Six Days

by Jeremy Bowen

  Fifty paratroopers who were billeted in the American Colony hotel in East Jerusalem were very well behaved. They brought their own rations and only needed water, which they took from the rainwater cistern. They borrowed mattresses to sleep on the floor. Everything was returned and the soldiers left the rooms swept and clean. An officer tried to commandeer an Austin 1100 belonging to the family who owned the hotel. Frieda Ward, a member of the family, was about to open it when she saw the paratroopers taking cover in case it was booby-trapped. She thought they would never see it again. They brought it back a few hours later, because they could not work out how to disable the immobiliser. But by Friday, as the tail of the army moved in, they had to post watchmen to try to keep looters away.

  Every army has more soldiers at the rear than at the sharp end. Abdullah Schleifer, the American journalist who lived in the Old City, saw the second wave in action. They were ‘shooting the locks off the metal shutters and smashing their way into empty houses whose occupants had fled. They took radios, jewellery, TV sets, cigarettes, canned food and clothes. On the sidewalk outside the king’s Jerusalem palace a young Israeli girl soldier danced about in an evening gown while her comrades ripped into Hussein’s liquor stores in the basement.’ Soldiers backed trucks up to shops in East Jerusalem’s main shopping streets and took stoves, refrigerators, furniture and clothing.

  One of the looted houses belonged to Um Sa’ad. She lived on the north-eastern side of Jerusalem, near the airport. She had fled to Ramallah when the fighting started, with her child and her husband, who ran a successful building company. They stayed in Ramallah the whole six days. ‘After the war was ended, somebody came and told me, “We saw your doors wide open.” I lost everything in that house. I found a couch that was slashed all up and down, no curtains, nothing in the house that you could use. Our wedding pictures were just stabbed. They left clothes under the bed or under the table. And there was a curfew. Nobody could leave his house to steal or to do something like this. It had to be Israeli soldiers who did it.’ When Palestinian shops eventually reopened in the Old City, a British diplomat reported that their owners were ‘afraid to show much in the windows’ because so much had been stolen and added his own gripe that ‘some of my staff were fired at by Israeli soldiers when sitting in a garden at 5 p.m. The Israelis cannot count among their qualities an ability to make friends.’

  Israeli troops in Gaza were also compulsive looters. UNRWA, the UN agency that looked after Palestinian refugees, carried out a comprehensive survey of looting after the war. The survey documented scores of thefts, carefully separating incidents in which Israeli soldiers stole UN property from looting by locals, which in places was also very thorough. On one occasion the UNRWA director of operations was threatened with a submachine gun and told to make himself scarce when he went to a UN food store in Gaza City that was being emptied by Israeli troops. At times more than fifty soldiers were involved, loading army trucks which were then driven away into Israel. Any safes that were discovered were blown open and robbed. UNRWA lost two complete operating theatres, one from Gaza and one from the West Bank. The stores at Rafah refugee camp were stripped. An UNRWA guard saw an Israeli car outside the camp loaded with timber and pipes. After Israeli troops left the Gaza YMCA and its hostel, which they occupied for two weeks, George Rishmawi, the YMCA chairman, discovered they had taken all its typewriters, its encyclopedia, its safe, television and radio and all its beds, blankets and mattresses. UNRWA schools were occupied by Israeli troops up and down the Gaza Strip. When they left, they often took with them anything that looked valuable – everything from sewing machines to sports equipment to desks and chairs, even doors and door-frames. On several occasions soldiers sold looted food and goods to Palestinians for cigarettes or Egyptian currency. What was not taken was often smashed. The latrines in the girls elementary school in Deir al Balah were vandalised. The soldiers used the rooms of the toddlers’ play centre instead. There are several reports of text books being piled up and burnt. Maps of the area showing a complete Palestine without Israel were shot up. After the war UNRWA presented a bill of $708,610.43 to the Israeli government for the damage done by its troops.

  The peacekeeping troops of UNEF had left in such a hurry that they could not take a stockpile of vehicles, communications equipment and other substantial stores of military and logistical equipment. It was looted on a grand scale by the Israeli army, which has a department of war booty. The UN had intended to transport the UNEF stores to Pisa where they would become the nucleus of a UN stockpile that could be used at short notice for peacekeeping operations, something that the UN has never had, before or since 1967.

  Archaeological treasures became spoils of war. The parts of the Dead Sea scrolls that were held by Jordan were taken from the Palestine Archaeological Museum while the fighting was still going on. They are still in the Israel Museum in West Jerusalem. Also taken to Israel were the Lachish Letters, messages sent by the garrison commander of a small fortress to his commanding officer in palaeo-Hebrew script written on small pieces of pottery. When Jordanian Jerusalem was annexed the entire museum was declared an Israeli institution. So many Egyptian artefacts were taken from the Sinai that their return was made part of the peace deal between Israel and Egypt that was thrashed out at Camp David in 1979. Hundreds of cases of antiquities were returned to Egypt. Moshe Dayan was an obsessive collector of ancient artefacts. While he was touring Israeli army positions in the Negev desert in the last days before the war started, he dropped in on Colonel Yekutiel Adam, who showed him some ancient arrowheads and a flint axe that he had just found on the border with Sinai. Dayan sympathised with his friend’s frustration that he was not able to use the army bulldozers at his disposal to do some more digging. Dayan took his leave of the colonel promising to find an untouched tomb that they would open together. The Egyptians complained that, archaeologically speaking, Dayan had far too good a war. They say that his activities in Sinai amounted to ‘the theft of hundreds of Egyptian antiquities’. They are still demanding the return of forty bronze statues, among many other items. They claim he removed entire columns from the Temple of Sarabeit El-Khadem in Sinai, which he displayed in his garden in Tel Aviv.

  Cairo, evening

  The minister of information, Mohamed Fayek, sent an outside broadcast unit to the El Koba palace for President Nasser’s broadcast. He sat down in his office at the TV centre to watch it. He did not know what was coming. In the morning Nasser had given orders that his name must not be mentioned in news broadcasts. Fayek assumed the president had decided to take the spotlight off himself for a few days, but now it was starting to look serious. The American journalists under house arrest at the Nile hotel found a TV set and at 7:30 p.m. they sat down in front of it too. The speech started at 7:43. According to Eric Rouleau of Le Monde, Nasser’s ‘features were drawn, his expression tormented. He appeared to be overwhelmingly depressed. Speaking haltingly and hesitatingly, he read a text, stumbling over his words.’ Throughout his career Nasser had been a fluent, charismatic public speaker. The contrast with his mood less than a week before could not have been clearer.

  He told them that they had all suffered ‘a grave setback in the last few days’. Just as he said that the air-raid sirens wailed. Among the watching American reporters in front of the Nile hotel’s TV, Trevor Armbrister thought he saw tears in Nasser’s eyes. ‘It was all very convincing.’ Nasser did not go into the scale of what had happened, or even use the word ‘defeat’. He used the Arabic word naksa, which means setback, to describe the calamity that had befallen Egypt in the previous five days. (His description stuck. The 1967 defeat is often still described euphemistically in Arabic as the ‘setback’, while 1948 is always called the ‘catastrophe’.) Nasser said they would get over the ‘setback’. Once again, he blamed the West for intervening on Israel’s side:

  ‘In the morning of last Monday, 5 June, the enemy struck. If we say now it was a stronger blow than we had expected, we must say at the sam
e time and with complete certainty that it was bigger than the potential at his disposal. It became very clear from the first moment that there were other powers behind the enemy – they came to settle accounts with the Arab national movement.

  ‘[The army had fought] most violent and brave battles in the open desert … without adequate air cover in face of the decisive superiority of the enemy forces. Indeed it can be said without emotion or exaggeration, that the enemy was operating with an air force three times stronger than his normal force …

  ‘Now we arrive at an important point in this heart-searching by asking ourselves: does that mean that we do not bear the responsibility for the consequences of the setback?… I tell you truthfully and despite any factors on which I might have based my attitude during the crisis, that I am ready to bear the whole responsibility …

  ‘I have taken a decision in which I want you all to help me. I have decided to give up completely and finally every official post and every political role and to return to the ranks of the masses and do my duty with them like every other citizen…’

  When he had finished, the announcer came back on the air and broke down. The microphones picked up the sound of weeping elsewhere in the studio. Heikal’s words and the sight of the wounded giant all struck a deep chord in Egyptians and in Arabs across the Middle East.

  General Salahadeen Hadidi, the head of Central Command, was watching the speech at the headquarters of the Cairo military district. He was disgusted. ‘Nasser had got us into the mess. It was up to him to get us out.’ Amin Howedi, a minister trusted by Nasser, saw him half an hour after the speech. ‘His face was pale. His eyes were wide open and staring straight ahead.’ At the Broadcasting Centre, the information minister Mohamed Fayek started receiving agitated visitors as soon as Nasser had finished. Egypt’s greatest musical diva, the singer Umm Kulthum demanded the right to go on air to make a statement of her own about Nasser’s greatness. Field Marshal Amer wanted his own broadcast to clarify his own position. The head of the Egyptian trade unions had to be physically stopped from battering his way into the studio to hijack the microphone. Luckily for Fayek, who refused all their requests, Egyptian TV was due to go off air at nine. But it took him another two hours to make it clear that they were not going on the radio either. A survival instinct told him that Nasser’s message should not be diluted by others.

  High above Cairo’s streets, in a twelfth-floor apartment, Eric Rouleau of Le Monde heard a noise that sounded like the approach of a storm, even though the weather was perfect. He went out on to the balcony. ‘From all sides,’ he remembers, ‘we saw people coming out of their houses like ants and heads leaning out of windows. We went down. It was dusk and the city was half immersed in the darkness of the black-out. It was an extraordinary spectacle to see people hurrying from all sides, shouting, weeping, some wearing pyjamas, some barefoot, women in night dresses, all tormented by a suffering beyond endurance and imploring “Nasser, do not leave us, we need you.”’

  Gunfire started. ‘The crazy Egyptians were firing ack-ack and rockets at the stars – and some of the bursts seemed close,’ an American reporter, held with the rest of the US press corps in the down-at-heel Nile hotel, noted with alarm. By now they were all thoroughly spooked. One of them thought he remembered that Europeans were dragged from their hotels in Baghdad during the coup in 1958 and butchered in the streets. At one point an Egyptian army captain shouted at the Americans, ‘Rush to your rooms. They are coming.’ After trooping upstairs they were escorted back downstairs for dinner at ten. ‘A few demonstrators, someone explained, had tried to set fire to the hotel, but they had been stopped by police.’ Some hotheads wanted to burn down the US Embassy but the police kept them back. Others gathered outside the USSR’s Embassy to chant anti-Soviet slogans. For Sergei Tarasenko it was the most frightening night of the war. It seemed as if ten million people were chanting a single word: ‘Nass-er! Nass-er!’ The Soviets lay low and waited for the night to be over.

  * * *

  Nasser had been the dominating personality in the Arab world for the best part of 15 years. He was a gigantic figure who was loved and hero-worshipped by millions. Nasser had given Arabs their pride back after the humiliations of colonialism and the disaster of 1948. Young people in their twenties had grown up listening to Cairo Radio’s accounts of his exploits, from the expulsion of the British, to the rhetoric about the rights of dispossessed Palestinians and what had seemed, until only a few days before, to be a heroic stand against Israel and its Western allies. Until a few hours before Nasser’s resignation, Cairo Radio had still been reporting the triumphs of the Arab armies. Now that familiar voice, coming from the same place on the dials of their radios (and on the television too), was shattering everything that had seemed certain in their lives. Nasser, the good son, the big brother, the father of the Arab nation, was going. No wonder they came out on the streets. Observers at the time reckoned there were hundreds of thousands of people on the streets of Cairo. In Egypt’s second city Alexandria there were also mass demonstrations. In Port Said, on the Suez canal, the governor had to intervene to stop the population decamping for Cairo to add their voices to the crowd in the capital.

  Whether Nasser’s plan to resign was sincere or not is still widely debated in Egypt. Many people believe the speech was a piece of political theatre. The truth is probably that he felt he had no other choice. The scale of the Egyptian defeat was so vast that his best guess on Wednesday and Thursday was that a popular rebellion would kick him out of office. Before the broadcast, Mohamed Fayek, the information minister, claims Nasser told him: ‘They’ll put me on trial and hang me in the middle of Cairo.’ Perhaps resignation was not only more dignified, but it offered the chance to return at some time in the future. What he could never have guessed at was the reaction of the people. A huge crowd gathered outside his villa, where he had returned after the broadcast. The wife of Amin Howedi, who was about to be appointed minister of defence, was so stricken with grief that she left her house in her dressing gown to join the crowd. Fayek arrived at Nasser’s villa in his official car. When the crowd was too thick to drive through, he got out to move forward on foot. Suddenly people started shouting that he was Zakkaria Mohieddin, the vice-president that Nasser had nominated as his successor. They turned on him, jostling him and ripping his clothes for having the temerity to take their hero’s job. Fayek was rescued by the presidential guard and entered Nasser’s residence badly shaken and dishevelled. Inside, he was received by Nasser, who was sitting alone. Fayek told him that a woman had killed herself with grief.

  Some of the demonstrations were organised. The ruling party, the Arab Socialist Union, told 20,000 hard-core activists in Cairo to expect instructions once the speech was over. According to the official Yugoslav news agency, they directed the demonstrators once they were on the streets. But there was a massive element of spontaneity. If party activists were organising elements of the demonstrations they did not do the job across the country. Some hapless officials of the ASU refused to provide vehicles to take the faithful to Cairo, saying they were waiting for an order. The faithful responded by burning down the party offices. Gamal Haddad, the governor of a province in the Nile Delta, was asked by the ASU to provide transport on the morning of the 10th to take demonstrators to Cairo. He was convinced their grief was spontaneous, because in his province the ASU was not capable of organising anything remotely so big. The same evening, after Cairo Radio broadcast that Nasser would be appearing the next day at the National Assembly, the Cairo office of the Socialist Youth Organisation of the ASU sent out a circular to its members telling them to seal off the National Assembly building ‘and not let Nasser go out unless he has gone back on his resignation’.

  Damascus

  Nasser’s announcement was as big a bombshell to the Syrians as it was elsewhere in the Arab world. In Damascus the government panicked. Jordan was defeated, Nasser’s resignation meant Egypt must be too – which left only one Arab country for th
e Israelis to knock over. They were already attacking. If a leader like Nasser could not resist them, who could? Self-preservation became the government’s priority. Orders were issued for the army to disengage and fall back to Damascus, only forty miles or so from the border. Key members of the government left the capital. The army command was infuriated by the order to pull back, which at first it refused to obey. But during the night General Suwaydani, the Syrian chief of staff, was told by Ahmad al-Mir, the commander of the front, that Israel was close to trapping the Syrian army by outflanking its defences. Suwaydani ordered them to fall back to Kuneitra, the main town of the Golan, which controls the road to Damascus.

  DAY 6

  10 June 1967

  Syria–Israel border, 0826

  Israel had used the night to regroup and resupply its forces – and to brace themselves for a counter-attack which never came. Instead the Syrian army was pulling back. Its soldiers were being shelled and bombed from the air. But in the end they broke because of a piece of Syrian propaganda. A defence ministry communiqué was read out on Damascus Radio, saying that Kuneitra, the provincial capital, had fallen. It was untrue. Perhaps they hoped a false report would put more pressure on the UN Security Council or the USSR to stop the Israelis. Or perhaps it was a mistake, a sign of panic and confusion. Two hours later General Hafez al-Asad, the Syrian minister of defence, ordered a correction to be broadcast. But by then the damage had been done. Syrian troops facing the Israelis ran for their lives. Ahmad al-Mir, the commander of the front, escaped on horseback. Some reserve officers changed into civilian clothes and headed for the Syrian capital. Damascus Radio tried to make up for its mistake by, once again, claiming that America and Britain were helping Israel. ‘The enemy’s air force,’ it reported, ‘covered the sky in numbers which can only be possessed by a major power.’ Later, Ba’th party officials claimed the premature announcement about Kuneitra was a clever tactic which saved the lives of thousands of soldiers.