessitate a degree of deception:
We need a period of 2-3 years before we are ready to launch a far-reaching operation to remove the traces of the aggression, but we must hide our preparations under political activity that will convince our friends, and first and foremost the USSR, that we did everything possible within the UN framework and in international negotiations.
The sole exemption to this plan was Jordan, which, dependent on American arms, could not hope to mount a military initiative by 1970. “There is no choice but to give him [Hussein] the freedom to maneuver to regain the West Bank,” Nasser confided to Heikal. As long as he refrained from reaching a separate peace agreement with Israel, Hussein was free to explore ways of retrieving the West Bank through American mediation.17
Preparing for war and maneuvering around peace—Egypt’s “security” and “political” goals; Nasser, too, made the distinction—meant maintaining the level of Arab unity achieved on the eve of the war. A way had to be found of ending the Yemen conflict, of healing the rifts between revolutionary and conservative regimes. In the weeks leading up to Khartoum, Nasser endorsed the resumption of Arab oil shipments to the West; he offered to cease all subversive activity against Arab monarchs and, in return, asked that they aid in salvaging Egypt’s economy. To King Hussein, Nasser wrote, “We have entered this war together, lost it together, and we must win it together…Egypt is willing to tie its fate completely to that of the brave Jordanian people.” In al-Ahram, Heikal made the case for Arab co-existence: “It is in the national interest to permit other experiments and different political and social opinions.”18
Nasser’s prodigious efforts succeeded in preserving at least the semblance of Arab unity, but greater energy still would have to be expended to keep his own country united.
Since his resignation, ‘Abd al-Hakim ‘Amer had secluded himself with sympathizers, chanting “there is no commander but the field marshal” and petitioning for his reinstatement. Fearing widespread sedition, Nasser had offered to restore his former post as vice president, but ‘Amer would settle for nothing less than commander in chief. He began to hoard arms, to mobilize officers soon to be cashiered for their failures in the war. A date was set for the coup—September 1, while Nasser was away in Khartoum—but a week before, Nasser determined that his longtime best friend constituted “a danger to peace, the army, and the homeland,” and decided to act.
Gen. Fawzi led a handpicked battalion to ‘Amer’s villa in Giza. Nasser followed the troop with tears in his eyes. “He felt that processions such as this happen only in Greek tragedies and not in the real lif
e of politicians,” Heikal wrote. Fawzi confiscated piles of weapons and arrested 300 officers. But the purge was only beginning. Over 1,000 people would be incarcerated, including Generals Murtagi and Sidqi Mahmud, Shams Badran and Salah Nasr, and several hundred members of ‘Amer’s family. Many would be sentenced to lengthy prison terms, often with hard labor. Yet even those acquitted continued to suffer disgrace. “People would throw bricks through my windows. When I went outside they would curse me bitterly,” confessed Gen. ‘Abd al-Hamid al-Dugheidi, a senior air force commander who moved from Cairo to Alexandria in order to escape the shame. “Even my own nephew, a child of five, said to me, ‘You’re a coward, uncle. You ran and abandoned us.’”
The cruelest fate, however, awaited ‘Amer. After a prolonged interrogation, the former field marshal and contender for Egypt’s leadership became violently ill and died. An official autopsy discovered that the cause of death was aconite poisoning—a dosage of the drug was found taped to ‘Amer’s stomach—though rumors persisted that he had been shot while trying to escape or executed for threatening to disclose the government’s role in the debacle. Nasser, nevertheless, was crushed, confessing, “It would have been far better for me if I had died rather than witness this defeat. And greater even than the defeat itself is my disappointment in my lifelong friend, ‘Abd al-Hakim.” Others, however, were far less aggrieved. “[It] was the best decision ‘Amer even has taken,” Sadat concluded. “If I were him I would have done it on June 5.”19
These events took a further toll on Nasser, who arrived in Khartoum a physically sick but politically secure ruler, determined to “restore Arab dignity and honor.” King Hussein, by comparison, was both ailing and deeply afraid for his crown.
Six Days of War Page 51
