Six Days

by Jeremy Bowen

  Israel had destroyed its enemies, just as its generals and the intelligence services in Washington and London had predicted. The victory was greeted with huge relief by the Israeli people. Because of strict censorship, they had never known how confident their generals were of victory. Instead they had listened to blood-curdling Arab propaganda, which they had no choice other than to take seriously. Twenty-two years after the end of the European Holocaust, many Israeli civilians believed they had been delivered from an evil that could have turned into another genocide. If the Arab armies could have destroyed the Jewish state, millions of Arabs would have been delighted. But as the commanders of the IDF knew, they would never have the chance. Israel was too strong.

  Reaction to the victory in Western Europe and North America was summed up by the journalist Martha Gellhorn, one of the great reporters of the twentieth century’s wars. ‘In June 1967, Israel was the hero of the western world. The Six-Day War was a famous victory, unmatched in modern warfare. The David and Goliath aspect of this conflict aroused great admiration. Considering Goliath’s superior force, it looked beforehand as if David might not make it.’ The truth, of course, that was demonstrated so well by the IDF during six days of war, was that if any country in the Middle East was Goliath, it was Israel. But Abba Eban, its foreign minister, sensed and seized skilfully the prevailing mood in the West. On the second day of the war, in a speech at the United Nations in New York that reflected the genuine fears of Israeli civilians, he described the previous fortnight as a time of ‘peril for Israel wherever it looked. Its manpower had been hastily mobilised, its economy and commerce were beating with feeble pulse, its streets were dark and empty – there was an apocalyptic air of approaching peril, and Israel faced this danger alone…’

  The idea that the story of David and Goliath was being replayed in the 1960s was easy to understand, and enormously attractive in Israel and the West. It was also a deadly political weapon, as effective in its own way as the IDF had been on the battlefield. It helped turn a military victory into a political one. Eshkol, Eban and the rest of the Israeli government were determined to avoid a repeat of what Eban called the ‘nightmare’ of 1956, when Israel ‘won a glorious victory and then … [was] forced back by political pressure without any concrete gain’. Just as important as David and Goliath to Eshkol and Eban was their successful resistance to the demands of the Israeli generals and their cabinet allies for an immediate military response to Egypt’s adventurism. By not going for immediate war, and by dropping the problem in the lap of Lyndon Johnson, they gained the moral high ground. Once the Americans realised that the only way to stop a Middle East war was to risk starting one themselves, something they were not prepared to do, Israel’s politicians were free to turn to their superbly confident and competent generals without paying an international political price. By the time Eban addressed the UN Security Council on 6 June, President Johnson’s most influential advisers were already telling him that Israel should be allowed to hold on to the land they had captured until a broader peace settlement could be negotiated. The Sinai was returned to Egypt after the Camp David peace agreement in 1979. The West Bank, Golan Heights and Gaza are still under Israeli control.

  The Israeli newspapers that were being prepared on the evening the war ended talked about the Messiah walking behind advancing Israeli tanks. Even to secular Israelis, victory felt miraculous. But it was no miracle. Israel won because of a generation of hard work. In 1972 some of Israel’s commanders in the Six-Day War were starting to enter politics and were in no mood to minimise their role in one of the most overwhelming military victories of the twentieth century. Future president Ezer Weizman, blunt as ever, told an Israeli newspaper that ‘there was never a danger of extermination. This hypothesis had never been considered in any serious meeting.’ Chaim Herzog, another future president, agreed: ‘There was never any danger of annihilation.’ General Matityahu Peled, a pioneer of the peace movement said that, ‘To pretend that the Egyptian forces concentrated on our borders were capable of threatening Israel’s existence not only insults the intelligence of any person capable of analysing this kind of situation, but is more than anything an insult to the Israeli army.’

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  So if Israel did not face extermination in 1967, why was it fighting? Fifteen years later, Menachem Begin, by then Israel’s prime minister, told the New York Times: ‘In June 1967 we had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.’ The choice was about going to war or letting Nasser inflict Israel’s most serious political defeat since independence in 1948. Losing the port of Eilat’s connection to the Red Sea, Africa and Iranian oil would not put the existence of the Jewish state in danger. It would have been a serious economic blow, but even worse for Israel’s leaders, it would have been a genuine Arab political victory. Nasser risked everything in pursuit of that political victory. He did not want a war. But he convinced himself that if he took a military crisis to the brink, he could force Zionism into its first backward step. His gamble was based on the delusion that Israel would not fight, and the illusion that his forces would at least hold the IDF until the superpowers forced a ceasefire. Both the Arabs and the Israelis are bad at reading each other’s motives, but Nasser could not have got it more wrong. In 1967, Israel’s own rules of behaviour told it clearly that if Nasser did not back down, it would go to war, to defeat the Arabs in the way that it had been planning since the early 1950s. Eshkol and Eban did not embrace war willingly. But they were prepared to fight rather than hand Nasser and the Arabs any sort of victory, bloodless or bloody. The generals and their fire-breathing political allies would have fought much sooner. They regarded war as a part of Israel’s life in the Middle East. For them, the dangers lay in hesitation. But Eshkol, Eban, Allon, Dayan and the rest of them were agreed. An Arab victory, political or military, whether or not he attacked, was simply unthinkable.

  On the Arab side post-mortems started. One condemned the way that ‘foolish and irresponsible’ Arab governments ‘allowed themselves to appear as the aggressor instead of the victims. While they talked of war and conquest, Israel prepared for it.’ Amer Ali, a retired Iraqi major-general, submitted a devastating analysis of Arab military failure to heads of state of the Arab League. He ripped into weak political and military leadership, faulty strategy and inadequate logistics. The fundamental aim of warfare, he wrote, is the complete operational destruction of the enemy until ‘he is neither willing nor able to continue resistance. This aim can only be achieved by persistence and by taking the initiative, qualities which the Arab leaders have lacked for nineteen years, and the lack of which has been aggravated by the lying propaganda broadcast by all Arab radio stations.’ The Arabs, the general went on, also ignored the power of surprise, ‘one of the most effective weapons available’. Instead, they ‘publicised their own movements, used conventional plans against which the enemy had already taken precautions and depended on foreign newspapers and periodicals for information about the enemy’s movements’.

  In every department of warfare in which the Arab armies failed, Israel excelled. The Israelis were clear about what they had to do. The Arabs were confused. Another Arab military critic warned that if his side did not improve its coordination and manoeuvrability and seize the element of surprise Israel would always win ‘even if we arm ourselves with nuclear bombs’. But criticism went much deeper than the conduct of military affairs. Even the way that the Arabic language was used to create and then embroider Arab dreams and illusions was attacked. Writers called for a more honest use of words. The rhetoric about revolution, reform and rebirth that had surged around the Arab world in the 1950s and ’60s was shown by the defeat to be hollow. The debate among intellectuals was passionate. Much of what they said is still valid in the twenty-first century. But because most Arabs lived in police states, not much of it penetrated to the masses. In the year
s ahead, they started listening intently to a message that was much stronger, that came loud and clear from the mosques.

  A few days after he emerged with his camel from the Sinai desert, Major Ibrahim El Dakhakny left Port Said for Cairo by car. To his horror, an artillery exchange started as they drove along the Egyptian side of the Suez canal. Shells landed near them. It was his most frightening moment since he left Gaza. ‘Oh God, I thought, to get this far, and die here! But two days later I was back in my office in Cairo … We had to start work to rebuild.’

  Consequences

  Operation Johnson

  Nasser called in the Egyptian general staff and exploded with fury. They were ‘cowards and bastards’. Nasser’s entourage was full of talk of reprisals against senior officers. In the end there were trials, but no executions. He huffed and puffed about restarting the war, but the Israelis were not impressed. Even though Egypt was re-arming, they believed the damage they had inflicted made war impossible ‘for quite some time to come’. By the end of July morale in Egypt was at a very low ebb. The full implications of defeat had sunk in. More people were prepared openly to oppose the government and fiercely to criticise the ‘bourgeois lifestyle’ of the officer class that sustained Nasser’s regime.

  Nasser’s biggest problem, though, was Field Marshal Amer, who was refusing to accept his dismissal as commander-in-chief. It was a direct challenge to Nasser’s authority. The president’s old fears about Amer leading a coup against him resurfaced. The field marshal was officially under house arrest in his villa in Giza, a suburb of Cairo near the pyramids. But he had surrounded himself with around two hundred loyal officers and kinsmen from his village in Upper Egypt, all of whom he had looked after royally in the fat years. They turned the house into a fortress.

  Across the city, around the pool in an exclusive club in Heliopolis, three close advisers of Nasser met on his orders. They were Amin Howedi, the new minister of defence and director of general intelligence, Sami Sharaf, Nasser’s chief fixer and private one-man intelligence agency, and Sha’rawi Goma, the interior minister. They hatched a plan to bring Amer to heel that, sardonically, they called Operation Johnson. Arresting him at his villa was no good because it could turn into a bloodbath. Stopping Amer’s limousine in the centre of the capital when he was out defying his house arrest, touring his old haunts in Cairo, could also be bloody. They came up with something much more discreet. Nasser would invite Amer to dinner at his home. At the same time troops would surround Amer’s house. Amer would then be told that the game was up. They hoped he – and his men – would come quietly. Nasser wanted the job done by 29 August, when he was due to go to Khartoum for the Arabs’ official inquest into the June disaster.

  Amer leapt at the chance to have dinner with Nasser again. On 25 August he arrived at the president’s house, which was much more modest than his own. Minutes after he went inside, his car was seized. There were going to be no quick exits. Waiting with Nasser were the vice-presidents Zakkaria Mohieddin and Hussein el Shafei and Anwar El Sadat, the speaker of the national assembly. When Amer was sacked at the end of the war Nasser sent Sadat to offer him a moneyed exile. Amer sent Sadat back to his master with a flea in his ear. This time, nothing nearly as tempting was on the table.

  Howedi watched Amer going in, confirmed that his house in Giza had been ringed with troops, then went into the reception area outside the sitting room to wait. He could hear raised voices. After a while, Nasser came out. He was furious, ‘smoking like a refinery’. He stamped up the stairs to his bedroom. Howedi went into the sitting room, to join Amer and the three vice-presidents. He could feel the tension in the air. Sadat seemed to be close to tears.

  Amer exclaimed mockingly, ‘Look, the minister of defence has arrived. You’ve really been cooking something up here, haven’t you?’ Then he went into the bathroom, which was off the main hall. After a few minutes he came out with a half-full glass of water in his hand. He threw it on the floor and said, ‘Go tell the president that Amer has taken poison.’ Howedi ran up the stairs. Nasser had changed into slippers and a T-shirt. Howedi blurted out the message. Nasser did not believe it. ‘If he was going to do that he would have after what happened in Sinai,’ he said sarcastically.

  Downstairs doctors were arriving for Amer, who was showing no signs of expiring. In fact he had perked up, and was protesting loudly that he was not the only one to blame for what had happened. At Amer’s house his people were burning documents in the garden. By 4:00 a.m. General Fawzi reported in from Giza. The house had surrendered. Three lorry-loads of weapons had been removed.

  Amer returned home. On 13 September he was sitting with his eleven-year-old son, Salah, in his grand drawing room. Now he had lost his arsenal and his private army, he was surrounded by Nasser’s men. General Fawzi, who had succeeded him as head of the army, and General Riad, who had presided over Jordan’s defeat, entered the room. They informed Amer he was to be moved from his house. He refused. Guards grabbed him to take him by force. The field marshal was a big man, over six feet tall and well built. His son saw him struggling with the guards as they dragged him out of the room. It was Salah’s last sight of his father. Amer, the authorities made it known, was under observation for his own protection because he had tried to kill himself again. Doctors, his family say, found no evidence of poison when they pumped his stomach. Fawzi moved him to a villa owned by the secret police in Mariotya, not far from the pyramids. He was closely guarded, and checked every six hours by doctors.

  The next morning, 14 September, he sent a message to his family asking for books and for medical preparations he needed for toothache. They heard nothing more until the next day, when a messenger arrived telling them to travel to Minya, Amer’s home village in Upper Egypt. As his wife, four daughters and three sons drove into the village they were greeted by crowds of wailing women. They realised Amer must be dead. They were taken to the graveyard, where he had already been buried. Eleven-year-old Salah never forgot that the cement on the stone over the grave was still wet. An official communiqué was issued. Field Marshal Amer had taken poison and killed himself.

  Operation Johnson had succeeded. Amer was no longer a threat to Nasser’s regime. The question is whether Amer was murdered, as his family believe, or whether he killed himself. Certainly, Amer had reasons to end his life. He faced personal and professional ruin. He was being blamed for a catastrophic defeat. He faced trial for the capital crime of conspiring to bring down the government. And Cairo’s drawing rooms were buzzing with the scandal, which had just leaked out, that he had secretly made his mistress, a famous actress, into his second wife. Thirty-five years on, Howedi and Sharaf, surviving members of the team that ran Operation Johnson, insist that the field marshal obtained a deadly poison called Aonitine from stocks held by the army. Howedi says that when Amer’s body was examined, unused capsules of the poison were found taped behind his testicles. He claims that on 26 August, the day after his house arrest began, Amer was visited by the head of the army’s poisons department who later confessed he prepared capsules of Aonitine for the field marshal.

  Amer’s family insist that he was murdered on the orders of Nasser. They say he collapsed after drinking a glass of guava juice that had been spiked with Aonitine. A week before he died, on 7 September, Amer completed a last political testament, which was smuggled out of Egypt to Lebanon after his death and published in Life magazine. In it he wrote that his enemies were closing in. He said he no longer felt safe from Nasser, his ‘friend and brother … I am receiving threats because I asked for a public trial. Some two hours ago I was visited by an intelligence officer whom I would not bother to look at in the time of my glory. He threatened to silence me forever if I ventured to talk. When I said I wanted to contact the president he said: if you think your friendship with the president can protect you, you are mistaken. I tried to contact the president by telephone … for three days I was told that he was busy. I feel sure that a conspiracy is being prepared against me…’
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  Aonitine was found in Amer’s body at the autopsy. The question is how it got there. The saga, his family insist, has all the signs of a cover-up. If he was planning suicide, they say, why did he ask his family a few hours before he allegedly killed himself to send him books and ointment for toothache and sore gums? It took six hours for Nasser’s men to tell the attorney-general that Amer was dead. It was another six hours before forensic scientists came to the villa where he died. By then, his corpse had been dressed in clean pyjamas, and the glass that his family believe contained a lethal cocktail of guava juice and poison had been washed, dried and put away.

  The official report into his death, signed by the Egyptian attorney-general, said that Amer had killed himself with two doses of poison, on the day he died and the day before. But in 1975 Anwar El Sadat, who assumed the presidency of Egypt after Nasser died in 1970, reopened the files. Dr Ali Diab, a professor and toxicologist at Egypt’s top institute for scientific research, re-examined all the evidence. He said it was physically impossible for Amer to have taken two separate doses of Aonitine a night apart. A fraction of the dose contained in one of the capsules would have killed him instantly. Dr Diab concluded that Amer could not have killed himself. Someone must have administered the poison.

  Even without Amer, the CIA believed that the Egyptian army was Nasser’s ‘main source of danger’. Even his life could be at stake. Nasser was prepared to take the risk. It was good for him to have Amer out of the way. The remaining Amer loyalists were purged from the army. The creeping fear of a coup led by his old friend left him for the first time since at least 1961. General Fawzi, who owed Nasser everything and who was lacking even an ounce of the charm and charisma that had made Amer so popular, was firmly in control of the army. Nasser travelled to the Arab summit in Khartoum at the end of August knowing that he would have a job to which he would be able to return. Even though he had led Egypt and millions of Arabs who idolised him to disaster, he was more secure than he had been in years.