Six Days

by Jeremy Bowen

  Jordanian Jerusalem was a quiet place. It was traditional, religious and poor. Helped by entrepreneurial Palestinian refugees, King Hussein was turning his capital, Amman, into a modern city. But after 1948 Jerusalem had lost its traditional hinterland in the rich farming land between the mountains and the Mediterranean coast. Palestinians grumbled not just because they were hard-up, but because they felt neglected and at times oppressed by Amman. A generation later, after more than thirty years of Israeli occupation, some Palestinians looked back sentimentally on what now seemed to have been golden years. One lamented: ‘We were masters in our own houses and of every inch of the good and holy earth of our Jerusalem. Yet we seem[ed] to be perpetual grumblers, unsatisfied and never content, always wanting more and better. We never appreciated the treasures in our possession.’

  Israeli Jerusalem was even quieter. It was centred on the New City, the commercial centre around Jaffa Street and King George Vth Street that had been built up during the British Mandate. Also in West Jerusalem were the impoverished ultra-religious Jewish communities centred on Mea Shearim and a belt of leafy suburbs that had been the home of the Palestinian middle class, which had either fled or been forced out in 1948. Israel declared Jerusalem as its capital city, an action that the rest of the world did not recognise. It did not matter to the visionaries on the Israeli side that shepherds still grazed sheep near their parliament or that most of its members took every opportunity they could to get out of the city. What mattered were the actions that had been taken and the point that was being made. Just as the only appropriate land for the Jewish state was the one given to the Jewish people by God, its only appropriate capital was the city about which they had prayed during all the centuries of exile.

  The fact remained though, that between 1948 and 1967 Jerusalem felt different, unfamiliar and a little uncomfortable to most Israelis. It was high in the mountains. It was cold, wet and miserable in winter – unlike the Mediterranean coast between Tel Aviv and Haifa where most Israelis lived. It was old, reeking of a history that belonged not just to Jews, but to others as well. For the Israeli writer Amos Oz who grew up in West Jerusalem in the 1940s and 1950s it was ‘the sad capital city of an exultant state’, wintry even in the summer and ‘surrounded at night by the sound of foreign bells, foreign odours, distant views. A ring of hostile villages surrounded the city on three sides: Sha’afat, Wadi Jos, Issawia, Silwan, Azaria, Tsur Bacher, Bet Tsafafa. It seemed as if they had only to clench their hand and Jerusalem would be crushed within their fist. On a winter night you could sense the evil intent that flowed from them toward the city.’

  In this half-city, Israel decided to hold a pageant and a military parade on 15 May 1967 to mark its nineteenth birthday. For a country that never had the chance to celebrate peace, Independence Day was always something special. It was a loud raspberry in the faces of the Arabs who had tried to strangle the Jewish state at birth and who, everybody knew, would try again if they were given the chance. Israelis in 1967 knew a lot about war. Many men under forty, even fifty, had done little else than fight. As teenagers they fought the British and the Palestinian Arabs. Thousands joined the British army in the Second World War. They had fought Arab regular armies in 1948 and 1956 and mounted raids in between. Well over a million immigrants had arrived since 1948, often after traumatic journeys from the ruins of Europe or from Arab countries, which kept the Jews’ property though not the Jews themselves. The youngest survivors of Nazi concentration camps were still barely thirty.

  The swinging sixties passed the Jewish state by. But for Independence Day 1967 there was going to be a special concert in the big stadium on the coast near Tel Aviv. Topping the bill were the Shadows, Nana Mouskouri and Pete Seeger. All over the country there were bandstands and dancing and fireworks. And in Jerusalem the army was putting on a parade.

  The UN believed that holding a parade in Jerusalem would only heighten the tension between Israel and Jordan. General Bull, the commander of the UNTSO military observers, and the senior UN representative in Jerusalem, was ordered not to attend. Most foreign ambassadors politely rejected their invitations. The CIA was worried about it too. It warned President Johnson that the parade ‘would be a clear violation of the armistice of 1949; a nasty incident in the divided city may result’.

  Two parades

  On 14 May, twenty-four hours after the Soviet warning, the officers at the Egyptian army’s operations command centre were thinking about lunch when they were jolted by entirely unexpected news. The supreme commander, Field Marshal Abd al-Hakim Amer, was putting the army on full alert for war. When Lieutenant-General Anwar al-Qadi, the chief of operations, asked why, he was told the Syrian border with Israel was about to explode. Amer issued the bellicose ‘battle order number one’. There were ‘huge troop concentrations on the Syrian borders’. Egypt was taking a ‘firm stand’. Al-Qadi was ‘astonished and alarmed’. He told Amer that the Egyptian army was in no state to fight Israel. The field marshal told him not to worry. Fighting a war was not part of the plan, it was just a ‘demonstration’ in response to Israeli threats to Syria. On 15 May General Fawzi, the chief of staff, went to Syria. He could not find any Israeli troops. ‘I did not find any concrete evidence to support the information received. On the contrary, aerial photographs taken by Syrian reconnaissance on 12 and 13 May showed no change in normal military positions.’

  Lt. Gen. al-Qadi was right. In May 1967 Egypt was no match for Israel. Economic problems meant that the defence budget had been cut earlier in the year. Training, never a religion, was now an even lower priority. In 1967 more than half the Egyptian army, including some of its best troops, were stuck in Yemen, where Nasser had intervened in the civil war. Yemen had the same corrosive impact on Nasser’s army that the Vietnam war had on the Americans. According to General Abdel Moneim Khalil, one of Egypt’s best commanders, ‘we incurred heavy losses in manpower, our military budget was drained, discipline and training suffered, weapons and equipment deteriorated, morale and fighting capability was seriously affected … It was a very bad way to prepare to fight the highly trained and well organised Israelis.’

  By 1967 the Egyptian high command had been concentrating on Yemen for five years. It had not done any serious training or preparation for a war with Israel. At the end of 1966 the military planners realised how bad things had become, warning that no offensive operations against Israel should be contemplated while Egypt was still involved in Yemen. Chief of Staff Fawzi approved the report. But in May 1967 Amer ignored it. He assured Nasser that, if it came to it, the army could fight Israel.

  Troops were marched ostentatiously through the centre of Cairo on their way to the Sinai desert and the border with Israel. The public show of strength confirmed the CIA in its view that it was a response to Israeli threats to Syria. ‘Nasser is going all out to show that his mutual security pact with Syria is something which the Israelis should take very seriously … [He] must be hoping desperately that there will be no need for him to fight the Israelis. He probably feels, however, that his prestige in the Arab world would nose-dive if he stood idly by while Israel mauled Syria again.’ The British, too, thought the movement of troops was ‘defensive-deterrent in character and were designed to show solidarity with [the] Syrians in the face of Israeli threats of action’.

  In Jerusalem Israel’s top politicians and soldiers were on their way to the Independence Day parade. They met up at the King David, the smartest hotel in West Jerusalem. Its grand public rooms overlooking the Old City were packed. Rabin updated Eshkol about the Egyptian deployments. More troops had been on the move during the night. Israel would have to mobilise some reservists. ‘We cannot leave the south without reinforcements,’ Rabin warned. They were not too worried. Something similar had happened in 1960, when Egypt moved tanks into Sinai after trouble on the Syrian border. Israel deployed its own reinforcements and, honours even, the crisis blew over.

  It was time to move. Eighteen thousand people were waiting for them in
the stadium at Givat Ram in West Jerusalem. Two hundred thousand more were lining the streets. Some of them had been there since dawn. Eshkol, his wife Miriam and Rabin were driven slowly along the crowded streets to the stadium. They settled themselves in the reviewing stand to watch a modest march-past of 1600 troops. Colonel Israel Lior, Eshkol’s military aide-de-camp, thought it looked like a scout parade. Independence Day was usually an excuse to show off Israel’s strength. The streets would shake with the weight of armour. In deference to the international disapproval Israel had kept the tanks out of Jerusalem. Outside the stadium demonstrators waved cardboard tanks in protest.

  Telephones were installed under the seats of the Israeli top brass at the parade. The phone under the seat of General Yeshayahu Gavish rang, with the latest news about Egyptian troops moving into Sinai. As soon as he could, he left and drove to his headquarters in Beersheba.

  UNEF

  Two days after it gambled by mobilising troops, Egypt dug itself deeper into crisis. A courier was dispatched from Cairo to Gaza with news for General Indar Jit Rikhye, the commander of the United Nations Emergency Force. In just over a decade in Gaza, the officers of UNEF had made themselves quite comfortable. When they were not on patrol or in their observation posts there were sand dunes and Mediterranean beaches, squash and tennis, a decent mess and a comfortable bar. UNEF even had a golf course laid out on its airstrip near the Mediterranean. It was not a classic seaside links. They played off strips of doormat, which were carried by their Palestinian caddies. Nonetheless, on the afternoon of 16 May, Rikhye, who was a general in the Indian army, was looking forward to a few holes. It was hot, sweaty and overcast. He was hoping there might be some breeze coming off the sea on to the first tee when the telephone rang. It was Brigadier General Ibrahim Sharkaway, who was chief of staff of the Egyptian team that liaised with UNEF. A special courier was on his way. General Rikhye was to stand by for a meeting at short notice. Rikhye was proud of his force of 1400 lightly armed peacekeepers. Originally they had been deployed to monitor the withdrawal of British, French and Israeli troops from Egypt after the 1956 war. After they left UNEF stayed on with a new role as a symbolic buffer force on the border. Egypt promised to keep its troops 500 metres behind the armistice line in Gaza and 2000 metres behind the old international border between Egypt and Palestine. UNEF operated in the space in between. Israel would not let it on its side.

  Rikhye decided not to play golf. He should have done. It was his last chance on the Gaza links and the courier from Cairo did not arrive until ten in the evening. At Sharkaway’s office, which was in a khaki-coloured building behind the whitewashed UNEF headquarters, Rikhye realised something big was happening. The courier was a brigadier general called Eiz-El-Din Mokhtar. He handed Rikhye a letter.

  COMMANDER UNEF (GAZA)

  To your information, I gave my instructions to all U.A.R. [Egyptian] armed forces to be ready for action against Israel, the moment it might carry out any aggressive action against any Arab country. Due to these instructions our troops are already concentrated in Sinai on our eastern border. For the sake of complete security of all UN troops which install OP’s [observation posts] along our borders, I request that you issue your orders to withdraw all these troops immediately. I have given my instructions to our commander of the Eastern zone concerning this subject. Inform back the fulfilment of this request.

  Yours,

  Farik Awal (M. Fawzi)

  Chief of Staff United Arab Republic.

  Nasser and Amer first talked about getting rid of UNEF in 1964. In December 1966 Amer sent Nasser a coded message from Pakistan suggesting it again. They were being damaged by criticism from Hussein’s radio stations accusing Egypt of sheltering behind UNEF’s skirts, using it as an excuse not to take action to protect other Arab countries. Amer’s suggestion was public enough to be picked up by British diplomats in Jordan. Still, for Rikhye, when the blow came it was ‘shattering … [war] would be inevitable.’ He wanted to tell the two Egyptian brigadiers that they were heading for disaster. Instead, stiffly, he told them that he had to pass the message on to the secretary general of the United Nations, U Thant, before he could comment. Then, as common Arab courtesy demanded, they drank coffee together. Rikhye asked them if they realised what they could be getting into. ‘Oh, yes sir!’ Sharkaway replied. ‘We have arrived at this decision after much deliberation and are prepared for anything. If there is war, we will meet in Tel Aviv.’

  Rikhye went back to his headquarters to cable New York. Then he summoned his senior officers. It was well after midnight. ‘General, what’s the occasion?’ one of them asked. ‘Is there a war on?’ Not yet, Rikhye answered, ‘but there will be one soon’.

  The Syrians were delighted by what was happening. The British ambassador in Damascus thought they were trying to make sure that Egypt would ‘willy-nilly be dragged in’ if Israel attacked. Dr Makhus, the foreign minister, who had been in Cairo, came home claiming that the slogan of the unity of progressive forces was now a reality. That was code for Syria’s satisfaction that Egypt was now in the front line.

  Charade

  At first, the Israeli army was remarkably understanding about Egypt’s actions. Its Syrian syndrome bristling, it was still focused on Damascus. On 17 May Shlomo Gazit, who was head of analysis in military intelligence, sat back at the dinner table in Tel Aviv after the plates had been cleared. Yes, he admitted to the American diplomats who were his hosts, the IDF had been taken by surprise. But it was ‘an elaborate charade’. It would only get serious if Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran and thus cut off the Israeli port of Eilat. That would mean war. The Israeli press picked up the army line that Nasser was playing a psychological game, to reassure and impress the Syrians. The service attachés from all the major embassies in Israel went looking for the concentrations of troops that Egypt had said were threatening Syria. They could not find any.

  Abba Eban, Israel’s foreign minister, warned that whatever the original intentions were, ‘an unwanted chain of events’ was the real risk. Eban wanted to wait for London and Washington to work out a diplomatic strategy ‘before taking any unilateral action’. But other high-ranking Israelis were not that patient. For them, diplomacy had already failed. The Americans half expected Israeli military action and did what they could to head it off. Johnson wrote to Eshkol on 17 May telling him ‘in the strongest terms … to avoid action on your side which would add further to violence and tension in your area … I cannot accept responsibilities on behalf of the United States for situations which arise as the result of action on which we are not consulted.’ A long-delayed aid package was authorised as a sweetener.

  Propaganda

  Long before most of his generation, Nasser recognised the power of the media. His radio stations trumpeted his actions across the Middle East. By far the most influential was Saut al-Arab, the Voice of the Arabs, which broadcast from Cairo to the rest of the Arab world via four Czechoslovak-made 150,000-watt transmitters. Whatever it turned its attention to could suddenly become disproportionately important. The British, for instance, were worried and irritated by a programme broadcast every night attacking its control of the Gulf. A correspondent for Reuters reassured Anthony Parsons, the British political agent in Bahrain, that it came from ‘one scrofulous room with five chairs and a table in a seedy building in Cairo’. It did not matter. The fact that it was being broadcast by Voice of the Arabs made it powerful.

  In a country that was often chaotic, where important army units were under strength and badly trained, Cairo Radio was well funded and meticulously organised. Like Nasser, they had drawn lessons from their experiences in 1956, when the RAF had bombed their transmitters. A manual with detailed instructions about what they should do in time of war was updated every year. Contingency plans were in place if the ultra modern radio and television centre on the Nile Corniche was bombed. Five separate teams of engineers and announcers were ready to back each other up to keep the broadcasts going. Cairo Radio was th
e arm of Nasser’s regime that was most ready for war.

  Ahmed Said, the main political commentator of Voice of the Arabs, had the most famous voice in the Arab world after Nasser himself and the legendary Egyptian diva Umm Kulthum. In the Gulf, radios were nicknamed ‘Ahmed Said boxes’. By 1959 there were 850,000 radios in Egypt and half a million in Morocco. They were set up in cafés or in village squares. Dozens of people listened to each one. For the first time, Arab mass opinion was created.

  The problem for the Arabs was that Ahmed Said and his colleagues were just too convincing. As war came closer in 1967, Said’s broadcasts became even more jingoistic. His listeners believed an easy victory was coming. Said believed he was doing for the Arabs what the BBC did for occupied Europe during the Second World War: ‘You’re asking people to fight, not to dance. I had to keep the soldiers going. Many of them had radios. And we were also asking the Arab world to be with us … We believed the broadcasts were our most powerful weapon … many of our listeners were illiterate, so radio was the most important way to reach them.’

  Arabs often explain the broadcasts as exercises in sloganeering and rhetoric, not intended to be taken literally. But in 1967 most Arab listeners, even those with enough education to know better, were swept up in the excitement. The great mass of Arabs, especially the dispossessed Palestinians in their refugee camps, believed everything that Ahmed Said and his colleagues said. When reality crashed into their lives, their faith in their leaders only made defeat even more traumatic.