by Jeremy Bowen
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs
Maps
Introduction
1. Pre-War
2. Day One: 5 June 1967
3. Day Two: 6 June 1967
4. Day Three: 7 June 1967
5. Day Four: 8 June 1967
6. Day Five: 9 June 1967
7. Day Six: 10 June 1967
8. Consequences
9. Legacy
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Copyright
For Julia, Mattie and Jack – and my parents.
‘Euphoria after victory is dangerous.
But what’s even worse is arrogance.
You stop thinking and learning.’
Uri Gil, fighter pilot, Israeli
‘I want peace – but how can I teach my children to extend their hands to others when I carry so much pain in my memory?’
Fayek Abdul Mezied, archivist, Palestinian
Introduction
Roads into war zones feel the same wherever you go. It is something to do with the way that tanks churn up tarmac and verges and flatten parked cars and buildings. When it is wet, mud gets everywhere. If it is dry, you breathe and eat dust. Normal civilian traffic is stripped away by war, and roads turn into something more alien and primitive. Weeds grow where people walked and talked and did their shopping. And there are always jumpy, armed men. The road into Jenin in 2002 had all of that. The Israeli soldiers on the checkpoint were aggressive and hostile. When I got out of my car to talk to one of them he pointed his gun and threatened to shoot me. I did not think he was joking. Lines of cars belonging to Palestinians were kept for hours in a queue that did not move. Armed Israelis who lived inside the West Bank on Jewish settlements raced by, unchecked.
In the end my press pass from the Israeli government worked and the soldiers let me cross into Jenin. They had just been into the town themselves, on a raid to destroy the house of a man they had assassinated the previous night. A refugee camp stands in the heart of Jenin. Or used to. Now there is a great wide space instead. Children in school uniforms were trudging across it. It used to be a poor, densely populated district. The Israelis flattened it with armoured bulldozers after they entered Jenin on 3 April 2002 in the biggest and most ambitious military operation, until then, against the Palestinian uprising. They were after Palestinian militants who they believed had been behind the deaths of more than seventy civilians in Israel in the previous month or so.
The biggest Palestinian attack in a bloody and frightening few weeks was on 27 March 2002. Two hundred and fifty guests were sitting down to their Passover dinner at the Park hotel in Netanya, a seaside town north of Tel Aviv. A man came in wearing a long-haired wig and a big black overcoat. He seemed to be going from table to table looking for his place. His name was Abdel-Basset Odeh and his last act was to detonate the bomb that he had strapped to his body. The explosion blasted back off the walls and ceiling. It killed 29 people and injured 140. Most of them were elderly, many were couples, some had come to Israel after their families were slaughtered by the Nazis in the Holocaust. The attack caused terrible shock and outrage in Israel, because it killed so many innocent people and because it desecrated one of the most important Jewish nights of the year. Passover is a religious festival, commemorating the exodus of Jews from Egypt in the days of Pharaoh, but it is also a night when families, even if they are not religious, try to be together, like Christians do at Christmas. The bomber came from the Palestinian town of Tulkarem, which is around ten miles east of Netanya, not too far from Jenin.
After the Netanya bomb it was clear that the Israeli government would carry out its threat to mount big punitive operations in the West Bank, parts of which had been administered by Palestinians since 1995. In the end they reoccupied it completely. When the Israeli army entered Jenin, Palestinian fighters were ready. They put up a hard fight. After they killed thirteen Israeli soldiers in an ambush on 9 April, the armoured bulldozers went to work. The Israelis said it was a military necessity, and that minimum force was used.
Unwisely and inaccurately, the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat claimed there had been a massacre. An investigation by the widely respected American group Human Rights Watch found no evidence for the allegation. But they also found that Israeli soldiers had carried out serious violations of international humanitarian law, which if proved in court would be war crimes. According to Human Rights Watch, at least fifty-two Palestinians were killed. Twenty-seven or so were armed men who fought the Israelis. At least twenty-two were civilians, including children, the elderly and the physically disabled. One 37-year-old man, who was paralysed, was killed when the Israelis bulldozed his home on top of him. Human Rights Watch found that Kamal Tawalbi, the father of fourteen children, was kept with his fourteen-year-old son in the line of fire as human shields during a three-hour gun battle. Israeli soldiers used Tawalbi and his son’s shoulders as rests for their rifles while they fired.
The conflict between Jews and Arabs started when the first Zionist settlements were established in Palestine more than a century ago. But it took on its current shape after the Middle East war of 1967, when Israel captured large swathes of Arab land, much of which it still holds. The Israeli government that prosecuted the war in 1967 said that it had no territorial ambitions, that it was fighting for security, not land. But since then hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been settled on the land that Israel’s forces seized. The occupation that started in 1967 has become the driving force behind the violence that Israelis and Palestinians are inflicting on each other. I wrote this book because during the years I lived in Jerusalem as the BBC’s Middle East Correspondent I found that the best way to understand the conflict now is to understand 1967.
The dangers the war was creating were spotted very early on by President Lyndon Baines Johnson, one of the staunchest friends of Israel ever to occupy the White House. On the third day of the war, as Israel completed its capture of Jerusalem and the West Bank, he warned that by the time the Americans had finished with all the ‘festering problems’, they were going to ‘wish the war had not happened’. The war’s legacy has now been festering for more than thirty-five years. Four days after the war ended, Johnson’s Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, warned that if Israel held on to the West Bank, Palestinians would spend the rest of the twentieth century trying to get it back. At the beginning of the twenty-first, nothing has changed.
The Six-Day War swept up a generation of Israelis and Arabs whose children still cannot live peacefully in the world the war created. Israelis deserve peaceful, safe lives. Palestinians who were dispossessed and exiled if they became refugees, humiliated and abused if they stayed, deserve justice. Israel’s overwhelming victory turned into a curse. It has never been able to digest the land swallowed in 1967. It has poured money into colonising the Occupied Territories, defying international law and splitting its own people. Thirty-six years after the end of six days of fighting with Jordan, Egypt and Syria, after thousands more deaths and the failure of six years of negotiations, Israelis and Palestinians are fighting again over the future of the West Bank and Gaza. It is still a low-intensity war. But if another full-blown Middle East war breaks out, its roots will lie in those six days in 1967. The Middle East will have no peace until Israelis and Palestinians, as equal partners, settle the
future of the land that was captured in 1967 and unwind the consequences of the war.
Pre-War
Israelis
Mount Zion is a grand name for a small hill. It dominates the southwest corner of the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. Christians venerate Mount Zion because they believe it was the place where Jesus and his disciples ate their last supper. Running east from Mount Zion outside the city walls is the Himnon Valley, a narrow, rocky canyon where Canaanites once carried out human sacrifices to their god, Moloch. So many funeral pyres burned in the valley that the sky was turned black with their smoke.
On 28 May 1948 smoke was rising over Jerusalem again. A young Jewish commander, Yitzhak Rabin, one of Israel’s top soldiers, stood on Mount Zion, looking down at houses and synagogues on fire inside the Old City. The Jewish quarter was burning and there was nothing he could do about it. His men had tried. The nearest entrance to the city, the turreted Zion Gate, was blackened and blasted by explosions and pitted with bullet holes. Twenty-six-year-old Rabin was the commander of the Har’el Brigade of the Palmach, the strike force of the Haganah, the Jewish army. It was two weeks since Britain had pulled out its last troops and given up the mandate under which it had controlled Palestine since the First World War. Jewish leaders immediately declared Israel independent. The new state was recognised and admitted to the United Nations by world leaders who believed that the Jewish people deserved a state after the horrors of the Holocaust. Arab armies invaded to try to kill off the new state. A civil war in one of Britain’s colonial territories between its native Arabs and Jewish settlers blew up into the first all-out Middle East war of modern times.
Below Mount Zion, inside the walls, was a ‘shattering scene’ that stayed with Rabin for the rest of his life. The Jewish quarter was surrendering. A procession led by two rabbis was walking towards what Rabin knew were the positions of the Jordanian Arab Legion. The young Jewish state was losing its last toehold inside the walls of the holy city. Nine days before, on the 19th, men from the Palmach captured Mount Zion and held it against a fierce Jordanian counterattack. Some of them were ‘so bone-tired’ that even though they expected a counter-attack at any moment they kept dozing off.
Failing to capture the Old City, which contains places holy to Jews, Muslims and Christians, was the biggest Israeli defeat of the 1948 war. One of Rabin’s senior officers was a 23-year-old Jew from Jerusalem called Uzi Narkiss. He had led the counter-attack through Zion Gate that reached the Jewish quarter. But his unit was exhausted, under strength and without reinforcements, and Jordanian troops drove them out. Like Rabin, the failure haunted him for years. On the eve of war in 1967, Uzi Narkiss was a general, still suffering ‘from guilt that Jerusalem was divided, that no Jew remained in the Old City … for one night I held the gate to the city in my hands – but it was torn out of them’. He had one war aim – to go back.
Palestinians
In July 1948 tens of thousands of exhausted Palestinian civilians were forced out of their homes and into territory controlled by the Jordanian army on the foothills of the West Bank. An Israeli intelligence officer called Shmarya Guttman watched them go: ‘A multitude of inhabitants walked after one another. Women walked burdened with packages and sacks on their heads. Mothers dragged children after them … warning shots were heard … occasionally, you encountered a piercing look from one of the youngsters … and the look said: “We have not yet surrendered. We shall return to fight you.”’ They had been expelled by the Israeli army from the towns of Ramle and Lydda, on the orders of Rabin. During the assault on the towns the Israelis killed around 250 people, including dozens of unarmed Palestinian detainees who were being held in the church and the mosque. Yeruham Cohen, an Israeli intelligence officer, reported: ‘The inhabitants of the town became panic-stricken. They feared that … the Israeli troops would take revenge on them. It was a horrible, ear-splitting scene. Women wailed at the top of their voices and old men said prayers, as if they saw their own deaths before their eyes.’ All but around 1000 of Lydda and Ramle’s population of 50–70,000 was expelled in the next few days. Some of them were robbed of their valuables along the way. On the long and hot walk to the Jordanian lines, many refugees were killed by dehydration and exhaustion. ‘Nobody will ever know how many children died,’ wrote Glubb Pasha, the British commander of the Arab Legion. Ramle and Lydda, which was renamed Lod, are now medium-sized Israeli towns. Rabin was not proud of what he did, but regarded it as necessary: ‘We could not leave Lod’s hostile and armed populace in our rear.’
Palestinians use the Arabic word nakba, which means catastrophe, to describe 1948. A society that had grown up over more than a thousand years was destroyed and scattered across the Middle East. Palestinians fled for the reasons that civilians do in all wars, to save their lives and protect their children and also because, in some places, Israel practised what is now called ethnic cleansing. In Deir Yassin, a village on the outskirts of Jerusalem, Jewish extremists carried out the most notorious massacre of the war. They boasted that they killed 250 people. Afterwards, it was enough for Jewish psychological warfare units to broadcast the village’s name for traumatised Palestinian civilians to head for the border. The truth about Deir Yassin was bad enough, but the versions that went out on Palestinian radio stations made brutal slaughter sound even worse. Hazem Nusseibeh, a young man from one of Jerusalem’s leading Palestinian families, sat at the microphone at the Voice of Palestine radio station and rebroadcast grisly details of murder, mutilation and rape. He concentrated on the rapes, hoping that it would strengthen Palestinian resistance, which was collapsing. It had the opposite effect. More Palestinians decided their only chance of survival was to get out. Nusseibeh realised he had made a mistake when group after group of refugees coming into Jerusalem’s Old City through Jaffa Gate told him the thought of death was one thing but the prospect that their women would be dishonoured was even worse.
Between 600,000 and 760,000 Palestinians were refugees by the summer of 1949. A few had enough money left to relocate their families and start businesses somewhere else. Most of them were poor peasant farmers or labourers who became utterly destitute. The vast majority ended up in miserable camps in the surrounding Arab states. Their property was seized by the Jewish state. The Palestinians’ old homes were either bulldozed or occupied by new immigrants to Israel. By the 1960s the refugees’ resentment was one of the main engines of Palestinian nationalism. What Shmarya Guttman saw in the eyes of the refugees being expelled from Lydda came to pass. The Palestinian refugees’ children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren became foot-soldiers in the Middle East’s long war.
Egyptians
At the end of 1948, what was left of the Egyptian army that had entered Palestine to destroy the new Jewish state was besieged southeast of the port of Ashdod in what was known as the Faluja pocket. In a lightning campaign the Israelis broke a United Nations truce, seized the Negev desert, delivered a crushing blow to the Egyptian army and captured hundreds of square miles of territory along with Beersheba, the only real town in the desert. But the Egyptians left behind in the pocket were fighting back hard. A meeting was arranged between the two sets of commanders to discuss a truce. Among the Egyptian officers was a young major called Gamal Abdul Nasser. Yigal Allon, the Israeli commander of the southern front, and Yitzhak Rabin, his head of operations, led the Israelis. Both sides were courteous, complimenting the bravery of each other’s soldiers. The Egyptians refused to surrender. They went back with their jeeps and white flags to their own lines, and the siege of the Faluja pocket continued. Four years later, in the aftermath of the humiliation of 1948, Nasser led a group of young officers who seized power in Egypt. He became president. After he defied Britain, France and Israel in the 1956 Suez crisis, Nasser was seen as the leader of the Arab world. Allon left the army and went into politics. In 1967 he was one of the leading hawks in the cabinet. Rabin continued his military career. In 1967 he was chief of staff, the Israeli army’s most senior officer
.
Jordanians
King Abdullah of Jordan had a grandson, a prince called Hussein. On 20 July 1951 Abdullah invited Hussein, who was sixteen, to go with him to Jerusalem. Hussein was delighted. He idolised his grandfather, who had just appointed him captain in the army to celebrate a fencing prize he had won at school. On Abdullah’s orders he wore his new uniform for the trip. Abdullah was going to Jerusalem for a secret meeting with Jewish officials, with whom he had been quietly negotiating for thirty years. Between them, they made sure that the Palestinians had no chance of creating their own state. Even though his army fought Israel fiercely in 1948, especially in and around Jerusalem, many Arabs regarded Abdullah as a traitor for colluding with the Jews and not fighting harder. The king also wanted to pray at the Aqsa mosque, Jerusalem’s great Islamic shrine. The British ambassador to Jordan, Sir Alec Kirkbride, a man some people said was as powerful in the land as the king, warned Abdullah not to go. There had been talk that he might be assassinated. The king brushed the warning aside. He was a descendant of the prophet Mohammed. He was not going to be scared out of Jerusalem. Besides, he had important business.
Sir John Glubb, ‘Glubb Pasha’, the British officer who commanded Jordan’s Arab Legion (for which Britain paid the bills and issued most of the orders), sent extra troops to line the streets and flood the 2000-year-old compound that encloses Jerusalem’s two great Islamic shrines. The soldiers milled around the Aqsa mosque, the holiest place in the world for Muslims after Mecca and Medina and the great golden Dome of the Rock, the oldest, most striking building in the Islamic world. As he went into al-Aqsa, Abdullah told his guards to drop back. They were crowding him. A young man called Shukri Ashu stepped out from behind the door with a revolver. He shot the king behind his right ear. The bullet came out through his eye. He died instantly. The assassin kept on firing until he was cut down by Abdullah’s bodyguards. One of his bullets ricocheted off a medal on Hussein’s chest. In the confusion twenty more people were killed and hundreds wounded. Prince Hussein was hustled away and flown back to Amman. ‘The next day,’ he wrote, ‘I carried a gun for the first time.’
