Thirteen Days in September

by Lawrence Wright

  The armistice that ended Israel’s War of Independence left Egypt in control of the Gaza Strip. A single furrow in the sand made by a tractor plow marked the border. Dayan would stand beside the furrow and survey the mud huts of the refugees, many of whom had been driven from their former homes by his forces. The squalid, crowded camps, swarming with schoolchildren, looked to him like anthills. “Thousands of youngsters, the boys in blue, the girls in black, poured out like a swollen river, branched into the alleys, and were absorbed by the slums,” he writes. At times, refugees would slip into Israel to harvest crops they had left behind or graze their flocks. Some came for revenge, planting bombs or attacking Israelis. The official Israeli army policy was to shoot any Arab who strayed into the territory Israel now claimed.

  “We shoot from among the 200,000 hungry Arabs who cross the line—will this stand up to moral scrutiny?” Dayan asked himself. “Arabs cross to collect the grain that they left in the abandoned villages and we set mines for them and they go back without an arm or a leg.” Perhaps it wasn’t moral, he concluded, “but I know no other method of guarding the borders. If the Arab shepherds and harvesters are allowed to cross the borders, then tomorrow the State of Israel will have no borders.”

  Dayan’s philosophical excuses masked an avidity for killing. He initiated retaliatory raids as a form of collective punishment. In February 1955, when a team of Egyptian intelligence scouts slipped into Israel to reconnoiter military facilities and indiscriminately killed an Israeli cyclist, Dayan, now the military chief of staff, sent two companies of paratroopers into Gaza to attack an Egyptian military post. They massacred the Egyptians in their barracks. A truck carrying reinforcements was rocketed and set afire, burning the troops alive. Forty Egyptians were killed, and eight Israelis. It was the bloodiest clash since the 1948 war, and it would cause Nasser to consider how to respond. In September, he concluded a massive Soviet arms deal with Czechoslovakia. From now on, he said, invoking the immemorial tradition in the Middle East, it would be “an eye for an eye.”

  That suited Dayan. His strategy was to provoke Nasser into a counterstrike that would give Israel the excuse to wage war before Egypt could put new Soviet weapons to use. After a series of skirmishes along the border, including Egyptian mortar fire toward a kibbutz, Dayan turned the army loose on the Gaza Strip, shelling the marketplace and homes and even a hospital. Fifty-eight civilians, including thirty-three women and thirteen children, were killed; four Egyptian soldiers were also killed.

  Under pressure from the UN, Ben-Gurion directed Dayan to halt the border patrols and pull back from the armistice line. Dayan reluctantly obeyed, but in a bitter meeting with his mentor, Dayan told the prime minister that a show of weakness would only encourage the Arab terrorists. Indeed, the Egyptians retaliated with suicide squads, including one that attacked a synagogue near Tel Aviv, where five children were murdered. Although the war Dayan sought eluded him, the inescapable moral calculus of terror had taken hold, as each side cloaked itself in righteousness, allowing blood to flow without discrimination or pity.

  One of the victims was Roy Rotenberg, a security officer for the kibbutz Nahal Oz, the closest village to the border of the Gaza Strip. Dayan had met Rotenberg during the siege of Gaza and had been impressed by the charming young man with bright blue eyes. Only a few days after that meeting, Rotenberg spotted some Arabs who were pasturing their flocks in the fields that had been commandeered by the kibbutz. He got on his horse to drive them away, but he was shot, and then his body was dragged across the border. His mutilated corpse was later given to UN soldiers, who returned it to the kibbutz for burial.

  Dayan spoke at Rotenberg’s graveside. His eulogy became a defiant anthem for the State of Israel as well as a candid and unvarnished lament for the tragedy that encompassed both sides. “Yesterday morning Roy was murdered,” Dayan said.

  The morning stillness so dazzled him that he did not see those lying in wait for him on the furrow line. Let us not cast blame on his murderers today. It is pointless to mention their deep-seated hatred of us. For eight years they have been sitting in Gaza refugee camps while before their eyes we have been making the land and villages where they and their forefathers had lived our own.

  It is not from the Arabs in Gaza that we should demand Roy’s blood, but from ourselves. How we shut our eyes to a sober observation of our fate, to the sight of our generation’s mission in all its cruelty. Have we indeed forgotten that this young group in Nahal Oz carry on their shoulders—like Samson of old—the heavy “Gates of Gaza”—and that behind those gates live hundreds of thousands of hate-ridden people who pray that we be weakened so that they may then tear us apart … ?

  We are the biblical generation of the settlement, following the Joshua conquest, and the helmet and the sword are essential requirements. Our children will have no life if we do not dig shelters, and without barbed wire and a machine gun we will not be able to pave roads or drill for water. Millions of Jews who were annihilated without having had a country look to us from the ashes of Israeli history, commanding us to settle and build a land for our people. But beyond the furrow border, a sea of hatred and vengeance swells, waiting for the day that calm will dull our vigilance, the day that we listen to ambassadors of scheming hypocrisy who call on us to lay down our arms.…

  This is the choice of our lives—to be prepared and armed, strong and resolute or to let the sword fall from our fist and our lives be cut down. Roy Rotenberg, the blond, slender young man who left Tel Aviv to build his home at the gates of Gaza and serve as our bulwark, Roy—the light in his heart blinded him to the gleam of the knife, the longing for peace deafened him to the sound of lurking murder; alas, the gates of Gaza were too heavy for him and they prevailed.

  ON JULY 26, 1956, four years after the Egyptian military overthrew the king, President Gamal Abdel Nasser stood in a square in Alexandria, a quarter of a million people at his feet. His speech was being broadcast all over Egypt and the Arab world, to the millions captivated by Nasser’s vision of Arab unity and rebirth. Through diplomacy, Nasser had already persuaded the British to abandon their occupation of Egypt, meaning that his country would soon be free of foreign domination for the first time since the brief interval in the sixth century BCE when Egyptians overthrew their Persian occupiers.

  The phased departure of the eighty thousand British troops stationed along the canal had come as a great blow to Israel, which depended on them to act as a barrier against Egyptian aggression. Nasser was now taking an even more consequential step. “The Suez Canal was dug by the efforts of the sons of Egypt—120,000 Egyptians died in the process,” Nasser exhorted the crowd.2 “Today, O citizens, we declare that our property has been returned to us. We are realizing our glory and our grandeur.” As of that moment, he announced, he was nationalizing the Suez Canal. “And it will be run by Egyptians! Egyptians! Egyptians!”

  This stunning action catapulted Nasser into being the hero of the developing world, a leader with a following that knew no borders. Meanwhile, as Britain and France were recovering from their shock, they started plotting how to seize control of the canal. It was not just Suez that was at stake, it was their status as Great Powers. Although Britain had already lost India and was leaving Egypt, it still ruled over thirty-five colonies, including half of Africa. France had nearly as many—including, most importantly, Algeria, which was falling dangerously under the sway of the charismatic Nasser and his dream of Arab nationalism. In addition, most of the oil going to Britain and France came through the canal; a cutoff could bring their economies to the point of collapse. The fact that one man had his finger on the pinch point of Western power was an earthshaking revelation. Britain and France were suddenly more vulnerable than their colonies; the world order seemed to have been completely upended.

  Two months after the nationalization of the canal, Dayan and an Israeli delegation flew to Paris to meet secretly with French officials, who invited the Israelis to be their partner in toppling Nasser
and gaining control of the canal. If Israel agreed, the French were certain Britain would join in as well. The only purpose Israel actually served in this plan was to offer a pretext for the two Great Powers to enter a war they didn’t want to be seen as starting. The scheme was for the Israelis to capture Sinai, which would give the British and the French an excuse to take over the canal, ostensibly to protect it. The French called their scheme Operation Musketeer, after Alexander Dumas’s famous novel, The Three Musketeers.

  Ben-Gurion, the indomitable prime minister, was short and stocky, with intense dark eyes and tufts of white hair that spread from the sides of his head like pigeon wings. He was suspicious of the plan and insisted that the British commit themselves on paper, not just through vague assurances offered through French intermediaries. On October 21, days before the war was scheduled to commence, Dayan and Ben-Gurion returned to France for more talks. On the flight, Dayan observed the prime minister buried in a volume by Procopius, the sixth-century Palestinian historian. Ben-Gurion excitedly called his aides over and pointed to a passage in which the author mentions a Jewish mini-kingdom in the Red Sea region called the “isle of Yotvat”—an ancient Hebrew name for Tiran, one of a pair of small islands at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba. That would become a justification for Ben-Gurion’s assertion that Sinai never belonged to Egypt at all—it was once a part of historic Israel, and it must be again.

  The Israelis landed at an obscure airstrip southwest of Paris, where they were shuttled to a small private villa in Sèvres, on the outskirts of the capital. There they met with top French officials, including Prime Minister Guy Mollet. Ben-Gurion, who had seemed so reluctant at first to get involved in the conspiracy, now shocked his French counterparts by proposing what he termed a comprehensive solution to the Middle East’s problems. It amounted to an entirely new map of the region, one in which Israel would expand its territory significantly and shed the troublesome Palestinian refugees by sending them across the River Jordan. Israel would then annex the West Bank, while British-dominated Iraq would gobble up the remainder of the Kingdom of Jordan. Southern Lebanon would also be folded into Israel, and the predominantly Muslim parts would be handed over to Syria. What remained of Lebanon would become a Christian state. Finally, Israel would also take over the Sinai Peninsula. In this manner, the three musketeers would not only control the canal, they would dominate the Middle East long into the future. The French were cool to Ben-Gurion’s scheme, possibly because it had little more to offer them. The canal was enough.

  That evening the snappish and disdainful British foreign minister, Selwyn Lloyd, arrived. The contempt the British minister felt for Jews was clear, but in Dayan’s opinion it was outweighed by Israel’s opportunity to forge an alliance, even a clandestine one, with two such powerful nations. At first Lloyd and his officials sat in a separate room, getting briefed by the French and relaying suggestions to the Israelis—all in the effort of preserving the sham that they were not in collusion. Lloyd even proposed that, during the war itself, the British would indiscriminately bomb both Israeli and Egyptian forces on either side of the canal in order to give the appearance of strict impartiality. One can imagine the Israelis’ reaction.

  Within a few hours the British deigned to meet face-to-face with the other parties. Lloyd conceded that the Egyptians had already agreed to allow international supervision of the operation of the canal and had even offered guarantees to keep it open. But that was not enough. Nasser had to be taken down. To preserve Britain’s precious standing in the world, however, Lloyd required Israel to commit a “real act of war” against Egypt in order to provide moral cover for the Anglo-French invasion.

  Dayan offered a plan for a limited raid into Sinai, followed by a paratroop drop behind Egyptian lines, which would be seen as an attempt to seize the canal. The British and the French would then meet, pretend to discuss the matter, and then demand that both sides withdraw their troops ten miles from the canal area. The Israelis would make a show of accepting the proposal while the Egyptians would necessarily reject any ultimatum to withdraw from their own territory. Thereupon, the British and the French would begin their bombing campaign, wiping out the Egyptian Air Force as a prelude to a larger war followed by the overthrow of Nasser and the installation of a puppet government in Cairo. With some modifications, the three leaders agreed to Dayan’s proposal. D-day was scheduled for October 29, at five p.m.

  That day, a curfew was abruptly imposed on Arabs living inside Israel. Half an hour before it went into effect, the mayor of the village of Kafr Qasim, near Tel Aviv, protested that many of his citizens were out in the fields or working in neighboring towns and had no way of knowing about the new rule. The Israeli Border Police refused to hear his plea and blockaded the village. All the Arabs returning to their homes after five p.m. were shot. Some were murdered as they arrived on donkeys or bicycles, others executed en masse as they were returning on a bus from the olive fields. Within an hour, forty-nine villagers were killed, many of them women, including one who was eight months pregnant. About half of those slain were children between the ages of eight and seventeen.

  The war began when four Israeli P-51 Mustangs, flying about twelve feet off the ground to avoid detection, used their props and wings to slice the Egyptian communication lines. Two hours later, Israeli paratroopers dropped into the desert and took up blocking positions. After feinting at Jordan, an armored column, led by the headstrong Ariel Sharon, raced across the desert, sweeping away lightly defended Egyptian outposts.

  The next day, the British and the French issued their agreed-upon ultimatum, threatening armed intervention within twelve hours. As expected, Israel nominally agreed to the terms, the Egyptians rejected them, whereupon Israeli forces continued their march through Sinai.

  Only two roads crossed the peninsula; the main one leading to the canal passes through a narrow gap in the arid southern mountains called the Mitla Pass. Sharon was under orders from Dayan not to try to take it because the paratroopers had already outflanked the Egyptian defenders. Sharon did so anyway, believing that the defile would be poorly defended, like the forts he had crushed on his way, so why not. When the Israelis were partway through the pass, however, Egyptian troops, who were dug into rifle pits carved into the walls on either side, rained down fire, creating a hellish gauntlet that trapped the invaders. Israeli reinforcements climbed onto the ridges and scrambled down the hillsides in order to root out the Egyptian defenders in hand-to-hand combat. The Israelis finally took the Mitla Pass at a cost of 38 dead and 120 wounded. The Egyptian casualties included 150 killed. After the battle the pass was abandoned; it had been a totally pointless action.

  In this war Dayan formed a firm opinion about the fighting qualities of the Egyptian soldiers. “In general, they fought well during the static phase of their combat,” he observed. “Dug in and using their anti-tank, field, and anti-aircraft guns from fixed positions prepared in advance, they fought effectively. But they became poor soldiers when we forced them to leave their entrenched posts or change their plans.” Some sights made a lasting impression on him. On the morning of November 1, he joined Israeli troops entering the stronghold of El Arish, where a major battle had been fought the day before. The Egyptians had withdrawn during the night. Not even a single nurse remained to take care of the badly wounded men left behind. There was a dead Egyptian soldier on the operating table. His leg had been amputated. “He had been abandoned in the middle of the operation without a doctor or a nurse stopping to bandage him, and he died from loss of blood,” Dayan observed.

  Some Egyptian snipers held on; one of them killed Dayan’s signalman, who was standing at his side. When Dayan departed, in a Piper Cub, his pilot climbed high to avoid the random fire. Dayan could see an Israeli armored brigade headed for the canal and Egyptian soldiers fleeing haphazardly through the dunes. “These troops, abandoned by their officers, immediately shed all they wore and carried which hampered movement—weapons, military pack, uniform, and even
their heavy army boots,” he wrote in his diary. “From the air these troops looked like an endless procession of pilgrims, their white underwear conspicuous against the background of golden sand.”

  Meantime, an immense amphibious fighting force was steaming toward the Egyptian shore. The British and French assembled nearly 250 warships carrying 80,000 soldiers, in the company of 80 merchant ships and hundreds of landing craft. The purported objective of the Anglo-French invasion was to impose peace, but Nasser had already agreed to an American-sponsored cease-fire resolution in the UN, and Israel followed on November 5—the same day that it took Sharm el-Sheikh, completing its capture of the peninsula. Still the armada sailed on, despite the absence of combatants and in the face of worldwide condemnation of what everyone now knew was about to happen.

  At dawn the next morning, the main act began with a naval bombardment of the beaches around Port Said and Port Fuad, accompanied by an aerial assault. The troops came ashore while the sand was still burning from the intense cannonade. The point of the overwhelming display of force by the Anglo-French invasion was to terrify the Egyptians into immediate surrender. The military planners expected that the people would topple Nasser themselves. Instead, the invaders found themselves fighting the entire town of Port Said. Nasser had called upon all Egyptians to resist the invaders, supplying the citizens of the canal area with assault rifles and grenades. For two days, the people of the isolated desert town kept up their amateur resistance, although much of Port Said was burned to the ground by the fierce assault, which killed 2,700 Egyptians and left tens of thousands homeless.