by Jeremy Bowen
Since 1948 Jordan had two distinct halves. The East Bank, mainly desert, was Hussein’s power base. He could rely on the support of the leaders of its Bedouin tribes whose men were the backbone of his army. But since 1948 there had also been more than half a million Palestinian refugees. Another 700,000 Palestinians lived on the West Bank and in the Old City of Jerusalem. Educated Palestinian urbanites tended to look down on East Bankers as country bumpkins. Hussein put members of aristocratic Palestinian families in his cabinets. But the king and his close advisers, rightly, were deeply suspicious of the great mass of Palestinians. They were seen as a potential fifth column, ready to be seduced by the violent criticism of Hussein and the Hashemite dynasty that came from the regime of Gamal Abdul Nasser in Cairo. Anyone found listening to Nasser’s radio station Saut al-Arab, the Voice of the Arabs, could be arrested.
Hussein did not think Israel planned to march on Amman and take him prisoner. Instead he feared that its actions would stir up trouble on the West Bank that would be exploited by ambitious army officers. If a coup established a radical, pro-Nasser regime in Jordan, Israel could use it as an excuse to step in. The CIA believed his analysis was realistic. Whichever way it went, the result would be that Hussein would lose his throne, and his dynasty, the Hashemites, would lose their last hold on power. Mecca, Medina and the rest of the Hejaz were lost to Ibn Saud after the First World War. In a coup in 1958 the Hashemite king of Iraq, Hussein’s cousin and friend, was slaughtered along with most of his immediate family. Hussein Ibn Talal, ruler of Jordan, descendant of the prophet, did not want to be the last Hashemite king.
As Hussein feared, Palestinians on the West Bank seethed with anger after the raid. The people of Samua refused offers of emergency food, tents and blankets. Instead they demanded weapons. One of them asked a reporter from the Los Angeles Times when he reached the village: ‘What do they expect us to fight with – with women? With children? Or with stones?’ It felt like a return to the early 1950s, when Israel carried out a long series of brutal and almost wholly counter-productive raids on the West Bank. Two days after the raid, demonstrators took over the centre of Hebron, the big Palestinian town close to Samua. The governor sent the fire brigade to turn their hoses on the crowd, only for them to be sent back to their fire stations by the local police chief, who said they would make things worse. A policeman who brandished his revolver at demonstrators was beaten up. Slogans were chanted against King Hussein, against America for protecting Israel, and against Syria and Egypt for not sending planes to protect them. Demonstrations spread to East Jerusalem and Nablus. The king slapped martial law on all the Palestinian towns. He could feel his throne shaking under him.
The government was accused of covering up the number of casualties and the size of the defeat. Jordanians were proud of their dead, but officers felt humiliated and shamed. A senior security official told the Americans that air force officers were especially bitter because they had been forced to go into action with ‘completely inadequate equipment’ – the ageing, subsonic, British-built Hawker Hunters. They thought they had been handed a choice – stay on the ground or commit suicide in the air. During the raid four Jordanian Hawker Hunter aircraft engaged Israeli Mirages in dogfights. One of them was shot down, after a long, low-level dogfight in which the pilot impressed the Israelis with his skill. At his funeral, army officers criticised the king violently. Instead of protecting the border, he had ‘squandered’ money on his own pleasures and cared more about hanging on to his throne than about the defence of his country. It was impossible to live in peace with Israel. Some of the officers thought Jordan should move against Israel now, whatever the consequences. King Hussein was told about the fury of his officers. He believed that only traditional Bedouin loyalty was keeping the army on his side.
Hussein’s troubles pleased his enemies in the radical Arab regimes in Egypt and Syria. No message of support came from Cairo. Damascus was relieved it had got off so lightly. The Israelis regarded the guerrilla groups as Syrian proxies. The British ambassador in Damascus thought it was more complicated than that: ‘Even if the Syrian government do control one or more of these bodies, I doubt whether their control is sufficiently close for there to be day-to-day coordination between terrorist operations and military action on the border.’ Still, no one in Damascus would deny that they encouraged and supported Palestinian attacks – and Israel had chosen not to attack them. The army chief of staff General Suwaydani ordered the cultivation of what Syria said was Arab land in the demilitarised areas. Let the Israelis shoot at us, he said. We’ll shoot back harder. Samua did not stop cross-border raids, although the Jordanians tried even harder to stop infiltration through the West Bank into Israel. The violence escalated. The Israeli army was itching for a fight and every Zionist bone in Prime Minister Eshkol’s body opposed making any concessions to Syria whatsoever over the disputed demilitarised zones. Added to that was growing political pressure, especially from the border settlements, to take tough action. It all came to a head on 7 April 1967.
Leading the country to war
Israelis who lived at Kibbutz Gadot, very close to the Syrian border, were standing in their yard, watching the action on the hills above them. All afternoon the air force had been bombing Syrian positions. A big battle had been brewing for the best part of a week. Now it was on.
Two Israeli tractors started work at 0930. Within fifteen minutes tanks, howitzers and heavy machine guns were exchanging fire. The battle increased in intensity. Israeli aircraft dive-bombed Syrian positions with 250 and 500 kg bombs. The Syrians shelled Israeli border settlements heavily. Israeli jets retaliated with an attack on Sqoufiye, a civilian village, destroying around forty houses. UN observers believed Syrian casualties were much heavier than the five Damascus admitted.
At 1519 shells started to fall on Kibbutz Gadot. One landed near the children’s house (children on kibbutzim lived communally, visiting their parents at set hours and sleeping separately in their own accommodation). Adults ran in to the building, grabbed the children and took them to the shelters. The children’s shelter was equipped for a long siege. It had cots, a kitchen for making food and lots of toys. Suddenly, it was very crowded, because the adults who had brought the children in were stuck there too. They started singing to try to take the children’s minds off the crash of the shells outside. In 40 minutes 300 shells landed within the kibbutz compound. One mother had to be physically restrained from running out into the open during the bombardment to find her child. When they emerged from the shelter, with all the children safe, they saw their homes in ruins. Offers of help came in from all over Israel, everything from cows for the dairy to a loan of labourers from the atomic reactor in Dimona to help them rebuild.
Israeli Mirages routed the Syrian MiG-21s. Two were chased most of the way to Damascus and were shot down over the suburbs. The Israelis roared low over the capital to rub the Syrians’ noses in what they had done. Four other Syrian MiG-21s were shot down, three of them over Jordan. The British air attaché, who examined the wreckage, was struck by how close they were to each other. He concluded that ‘either the Israeli aircraft had carried out an almost unbelievably skilful operation and shot down three aircraft almost simultaneously whilst still in formation or that the Syrian pilots had abandoned their aircraft, again while still in formation, rather than face up to the Israelis’. The absence of obvious bullet holes in the wreckage encouraged his view that the Syrians, who all ejected safely, had chosen discretion over valour. Privately, the Jordanians claimed the Syrians had admitted as much in hospital, complaining that they did not stand a chance against well-trained Israeli pilots with better ground control. Syrian military weakness was clearer than ever. At the height of the battle, Mezze Airfield, one of its main bases, was wide open to attack from the air. Its army garrison was standing to, with five tanks and five armoured personnel carriers. But its twenty-four MiG-17s were lined up on the tarmac and only four of its six 54 mm anti-aircraft guns were manned.
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The next morning young Palestinians in Jerusalem showed ‘a stunned awe at the Israeli competence and Arab helplessness in the face of it…’ and they asked ‘where were the Egyptians?’ Cairo had done nothing for Jordan after it had been humiliated at Samua. Now Syria had been humiliated, a country with which Egypt had a mutual defence pact. This time, Nasser had no choice. Something would have to be done.
Israel basked in a mood of national self-congratulation. Film of the MiGs being shot down from the Mirages’ gun cameras played in newsreels in the cinemas to appreciative audiences. The army heavily reinforced the northern border, moving in thirty-five tanks, mainly Centurions, and at least fifteen 105 mm guns. In a corridor in the Israeli Knesset, Moshe Dayan, the former chief of staff and now member of parliament, bumped into General Ezer Weizman, the former head of the air force and now number two in the IDF. ‘Are you out of your minds?’ he said to Weizman. ‘You’re leading the country to war!’
After the 7 April battle Syria and the guerrillas it sponsored tried even harder to provoke the Israelis, who obliged them by rising to every provocation. Wearily, the British ambassador in Damascus commented that ‘the Syrians are clearly in the wrong in not preventing infiltration. On the other hand, Israeli reaction to what after all are relatively little more than pinpricks, has been quite out of proportion.’ Rabin and Eshkol used interviews and broadcasts granted for Independence Day, which was coming up, to warn Damascus to expect more of the same and worse. The British government believed Israel’s threats were ‘the starting point of the chain of events that led to war’. The CIA picked up the threats and told President Johnson to expect a move against Syria. The Egyptians drew the same conclusions. Israel ‘is contemplating an attack on Syria … preparing world opinion for it and asking for assistance’.
The toughest threat was reported by the news agency United Press International (UPI) on 12 May: ‘A high Israeli source said today Israel would take limited military action designed to topple the Damascus army regime if Syrian terrorists continue sabotage raids inside Israel. Military observers said such an offensive would fall short of all-out war but would be mounted to deliver a telling blow against the Syrian government.’
In the West as well as the Arab world the immediate assumption was that the unnamed source was Rabin and that he was serious. In fact, it was Brigadier-General Aharon Yariv, the head of military intelligence, and the story was overwritten. Yariv mentioned ‘an all-out invasion of Syria and conquest of Damascus’ but only as the most extreme of a range of possibilities. But the damage had been done. Tension was so high that most people, and not just the Arabs, assumed something much bigger than usual was being planned against Syria. Israel’s English-language newspaper, the Jerusalem Post, took the threats and warnings as an authoritative ultimatum. A year later, Abba Eban, the foreign minister – who had been one of the first to weigh in against Syrian-sponsored ‘marauders’ that month – commented caustically: ‘There were some who thought these warnings may have been too frequent and too little coordinated … if there had been a little more silence the sum of human wisdom would have remained substantially undiminished.’
The message received outside Israel was that Damascus was in the sights of the IDF. For Nasser, it became an article of faith that ‘the Israeli leaders had announced that they would undertake military operations against Syria to occupy Damascus and bring down the Syrian regime’. The Egyptians claimed to have seen an Israeli plan for a powerful force to occupy the heights overlooking the Sea of Galilee. Israel, they claimed, planned to withdraw only if peacekeepers from UNEF were brought in to replace them.
The Syrians also believed they were about to be invaded. President Atassi, the head of state, sent messages to Cairo asking for military support under the terms of their mutual defence pact. The Syrian leadership did not mind provoking Israel, but they did not want all-out war. They had been taught a hard lesson in the air battle of 7 April. Members of the regime, like the air force commander General Hafez al-Asad, knew all too well that those who seize power in coups tend to have their power taken away in counter-coups, especially if they lose a war. Well before the 7 April battle, Asad already seemed ‘extremely nervous and appeared to dread the prospect of a major incident’. Yet icy reality did not cool down their rhetoric. Israel was ‘caught in the pincers’ of Egyptian, Syrian and Palestinian commandos. America could not protect ‘the foster child state of bandits’. The Grand Mufti went to inspect front-line positions and declared that religious leaders were ready to join the army in battle because Israel was ‘the enemy of Islam, Arabism and humanity’. Local rallies were held, where slogans were chanted and speeches made. It would, a newspaper editorial predicted, be ‘the last blow’ against Israel.
At this point, as the British foreign office had it, ‘the Russians pricked the Egyptian donkey’. Moscow delivered a warning to Cairo that Israel was massing troops on the border with Syria and would attack within a week. On 13 May the President of the Egyptian parliament, Anwar El Sadat, was at Moscow international airport, being seen off by Vladimir Semyenov, the Soviet deputy foreign minister, and Nikolai Podgorny, chairman of the presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Sadat’s plane was late. They spent the extra hour talking, mainly about Syria. ‘They told me specifically that ten Israeli brigades had been concentrated on the Syrian border.’ He passed the message to Nasser who had also received it from the Soviet Embassy and the KGB. By the evening, General Muhammad Fawzi, the Egyptian army’s chief of staff, had received a similar message from Major-General Ahmad Suwaydani, his Syrian opposite number.
Exactly why the Soviets delivered the warning is not clear. The Soviets seem to have believed they were passing on accurate intelligence. Perhaps they were misled by the Syrian regime, Moscow’s ideological soul mate in a way that Egypt could never be. The Soviets wanted to protect their clumsy protégés, who as well as provoking Israel had now provoked Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority with a newspaper article that was taken to be anti-Islamic. Tens of thousands took to the streets to protest. The Atassi regime was becoming so unpopular that it needed a good way to unite the country. The spectre of an Israeli attack was perfect.
A ‘medium-level’ Soviet official told the CIA that the Soviet Union had stirred up the Arabs to try to make trouble for the United States. They hoped the US, already embattled in Vietnam, might become involved in another long war. Perhaps that seemed like a good enough reason among Soviet hawks – but there were limits to the mischief that the Kremlin was prepared to make. The consensus in the CIA, the State Department and the White House throughout the crisis was that the Soviets did not want war and did not encourage the Arabs to go to war either, nor did it promise to take military action if things started to go wrong. A KGB officer told a CIA informant: ‘I think this is difficult for the Arabs to understand, but everybody in the outside world believes that it is not worth it to have a world war over the question of Palestine.’
The message from Moscow to Cairo worried the Eshkol government. Was there a leak? ‘Limited’ retaliation against Syria (an elastic concept – the Samua raid was ‘limited’) had been authorised by the cabinet on 7 May. Secret plans existed and had been discussed in the prime minister’s office and in the IDF General Staff. The real problem with the Soviet message to Egypt was that even though it was plausible, it was inaccurate. Israel was contemplating a big raid into Syria. But it had not concentrated a huge force on the border – Damascus had alleged fifteen brigades, which was not far off Israel’s fully mobilised strength.
In Washington the White House, just like the Arabs and the Russians, had concluded that Israel was planning something big. President Johnson’s information was that ‘the Soviet advice to the Syrians that the Israelis were planning an attack was not far off, although they seem to have exaggerated on the magnitude. The Israelis probably were planning an attack – but not an invasion.’ Another official agreed. ‘It is probable Soviet agents actually picked up intelligence reports of a planned Israeli
raid into Syria. I would not be surprised if the reports were at least partly true. The Israelis have made such raids before: they have been under heavy provocation: and they maintain pretty good security (so we might well not know about a planned raid). Intelligence being what it is, the Soviet agents may have not known the scale of the raid and may have exaggerated its scope and purpose.’
Jerusalem
Divided Jerusalem was a backwater between 1948 and 1967. Barbed wire, mines and machine gun posts marked the place where two hostile worlds butted against each other. UN Security Council resolution 181 that had partitioned Mandatory Palestine in November 1947 had declared that Jerusalem would be a separate entity under international control. Israel and Jordan ignored it, the big powers did not try to enforce it. The single crossing point was the Mandelbaum Gate, Jerusalem’s Checkpoint Charlie. Only foreigners with special permission could cross between the Arab world and the Jewish state. Occasionally, after long bureaucratic campaigns, divided Palestinian families were allowed through for reunions. The two sides sometimes shot covetous glances – and bullets – at each other, but in Jerusalem no one was killed trying to escape from one side to the other. Plenty of people would have been quite happy if the people on the other side vanished. But they wanted to be in their world, not their enemy’s.
The walled Old City was on the Jordanian side. Israelis were not allowed to visit any of the Jewish holy places. The Jordanians also had the Mount of Olives, which overlooks the Old City from the east. On its slopes is the Garden of Gethsemane, where Christians believe Jesus sweated blood on his last night before he was arrested by the Romans. A little higher up is the Jews’ most important cemetery. The Jordanians paved the road with some of its gravestones. In the 1960s well-off Jordanians would motor over from Amman to have lunch at the brand-new Intercontinental hotel that had been built on top of the Mount of Olives. For them, Jerusalem was a beautiful symbol rather than a capital or a place to live. It was an easy drive of twenty-five miles or so from Amman, across the river Jordan, up past Jericho and through the Judean desert. They could eat looking down across the holy city at the mysterious and sinister Israelis on the hills opposite.