by Jeremy Bowen
Frustration oozed out of Yigal Allon. Israel, he said reluctantly, was committed to playing the American game. But it would go to war if it found credible intelligence that Egypt was about to strike the Israeli air force. The American ambassador Walworth Barbour, a reclusive, very tall, immensely fat man with chronic emphysema, was especially close to General Yariv, the head of military intelligence. He reported that, ‘They feel they can finish Nasser off … they are prepared to wait a few weeks but are maintaining mobilisation at top level which cannot be done indefinitely without serious economic effects [on] Israel.’ The fact that it was Eban who had caused the delay was particularly infuriating. His classical education, often orotund style and metropolitan ways played brilliantly in the West but had always got under the skin of more down-to-earth sabras, native-born Israelis, who had spent their early years milking cows and mounting guard rather than reading Homer. They thought he was just plain wrong. What was he doing wasting his time over promises the Americans may or may not keep in the Straits of Tiran when the real issue had become the Egyptian divisions in the Sinai? General Yariv was furious. As far as he and other generals were concerned, Eban had disobeyed his orders. Tiran was ‘not important’. What mattered was the big picture. Nasser was uniting the entire Arab world against Israel. Eban should have taken the cable that Rabin had rewritten more seriously. A rumour was started by Eban’s enemies that he would be replaced by Golda Meir.
Nasser’s bandwagon
The Egyptian capital was calmer than it had been. In the papers the government ran campaigns to give one day’s wages to the army and to give blood at the newly opened donor centres around Cairo. There was no rush of volunteers. The minister of culture arranged for intellectuals to tour the provinces to make speeches and declaim patriotic verse to inspire the masses. For the foreigners who were left, Cairo was bleak. The American Embassy, desperate for something positive, was comforted that critical voices in the press and radio, which had ‘reached upper decibel range … now describe British as our accomplice in the plot so we no longer alone’.
For Nasser, 28 May was an excellent day. The world’s press waited for him as he strode confidently into the floodlit, circular council chamber of the Presidential Palace. A British foreign correspondent, Sandy Gall of ITN, felt Nasser’s charisma. ‘Physically he was an impressive man, tall for an Egyptian, well built, handsome and with a film star quality that turned heads and made him the centre of attention. But his most noticeable feature was his smile. It came on like an electric light, the shiny white teeth flashing on and off.’ Among Arabs, his prestige had never been higher.
It was a confident, assured performance, broadcast live on radio in Egypt and, through Voice of the Arabs, across the Arab world. The crisis over UNEF and the Straits of Tiran, Nasser told them, were just ‘symptoms’ of the constant threat to the Arab world posed by Israeli aggression against Palestine. What could be more natural than an Egyptian response? He threatened anyone who tried to ‘touch the rights of Egyptian sovereignty’ with ‘unimaginable damage’. Nasser warmed to his theme. Israel had been deceived by its ‘sham victory’ in 1956. Coexistence was not possible because Israel had robbed the Palestinians and expelled them from their country. Palestinian rights must be restored and Eshkol would get what was coming to him for threatening ‘to march on Damascus, occupy Syria and overthrow the Syrian Arab regime’. Winston Burdett of CBS News thought Nasser sounded like a ‘sleepwalker speaking in an exalted trance of fatalism’. But a British diplomat who was listening reported that Nasser was ‘riding high and working coolly and cleverly’.
American diplomats in Cairo listened with dismay, certain that a crisis was becoming a disaster. The US position in the Arab world, already weak, was about to be destroyed. Nasser, they believed, would not turn back, except perhaps if he was faced with the threat of clear and overwhelming force. Even then, he would turn a retreat in the face of American power into a major political victory. They accepted he did not want to fire the first shot. But he hoped a showdown with Israel would strengthen his position in the Arab world. They dismissed a theory put around by some Nasser-watchers in Washington, who detected hints that he would let oil pass through the straits to Israel, as long as it went quietly in neutral tankers.
After Nasser had finished, King Hussein’s private secretary, Ziad Rifai, switched off the radio he kept on the desk of his office in Amman. What Nasser had said, and the way he said it, meant war was coming. The king, who had been listening in his quarters in the palace, felt the same. Hussein’s first reaction to Nasser’s blockade of Eilat was that it was ‘incomprehensible and extremely dangerous’. But he decided that his only chance was to try to repair relations with Nasser. New light has been thrown on Hussein’s reasons for taking his decision by recently declassified CIA documents. The CIA had a special relationship with Hussein. For many years it channelled secret subsidies to the king. The CIA station chief in Amman, Jack O’Connel, became Hussein’s close confidant. He reported that the king and his generals were more convinced than ever that the West Bank was Israel’s ‘strategic target’. Jordan’s generals were pressing very strongly for coordination of defensive plans with other Arab states. Failure to do it, they argued, meant that they would lose more soldiers and more territory. The CIA reported that ‘the army’s mood was determined, their argument was irrefutable and the King faced serious morale and loyalty problems if he did not respond to it’.
Hussein warned Washington that its unilateral support of Israel was endangering its ‘traditional Arab friends’, a reference to himself. He warned them that he might oppose the US to ‘survive the Arab wrath’. Even so, his friendship with the US might have made him ‘too vulnerable to survive’.
Hussein realised that even if Nasser’s actions were a lousy way to prepare for a war, they had propelled him right back into the hearts and minds of Arabs everywhere, and nowhere more so than among Palestinians on the West Bank. For Hussein, it all came down to survival. He could feel the Arab political bandwagon that had started in Cairo rumbling threateningly towards him. If he did not jump on to it, he would be squashed. War was coming and he would not be able to stay out of it. He was just too close to the action.
An alliance with the viciously anti-Hashemite regime in Syria seemed out of the question. Jordan did not even have diplomatic relations with Damascus. The king withdrew his ambassador after a lorry filled with explosives blew up at Ramtha on the Jordanian side of the border with Syria on 21 May, killing twenty-one Jordanians. Syria accused the king’s men of planting the bomb. Hussein’s court became convinced that the radicals in Syria saw the king as the real enemy, not Israel. All that was left to him was a reconciliation with Nasser. Hussein’s reading of Israel’s intentions, and the pressure from his generals and the people on the streets, especially Palestinians, left him with no choice. If he stayed out, an ‘eruption’ would cause his regime to collapse, which ‘would result in an Israeli occupation of probably the West Bank or even more than the West Bank’. If he fought, Egyptian air cover might delay Israel’s advance into the West Bank long enough for the UN to intervene. In his official business he gave the impression that he had become ‘a lonely man’.
Just after dawn on the morning of Tuesday 30 May, King Hussein left for Cairo. He strode from his car to the plane, scribbling his signature on papers appointing his younger brother Prince Mohamed as regent while he was away. He told them to expect him back for lunch. Hussein was tense, excited and in a hurry. He was wearing a khaki combat uniform with field marshal’s insignia, and a big American Magnum automatic handgun in a canvas holster on his left hip. The king found flying calmed him so he took the controls of the Jordanian Caravelle. He flew it south across the desert, over Petra, Wadi Rum and the Red Sea towards Cairo.
Nasser was waiting at the airbase, as usual wearing an immaculate business suit, in high good humour and in the mood for banter. He looked at the king.
‘I see you are armed and in uniform.’
> ‘It means nothing,’ said the king, ‘we’ve been dressing this way for more than a week.’
‘Since your visit is a secret,’ Nasser replied, ‘what would happen if we arrested you?’
Hussein, who had travelled with his prime minister and his top generals but without bodyguards, smiled. ‘The possibility never crossed my mind.’
It was a little awkward. They got into a black Cadillac and swept off to the Koubbeh palace. Nasser and Hussein went into a small drawing room on the first floor and started to talk. Field Marshal Abd al-Hakim Amer joined them. He was in a bullish mood. He told Hussein that Egypt did not need anything from him. ‘We just want you to sit and watch what we are going to do with them. We are going to destroy them.’ The king thought Amer’s performance was absurd. He tried to convince Amer and Nasser that Israel was too strong and that they were risking a disaster. Don’t worry, they told him. We know what we’re doing. Nasser and Hussein were fatalistic. Both of them said, apparently sincerely, that whether the battle was lost or won, they could not shy away from the fight. Arab dignity demanded nothing less. (The CIA commented that ‘dignity has unquestionably become an overriding priority in the scale of Arab considerations’.) The king asked to see the pact Egypt had signed with Syria. ‘I merely skimmed the text and said to Nasser: “Give me another copy. Put in Jordan instead of Syria and the matter will be settled.”’
They relaxed. Nasser and Hussein agreed that he would take back with him the leader of the PLO, Ahmed Shukairy. He came in, the king recalled with distaste, ‘bareheaded, tieless, in a long-sleeved shirt and khaki pants, looking particularly unkempt’. In fiery speeches he had been hurling abuse at Hussein, ‘the Hashemite harlot’ who threw Palestinians into his ‘towers’. Now he was ingratiating, all smiles, telling Hussein he was the real leader of the Palestinians. Nasser turned to the king. ‘Take Shukairy with you. If he gives you any trouble, throw him into one of your towers and rid me of the problem.’
At 3:30 p.m., Cairo Radio interrupted its programmes with a news flash announcing the pact. Jordanians and Palestinians in Hussein’s kingdom were amazed and delighted. The king was mobbed as he drove back to his palace from the airport. The deliriously happy crowds were more convinced than ever that victory was certain. They hated the Israelis and believed Nasser’s propaganda. Hussein, though, was not deluded by his new fans who were trying to lift up his Mercedes so they could carry it to the palace. Nasser had been the real winner. The deal he had made only granted the Hashemites a reprieve. The crowds loved him because Nasser had accepted him, not the other way around. ‘I knew that war was inevitable. I knew that we were going to lose. I knew that we in Jordan were threatened, threatened by two things: we either followed the course we did, or alternatively the country would tear itself apart if we stayed out, and Israel would march into the West Bank and even beyond.’
After he came back from Cairo, Hussein toured his units in the West Bank with his cousin Prince Zaid Ben Shaker. They started with the armoured brigade that Ben Shaker commanded, which was just inside the West Bank. Ben Shaker gathered all the senior officers. The king spoke frankly. ‘He told the officers, “I am convinced that we are not going to win this war. I hope we do not get involved in this war but if we do, all I ask you to do is your best, respect your traditions and remember that you are fighting for your country” … And he said that time and again in every formation in the West Bank. In the car when we were going from one place to another he’d say, “I hope to God that there won’t be a war but I think there will be one.” He feared the worst from the very beginning.’
Fear
Strict military censorship meant that Israel’s generals kept to themselves their overwhelming confidence about the coming victory. Cut off from official reassurance, Israeli civilians were desperately worried. Bloodthirsty threats were pouring out of Arab radio stations and on to the pages of the Israeli papers. Only twenty-two years after the end of the Holocaust, it is not surprising that Arab propaganda hit home. The official army minder attached to the British journalist Winston Churchill Jr told him that he was ready to kill his wife and baby daughter rather than let them fall into the hands of the Arabs. The crisis was especially frightening to Jews in the Diaspora, who looked at the map and saw tiny Israel surrounded by big, threatening neighbours. It all sounded appalling in Europe and the US, and helped strengthen already strong Western sympathies for Israel, which looked like a friendly democracy surrounded by a baying, murderous mob.
Translated, the Arab broadcasts are blood-curdling. No wonder many Israelis were scared stiff. Ahmed Said on Voice of the Arabs told his audience in a typical broadcast: ‘We have nothing for Israel except war – comprehensive war … marching against its gangs, destroying and putting an end to the whole Zionist existence … our aim is to destroy the myth which says that Israel is here to stay … every one of the 100 million Arabs has been living for the past nineteen years on one hope – to live to die on the day Israel is liquidated. There is no life, no peace or hope for the gangs of Zionism to remain in the occupied land.’ Faced with what seemed to be horribly clear threats from their biggest neighbour, Israelis pulled together.
A doom-laden mood overtook Israel in May 1967. Black jokes about imminent annihilation circulated – ‘will the last one out at the airport turn off the lights – let’s meet after the war … where? In a phone booth…’ According to a kibbutznik on the border with Syria, ‘Suddenly everyone was talking about Munich, about the Holocaust, about the Jewish people being left to its fate. A new Holocaust did not seem as real a possibility to us as it did to the people of Europe; for us it was a concrete picture of an enemy victory, and we decided that, come what might, we would prevent it.’ The youngest Holocaust survivors were still in their twenties, but they were not given any special treatment in a society that valued military strength above all else. Native-born Israelis were brought up in the 1950s and ’60s to reject what they assumed was the weakness and passivity of Jews who did not fight when the Nazis came.
The government made secret preparations for heavy casualties. Thousands of coffins were ordered. Rabbis consecrated parks as emergency cemeteries. During May, more and more men were called up into the army. Children delivered the mail, newspapers and milk, dug trenches and, when they finally got to school, practised air raid drills. The Civil Defence Corps, fully mobilised by 26 May, pasted up instructions in the streets, stockpiled medical supplies and made sure the shelters were clean and in good order. Civilians were drafted into essential services if they were not in the army. The working week was extended from forty-seven hours to a maximum of seventy-one. Vehicles were called up into national service as well. Yellow labels printed with the words ‘mobilised equipment’ were stuck on to their windscreens. Bread lorries, buses and their drivers were sent to the front to transport troops. Hitch-hiking became the most common form of transport. The insurance companies rallied around, extending driver’s policies to cover hitch-hikers. In Tel Aviv, volunteer taxis ran along discontinued bus routes. In Haifa, secondhand car dealers offered vehicles and drivers. Some people started up shuttle services to and from military bases. Women with cars adopted shops and acted as their van drivers, picking up supplies from warehouses. By the Thursday before the war, 1 June, so few able-bodied men were left out of uniform that a visitor from the US thought Tel Aviv was like a ‘sunny, sparsely populated colony for the infirm. Even the taxi driver wore a leather glove concealing an artificial hand…’
In Israel tens of thousands of pints of blood were donated. In Arab Jerusalem it was more casual. Towards the end of May a local journalist heard an appeal for donations on the radio. When he went to give blood at the Red Crescent centre in the Old City it was empty. The staff were not sure why he was there. ‘Had there been an injury in the family? At which hospital was the patient? Forty-five minutes passed before Nabil could yield his patriotic pint.’
In Israeli factories clerks offered to work on the shop floors. People did unpaid over
time. Women took on jobs left empty by husbands and sons who were in the army. Taxpayers settled bills they had been trying to forget about, or even paid their taxes in advance. Other people just sent money to the government. Police officers who were not in the army gave back 10 per cent of their monthly pay. Foreigners who were studying at religious schools in Israel asked for military training. Religious Jews, who did not have to do army service and were often involved in furious rows with Israel’s secular establishment, declared their own ceasefire for the duration, cancelling demonstrations against driving on the Sabbath in Jerusalem and against autopsies in Haifa. The rabbis told soldiers the obligations of the Sabbath were suspended.
Eshkol
On the morning of Sunday 28 May Israel’s prime minister Levi Eshkol was exhausted. But there was no chance to rest. The next item on his agenda was a live radio broadcast to the nation. The people wanted reassurance and leadership. Eshkol tried to say all the right things, praising the strength of the army and the spirit of the country. But he fluffed his lines. The prime minister was reading from a script that had been written in a hurry. On his copy words had been changed around, crossed out and added on. Some of it was just military jargon. And he had not bothered to rehearse. When the red light went on he stumbled and stammered his way through the most damaging few minutes of his political life. It was a disaster. The irony was that Eshkol was correct. The IDF was in good shape. In Washington that day, both morning and afternoon White House intelligence situation reports stressed that ‘nothing had changed to alter the findings of the 26 May special report of the Watch Committee. There is no information which would indicate that Egypt intends to attack. At the same time, the Israelis could attack with little or no warning if they decided to.’
