Six Days

by Jeremy Bowen

  The gamble

  Nasser was gambling for high stakes. It was, the Americans concluded, ‘a massive power play which, if successful, will be his biggest political victory since Suez, even if no shot is fired … if the Israelis do not retaliate, Nasser will have forced them to back down and will have won the first Arab victory over Israelis, and incidentally will have won another victory over US in Arab eyes … He is playing for keeps and we should make no mistake in this regard.’

  The next day, Monday 22 May, Nasser doubled the stakes. Israel had not called his bluff when he mobilised the army and reinforced the Sinai. So Nasser went one stage further. He banned Israeli shipping from the Straits of Tiran, the entrance to the Gulf of Aqaba, effectively reimposing the blockade of the port of Eilat that had been lifted in 1956. Nasser chose an airbase in the Sinai desert as the place to announce the news. ‘The Israeli flag shall not go through the Gulf of Aqaba,’ Nasser said. ‘Our sovereignty over the entrance to the Gulf cannot be disputed. If Israel wishes to threaten war, we tell her, you are welcome.’

  The wire services circulated a photo of Nasser, looking as debonair as ever, surrounded by equally happy young flyers. Some of them were wearing their cockpit pressure suits. White teeth flashed across the grainy black and white still. The image Nasser desired was pumped around the world – the leader of the Arabs challenging the Jewish state, surrounded by highly trained young experts ready for action. Nasser looks excited, almost like a child intoxicated by the enormity of the line that he has just crossed.

  Forty-two minutes after the report from Cairo, the White House dispatched a letter from Johnson to Nasser. Denying that the United States was unfriendly to Egypt, the letter tried half-heartedly to suggest that Washington understood some of Nasser’s preoccupations. The most important part of the letter dangled the prospect of a visit by Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, ‘if we come through these days without hostilities’. Johnson did not want to waste space on pleasantries. He scratched out the words ‘with greatest respect’ from the sentence before he approved it.

  The announcement of the blockade embarrassed U Thant, the UN secretary general. He was in the air, travelling to Cairo on a belated peace mission when the news came through. By the time his Pan American airliner had taxied to a halt at Cairo International airport, the official welcoming party was swamped by a big crowd that rushed on to the tarmac, chanting slogans welcoming U Thant and glorifying Nasser. The press corps broke out of their pen to join them. The fastidious General Rikhye saw Mahmoud Riad, the Egyptian foreign minister, fighting his way over to them ‘through sweaty, heaving, arm-flinging bodies’.

  On the evening of 24 May U Thant and General Rikhye had dinner with Nasser at his villa in the Cairo military cantonment. Nasser had lived there since the early 1950s, when he was a lieutenant-colonel plotting to seize power. It was still the same relatively modest house, with an extension added to one side to give him an office and formal reception rooms. The UN delegation was received in a room furnished with golden chairs and sofas in the style of Louis XIV that was very popular among Cairo’s middle classes. Nasser deployed all of his considerable charm. Disarmingly, he explained he had to close the straits before the secretary general reached Cairo because he knew U Thant was coming to ask him to keep them open. Personally, he did not want war. Egypt just wanted to get back what it lost in 1956, when it was the victim of British, French and Israeli aggression. He did not believe American assurances that Israel would not attack Syria. The CIA were out to kill him, and anyway they were saying something very similar just before Israel attacked Egypt in 1956.

  Nasser led them past walls full of family photographs to the dining room. While they were eating he conceded that there was ‘some foolhardy bravado’ in the lower ranks of the army. At the senior level they were realistic. Egypt had been defeated in 1956. It was not a long time ago. But the army, if necessary, would do its job. He offered U Thant the same promise he had made to the Soviets and the Americans. Egypt would not fire the first shot. But if they were attacked, they would defend themselves. Back at his suite at the Nile Hilton, overlooking Egypt’s great, broad river and the lights of the capital, U Thant sat down with his advisers. Unless there was a way round the blockade, war was inevitable.

  General Yariv, head of Israeli military intelligence, telephoned Rabin in the small hours on the morning of 23 May to tell him that Nasser had reimposed the blockade of Eilat. Rabin felt sick with worry. The morning papers had the story. Any idea that Nasser’s actions were a charade had disappeared. The popular newspaper Maariv compared Nasser to Hitler and said he had declared war. For Yediot Aharonot, the other mass-circulation daily, the ‘decisive day’ had come, and just as they had done at Munich in 1938 when Hitler threatened Czechoslovakia, ‘the great powers are abandoning those who are considered weak and are encouraging those who are considered strong’.

  Rabin and responsibility

  The day after Nasser closed the straits, Eshkol and the cabinet ordered a full mobilisation of Israeli forces. Israel was on a direct line to war. Mobilisation was a well-rehearsed procedure. In 48 hours 250,000 men could be put into the field. When an Israeli soldier completes his compulsory military service, he is allocated to a reserve unit. They exist only on paper, until they are called up for their annual training or for war. Mobilisation started with phone calls to the commanders of the most important units. One of them, a lawyer in civilian life, reported for duty with his private secretary and driver and ‘within ninety minutes was busy getting his brigade out of the card index and into the field’. The message passed down the line to officers who called NCOs, who called the soldiers. Cars or lorries went from door to door to pick them up. Other units were called up by code words that were broadcast on the radio. The Israeli writer Abba Kovner, who led the revolt of the Jews in the Vilna ghetto in Poland in the Second World War, watched it happen.

  I was leaning on a newspaper stall at the time. The newspaper seller was in the very act of stretching out his hand towards the paper I wanted when suddenly the voice caught his attention. His eyes widened, he looked through me rather than at me, and said, as if in surprise, ‘Oh, they’ve called me up too.’ He rolled up his papers and went. The salesgirl came out of the shop opposite, stopped jerkily at the door, adjusted her blouse, a little nervously, snapped her handbag shut, and walked off. A group of men stood huddled round a transistor in the middle of a patch of lawn. Whenever one of them heard his code word read out by the announcer, he detached himself from the group and left … a unique silence descended upon the town.

  In a couple of days, most Israeli men under fifty were in some sort of uniform. Some units had a turnout of more than 100 per cent. Overage men arrived at their unit’s mobilisation points and demanded to be allowed to fight. One persistent 63-year-old, a veteran of the British army, was told his unit would only take him back if he brought a jeep. The next day he turned up with one from Hertz.

  Full mobilisation made war feel much closer because the exodus of men effectively closed the economy down, and Israel could not do without its economy for long. The newspapers had been praising Israeli civilians’ ‘refusal to panic’. But after Nasser closed the straits housewives went on the offensive. By the evening of the 23rd, most of the supermarkets were empty. One columnist condemned ‘rapacious animals at the canned goods shelves in the supermarkets … vultures with their shopping bags sagging down to the floor’. Some traders cashed in by putting up prices. The government opened its warehouses and flooded the shops with food. There were another few days of furious shopping before sales started getting back to normal around the 26th.

  The pressure was crushing Rabin. The man who was responsible for planning the campaign was close to panic. Against all the military evidence, he convinced himself that he was leading Israel to catastrophe. Rabin spent hours in angry, edgy meetings with the cabinet and with the military elite. Some of them wanted war. Others could not believe that Israel had been unable to head the crisis
off. Rabin smoked pack after pack of cigarettes and hardly slept. On 23 May, after another frantic day that started at 4 a.m., he turned to David Ben-Gurion, who had led the fight for independence in 1948. He drove to his house, hoping for some guidance or consolation. Instead Ben-Gurion yelled at him. ‘You have brought this state to this most dangerous situation. You are to blame for this! We must not go to war. We are isolated!’

  Rabin was stunned. The leader of the National Religious Party, interior minister Haim Shapira, had shouted in the cabinet meeting: ‘How dare you go to war? How dare you? We must dig in!’ But now it was Ben-Gurion speaking, the most respected man in Israel.

  ‘What if he’s right? What if he’s right?’ Rabin asked himself, again and again as he paced up and down outside his house.

  When he got himself inside, exhausted, distraught and panicking, he had a nervous collapse. At about eight in the evening he phoned his deputy, General Ezer Weizman, the head of the General Staff division, and asked him to come round to his house immediately. He was sitting on the edge of a settee, looking ‘broken and depressed’ when Weizman arrived. Rabin said he had made mistakes, led Israel into an entanglement that would be ‘the greatest and hardest war the state has ever experienced’. Then, Weizman says, Rabin asked him to take over as chief of staff. Weizman told Rabin to pull himself together. He wanted the job but could not accept it. (It was not in Rabin’s gift.) He told Rabin that his resignation would make the politicians even more hesitant about going to war. It would also be worth a few divisions to Nasser, would be a heavy blow to the morale of his own troops and would finish him for the rest of his life.

  Ten years later, Rabin put it down to ‘a combination of tension, exhaustion and the enormous amounts of cigarette smoke I had inhaled in recent days (I had suffered severe nicotine poisoning on two previous occasions). But it was more than nicotine that brought me down. The heavy sense of guilt that had been dogging me of late became unbearably strong on 23 May. I could not forget Ben-Gurion’s words – You bear the responsibility…’

  Rabin never said what he was guilty about. Perhaps it was his own policy of encouraging aggressive behaviour on the Syrian border. Rabin was an introspective man who bottled up pressure. He did not talk to his wife Leah about what was haunting him. She wrote after his death that the prospect of thousands of casualties was ‘a crushing burden’ to him. Ruhama Hermon, who ran Rabin’s office, believes he broke because ‘he was alone. There was terrible procrastination among the politicians. But among the generals there was a sense of confidence and determination. Rabin had to walk between the two. When he came back from seeing Ben-Gurion it was as if an extra boulder had been placed on his back. Every day his shoulders seemed to sag lower. He was sending young men off to war and he didn’t know how many would come back…’

  If only Rabin had realised. The blockade was all window-dressing, like so much else in Nasser’s Egypt in 1967. Brigadier Abdel Moneim Khalil had been dispatched to Sharm al Sheikh with 4000 paratroopers on 19 May. On the 22nd he was sent orders by Cairo to impose a blockade, which he thought were contradictory and unenforceable. Israeli merchant ships were to receive shots across the bows and stern to stop them. Powerful coastal artillery had been delivered to do the job. But that was as far as the blockade went. No mines were laid in the shipping lanes. Brigadier Khalil’s orders were to let all naval vessels through, even Israeli ones. Merchant convoys with a naval escort were also to be left alone.

  Ready to fight

  Israel’s generals thought war was unavoidable, were confident they would win and wanted to get on with it. At the end of May an Israeli paratroop commander told his men that they would be fighting the same Arabs they had come up against in 1956, ‘with the same deep chasm between officers and soldiers, with the same inferior fighting spirit, with the same tendency to disintegrate the moment something goes awry in their planning … they will crumble as their brothers did ten and twenty years ago.’

  In 1967 Israel had the best armed forces in the Middle East by a long way. American and British military intelligence reports show Israel’s existence was not in danger at any point. Together the Arab forces had more weapons than the Israelis. But they were incapable of mounting an offensive. The only way that the Israeli army could have lost would have been to decide not to fight.

  Fifteen years of hard work had turned the IDF into the speedy, mobile force that had been envisaged in the early 1950s. Infantry rode into battle. Most heavy weapons were self-propelled. Even the chain of command was streamlined. Unlike most Western armed forces in 1967, Israel’s army, air force and navy were fully integrated under one headquarters, commanded by Chief of Staff Rabin. Israel and Egypt had around the same number of tanks, armoured personnel carriers, artillery and self-propelled guns. But if Jordan and Syria were added the Arabs had a two-to-one advantage. In the air Israel and Egypt had about the same number of fighters, but Egypt had four times as many bombers. All that, though, would be cancelled out ‘by the superior training and fighting effectiveness of the Israelis’ and by attacks from their air force. Israel had other advantages. It could get its troops into the field faster and more effectively than the Arab armies. Its full force of twenty-six brigades (including four armoured and four mechanised) could be mobilised within forty-eight hours. In the same period Egypt could deploy a maximum of ten brigades, Syria six and Jordan eight. In the longer term the Arabs could find another five brigades between them. But, by then, Israel’s plan was that the war could be over.

  Just before war broke out, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff judged ‘that Israel will be militarily unchallengeable by any combination of Arab states at least during the next five years. As presently trained and equipped, the armed forces of Israel are greatly superior in effectiveness and firepower to those of their potential opponents, individually or collectively.’ Another report compiled on the eve of war, from the US National Military Command Center, judged that Israel had ‘the most effective fighting force in the Middle East. It is highly literate, has a relatively young senior officer corps, and is highly motivated and patriotic. A large proportion of its officers and NCOs have had battle experience. The Israeli army is considered capable of defeating the forces of any or all of its Arab neighbours and could offer effective delaying action against the ground forces of a major power.’ The report also accurately predicted Israel’s chosen strategy: ‘Israel, numerically outnumbered in combat aircraft and lacking territory and bases to effect adequate dispersion, must rely upon a pre-emptive strike to gain air parity or air superiority. Israel can, in a surprise attack, cause sufficient losses among UAR [Egyptian] and Syrian aircraft and facilities to render them unable to take effective offensive measures.’ Even if Israel used its air force in a purely defensive role, it ‘can maintain air parity’.

  The British estimates were very similar. Six weeks before the war started, the British cabinet’s Joint Intelligence Committee compared the armed forces of Israel and its main Arab enemies, Egypt, Syria and Jordan. At every level, Israel was far ahead. The study concluded that it was ‘inconceivable’ that the Arabs would improve their efficiency and morale to a point where they could beat Israel. The British defence attaché in Tel Aviv, a professional soldier, believed that ‘in command, training, equipment and services the Israel army is more prepared for war than ever before. Well trained, tough, self-reliant, the Israeli soldier has a strong fighting spirit and would willingly go to war in defence of his country.’ Before he was assailed by panic, General Rabin felt his country was secure. Israel ‘enjoys superiority over her enemies which seems to be assured for many years to come…’ and he could ‘see nothing which would upset Israel’s superiority in the next three or four years.’ The British intelligence services thought General Rabin’s estimate was ‘conservative’.

  Israel’s major strategic objective was a nuclear weapon. In 1967 the Americans had deep suspicions that Israel had already built a bomb. Israel had a contract to buy the MD-620 surface-to-surface missile
from the French firm, Dassault. Nothing had been delivered by 1967, but the Americans assumed that the missiles were being acquired as a delivery system for nuclear warheads. Periodically the Israelis allowed American inspections of their nuclear reactor at Dimona in the Negev desert. At their last visit before the war, on 22 April 1967, Israel was producing enough plutonium to make one or two bombs a year. They found no evidence that bombs were being made there but were concerned that they could be being made somewhere else. What deepened their suspicions was Israel’s refusal to tell them what had happened to 80–100 tons of uranium it had bought from Argentina in 1964. Israel, they believed, also had a nuclear chemical separation plant – a big step towards a weapons capability. In May 1967 the Americans concluded that, at the very least, Israel could build a bomb at short notice if it wanted to do so. Top US military and intelligence chiefs disagreed about the findings. Richard Helms, the Director of Central Intelligence, was definite that there were no nuclear weapons in the area. General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared himself ‘more sceptical’.

  The Egyptians could not build a nuclear power station, let alone nuclear weapons. In the 1950s Egypt hired German scientists to produce an Arab super weapon. But, by 1967, the scientists had left and Egypt’s much-hyped missiles –which did not work – were no more than useful props at military parades. Experts at the US National Military Command Center analysed Egyptian strength on the eve of war. They concluded that it would stay on the defensive. Its three-to-two superiority in tanks ‘would be insufficient to launch a successful attack against the Israelis without air superiority’. Another problem was the quality of its soldiers. ‘The Egyptian army is capable of stubborn resistance in a static defense, but has difficulty adjusting to the fluid, rapidly changing mobile warfare which would be required against the Israelis.’ The Egyptians also had ‘chronic’ problems with logistics. ‘The enlisted men are often illiterate and difficult to train as mechanics and repairmen…’