by Jeremy Bowen
Only highly motivated people went to live in the Israeli border settlements. They were dangerous places. Families spent long periods in bomb shelters. Fathers could find themselves driving armoured tractors under fire to prove Israel’s claim to small pieces of land with strange names like de Gaulle’s nose, the beetroot lot, and the bean patch. The settlers believed that if the Syrians shelled a particular field, it was even more important to cultivate it. In their view, ‘Making concessions to the Syrians does not further the cause of peace. We would only invite them to challenge our rights to the next tract.’ These days the popular Israeli version is that the settlers of the mid-1960s were defenceless farmers. But they saw themselves as nation builders. Once when Levi Eshkol, who had succeeded David Ben-Gurion as prime minister, visited the settlements after they had been thoroughly shelled they gave him a statement saying, ‘This is our home. Every bit of destruction is painful for us. But we settled here in order to confirm the sovereignty of Israel along these borders. We therefore accept all the risks and ask the Government that the work be allowed to continue.’ For the Israelis, cultivating the demilitarised zones was about building the state, not agriculture. In April 1967 a local security official admitted that ‘the cost of the kernel we reap is higher than if we had imported it from the United States, each wrapped separately in cotton and cellophane’.
According to Moshe Dayan, Israel’s most famous soldier who became minister of defence on the eve of the Six-Day War, Israel provoked ‘at least 80 per cent’ of the border clashes. ‘It went this way. We would send a tractor to plough somewhere where it wasn’t possible to do anything, in the demilitarised area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn’t shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance further, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and start to shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that’s how it was.’ Dayan said he provoked the Syrians, as did Rabin and his two predecessors as chiefs of staff, Chaim Laskov and Zvi Tsur. But ‘the person who most enjoyed these games’ was General David Elazar, who led the IDF’s Northern Command from 1964 to 1969. Dayan believed it was all about a hunger for land: ‘Along the Syrian border there were no farms and no refugee camps – there was only the Syrian army. The kibbutzim saw the good agricultural land … and they dreamed about it.’
Israel set the pace, but the Arabs did their best to keep up with the violence. On the last day of 1964, Yasser Arafat, the leader of a Palestinian faction called Fatah, entered the life of Israelis for the first time. A small team of Palestinians tried to sneak into Israel from south Lebanon, intending to attack a pumping station on Israel’s national water carrier. Before they could reach the border fence they were arrested by the Lebanese secret police. The following night another team made it into Israel and planted a bomb which did not explode. Palestinian organisations celebrate New Year’s Day 1965 as the start of the armed struggle. When Arafat seized control of the Palestine Liberation Organization after 1967, his people put round a story that he had led the first cross-border raid. In fact, until he too was arrested, Arafat was in Beirut, busily circulating exaggerated details of the raid in Fatah’s Military Communiqué Number One, under the name of the so-called Asifah ‘Storm’ forces.
Arafat and his friend Khalil al-Wazir were known as ‘the madmen’ in Palestinian circles. (Wazir, who was also known as Abu Jihad, remained one of the few people close to Arafat who was not a yes-man until Israeli commandos riddled his body with 150 bullets in front of his wife and child in Tunis in 1988.) The ‘madmen’ believed they could do for their people what the Vietnamese and the Algerian national liberation movements had done for theirs. Other groups appeared. The Palestinian Liberation Front, under Ahmad Jibril, was followed by ‘Vengeance Youth’ and the Heroes of the Return, who came together as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
According to Fatah’s communiqués they were fighting a bruising guerrilla war, killing scores of Israelis and causing serious damage to the infrastructure of the Jewish state. In fact when it came to the military punch, they were never more than a nuisance. But politically and psychologically, they made an impact. For Palestinians, they kept the idea of resistance alive. For Israelis, they were terrorists bent on the destruction of the state and the expulsion of the Jews, who had to be resisted.
President Nasser had established the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964 to control the activities of people like Arafat. The last thing he wanted were guerrillas carrying out freelance operations against Israel. Nasser planned to create a noisy and relatively harmless organisation, which would satisfy the desire shared by all Arabs to do something about the Palestinian catastrophe but which could be contained and controlled. He installed Ahmed Shukairy as leader of the PLO. Shukairy was a charlatan, who specialised in bombastic speeches threatening Israel with a bloody and savage end. Nasser ignored Shukairy’s windy rhetoric. He repeated many times that the Arabs were not strong enough to attack Israel. They should wait, building their strength until the time was right. He allowed the creation of a Palestine Liberation Army as part of the standing forces of Egypt and Syria, under firm political control.
But by 1966 Nasser’s strategy of keeping the borders quiet started to fall apart. Syria had its ninth military coup in seventeen years. It was bloody. Several hundred people were killed. The mastermind behind the coup was General Salah Jadid, who installed Nureddin al Atassi as head of state. Jadid, like many officers, was an Alawi, an ethnic and religious minority that followed its own form of Islam. The easiest way for the Alawis to ingratiate themselves with Syria’s Sunni Muslims, who were the majority, was to work even harder to heat up their border with Israel. It was a labour of love for radical Arab socialists.
The level of violence rose throughout the spring and summer of 1966. There were artillery exchanges, guerrilla raids, even a fight between Israeli patrol boats on the Sea of Galilee and Syrian shore batteries that ended up with an air battle. In Israel the government of Levi Eshkol came under more and more pressure to hit back. On 16 October the top Israeli military commanders talked about their plans for a major reprisal raid against Syria at a lunch for a visiting British air marshal. Rabin and Ezer Weizman, his number two, dropped heavy hints that they were planning a ‘large-scale operation to occupy the Syrian border areas, including all the high ground … with maximum destruction of Syrian military personnel and equipment’.
But early in November Syria signed a mutual defence agreement with Egypt. For the Syrians, it was more than just an insurance policy. Now they had a chance of getting the Egyptians, who had said many times that they were not ready to confront Israel, to march alongside them whether they liked it or not. Nasser hoped the pact would restrain the hotheads in Damascus. But all it did was encourage them. An Israeli intelligence officer commented that Nasser was ‘the only Rabbi who can give the Syrians a kosher certificate of respectability as revolutionaries’. The Syrian junta did not trust the Egyptians enough to let them station troops in Syria. But they knew that Israel would be alarmed by an alliance between Egypt, its most powerful Arab neighbour, and Syria, its most hostile one. The new agreement made Israel think again about launching a major raid on Syria. They hit Jordan instead.
Raiding Samua
King Hussein started counting down to the next Middle Eastern war on Sunday 13 November 1966, the day that Israel raided the village of Samua on the West Bank. Life in Samua was never easy. For at least 2000 years peasant farmers had grazed sheep and goats and raised a few dusty crops on its bare, rocky ground. In the summer the heat blasts off the stones and the scrub. Though the winter is short, the wind and rain bite at the shepherds on the hills and flash floods can sweep away anyone foolish enough to walk along the deep wadis. Samua is on the edge of two deserts – the Judean to the east, and the Negev to the south. Since 1948 it was also on the border with Israel. Generations of Palestinians in Samua had worked out ways to deal with nature. Dealing with the Jewish state
was much more complicated.
The people of Samua were early risers. The men went to pray in the mosque at dawn. The women started clattering around their kitchens even earlier. They had big families. Water had to be fetched and there was bread to bake. That morning in November 1966 seemed like any other. The first rain clouds of winter were building up over the high plateau that comes down from Mount Hebron. Then, at about six o’clock, they started to hear tanks firing. The sound came from the border, which was only five kilometres away. The villagers grabbed their children and went as quickly as they could to the fields and the limestone caves around the village. From hard experience, they knew about Israeli reprisals.
What they could hear were Israeli tanks destroying the Jordanian police post at Rujim El-Madfa, about a kilometre inside the border. A big force of Israeli tanks, supported by infantry mounted in armoured half-tracks had crossed the border and was heading towards them. Tank shells started whooshing over the top of the village. Ouragan ground-attack aircraft flew low over their heads. Higher up, supersonic Mirage fighters provided air cover, waiting for the arrival of the Royal Jordanian Air Force.
Major Asad Ghanma, commander of the 48th Infantry Battalion of the Jordanian army, knew that the Israelis were coming and that he had to fight them. His unit was the only one in the area at the time. The border with Israel was more than 600 kilometres long. The Jordanian army was spread thinly along it. It was bigger than it had been in 1948, but less efficient since King Hussein dismissed its British officers in 1956.
The major and his men drove fast out of their barracks and raced headlong down the road towards the Israelis. There had been rumours of a raid for a couple of weeks, since saboteurs had tried to blow up a block of flats on the Jewish side of Jerusalem and derailed an Israeli train. Nobody had died in those attacks. But the day before, on Saturday, a routine Israeli border patrol had driven over a mine. Three Israeli soldiers had been killed and six others injured. The Israelis believed terrorists from Samua had left the mine. Now they wanted revenge.
Their plan was to enter Samua, blow up a lot buildings, then pull back. General Rabin calculated that it ought to take about an hour and a half to deliver what he thought was a clear and uncompromising message: that the people of Samua, and all the other 700,000 Palestinians on the West Bank, should not harbour terrorists, and that King Hussein himself should do more to stop them crossing the border to kill Jews. It was the biggest Israeli military operation since 1956. Two raiding parties crossed the border. The bigger one headed for Samua, led by 8 Centurion tanks, followed by 400 paratroopers mounted in about 40 armoured, open-topped half-tracks. Ten more half-tracks followed with 60 combat engineers who were going to do the demolition. The second force was made up of 3 more Centurion tanks and 100 paratroops and engineers in 10 half-tracks. They had a separate mission, to blow up houses in two other smaller villages, Kirbet El-Markas and Kirbet Jimba. Five more Super Sherman tanks and eight field guns supported them from the Israeli side of the border. Behind them were powerful reserves, in case the raiding force ran into trouble. In the air the Ouragans were armed with rockets to attack Jordanian armour or artillery if it appeared.
The smaller force cleared civilians out of Kirbet El-Markas and Kirbet Jimba and set to work blowing up houses. Then three companies of Major Ghanma’s men drove straight into an Israeli blocking position on the high ground to the north-west of Samua. Another two companies that tried to get in from the north-east were also intercepted by Israeli troops. But a platoon of Jordanians with two 106 mm recoilless guns entered Samua and attacked the Israelis. There was some fierce close-quarter fighting at the southern end of the village until Israel cleared the Jordanians out with tanks. The Israelis fought bravely, following their orders and adapting them efficiently as things changed. Individual Jordanians also fought bravely, but without a plan. Once they had been dealt with, Israeli paratroopers went from house to house to check the village was clear while the engineers laid the charges.
By 0945 the Israelis were back on their own side of the border. During the raid three Jordanian civilians and fifteen soldiers were killed. Fifty-four other Jordanian soldiers and civilians were wounded. The Jordanian army, a proud force that believed itself to be the best in the Arab world, had been humiliated. On the Israeli side the commander of the paratroop battalion was killed and ten others were wounded. Four hours later, when a missionary called Eric Bishop arrived, the ‘dazed and frightened’ people were drifting back. The bridge into the village was blocked by three smoking, burnt-out Jordanian army vehicles. Bishop followed the villagers down off the road and across the dry river bed. Unexploded shells and twisted scraps of metal were all over the roads. The village’s only clinic had been reduced to a pile of rubble. So had the girls’ school. The town bus was crumpled under stones from a blown up building. In all, 140 houses had gone. So had the post office and the coffee shop. Bishop saw a couple and their four children ‘rolling rocks down from a mound where their home had been. Someone shouted that they should look out for unexploded shells but they paid no attention.’
King Hussein was aghast. He had been having secret meetings with the Israelis. On the morning of the raid on Samua, he received an unsolicited message from his Israeli contacts that they had no intention of attacking Jordan. In what the White House considered ‘a quite extraordinary revelation’ he told American ambassador Findley Burns and the head of the CIA’s Amman station, Jack O’Connel, that for three years there had been secret correspondence and clandestine meetings with Abba Eban, Israel’s foreign minister, and with Golda Meir, his predecessor. They had talked about peace and he had assured them he was doing everything he could to stop terrorist attacks from Jordan.
‘I told them I could not absorb or tolerate a serious retaliatory raid. They accepted the logic of this and promised there would never be one.’ Burns and O’Connel saw tears in the king’s eyes as he told them that the attack was ‘a complete betrayal of everything I had tried to do for the past three years in the interests of peace, stability and moderation at high personal political risk. Strangely, despite our secret agreements, understandings and assurances, I never fully trusted their intentions towards me or towards Jordan.’ Bitterly, the king ended the conversation by saying ‘this is what one gets for trying to be a moderate, or perhaps for being stupid’.
The ambassador had ‘never seen him so grim or so obviously under pressure. It was apparent that he had to use the utmost in self control to keep his emotions from erupting openly.’ He asked that Hussein’s request to keep his contacts with Israel secret should be respected. The king’s grandfather, after all, had been assassinated for doing exactly the same thing.
The king concluded that his throne was in serious danger and that Israel still wanted the West Bank, just as it had in its early years of independence. Hussein knew that many Israelis believed that Israel would not be secure until its eastern border ran down the river Jordan. He told the diplomats that he had always thought it was possible to live with Israel. But now the only option he had left was irrevocable hostility. Highly emotional, the king even talked about mounting his own attack on Israel, a threat the Americans, knowing the weakness of the Jordanian army, did not take seriously.
The morning after the raid he summoned all the ambassadors accredited to his court to his palace in Amman. He told them it was the latest instalment in Zionism’s long history of aggression and expansionism. Samua, he said, could not be seen as a mere reprisal. It was ‘the first battle’ in Israel’s campaign to swallow the West Bank. He told them that if they did not ‘restrain the aggressor’ by moral and if necessary physical force, the crisis would drag in all their countries too. Britain and America believed Hussein when he said that he was doing everything he could to stop infiltration. One of the alleged organisers of the attack on the Israeli border patrol had been arrested before the Israeli reprisal happened. The United States was so concerned about the raid that even after it supported a resolution in the UN Securi
ty Council condemning Israel’s actions, National Security Advisor Walt Rostow still thought they had not reacted strongly enough. The US airlifted urgent military aid to Jordan, a move the White House decided was necessary to save King Hussein’s throne. They feared that if they did not send aid Hussein would call in Egyptian troops or even Soviet advisers and equipment.
Hussein was very focused when it came to matters of his own survival. Not only had he witnessed his grandfather’s assassination; since becoming king he had faced a series of plots and would-be assassins of his own. Now the latest threat, he believed, was coming from Israel, his increasingly mighty neighbour. Hussein had learnt from his grandfather that he would always have to do business with Israel. In return, Israel had humiliated him. He was determined that he was going to survive, along with his regime.
