by Jeremy Bowen
Gaza
Egyptians and Palestinians had fought hard and killed scores of Israeli soldiers. But two Israeli brigades had mastered an urban battlefield which, on the first day of the war, had been defended by 10,000 armed men. Now Israeli troops were mopping up scattered resistance. Much of it came from Palestinian civilians, who had been given arms by the Egyptian authorities. Some fought to the death. Some were shot out of hand after they surrendered. Twenty-eight young men from the Abu Rass family in Gaza’s Zaytoun district were captured, taken away and summarily executed. Their bodies were dug up from a mass grave by their family and reburied after the war.
But, according to their families, men of military age who had not taken up arms were also deliberately killed. In Khan Younis, where fighting had been especially bitter, Shara Abu Shakrah, a woman of forty, was at home with her husband Zaid Salim Abu Nahia. He made his living selling tomatoes, potatoes and okra from a stall. Zaid’s thirty-year-old brother Mustafa and his wife were there too, with Ghanem, another brother, and Mohammed, Zaid’s son from an earlier marriage. They had all been sheltering inside, hoping that the fighting would pass them by.
Suddenly they heard loud voices outside the house, calling in broken Arabic for the men to come out. The men complied. The women were terrified. Their first thought was that the Israelis wanted to kill their men. Their fears were based on what had happened in the 1956 war. Then, on 3 November, the invading Israeli troops carried out a series of massacres in Khan Younis. They started in the centre of the town, then moved out into the suburbs. Between 500 and 700 Palestinians, mainly civilians, were summarily executed. The dead included children and the elderly. In one case, twenty-one members of a single family died together.
Shara and the other women in the house screamed and tried to push their way out into the yard outside. They thought it was happening again. The Israeli soldiers pushed them back inside and blocked the door. Inside, the women heard shooting. They pushed harder against the door, trying to get out. In a few minutes the door opened and they spilled out into the yard.
Mustafa was lying dead in the dust. He had three sons and two daughters. Next to him Mohammed was badly wounded, with a hole in his stomach which was bleeding profusely. A few yards further on, they found Ghanem’s body. Shara could not see Zaid, her husband. She found his body on the other side of the house. He had been shot through the head.
The women washed and wrapped the bodies, preparing them for burial. But under Muslim law, they could not bury them. They waited three days for the curfew to be lifted long enough for neighbours to come round to do the job. Before that happened, while the bodies were decomposing rapidly in the heat and humidity of Gaza in early summer, more Israeli soldiers came to the house, asking Shara where the men had gone. ‘We screamed and threw sand at them, and scooped sand from the ground on to our faces. We said come to see them, they’re dead.’ Mohammed took two days to die. His stomach wound kept on bleeding. ‘We had no doctor, no medical treatment. We were all women, we didn’t know what to do.’
Cairo, 1630
By Tuesday afternoon, a day and a half after the fighting started, news of the defeats in the desert overnight was coming in to Amer at GHQ in Cairo. It seemed to General Fawzi, the Egyptian army chief of staff, that Field Marshal Amer was ‘psychologically worn out … on the verge of nervous collapse’. Suddenly, he called Fawzi into his office and gave him twenty minutes to make a plan to pull the Egyptian army out of Sinai to the west bank of the Suez canal. It was the first direct order that Amer had given to his chief of staff since the war began. A fighting withdrawal is a legitimate and effective military tactic. It takes good organisation and a brave rearguard that will keep on shooting until the rest of the forces can pull back to a defensible position. At their military academy and staff college, Egyptian officers learnt about Britain’s withdrawal to El-Alamein in 1942, when Montgomery and his commanders rallied their troops and forced them to hold on until they had rebuilt their strength for the offensive that turned the tide of war in North Africa. Some senior Egyptian officers even met Montgomery himself in Egypt in May 1967, when he came for the commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the battle of El-Alamein. Many Egyptian units, though battered, were still largely intact. A fighting withdrawal should have been possible.
After the order from Amer, Fawzi dashed off and with two other generals came up with a plan and a timetable for a withdrawal to the canal that would take four days and three nights. In his memoirs Fawzi describes what happened when they presented the plan to Amer and told him how long it would take. ‘He raised his voice and addressing me said, “Four days and three nights, Fawzi? I have already given the order to withdraw and that’s that.” His face had become very red and he left, looking somewhat hysterical, for his bedroom, which was behind his office. The three of us were left completely taken aback by his condition.’
Amer claimed that Nasser had approved the decision. Nasser claimed the decision was Amer’s. Whoever was finally responsible, Amer passed the order on in what had become his signature haphazard manner, mentioning it to everyone he spoke to in the field. According to Vice-President Abdul Latif Boghdady, Amer told them to dump their heavy weapons and pull out during the night, to try to get to the west side of the canal before dawn. When Boghdady visited Amer on Tuesday evening and heard what was happening he told Amer it was ‘a disgrace’. Amer replied, ‘It is not a matter of honour or bravery, but a matter of saving our boys. The enemy has destroyed two of our divisions.’ Apart from getting involved in the war in the first place, Egypt’s worst error in June 1967 was its shambolic withdrawal from Sinai, which led to the deaths of thousands of Egyptian soldiers and the loss of millions of dollars’ worth of equipment.
Field Marshal Amer, the obvious scapegoat for what was happening in Sinai, grabbed at the accusations against Britain and the United States. He summoned the Soviet ambassador for a dressing-down. Why, he demanded, hadn’t the USSR done for Egypt what the West was doing for Israel? Was it because of ‘détente’ between Washington and Moscow? If that was the case, the Soviets were, effectively, colluding with Israel too. What about the incident in the early hours of 26 May, when the Soviet ambassador had woken Nasser at 3 a.m. with an urgent message from Kosygin, warning Egypt not to attack? Moscow had practically condemned Egypt to defeat. ‘It is you who prevented us from making the first strike,’ Amer went on, desperate to blame anyone other than himself. ‘You deprived us of the initiative. That is collusion!’
The Egyptians sent out official messages to their embassies abroad containing evidence they said proved the allegations. A captured Israeli pilot had ‘freely confessed’ that British aircraft had used the airbase from which he had taken off. Syrian radio had intercepted messages in English appealing for help from US aircraft carriers. French fighter planes had been brought back from South Africa and delivered to Israel. King Hussein had personally seen British warplanes in action. The reports were believed, an Egyptian diplomat claimed, ‘in the highest Arab circles’.
* * *
At the headquarters of the Cairo military district, the head of Egypt’s Central Command, General Salahadeen Hadidi, had long since stopped believing what he was hearing on the radio. He was spending most of his time on the phone to other senior officers, trying to find out what was really happening on the battlefield in Sinai. A deserter was brought to his office, a private soldier who had been arrested at Cairo’s main railway station by the military police. Hadidi had been in charge of Eastern Command – the Sinai desert – from 1964 to 1966. He knew about the Qaher plan for the defence of the area. The general interrogated the exhausted private about his unit, where he had been and what had happened. The soldier had been on the front line. He gave a bleak account of a hellish landscape dominated by swooping, predatory Israeli warplanes. Nothing, he said, could be done to stop them. His unit had been broken and so had the units around him. Everybody was in retreat, trying to get away from the Israeli jets. It was every bit
as bad as the general had feared. The soldier was court-martialled and sent to the military prison. General Hadidi spent the rest of the war trying to reconstruct recognisable units from the exhausted and demoralised individuals who were streaming in from the desert. ‘I was very shocked. The whole country was very shocked.’
* * *
By 8 p.m. the US press corps had retreated to the Nile Hilton for dinner. Kamal Bakr, the head of the press centre, rushed into the dining room and told them he had very important news. Courteously, the American newsmen asked him to join them for something to eat. Bakr replied, ‘It is impossible. You have to leave the country – tonight.’ They were told to call their embassy, which advised them to stay where they were. The air-raid sirens wailed again. Flashes and explosions seemed to be coming from the direction of the pyramids. Egyptian air defence batteries were shooting back.
Sinai
The Egyptian army in Sinai was collapsing so quickly that no one really noticed an expeditionary force of 1250 men that had been sent by the ruler of Kuwait. More than half of them were kept safely in reserve in the Suez canal zone. But 550 commandos were sent into Sinai by train. They were bombed by the Israelis as they were unloading their gear from the train in Al-Arish. During the night of 5 June they tried and failed to phone the Egyptian gunner regiment to which they were supposed to be linked. On the morning of the 6th they drove to where the Egyptians were supposed to be. They had gone. In the absence of a war to fight and an ally to fight it with, the Kuwaitis decided to pull back to the canal as well. Two weeks later, between 100 and 150 of them were still missing in Sinai. General Mubarak, their commander, told a British diplomat in Kuwait that he was ‘quite relaxed about their fate, because they are Bedouin and will, he is sure, be able to survive. Understandably, however, he has little good to say about the Egyptians.’
Lieutenant Mohammed Shaiki el-Bagori was part of the Egyptian 6th Division, in the desert not far from where the Kuwaitis had been supposed to deploy. All day his division’s armoured vehicles and supply trucks were hammered by the Israeli air force. He lay on the ground, trying to find some cover, listening to a small transistor radio he had brought from home. As he tried to make himself smaller, and the Israelis ripped his unit to shreds, he listened to Cairo Radio predicting victory. ‘The Egyptian army has been storming the Zionist concentrations … advance and strike the enemy.’ Someone, he realised, was lying to them. He could not believe it could have been Nasser.
By 5 p.m. the Egyptian garrison at El Kuntilla had destroyed or buried what was left of their equipment. An hour before they had been ordered to retreat. Corporal Kamal Mahrouss, a professional soldier, felt a strong sense of personal humiliation. The soldiers got into trucks which drove slowly away, trying to get to Ismailiya on the Suez canal. They were sitting ducks. After dark they were picked out by searchlights. Israeli tanks started firing. Another Egyptian column was under attack ahead of them. More Israeli tanks were behind them. The men who still could leapt out of the trucks and ran away.
Near the front of the Israeli advance, Brig. Gen. Gavish now realised that the Egyptians were retreating. ‘It took a day and a half for the Egyptians to understand that their air force had gone and we had three divisions in the Sinai. Now we had two problems – stopping them getting out of Sinai and fighting tanks that were scattered all over the desert.’ Gavish and his divisional commanders decided the best way to destroy the Egyptian army in Sinai would be to overtake it in the race to the passes through the mountains in western Sinai. That would mean sending armoured spearheads down the three main roads across the desert, driving right through the Egyptians to set up blocking positions at the entrance to the passes before they got there. The rest of the Israeli forces would advance on a broad front, driving the Egyptians on to the guns that would be waiting for them.
Moscow
An unexpected message came through to the Austrian Embassy in Moscow. First deputy foreign minister Kuznetsov wanted to take up an invitation that had been discussed vaguely a couple of weeks earlier to lunch with the ambassador. It was a surprise. Impromptu lunches with senior Soviet officials were not the norm in Moscow in the sixties. They spent two and a half hours together. The Soviet minister confided that when he arrived at his office on Monday morning (Moscow is in the same time zone as Cairo) the news of the fighting had taken him totally by surprise, especially since he had thought a deal on the Gulf of Aqaba was close. He could not believe that the Israelis would have attacked without assurances from the Americans. The question now, though, was how to end it. Kuznetsov, who seemed in a confident mood, was hoping that the Security Council in New York would call for a ceasefire followed by a withdrawal. The Russian hoped ‘this unfortunate matter’ would not stop progress towards East–West détente.
Moscow was sending out a deliberate message. In 1967 Austria was a neutral central European state that was sometimes seen as a point of contact between East and West. Kuznetsov did not seem to know that he was using an informal back channel to the West to push for the kind of deal that the US was offering at the UN, and which the Soviet ambassador, without firm instructions from Moscow, was in the process of turning down.
United Nations, New York, 1000 (1700 Israel, 1800 Cairo)
The US ambassador Arthur Goldberg had another meeting with his Soviet counterpart Nikolai Fedorenko. Once again he rejected Goldberg’s offer of a Security Council resolution demanding a ceasefire and withdrawal to the positions both sides held on Sunday 4 June, before war broke out. This time the problem was that Goldberg said a disengagement of forces had to include ending the blockade of the Straits of Tiran. A report to the White House at 1:15 p.m. said ‘the continuing delay in convening the Security Council is very much in Israel’s interest so long as Israeli forces continue their spectacular military success … The Russians suffer a genuine disadvantage in having slower and more distant communications than we do. They have shown signs of trying to adjust their position to the changing situation on the ground in the Mid-East, but their adjustments have not caught up with the deteriorating position of their allies…’
Fifteen minutes later, Fedorenko called Goldberg. He had received a telephone call on an open line from Moscow, which in itself was ‘an extraordinary occurrence’. It came from the deputy foreign minister, Vladimir Semyonov. New instructions were on their way. As soon as they arrived, he stressed, Fedorenko had to arrange a meeting with Goldberg. Finally, and very belatedly, the Soviets had realised what was being done to the Arabs, now that Israel’s troops were racing towards the Suez canal and closing in on Jerusalem. When the new instructions arrived, Fedorenko was told to accept the US plan for a ceasefire plus withdrawal. If for any reason that was not feasible, he was to go back to the original Security Council resolution calling for a simple ceasefire.
Following his orders, he tried to find Goldberg. But now the Americans were making themselves scarce. At 3 p.m. they met again. Fedorenko said again he would support the American resolution, but could not accept that it would apply to the Straits of Tiran. Goldberg’s compromise was ceasefire followed by ‘urgent consultations’ on withdrawal. Fedorenko said that was even worse. Then he suggested going back to the original resolution that had been first put to the Security Council on Monday morning. It called only for a ceasefire and a cessation of all military activity. In the resolution only the phrase that it was ‘a first step’ suggested that other matters might have to follow. A withdrawal to the positions of 4 June was not mentioned. It was adopted unanimously at 6:30 p.m.
There was one more twist. In the morning, at 10:02 a.m., Johnson had sent a hotline message to Kosygin, urging him to accept the US resolution calling for a prompt ceasefire and withdrawal to the armistice lines. Kosygin took eight hours to reply. When he did, he told Johnson that he agreed and that instructions had been sent to Fedorenko to accept the resolution that Johnson had described. Kosygin’s acceptance of Johnson’s formula had come over the Washington end of the ‘Molink’, the hotline’s nickna
me, just after six. The Americans had a rough translation of the message, taken off the printer, by 6:12. It was in the hands of the president three minutes later. But as they read the incoming message, Johnson’s advisers could see on their televisions the Security Council preparing to vote for a plain ceasefire without withdrawal. In the Situation Room there was a rapid discussion of whether they should stick to Johnson’s offer, or let events at the UN take their course. Everyone agreed they should take advantage of what looked like a first-class Soviet diplomatic foul-up. There was time to get a call to Goldberg at the Security Council. In the Situation Room they sat back, watched the TV and waited for Fedorenko to vote. When he did, they cheered, then wondered whether Fedorenko would end up in Siberia.
The Americans had offered the USSR much more than the Israelis wanted them to give. But Moscow’s incompetence made sure the Israelis had exactly what they needed. Once Egypt’s air force had been destroyed, much more troubling for Israel than the fight in the desert was its fear that diplomatic pressure in the UN would stop it before it had achieved its military objectives. Worst of all would have been a rerun of what happened after the war in 1956, when they were forced to pull out of occupied territory in the Sinai. But the Kremlin’s bungling neutralised the weapon the Israelis feared most. By the end of Tuesday, the second day, they still controlled around a quarter of Sinai, though they were hours away from conquering Jerusalem. Had the Soviet Union not turned down the chance of a ceasefire and a withdrawal of forces to the positions they had held until 4 June, significant parts of the Egyptian army might have survived in the Sinai. Egypt would have had to lift the blockade of the straits, but in the circumstances, it would not have been a high price.
