City of Oranges

by Adam LeBor

  The makeshift shacks eventually evolved into the nearby village of Ein Hawd al-Jadida, one of many ‘unrecognised’ Arab villages, all of which lack proper water and electricity supplies, access roads, sewage systems or any legal recognition. Much of the tangled connection between Ein Hawd and Ein Hod – displacement, appropriation, denial and renaming – would be mirrored in the relationship between the renovated artists’ quarter of Old Jaffa and its Arab surrounds.

  16

  Six Days that

  Shook the World

  1967

  There were also the grim preparations that had to be kept secret: the parks in each city that had been consecrated for possible use as mass cemeteries; the hotels cleared of guests so they could be turned into huge emergency first-aid stations.

  Golda Meir, on the days before

  the start of the Six Day War1

  They came for Fakhri Geday at 8 a.m. on Monday 5 June 1967. He opened the door of his pharmacy to find two policemen in uniform and a plainclothes officer from Shin Bet standing on the step. The Six Day War was fifteen minutes old and Fakhri was under arrest. As a leading member of Al-Ard, the banned Arab nationalist party, he was considered a security risk and was one of many Arab activists to be interned. But Fakhri was not worried. ‘They told me I would be held in detention until the end of the war. I knew one of them very well. We always spoke in French together. He told me that he was very sorry, but he had orders to take me. My sister was here, together with a girl who worked for me. They both began to cry. I told them, “Don’t cry, don’t cry, it is only for two or three days. Then Nasser will be here in Jaffa,”’ he recalls, laughing out loud at the memory.

  The policemen and the Shin Bet officer were shocked. Dr Geday was a well-respected figure, popular in Jaffa. Both Jews and Arabs turned to him for medical advice, which he dispensed with courtesy and professionalism. But Fakhri’s mordant humour did not seem so funny to the rest of Israel: Nasser, the Egyptian leader, was Israel’s sworn enemy. Numerous high-ranking Nazis had found refuge in Egypt, including rocket scientists and former SS and Gestapo officers, many given senior government positions or posts in the secret police.2 Most Israelis believed that together with their Nazi advisers, the massed Arab armies would slaughter every Jew they could.

  Fakhri thought otherwise and believed that Nasser’s army would be liberators of Palestine not killers of civilians. ‘The policeman asked me how I could say such a thing in front of him. I told him that this was the truth. I asked him what he wanted me to say, this was what I believed.’ More practically, Fakhri gave his sister the telephone number of his Jewish lawyer in Tel Aviv, Abraham Suchovolsky, and told her to call him to explain what had happened. Fakhri’s lawyer was a friend of Moshe Dayan, the charismatic one-eyed general who had just been appointed Israel’s minister of defence. ‘I told my sister to call him, only Suchovolsky, and tell him what had happened.’ Fakhri’s lawyer finally got through to Dayan after midnight. Not surprisingly, with Israel fighting for its survival against the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian armies, Moshe Dayan was not overjoyed to hear from his friend. ‘Dayan asked why he was calling him at that hour. My lawyer told him because the man whose detention he had ordered was like his own brother. Dayan replied that I was dangerous, that I planned to make demonstrations. But I had never even thought about it.’ Fakhri Geday was not a threat to Israel’s security, but his detention highlighted the ever ambiguous position of Israel’s Arab minority. His views, at least, were quite straightforward, which is why Shin Bet took him away for the duration of the war.

  Throughout the 1960s the Arab states had refused to make peace with or recognise Israel, although there was clandestine communication between Israel and Jordan. For the radical regimes in Cairo and Damascus especially, Israel’s very existence was a national humiliation: proof that Arab lands could be parcelled out by the West, and an alien implant imposed, by the same powers that had always coveted Arab resources and betrayed their peoples, right back to the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 that had secretly carved up the Ottoman Empire and denied Arab national aspirations. By invading Egypt with Britain and France in the 1956 Suez crisis, Israel had firmly placed itself in the western camp. The Arab-Israeli conflict seemed to be a proxy Cold War, with Israel allied to the United States on one side, and the Arab states supported by the Soviet Union on the other.

  Yet Cold War politics, while important, were not the only factor. The lines of superpower allegiance were not as clearly drawn in 1967 as in 1997: Israel maintained diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and the Communist countries of eastern Europe. France, not the United States, had been Israel’s principal arms supplier in the state’s early years, and the two countries traded intelligence on the Arab world, some of it gleaned by Israel from the immigrants pouring into Jaffa during the 1950s. France helped Israel build its nuclear reactor at Dimona, in the Negev, as a payoff for Israel’s participation in the Suez campaign. In addition, Egypt was aiding the rebels in Algeria, and France hoped that a nuclear Israel would be a strategic counterweight to Cairo’s ambitions.3

  Into this complex geo-political mix was added another factor, less concrete, but also important in deciding Israeli policy: the visceral Jew-hatred that the Arab state-controlled media daily pumped out across the Middle East. Jews had once prospered under Islam but that tolerance had vanished, replaced by a mix of shrill nationalism and atavistic loathing. Nasser and the other Arab leaders spoke openly of the need for a ‘third round’, in which Israel – referred to not by name, but as the ‘Zionist entity’ – would be wiped off the map. As Benny Morris notes, Nasser himself wrote of Israel, ‘We believe that the evil introduced into the heart of the Arab world must be uprooted.’4 Barely twenty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, such proclamations had an effect, feeding Israel’s Holocaust complex, and reinforcing the views of those who believed attack, possibly pre-emptive, was still the best form of defence.

  Tension rose steadily during the mid-1960s, especially between Israel and Syria, with armed clashes over water resources in and around the Sea of Galilee. Fighting continued in early 1967 as Syrian troops shot at nearby farmers and kibbutzim. In early April of that year more than two hundred shells were fired onto Kibbutz Gadot. The incident rapidly escalated into an artillery and tank duel. Israeli fighters swooped over the Syrian positions, shooting down six MiG-21s in as many minutes, the aerial dogfight extending as far as the skies over Damascus. Humiliated, the Syrians despatched an agent to Jerusalem to set off bombs, who was quickly discovered by Israeli intelligence. In mid-May Nasser demanded that the UN pull its 3,400 troops out of the Sinai peninsula. The UN soldiers were charged with monitoring the ceasefire between Israel and Egypt after the 1956 Suez crisis. U Thant, the UN Secretary General, did not even call a meeting of the Security Council, but immediately acquiesced. It became increasingly clear that war was inevitable, and that Israel would stand alone. At Tiv, there was talk of little else, says Yoram Aharoni. ‘Those weeks before the war started were full of tension. Everywhere there was an atmosphere that we were facing a great danger. It was a very difficult situation and people were very afraid of what was going to happen. We thought that any war – which we did not want to start – would be a fight for survival. The Egyptians had a big army in the Sinai. In a way, the feeling was similar to that of 1948.’

  Nasser appeared cool and determined in his new role as de facto leader of the Arab world. On 22 May, he announced that Egypt was blockading the Straits of Tiran, which closed off Israel’s access to the Red Sea, and isolated its southern port of Eilat. This was an act of war. Nasser poured Egyptian troops into the Sinai and Gaza Strip. Israel mobilised. Yoram was called up. He handed over the keys to Tiv to his wife, Rina, and went off to war. He would be away for two months. Israel in 1967 was very different from the military power it is now. The state was less than twenty years old, with a population of just two and a half million. It had already fought two wars, and then the West Bank and East Jerusalem w
ere part of Jordan. Tel Aviv was well within artillery range. A swift, co-ordinated tank attack from Jordan could cut Israel in half in less than an hour. Few Israelis believed that the Geneva Conventions would be observed if the Egyptians took Jaffa and Tel Aviv, or the Syrians Haifa, nor did they expect that the West would come to their rescue. In Cairo, Baghdad and Amman, Arab crowds called for death to Israel, and death to the Jews. For the corrupt monarchs and dictators of the Middle East, anti-Israel fury was a useful safety valve for populations deliberately kept mired in poverty and fear. But that was no reason not to believe the crowds’ sincerity.

  ‘The battle will be a general one and our basic objective will be to destroy Israel. I probably could not have said such things five or even three years ago. Today I say such things because I am confident,’ Nasser proclaimed on 26 May.5 That same day Egyptian fighters flew over Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor on a reconnaissance mission, triggering fears that Cairo was about to attack the site. Ahmed Shukeiry, the first leader of the PLO, promised that all Israelis born outside the country would be ‘repatriated’. As for those who had been born in pre-1948 Palestine or Israel, he explained, ‘Those who survive will remain in Palestine, but I estimate that none of them will survive.’6 Prime Minister Eshkol, who also held the defence portfolio, made a conciliatory radio broadcast on 28 May saying Israel did not seek war. His delivery was stumbling, and he had problems reading his script. It made a poor impression, says Yoram. ‘It was a bad speech. I was very concerned, especially for my family. The government did not seem to have a proper policy.’ Energised by the apparent prospect of finally wiping Israel off the map, the Arabs discovered a new-found unity. Egypt signed mutual defence pacts with Jordan and Iraq, and Egyptian commandos and Iraqi troops were despatched to Jordan.7

  In response on 1 June Eshkol formed Israel’s first National-Unity government, drafting Menachem Begin, leader of the right-wing Herut opposition party, to the cabinet. On the home front, families stockpiled food and water and taped over windows, to prevent flying glass. Ordinary life, wrote Golda Meir, soon to be Israel’s first woman prime minister, came to an end. ‘And, of course, there were the military preparations, because even though we had by now absorbed the fact that we were entirely on our own, there wasn’t a single person in Israel, as far as I know, who had any illusions about the fact that there was no alternative whatsoever to winning the war that was being thrust on us.’8

  Israel bordered four hostile Arab countries: Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt. The combined Arab armed forces totalled 207,000 soldiers, 1,600 tanks and 700 combat aircraft, writes Martin Gilbert.9 Other Arab nations such as Sudan and Algeria also began to mobilise. With full deployment of its reserves, Israel could muster 264,000 soldiers, 800 tanks and 300 combat aircraft. Should Israel lose what was now being hailed in the Arab world as ‘the final battle’, the Jewish state would be wiped off the map. The ‘Voice of the Arabs’ radio proclaimed: ‘The sole method we shall apply against Israel is total war, which will result in the extermination of Zionist existence.’ Syrian defence minister (and later president) Hafez Assad announced: ‘I, as a military man, believe the time has come to enter into a battle of annihilation.’10 Yet at the height of the tension Tel Aviv’s beaches, and the seafront by Manshiyyeh, were crowded with soldiers and officers on leave from the front. Was war really inevitable? In fact, the strolling soldiers were a trick to mislead the Egyptians, Israel’s greatest enemy, about the extent of the mobilisation.

  Yoram Aharoni was surrounded by sand, but he was not at the beach. Yoram was Deputy Commander of Armoured Vehicles Battalion 141, stationed in the Negev desert in the south of Israel, near the city of Beersheba. Battalion 141 was composed of four platoons – two combat, one auxiliary and one logistics – a total of seven hundred soldiers and more than forty armoured vehicles. The hours and days of waiting passed very slowly at their desert camp. Each morning Yoram and the troops were up at 4 a.m., with the vehicles armed and ready to go. They trained and prepared for an order that could come through at any moment, he recalls. Sometimes it seemed it never would. ‘The tension was very high while we were waiting. At the start of every day we thought we were going to war. When the order did not come through, we went back to our routine.’

  On Sunday 4 June Defence Minister Moshe Dayan presented his war plan to the Israeli cabinet. Based on an audacious pre-emptive strike, it was accepted. At 7.45 the next morning, Israel launched its attacks against the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian air forces. In essence, the Six Day War was won on the first day. The Israeli air-strikes destroyed over four hundred enemy aircraft, many on the ground, including one third of the Egyptian air force, together with its communications network. The land battles would continue for another five days on several fronts, but Israel’s air superiority had turned the tide. The swift destruction of the Arab air forces was a humiliating blow, further proof for the Arab masses of the incompetence of their leaders. The bitter defeat was later summed up in a sour joke: Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev telephones Egyptian President Nasser after the war is over. ‘We have your next batch of fighter planes here. Shall we bother delivering them to you, or just blow them up ourselves on the ground?’

  The destruction of the Egyptian air force was welcome news for Yoram Aharoni and Battalion 141. Without air cover, the Egyptians were almost defenceless. When the order finally came through, the battalion was so practised that it was mobile in ten minutes. Battalion 141 pushed through the Sinai desert, until at the end of the first day, the tanks halted. They had run out of fuel. The Israeli military planners had not accounted for the depth of the sand, which slowed progress and used up fuel faster. The battalion was resupplied by air and pushed on towards El-Arish, in northern Sinai. Yoram’s troops engaged a new Russian T-54 tank which had hit an Israeli truck, killing an army cook who had been sitting on the roof. Yoram and his comrades knocked out and captured the T-54, killing the lone Egyptian soldier inside – a valuable prize, as it was the first to fall into Israeli hands. The battalion then helped take control of the strategically important Bir Gafgafa junction, but the Egyptians made a counter-attack during the night, unleashing a barrage of gunfire on the Israeli forces and trying to punch through the lines.

  It was one of the longest nights of Yoram’s life. Yoram was now forty-three years old. He was a seasoned soldier, who had killed for his country, and would do so again when necessary. He was ready, too, to lay down his own life for Israel. He had fought as a guerrilla for Lehi, against the British, and in the 1948 and 1956 wars against the Arabs. Like most Israeli men of military age, he served two months every year in the reserves, to keep his training and skills up to date. But the battle to hold Bir Gafgafa was one of the toughest and bloodiest of his long military career. Jammed inside the Israeli tank as shells crashed around him, the air rent by the sound of gunfire and men’s screams, to Yoram Raziel Street in Jaffa and the sacks of spices and coffee at Tiv seemed like another universe. ‘Anyone who says they are not scared during battle is lying. Fighting a war is a terrible thing,’ recalls Yoram. ‘There was smoke everywhere, and the air was filled with the smell of gunpowder and fuel. You hear the sounds of the shells exploding around you, mixed with the noise of the engines, and the orders blaring out of the radio. But when you are in the middle of it, you concentrate so hard that nothing else is on your mind. The tension is at its peak. But somehow you feel quite protected inside the tank. Everyone inside knows his job but if the vehicle is hit by a shell the results are terrible. Some soldiers went into battle shock when they saw that.’

  Most of the Egyptian forces attempted to retreat back to the Suez Canal, but the Israelis cut off their path. The armoured columns were trapped in the mountain passes. The Egyptians were easy prey for the Israeli air force, which bombed and strafed them at will. The tanks were reduced to piles of charred, twisted metal, the men died in their hundreds and the desert was littered with corpses, recalls Yoram. ‘The smell and the sight of the dead bodies was horrifying, somet
hing unimaginable. Sometimes we found whole units which had been hit by the air force. The dead soldiers just lay there, full of flies.’ About fifteen thousand Egyptian troops were killed in the Sinai. ‘It was a sight that even the victors did not savour,’ wrote Yitzhak Rabin, then Israeli chief of staff. Once a ceasefire was signed, Rabin issued orders that Egyptian POWs should be allowed to go back to Egypt, although officers were to be detained. Yoram and his troops helped them return home. ‘We caught many Egyptian prisoners after the fighting was finished. They were hiding or they gave themselves up. We took them to the Suez Canal and blew a whistle. An Egyptian boat crossed over and took them back.’

  The Six Day War ended on 11 June. It was a stunning victory. Israel had fought a three-front war, defeating Egypt, Jordan and Syria. It had captured the Sinai desert and the Gaza Strip from Egypt; the Golan Heights from Syria and the West Bank of the River Jordan and East Jerusalem, including the Western Wall of Solomon’s Temple, from Jordan, thus returning the whole of the city to Jewish rule for the first time in two millennia. King Hussein had paid a heavy price for ignoring Israel’s repeated requests not to join the hostilities. Not just Israelis, but Jews across the world rejoiced. The Israeli army seemed unstoppable. There was even talk of rescuing the last fifteen thousand Jews of Damascus if Israel pushed into the capital. Including the Sinai desert, Israel’s territory had increased by 400 per cent. The country had lost 777 soldiers, a fraction of the casualties in 1948, when six thousand were killed. A million Arabs, most of whom were Palestinians – some refugees from 1948, including a good number from Jaffa living in Ramallah and Jerusalem – were now under Israeli control. Yoram eventually went home in late July, after two months. The Tiv spice and coffee shop had stayed open, run by his wife Rina and other relatives. The Aharoni family, like every Israeli, was proud and triumphant. Yoram recalls: ‘We felt we were the strongest country in the world in 1967. And it was those feelings that helped lead to what happened in the Yom Kippur War in 1973.’