Six Days

by Jeremy Bowen

  The first Israeli troops entered Kuneitra at two in the afternoon. One of the commanders reported: ‘We arrived almost without hindrance to the gates of Kuneitra … All around us there were huge quantities of booty. Everything was in working order. Tanks with their engines still running, communication equipment still in operation had been abandoned. We captured Kuneitra without a fight.’

  The riches left behind by the Syrians were too much of a temptation. After it fell to the Israelis, the entire city of Kuneitra was sacked. When Nils-Goran Gussing, the UN special representative, visited in July he observed ‘nearly every shop and every house seemed to have been broken into and looted’. Some buildings had been set on fire after they had been stripped. Israeli spokesmen told Gussing philosophically that ‘looting is often associated with warfare’. They claimed that because Syria had announced the loss of Kuneitra twenty-four hours before it was captured, fleeing Syrian soldiers had a whole day to loot the place themselves. Gussing listened politely and concluded that ‘responsibility for this extensive looting of the town of Kuneitra lay to a great extent with the Israeli forces’. Gussing’s version seems most logical. There were only five and a half hours between the false announcement on Damascus Radio at 0826 and the fall of the city at 1400. Troops so panic stricken that they abandoned tanks without even turning off their engines were unlikely to have stopped to clear out the shops.

  New York, 0850

  From the outset, the fact that Syria had accepted the UN ceasefire on Thursday night was irrelevant to Israel. They planned to keep going until they had what they wanted, or until they were stopped by one of the superpowers. But time was running out for the Israelis. They knew it, and so did the diplomats at the Security Council, who were getting impatient with what looked like a blatant land grab. They sat into the early hours of Saturday morning, waiting for news from the Syrian front. The attack on Kuneitra was the last straw. Lord Caradon, the UK ambassador, believed there was a ‘clearly deliberate Israeli campaign’ to attack the town after the council had twice asked it to respect the ceasefire. Like the French ambassador Seydoux, he saw ‘no justification’ in taking Kuneitra, since the fighting had stopped elsewhere. A report of bombing close to Damascus was ‘still more deserving of condemnation’. Abba Eban, who was at the UN, tried to call Eshkol at his flat. Eshkol’s wife Miriam answered. She told Eban that Eshkol was with the troops in the north. Eban said, ‘Tell Eshkol to stop the war. The United Nations is putting pressure on me.’ Mrs Eshkol called her husband, who had a radio telephone in his car. According to her, Eshkol was in a fine mood. ‘He started telling me how beautiful the Golan is and so on and then he said, “You do hear me, darling?” I said yes, yes, yes. Listen. Aubrey [they always used Eban’s original first name, rather than the Hebrew one he adopted] said you have to stop. Then Eshkol says, “I can’t hear you.” So I said, you could a minute ago … so he said, that’s it. I’ll talk to you when I get home.’

  Washington, 0900

  Walt Rostow, President Johnson’s National Security Advisor, had given up tennis for the Six-Day War. But, this Saturday morning, he knew they were working on a ceasefire in New York, so he thought it was safe to play. He was on the court when a message arrived from the White House. He had to get to work, fast. The Soviets had activated the hotline. If Israel did not desist, they would take military action. ‘They called me off the court. I was still in tennis clothes.’

  The translation of Kosygin’s message was with Johnson five minutes after the teleprinter had gone quiet. Without mentioning its advance into Syria, Kosygin said, ‘A crucial moment has now arrived.’ Israel was ignoring the resolutions of the Security Council. The US must tell Israel unconditionally to stop military action in the next few hours. The Soviet Union would do the same. If not, ‘these actions may bring us into a clash, which will lead to a grave catastrophe’. If Israel did not comply, ‘necessary actions would be taken, including military’.

  Rostow had time to change into a suit before he joined the rest of the president’s top advisers in the basement of the White House, around the mahogany table in the Situation Room. Everyone was speaking quietly. Most of them had gathered in the same room in 1962 after the Soviet Union deployed nuclear missiles in Cuba. It felt like the most dangerous moment since then. Richard Helms, the director of Central Intelligence, had never heard such low voices in a meeting of that kind. Johnson, studiously calm, was eating his breakfast. Under Secretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach left the Situation Room to call in the Israeli ambassador to put pressure on him to accept a ceasefire. Russian speakers, including Llewellyn Thompson, the ambassador to the Soviet Union who happened to be in Washington, studied the text of the hotline message, to make sure that the phrase ‘including military’ really was there. It was. Intelligence from Syria was sketchy. Richard Helms was reduced to ringing friendly countries that still had missions in Damascus to try to find out what was really happening.

  The gravity of the crisis depended on how soon Israel stopped shooting. In London, Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee, the prime minister’s main intelligence advisers, believed that the Russians were bluffing. Moscow, they thought, would not risk a confrontation with the United States. The JIC believed the ceasefire would start to stick once Israel had completed its conquest of the Heights, which would be wrapped up by the end of the day. The Soviet Union, the British thought, was just trying to save some face with its Arab clients, trying to convince them, very late in the war, that their toughness and determination had rescued Syria.

  But most of the Americans in the Situation Room thought that the Israelis wanted to press on to Damascus, which made it a big crisis. The main voice raised against was McGeorge Bundy’s. He shared the British line that the Soviets ‘were doing their damnedest verbally to protect their friends in Damascus’. The Americans had information that the Israelis had discussed taking the battle all the way to the Syrian capital. Before the offensive even began, West German diplomats in Tel Aviv passed on the word from their contacts in the IDF that an advance to Damascus might be necessary to destroy the Syrian armed forces.

  They had urgently to reply to Kosygin. Getting the tone right on a teleprinter was a very delicate business. The Russians seemed to be testing them out. Their worry was that if their message was too polite, they might look intimidated, as if they were backing down. Johnson approved his reply at 0930. It was transmitted at 0939. He chose not to up the ante by making threats of his own. Instead, he assured Kosygin that he was also pressing for a ceasefire. Kosygin replied insistently that, ‘We have constant and uninterrupted communications with Damascus. Israel, employing all types of weapons, aviation and artillery, tanks, is conducting an offensive towards Damascus … it is urgently necessary to avoid further bloodshed. The matter cannot be postponed.’

  After an hour or so, while Johnson was out of the Situation Room, McNamara, the Secretary of Defense, turned to Thompson and said, still in a low voice, ‘Don’t you think it might be useful if the Sixth Fleet which is simply orbiting around Sicily, in the light of this Russian threat … wouldn’t it be a good idea to simply turn the Sixth Fleet and head those two aircraft carriers and their accompanying ships to the Eastern Mediterranean?’

  Llewellyn Thompson and Richard Helms thought it would be a very good idea. Helms said, ‘The Soviets will get the message straight away because they’ve got some fleet units in the Mediterranean and they’re sure watching that Sixth Fleet like a hawk with their various electronic devices and others. Once they line up and start to go in that direction, the message is going to get back to Moscow in a hurry.’ When Johnson came back into the room, McNamara made the recommendation. The Sixth Fleet should head east. Johnson smiled and agreed.

  McNamara picked up a secure telephone and gave the order. Since 20 May, elements of the Sixth Fleet had been ordered to stay within two days’ steaming time of the Mediterranean coast of Israel and Egypt. In practice, because different ships move at different speeds, that meant 200 to
600 miles away, to the west of Cyprus, mainly near Crete and Rhodes. After McNamara’s order, they moved to around 100 miles closer to the eastern littoral of the Mediterranean. Without hard intelligence from Syria, the Americans were improvising. For Helms, the ‘momentous’ decision to move the Sixth Fleet ‘in a very assertive direction … [was] made literally from one minute to the next. There were no papers. There was no direct organisation. There was no estimate. There was no contingency plan, there was nothing!’

  The Americans handled the crisis neatly. The tension dissipated as quickly as it had built up when it became clear that Israel had achieved its objectives in Syria, was not going to capture Damascus and was ready to honour a ceasefire. Before that happened, the presidential advisers in the Situation Room talked a great deal about what the Soviets were capable of doing. Bundy’s view was that ‘the Russians’ possibilities were not really that impressive’. Recent evidence suggests that did not stop Moscow making plans. The Soviet Union had sent its Black Sea naval squadron into the Mediterranean in May and early June. It was not a match for American naval power, but it was still a big force. By the time the war started, as well as the surface fleet, the Soviets had eight or nine submarines in or near the Mediterranean.

  But the Soviet Union did contemplate military action. General Vassily Reshetnikov, commander of the Strategic Aviation Corps, was ordered ‘to prepare a regiment of strategic aviation to fly to Israel to bomb a number of military targets. We started the preparation, studied the maps, examined Israeli air defence systems … It was a real rush … we loaded the bombs and were awaiting the signal to go.’ An Israeli journalist, Isabella Ginor, has uncovered evidence that the Kremlin intervened to stop hawks in the military taking action. Once Israel started moving into Syria, a plan was put together to land a raiding party of about 1000 men and 40 tanks from an amphibious landing ship at or to the north of Haifa, Israel’s main port and naval base. Soviet Arabic language interpreters had been on board since 11 May. They were told they would liaise with Arabs inside Israel after a landing in Haifa. The raiding party was roughly improvised, but it might have been able to do some damage. Although most of the Israeli army was a long way from Haifa, on the front lines against Egypt, Syria and Jordan, battle-ready forces could have reached Haifa within twenty-four hours, and the Israeli air force would have bombarded the raiders without mercy from the first moment. But the USSR would have been directly involved, which would have taken the crisis on to lethal new ground. Some of the men told to ‘volunteer’ for the operation knew what was being risked. ‘What then,’ one of them told Ginor, ‘we land our force and world war three begins?’ At a Communist party politburo meeting in the Kremlin on 10 June hawks led by the acting defence minister, Andrei Grechko, and Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB, pressed for action. They were overruled by more cautious civilian leaders, who ‘realised that half an hour after we landed the world would be in ruins’. The foreign minister Andrei Gromyko suggested breaking off diplomatic relations instead. One of Andropov’s military advisers, Nikolai Ogarkov, said in 1991, ‘Thank God, that under the [Soviet] feudal regime we only had Afghanistan. There might have been Poland, the Middle East and … frightening to contemplate, nuclear war.’

  Imwas

  Some of the Palestinians who had been expelled from the three West Bank villages of Imwas, Beit Nuba and Yalu were given shelter by the great Trappist monastery of Latrun. A local official from the nearby Israeli settlement, Kibbutz Nachshon, was ordered to ‘transfer’ them all to Ramallah. The idea of ‘transferring’ Arabs out of the land needed for the Jewish state was well established in Zionist thought. Various schemes had been discussed since the 1930s. It is still an attractive idea to right-wing extremists in Israel. But as the official recalled a year later in a mimeographed newsletter on the kibbutz, ‘transfer’ may sound painless, but what it meant was uprooting people from their homes. He wrote that ‘an order is an order but to go physically to take out children and people and transfer them on buses … even though I tried to keep it as humane as possible it was hard to digest. It was much harder than killing someone or dealing with those already dead.’

  Hikmat Deeb Ali found his family in a village nearby. They joined the long column of refugees on the road to Ramallah. Just outside the town, Israeli soldiers stopped them and arrested twenty-five men of military age. Hikmat had a child in each arm and one on his shoulders. After some argument between themselves, the soldiers let him stay with his family.

  One of the soldiers who was guarding the village of Beit Nuba was an army reservist called Amos Kenan. He was struck by the beauty of the stone houses, which stood in orchards of olives, apricots and grapevines. There were carefully watered cypresses and other trees that had been grown for their beauty and shade. Between the trees were neatly hoed and weeded rows of vegetables. In Beit Nuba, Kenan and his fellow soldiers found a wounded Egyptian commando officer and some old women. The soldiers were told to take up positions around the villages. Israel Radio had been broadcasting assurances in Arabic that it was safe for Palestinian villagers to return home. But if anyone tried to get into Yalu, Beit Nuba and Imwas, the soldiers were to shoot over their heads to keep them out. Kenan and the other soldiers in the villages had been told why. Imwas, Yalu and Beit Nuba were to be destroyed. The houses would be blown up and the rubble bulldozed flat. There were good reasons, the platoon commander told his men; to straighten out the Latroun ‘finger’ in the confrontation line between Israel and Jordan; to punish ‘dens of murderers’; and to deprive infiltrators of a base in future.

  At noon the first bulldozer arrived and set about uprooting the trees and destroying the houses and everything that was inside them. Then a column of refugees arrived, trying to get back into their village. Kenan’s platoon tried to explain in Arabic what they had been ordered to do. They ignored their orders to shoot over the civilians’ heads to drive them away. Many of the soldiers were veterans of the 1948 war. Kenan had fought in the extremist Stern Gang against the British. They were experienced fighters who did not like the look of what seemed to them to be an operation against peaceful farmers.

  Kenan wrote and almost immediately published an account of what happened.

  There were old men hardly able to walk, old women mumbling to themselves, babies in their mothers’ arms, small children weeping, begging for water. They waved white flags. We told them to move on to Beit Sira. They said that wherever they went, they were driven away, that nowhere were they allowed to stay. They said they had been on the road for four days – without food or water. Some had perished along the way. They asked only to be allowed back into their own village and said we would do better to kill them. Some had brought with them a goat, a sheep, a camel or a donkey. A father crunched grains of wheat in his hand to soften so that his four children might have something to eat. On the horizon, we spotted the next line approaching. One man was carrying a 50 kilo sack of flour on his back and that was how he walked mile after mile. More old men, more women, more babies. They flopped down exhausted at the spot where they were told to sit … we did not allow them into the village to pick up the belongings, because the order was that they must not be allowed to see their homes being destroyed. The children wept and some of the soldiers wept too. We went to look for water but found none. We stopped an army vehicle in which sat a lieutenant colonel, two captains and a woman. We took a jerry can of water from them and tried to make it go round the refugees. We handed out sweets and cigarettes. More of our soldiers wept. We asked the officers why the refugees were being sent back and forth and driven away from everywhere they went. The officers said it would do them good to walk and asked, ‘Why worry about them, they’re only Arabs?’ We were glad to hear that half an hour later they were arrested by the military police, who found their car stacked with loot.

  In the refugee camp in Jordan where they ended up after the war, a family from Beit Nuba told a researcher that they saw red soil being put over the place where the houses had been. It
felt ‘just like a dream. It’s as if we had never been there.’

  Refugees in Ramallah on the West Bank had heard Israeli proclamations that it was safe to go home. Hikmat Deeb Ali did not try to return. With six children, it was impossible to walk back. The people who tried made it as far as Kenan and his colleagues. They saw Israeli trucks taking away the old heavy stones that had been their houses. What was left of their possessions was taken away to be dumped in a landfill. They were never allowed back to rebuild their homes. The sites of the villages were turned into a forest called Canada Park. Thirty-six years later, it is a popular Israeli picnic spot.

  UN Security Council, New York

  Goldberg, the American ambassador to the UN, asked Rafael, his Israeli counterpart, to join him in the delegates’ lounge. Goldberg was direct. ‘The situation has reached a point where you must immediately make a statement that Israel has ceased all operations on the Syrian front. Fedorenko [the Soviet ambassador] any minute now, is going to make a statement in the form of an ultimatum. He will declare that “the Soviet government is prepared to use every available means to make Israel respect the ceasefire resolution”.’ Goldberg said he was speaking on the specific and urgent instructions of President Johnson, who did not want the war to end with a Soviet ultimatum. It would be ‘disastrous for the future of not only Israel, but of us all’. Rafael was, once again, playing for time, arguing that he could not do anything without the authorisation of his government, when he was called to the phone. It was the foreign ministry in Jerusalem. There was a show of reluctance. They would stop even though their position ‘will not provide future protection for Israeli border settlements’. But Rafael took down a statement accepting the ceasefire, which went into effect at six-thirty in the evening, Israel time.