by Jeremy Bowen
War without end
Peace was possible just after 1948. The United Nations brokered armistice agreements between Israel and Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt, which were signed in the early part of 1949. Yitzhak Rabin took part in the negotiations in Rhodes. He was given a khaki tie to wear with his uniform, the first one he had owned. Despite lessons from his driver, he never mastered the art of tying it. He kept it permanently knotted, loosening it and pulling it over his head when it was time to take it off. At night he hung it up with his trousers. The UN hoped that the armistices would lead to proper peace agreements. Diplomatic contacts took place between Israel and all its neighbours. It was a real opportunity. But both sides, blaming each other, squandered their chance.
With no peace agreements, they slid into a series of vicious border wars. In the first few years after 1948 the quality of the Israeli army deteriorated. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s prime minister, disbanded the Palmach, its highly effective but independent minded strike force. Early cross-border operations of the new Israel Defence Forces (IDF) were embarrassing fiascos until, from the early 1950s, Israel started to develop the strategic doctrines and forces that fitted its own unique challenges. The armistice lines after 1948 left Israel with long borders that, in places, were extremely vulnerable. The centre of the country was not much more than ten miles wide. There was another narrow ‘neck’ connecting Jerusalem with the rest of Israel and the south. It would not have taken much for Jordanian and Egyptian forces to link up to cut off Eilat.
Israel decided to ignore its lack of strategic depth by fighting on Arab territory with flexible, highly mobile armoured ground forces backed up by air power. Intelligence, surprise and aggression were vital. They would not wait passively in static defences for their enemies to attack. From around 1952 Israel started a long project to build a modern army, a plan that came together spectacularly in 1967. First, though, came another full-blown war. It was launched in 1956 after Israel made a secret alliance with Britain and France to attack Nasser’s Egypt. Israeli tanks moved fast across the Sinai, showing what the rapidly evolving Israeli army could already do. Yet this was a work in progress. The most important air operations in the 1956 war were flown by the British and the French. But the diplomatic ground had not been prepared properly. Israel and the two declining imperial powers were treated as aggressors by the USA and the USSR, the two rising superpowers. Britain and France were humiliated and Israel had to give up the Egyptian territory it seized. In return, Egypt had to allow ships bound for Israel through the Straits of Tiran into the Gulf of Aqaba and on to the Israeli port of Eilat. Blue helmeted peacekeepers from the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) were deployed on the border, in the Gaza strip and at Sharm al Sheikh, an Egyptian village overlooking the Straits of Tiran.
After 1956 it suited Egypt and Israel to keep their border quiet. Both had a lot to do. The Israelis wanted to develop their economy, absorb more than a million immigrants and build the army. Nasser used his position as the Arab hero who vanquished the imperialists to lead a pan-Arab nationalist movement that his supporters fully expected would recreate Arab greatness. Nasser’s followers had huge faith in Egypt’s military power. The fact that its soldiers were roundly beaten in 1956 was quickly forgotten. The Soviet Union provided weapons and Nasser’s propaganda machine trumpeted his army’s prowess. Throughout the Arab world, listeners to Cairo Radio (which meant almost everyone) thought that Egypt could take on not just Israel, but the world.
But the truth was very different. The problems started at the top, with Field Marshal Abd al-Hakim Amer. Although he was a five star general with the post of commander-in-chief, his main qualification for the job was not his military achievements but the fact that he was the man Nasser trusted most. As a young officer he fought bravely in 1948. Soon, though, he became better known for his love of hashish and the good life, which remained a life-long interest, than for his martial prowess. His military knowledge did not progress after 1950, when as a major he attended Staff College. After that, he did nothing to master the art of preparing soldiers for the battlefield and leading them to victory on it. His real job, which he did very well, was to make sure that the army stayed loyal by stamping out plots and keeping the officers happy. Nasser wanted the Free Officers’ coup, in which he deposed the king in 1952, to be Egypt’s last military rebellion. Major Abd al-Hakim Amer was promoted to major-general overnight. His field marshal’s baton was not far behind.
In 1967 Amer led the Egyptian army to disaster. The warning signs were there in 1956, when he lost his nerve badly, begging Nasser not to resist the British and French. During the fighting, Nasser found him paralysed with indecision in his headquarters, tears pouring down his face. After the war Amer offered his resignation, which Nasser, presumably out of loyalty, refused to accept. He then allowed Amer to persuade him not to sack Sidqi Mahmoud, the air force commander. In 1956 he left his aircraft lined up at their bases to be destroyed on the ground by the British and French. In 1967 he did exactly the same thing for the Israelis.
Officers regarded Amer as decent, friendly and generous – especially generous. If they needed a favour, he would see that it was done. He made things happen. Smart flats in the best parts of Cairo were presented to trusted officers. Their families were looked after. When generals retired they were given well-paid jobs at the top of newly nationalised state enterprises. During the high point of pan-Arabism in the 1950s, when Egypt and Syria formed a brief union, Amer and his cronies illegally imported huge numbers of goods from Syria in military aircraft, which they sold off or presented to their wives and mistresses. Amer shouted down one of Nasser’s entourage who had the temerity to tell him to stop treating Syria as his private ranch. By the early 1960s Nasser and Amer were rivals as much as they were friends. Amer did not have a fraction of Nasser’s public presence and following. But Nasser never knew whether Amer would turn the army against him. In the early 1960s he made ineffectual attempts to reassert some control over the armed forces. But when Amer resisted him, he would not risk a showdown. After that, Nasser still needed Amer, for all the old reasons and they still had strange vestiges of friendship, but he did not trust him.
The Syrian syndrome
Syria had the worst army of all the Arab countries bordering Israel. The reason was that it was not designed to fight. Its speciality was politics. After independence from France in 1946, Syria had three years of shaky civilian government, followed by twenty years of equally shaky military government. Discontented young officers kicked out the politicians after the humiliation and defeat of 1948. The last straw was a scandal about the army’s cooking fat. It should have been a local staple called samnah, made from sour milk, as important to Arab warriors as apple pie was to American GIs. Instead it was discovered that the army fat was made from bone waste that gave off a terrible stink when it was cooked. But Syria’s first coup was not aimed at protecting the stomachs of its soldiers. Instead, the president made the mistake of trying to blame an officer for the scandal instead of the supplier. The chief of staff, more outraged by civilian interference than by the food his men were eating, seized power. By lunchtime, the officer who had been blamed for ordering the inferior fat was free and the merchant who supplied it was behind bars. There were two more coups in 1949.
The military became the dominant force in the country. The Syrian officer class was highly politicised. Most of them were poor boys who had joined up because the military academy offered them a free education, regular hot meals and a way out of the poverty-stricken, almost feudal provinces. Unlike European aristocrats, Syrian landowners did not consider soldiering a respectable way to earn a living. It was their biggest mistake. Ambitious, nationalistic officers seized on a new political ideology called Ba’thism, which had been invented by a Syrian Christian from Damascus called Michel Aflaq. The word Ba’th means resurrection. Ba’thism’s followers believed they would rebuild the Arab nation, without Western colonialists and feudal landlords. The best or
ganised people in Syria were the Ba’thists inside the armed forces.
Training for a war with Israel came a very distant second. Army officers concentrated on the art of seizing and then keeping power. By 1966 every serving officer above the rank of brigadier had a political job. Almost half the leadership of the Syrian Ba’th party were officers. The British defence attaché in Damascus, Colonel D. A. Rowan-Hamilton, tried to compare the set-up to Britain. ‘If the same conditions existed in the United Kingdom as existed in Syria, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff and Chief of Air Staff would have been not only MPs but members of the executive committee of the Labour Party. GOC Southern Command and the military secretary would have been vociferous MPs. All four would have been subject to incessant interference and insubordination from a group of totally unqualified and irresponsible young officers, each with his own regimental following and each after a plum job.’
Syria was in no shape to fight an enemy as well organised and determined as Israel. Colonel Rowan-Hamilton sniffily concluded that the morale of the ‘proletarian’ officer corps was quite high. But they were not capable of conducting a mobile or protracted war. Officers who had been on liaison visits to Western countries had ‘not taken the opportunity to advance their military knowledge nor absorb ideas new to them, but have treated the expedition as a free holiday’. The Syrian army had been reasonably well armed since the mid-1950s, mainly with second-hand weapons no longer needed by the Soviet army. Even though they were not the most modern weapons, learning how to use and maintain them was not easy. Some technicians were trained in the USSR. But the rank and file of the army had very little education. Rowan-Hamilton had something to say about that too: ‘Knowing well the problems facing even a Western army in training the soldiery to use and maintain sophisticated arms and equipment, I shudder to think of the difficulties which Syria has to face…’
In the mid-1960s the border between Syria and Israel was the place where the conflict between the Arabs and the Jews was hottest. Israel was much stronger than Syria. Its aggressive behaviour along the border set the pace, and started the slide to war in 1967. As early as 1964, as a pattern emerged, the British Embassy in Damascus was commenting that ‘while the Syrians were wrong in opening fire, the Israelis were plainly provocative in sending patrols into an area they knew was in dispute, and also that they were disproportionately severe in their retaliation’. An edge of hatred crept into this particular Arab–Israeli front that did not exist elsewhere. Colonel Israel Lior, who was the Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol’s military aide, identified what he called a ‘Syrian syndrome’ in the IDF. Suffering from it especially badly, Lior believed, were Yitzhak Rabin, who commanded the northern front in the 1950s and became chief of staff in 1964, and the general in charge of Northern Command, David Elazar. ‘Service on this front, opposite the Syrian enemy, fuels feelings of exceptional hatred for the Syrian army and its people. There is no comparison, it seems to me, between the Israeli’s attitude to the Jordanian or Egyptian army and his attitude to the Syrian army. We loved to hate them.’ Rabin and Elazar, Lior noted, were ‘very aggressive’ in combat operations over the two biggest flashpoints – the control of water and possession of the demilitarised zones.
The feeling was mutual. Destroying Israel was the only strategic military objective of the Syrian armed forces. But, preoccupied as they were with internal politics, they spent very little time thinking about how they would do it. Colonel Rowan-Hamilton recorded a typical conversation with a Syrian officer about Israel: ‘His eyes become glazed and his face flushes. When invited to explain how the Arabs intend to defeat Israel with the US Sixth Fleet pledged to its support if attacked, the officer will say: “I don’t know, but we will throw them into the sea.”’ The Americans agreed with the British about the Syrian army. It was barely adequate for peacetime ‘and would be totally inadequate in a war environment’, with poor training, ‘highly deficient’ command and control procedures, extremely weak logistics, and ‘especially lacking’ in reserves of electronic and other technical equipment. The Syrian leadership knew how weak they had become. After an abortive coup on 8 September 1966, the army suffered yet another wave of dismissals and desertions. They saw enemies everywhere. They thought the kings of Jordan and Saudi Arabia were plotting against them. They had no confidence that Egypt would intervene if it came to a fight with Israel. Most of all, they feared what the Israelis could do to them. In the autumn of 1966 the foreign minister, Dr Ibrahim Makhus, seemed to the British ambassador to be ‘chastened … affected by the hopelessness of it all’.
But Israel saw danger lurking in Damascus. Syria had become a radical, politically aggressive state, which encouraged and sheltered the first Palestinian guerrillas. Its Soviet advisers helped it build impressive defences on the Golan Heights. Behind them Syrian artillery periodically shelled Israel’s border settlements, often because of Israeli provocations. Casualties were low but it was politically awkward for the Israeli government.
Water and land
The night of 2 November 1964 was cold on the high ground near Israel’s border with Syria. A group of Israeli soldiers sat shivering around their tanks. The next day they were expecting combat, the first that Israel’s Armoured Corps had faced in six years. Captain Shamai Kaplan, their commander, brought out his accordion. ‘Lads, let’s sing a bit. It’ll warm us up!’ He started singing. At first, no one joined in. ‘Men,’ the sergeant called out, ‘liven it up! Pretend you’re having a picnic on the beach.’ They started singing and their voices drifted out into the darkness.
They were there because of water. Since 1959 Israel had been building its national water carrier, a system that sent water from the Sea of Galilee in the north through pipes and canals to irrigate the Negev desert in the south. In 1964 it was ready. The Arabs’ belated response was to sabotage it by diverting two of the three sources of the river Jordan that fed the Sea of Galilee. The men from ‘S’ Brigade of Israel’s Armoured Corps were going to attack the Syrian earth moving machines and the tanks that were protecting them.
To get the Syrian guns firing, the next day the Israelis set up an incident. A patrol went down a dirt road, just over the border from a Syrian village called Nukheila. When, as expected, the Syrians opened fire from two old German Panzers that were dug into the hillside, the Israeli tanks were ready. They pounded the Syrian positions for an hour and a half. The Syrians fired back as hard as they could. Smoke, dust and the smell of gunpowder filled the air. Once the UN had managed to negotiate a ceasefire, Brigadier-General Israel Tal, the newly appointed commander of the Armoured Corps, came to see how they had done.
‘How many Syrian tanks were knocked out?’
‘None, sir … One may have been slightly damaged,’ replied a lieutenant-colonel.
‘Did their tanks fire all the time?’
‘We didn’t silence a single tank, sir. The Syrians were still firing after we stopped.’
‘How many shells did we fire?’
‘Eighty-nine, sir.’
The attack was a failure. Kaplan, the accordion player, was blamed. Ten days later, after Tal had administered a general dressing-down to the Corps’ senior officers, the Israelis manufactured another incident at the same place. Once again the tanks were ready. This time they destroyed the two Syrian Panzers. The Syrians shelled Israeli farming settlements and, in a major act of escalation, the IDF sent in the air force.
Using the Syrian border as a test bed Tal worked on the Armoured Corps until, by 1967, he had turned it into a ferociously efficient weapon. Tal was born in 1924 on a Jewish agricultural settlement in Palestine. As a teenager he designed a gun to kill moles and tried to build a submarine to explore a local waterhole. In the Second World War he joined the British army and fought in the Western Desert and Italy with the East Kents. He was demobilised as a sergeant and went home to pass his expertise on to the Haganah, the Jewish underground army.
Tal instilled professionalism and discipline into the Armoure
d Corps. Traditionally the Israeli army is relaxed about uniforms and saluting. Tal was a martinet, not just on uniform but everything else. He stopped bullying, which had included forcing soldiers to bury a cigarette with full military honours in the middle of the night, or to carry around the ‘pocket wrench’ of their tank, which weighed eleven pounds. He was accused of trying to turn his soldiers into robots. He answered that it was fine for paratroopers to ignore what seemed like military routine, as long as they were brave. But dealing with tanks was a technical business, which was why they needed rules for everything from the right way to zero a sight to making sure that the oil and fuel were checked. Tal improved the gunnery of Israeli tanks to such an extent that they could hit targets eleven kilometres away. Sometimes he operated the guns himself. By 1965 the Arabs gave up trying to divert the rivers.
After Israel won the fight over water the action shifted to small parcels of land lying between the armistice line of July 1949 and the old Palestinian frontier. In the armistice the two sides agreed that they would be demilitarised with the issue of sovereignty postponed until a final peace treaty. In practice both sides occupied and cultivated demilitarised zones. Israel went about it more aggressively and efficiently than Syria, working tirelessly and successfully to alter the status quo in its favour. Many of the United Nations military observers who were based on the frontier believed that while the Syrians ‘often lie to UN officers but subsequently admit their untruths, the Israelis, while professing to offer complete co-operation, lie even more of the time and do all they can to deceive UN officers’. A widely held belief among the military observers was that the Israelis would periodically ‘fabricate’ incidents. Israel evicted Syrian farmers from the zones it controlled and gave their land to Jewish settlements. Periodically the tension blew up into exchanges of fire. According to Matityahu Peled, who was one of Israel’s senior generals in 1967, ‘over 50 per cent of the border incidents [with Syria] before the Six-Day War were the result of our security policy of maximum settlement in the demilitarised areas’. (Peled went from being an especially hawkish general in 1967 to the leadership of a joint Arab–Jewish party that campaigned for peace.) By 1967 a British diplomat reviewing the two sides’ claims to the land grumbled that ‘no amount of pseudo-legality or case law can justify the fact that in what was basically an Arab populated area there is now not a single Arab living’. General Odd Bull, who commanded the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) which did its best to make the armistice arrangements work, warned that Israel’s activities deepened the mistrust on the border.
