Along with his setbacks of 1958, however, Nasser also registered a stunning achievement in Egypt’s unification with Syria. There, the regime had also adopted an extreme socialist, pro-Soviet line, and the United Arab Republic, as the new entente was called, epitomized the radical Arab ideal. A year later, Nasser created an Entity in Gaza, a kind of government-in-exile which, though devoid of real authority, expressed his commitment to the Palestinian cause. His crowning accomplishment, however, came in 1960 with the Soviet-financed construction of the Aswan Dam, “the greatest engineering feat in the Middle East since the pyramids.” The “street” was ecstatic. With the linking of the two halves of the Arab world, east and west, and the stranglehold around Israel tightened, expectations of a military effort to liberate Palestine rose. Nasser could not ignore them, especially when, in February 1960, Syria seemed threatened with war.22
It started with an Israeli attempt to cultivate the DZ’s along the northern border. Syrian troops fired on the tractors and IDF guns blasted at Syrian positions on the overlooking Golan Heights. As friction heated, the Soviets stepped in and informed Nasser that Israel was planning to invade Syria, and even supplied a date for the attack: February 22, UAR day. Nasser had received similar warnings in the past, but in view of the sharp pitch of Arab opinion, he chose this time to act. Two Egyptian divisions, including the crack 4th Armored, were rushed into Sinai. The commanders of UNEF were told to be ready to evacuate the peninsula within twenty-four hours, should hostilities erupt.
It was a splendid display of muscle flexing that caught Israel, with only thirty tanks in the south, completely off-guard. Frantically, the army mobilized while Israeli diplomats scurried to assure foreign governments against any warlike designs on either Syria or Egypt. Tensions remained ultra-high until the beginning of March when, just as quietly as they entered, the Egyptian troops slipped out of Sinai.23 Called Operation Retama, after the fragrant desert plant (Rotem, in Hebrew) by the IDF, the episode was a major trauma for Israel and no less a triumph for Nasser. Memories of it would still be fresh, and its lessons seemingly clear, in 1967.
But the Aswan Dam and Retama were merely exceptions in the otherwise rueful saga of the UAR. Under ‘Abd al-Hakim ‘Amer, whose administration of the joint government in Damascus was as inept as his generalship in 1956, the union began to unravel. Corruption and despotism reigned as unyielding state control was imposed on Syria’s traditionally open economy. Syrian officers were also incensed, finding themselves outside the loops of power. In September 1961, a clique of these officers, among them Salah Jadid and Hafez al-Assad, staged a successful coup and declared Syria’s departure from the union.24‘Amer and his staff were ingloriously herded onto a plane and whisked back to Cairo. Their sole memento of the United Arab Republic was the name itself, which Egypt unilaterally retained.
The period of “The Secession” (infisal) marked the downswing in the heretofore ascendant career of Abdel Nasser. Physically sick—he contracted diabetes that year—Nasser also suffered through a stormy relationship with Khrushchev, for whom the Egyptian was never quite radical enough. The country’s economy was in free fall. The only illumination in this gloom came from the marked improvement in Egypt’s relations with the United States, under the new administration of John F. Kennedy.
In contrast to the more confrontational Eisenhower, Kennedy believed that carrots would prove more effective than sticks in containing Soviet influence in the Middle East and keeping Nasser out of trouble. Using what one top Kennedy aide, Chester Bowles, called the “great unseen weapon,” Washington offered Nasser semiannual shipments of wheat and other basic commodities, as an incentive “to forsake the microphone for the bulldozer.” The policy worked for a time. Nasser appeared to withdraw from the farrago of inter-Arab politics and to focus more on domestic affairs. Though Egypt’s support for militant liberation movements, particularly in Africa, and its championship of the non-aligned movement still irked the Americans, a door to dialogue had cracked open. Evidence of the change could be found in the warm correspondence between the two presidents (“differences will always remain between us,” Nasser wrote, and Kennedy replied, quoting him, “but mutual understanding will keep those differences within limits not to be exceeded”) and in expanding American aid, which, by 1962, was feeding 40 percent of Egypt’s population.25
But other events in 1962 sowed the seeds of disaster in the American-Egyptian détente, and in Nasser’s fortunes generally. The problem was Yemen. The Imam of the remote southern Arabian country, Badr, was overthrown in September by a group of Free Officers under a Gen. ‘Abdallah al-Sallal. Badr fled to Riyadh, where he sought and secured Saudi backing for a counterinsurgency. Al-Sallal turned to Cairo.
Al-Sallal’s appeal found Nasser still reeling from the UAR’s dissolution and the collapse of his economic policies, and fearing for the loyalty of some of his senior army officers. The latter, by providing tactical support to al-Sallal’s troops, presented Nasser with a fait accompli. He accepted it, though, deeming Yemen a good place for occupying the army’s attention, as well as for drubbing his Saudi rivals and even for harassing Britain’s colony in Aden. Khrushchev, eager to avenge his recent embarrassment in the Cuban missile crisis, also gave his blessing.26
Thus began an entanglement so futile and fierce that the imminent Vietnam War could have easily been dubbed America’s Yemen.27 Prisoners were routinely executed, bodies mutilated, entire villages wiped out. Egyptian forces bombed royalist depots in Saudi Arabia and, for the first time in the history of any Arab army, unleashed poison gas. Besides igniting the previously cold conflict between Arab “progressives” and “reactionaries,” the war also soured the all-too-brief honeymoon between Egypt and the United States. In Nasser’s intervention Kennedy perceived the beginnings of Soviet penetration of South Arabia, and through his special mediator, Elsworth Bunker, he hammered out an agreement whereby the Saudis stopped aiding Badr and Egypt withdrew its troops. But while Riyadh complied, Cairo broke faith, sending even larger forces to Yemen. “A breakdown of disengagement…could not but lead to a situation in which the US and the UAR, instead of moving closer together, would drift further apart,” Kennedy warned on October 19, just over a month before his assassination.28
It seemed inconceivable that the Arabs’ situation could have grown bleaker—and yet it did. The ruling regime in Iraq, whose relations with Egypt had hardly been cordial, fell violently in February 1963, when its leaders were shot by radicals of the Ba’th (Renaissance) party. Talk of a tripartite union—Egypt, Syria, and Iraq—resulted in the drafting of a joint constitution, but little else. A bloodbath ensued as Nasserist sympathizers were purged from the Iraqi army and then, as a result of an abortive coup in July, from the Syrian army as well. Hundreds were killed, executed, or caught in crossfires.
Such events, the deepening malaise of Egypt’s foreign relations and of inter-Arab affairs in general, could not but gladden the Israelis. With the UAR disbanded and Nasser’s army bogged down in Yemen, the danger of a third round of Arab-Israeli fighting seemed remote. Further assurance came from the momentous improvement in U.S.-Israel relations inaugurated by Kennedy. Unlike the Republicans, who did not enjoy the support of most American Jews and had little affection for Israel, the new Democratic president owed much of his narrow electoral victory to Jewish votes and spoke warmly of the Jewish state. “The United States has a special relationship with Israel comparable only to that which it has with Britain,” he told Foreign Minister Meir; “I think it is quite clear that in the case of invasion the United States would come to the support of Israel.” The commitment was concretized by the unprecedented sale of $75 million of U.S. weapons to Israel, a third of which was earmarked for Hawk ground-to-air missiles.29
Yet, U.S.-Israel relations were hardly friction-free. The Kennedy administration, no less than Eisenhower’s, objected to Israel’s retaliation policy, its attempts to divert the Jordan River, and its resistance to repatriating Palestinian refugees. Most
galling for Kennedy, a committed nonproliferationist, was Israel’s nuclear program. Israel’s production of fissionable material, he feared, might prompt the Arabs to install Soviet missiles on their territory, or even to launch a preemptive strike. Nasser had already cited Israel’s supposed capability as a pretext for initiating his own missile-making effort, one that employed German and ex-Nazi scientists rather than Russians. Israel’s repeated pledges that nothing untoward was transpiring at Dimona, and that it would “not be the first [country] to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East,” failed to appease the president. He insisted on semi-annual inspections of the reactor, threatened to review all of America’s security commitments to Israel if Ben-Gurion refused to cooperate, and proffered the Hawks in the hope that he would. Ben-Gurion argued that Israel’s nuclear projects were its own sovereign business, its best guarantee against a second Holocaust. The Hawks were deployed around Dimona.30
But for all his mettle, his rigid jaw, and defiant corona of hair, Ben-Gurion was no longer the dynamo of 1948 and 1956. In spite of its improving relations with America, its alliance with France and ties with Africa and Asia, Israel increasingly seemed to Ben-Gurion less a regional power than a ghetto, isolated and exposed. “The UAR is getting stronger and stronger thanks to Soviet arms,” he told French President Charles de Gaulle in 1961, “Nasser believes that in another year or two he can launch a lightning attack, destroy our airfields and bomb our cities.” When, in the July Revolution celebrations of 1962, Nasser paraded his new missiles through the streets of Cairo—“they can hit any target south of Beirut,” he boasted—the prime minister nearly panicked, then nearly panicked again the following May, when Egypt, Syria and Iraq pledged to join forces to liberate Palestine. “We alone are threatened each day with destruction,” he now warned America’s ambassador in Tel Aviv, “Nasser is clamoring for war with Israel, and if he achieves a nuclear capability, we’re done for.” The fact that the missiles were little more than V-I rockets, “a costly failure and…not operational for several years at least,” according to U.S. intelligence sources, and that the new Arab alliance was a sham, had little impact on Ben-Gurion. Urgently, he pressed for a deal with the French Marcel Dassault corporation for the completion of surface-to-surface missiles several years hence, in 1966 or 1967.31
Not that Israel was without causes for concern, a country surrounded by 639 miles of hostile borders and some thirty Arab divisions. Potentially, Egypt could again blockade Israel’s shipping through the Straits of Tiran, and Syria, in control of the Jordan River’s origins, could shut off its water supply. The Arabs’ combined outlay on arms—some $938 million annually—was nearly twice that of Israel in spite of a fivefold increase in its defense budget. Though “only” 189 civilians had been killed by hostile fire between 1957 and 1967, down from 486 during the years 1949 to 1956, the danger of ambushes and bombings was constant.
Israelis never forgot any of this, yet for many of them the early 1960s was not a time of overriding fear but rather of relative security, even prosperity. The country, its population trebled to 2.9 million, enjoyed an annual growth rate of 10 percent, equaled only by Japan, and the fifth highest proportion of university graduates per capita in the world. The arts flourished, and the press was active and free. And while prejudice and discrimination, particularly against the new North African immigrants, were rife, there persisted an all-embracing sense of national purpose, a uniquely Israeli élan. Basically conservative—the Beatles were barred from performing in the country, ostensibly on security grounds but really to shield Israel’s youth—the society was grappling with new ideas, an incipient materialism, and the emergence of a new generation of leaders, all with considerable confidence.
Much of that confidence was grounded in the IDF, an army that had burgeoned to 25 brigades, 175 jets, and nearly 1,000 battle tanks. The latter, armed with an improved 105-mm gun, provided the “mailed fist” that would break through Arab lines and secure an early victory before Israel’s vulnerable cities could be devastated. The air force was also geared to delivering a “knock-out punch” to Egypt, with the understanding that with Egypt neutralized, other Arab armies would crumble. But the IDF was more than a mere fighting force; it was an ethos. Undergirding it were deeply held notions of volunteerism, of officers leading their men into battle (with the cry Aharai!—“After me!”), and social responsibility. With women required to serve eighteen months of regular duty, and men at least two years, followed by weeks of annual reserve training through age fifty-two, Israeli civilians were more like permanent soldiers on temporary leave. Highly informal—saluting and marching were rare—the IDF placed its emphasis on speed, improvisation, and a flexibility of command in which even junior officers could make on-the-spot, far-reaching decisions. The assumption was always that Israel would have no choice but to fight yet another war of survival, a war in which the enemy would, in spite of the IDF’s growth, grossly outnumber it.32
Political confidence and military might combined in June 1963, when Israelis felt sufficiently sanguine to let Ben-Gurion, the father of their country, resign. The immediate cause was the never-ending scandal surrounding the 1954 sabotage operation in Egypt and the question of who ordered it, a former minister or elements in the security establishment. Ben-Gurion insisted on setting up an independent legal board to investigate the charges, as opposed to the internal governmental panel that had already exonerated the minister, and staked his office on it. He lost. The majority of his Mapai (Israel Workers’ Party) colleagues sided with the panel, and Ben-Gurion quit in protest. Such a changing of the guard—for that was really what lay behind the controversy, the desire of political parvenus such as Golda Meir and Yigal Allon, to advance—could not have been possible in truly perilous times. Nor would the state have been entrusted to the person chosen to replace its founder, an aging technocrat by the name of Eshkol.
They could not have been less alike, Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol. Colorless, seemingly artless as well, Eshkol, the former minister of agriculture and finance, knew much about finance and farming but little of matters of state. Few politicians expected him to hold out for long, assuming that Ben-Gurion would someday return. Eshkol, himself, at first described his post as “caretaker prime minister.” But when it came to Israel’s relations with the Arab world, their perspectives were almost indistinguishable. Eshkol also believed that the Arabs wanted war and that Israel was at once militarily invincible and mortally vulnerable—what he called (characteristically, in Yiddish) Shimshon der nebechdikker—Samson the nerd. Thus, within a single month in 1963, the new prime minister could tell an IDF airborne unit that “Perhaps the time will come when you, the paratroopers, will determine Israel’s borders. Our neighbors should not delude themselves that weakness prevents us from spilling blood,” and then turn around at the War College and warn, “The danger we face is one of complete destruction.”33
The Context Redux
Paradoxically, Israel owed some measure of its success to the Arabs, to their hostility that helped galvanize an otherwise factious society. Yet that same hostility also united the Arabs in visceral ways that their leaders were eager to harness. Thus, the proposed union of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq was presented first and foremost as a coalition against Israel because, for all their ideological affinity, there was no other issue on which all three could agree. Egypt portrayed its intervention in Yemen as a “step in the process of getting rid of Zionism,” while the Jordan-Saudi (Ta’if) pact opposing that intervention signified “a front against Jewish aggression.”34
But Palestine was a current that pulled in antithetical directions, joining but also splintering the Arab world as its leaders marshaled the cause against their rivals. With the stillbirth of the tripartite union in 1963, for example, Syrian dictator General Hafiz Amin accused Nasser of “going soft” on Israel and “selling out Palestine for a few bushels of American wheat.” Nasser countered by assailing Syria for “stabbing Egypt in the back” and trying to drag the Ara
bs into war before they were unified. Wasfi al-Tall, Jordan’s perennial prime minister, joined with his archenemies in Damascus and excoriated Nasser’s failure to fight Israel, his willingness to “hide behind UNEF’s skirts.”35 The continuing plight of a million Palestinian refugees, together with Israel’s assertive foreign and defense policies, ensured that the conflict would continue to serve as an agent for unity and discord.
By the beginning of 1964, the current seemed to swing away from divisiveness and back to cooperation. The pretext was Israel’s plans to channel Galilee water to the Negev. Irrigated, the Arabs feared, the desert would support an additional three million Jewish immigrants and strengthen Israel’s grip on Palestine. The Syrians would capitalize on that fear in their own competition with Nasser. Citing the Algerians’ recent victory over France—a victory that owed much to Nasser’s support—they called for a “people’s war” to destroy the Zionist plot. Jordan and Saudi Arabia weighed in on the side of Damascus, and suddenly Egypt found itself isolated, the strongest Arab state but seemingly unwilling to act.
Still, Nasser would not be outmaneuvered. He responded with a dramatic idea: a summit meeting of all the Arab states. “Palestine supersedes all differences of opinion,” Egypt’s president declared, “For the sake of Palestine, we are ready to meet with all those with whom we have disagreements.”36
Behind this bombast lay Nasser’s reluctance to cede Syria the initiative on Palestine, and behind that, his need to avert a war from which Egypt would be unable to abstain or emerge victorious. He explained as much in a speech in Port Said a week before the summit:
We cannot use force today because our circumstances will not allow us; be patient with us, the battle of Palestine can continue and the battle of the Jordan is part of the battle of Palestine. For I would lead you to disaster if I were to proclaim that I would fight at a time when I was unable to do so. I would not lead my country to disaster and would not gamble with its destiny.37
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