by Jeremy Bowen
Eshkol’s wife Miriam was listening to the broadcast. She ordered her driver to take her straight to the studios. Her husband was angry, ‘his advisers all running around like mice’. The broadcast was bad enough. For Eshkol, it was about to get much worse. At eight in the evening he was supposed to see the IDF high command. He was late. The generals had been listening to the radio and were very unhappy about what they had heard. As they waited the tension mounted. Brig. Gen. Ariel Sharon was angry about politicians who seemed to have run out of ideas. ‘We felt as if the burden was on our shoulders.’ Sharon had been a famous soldier since the 1950s when he created Unit 101, an irregular unit that used brutal tactics, often killing civilians, in reprisal raids into Gaza and the West Bank. Now he was commanding a division that was poised to storm into the Sinai desert. When Eshkol arrived they were waiting in a conference room just off the main war room. Under harsh new strip lights that had just been put in, the generals’ faces looked pale and grim. The air was clogged with cigarette smoke and the atmosphere was hostile and emotional. Nobody offered Eshkol any refreshments.
The generals gave him a roasting. They were furious, desperate for action, humiliated by the wait and utterly confident of the IDF’s ability to win. Aharon Yariv, the head of military intelligence, started with a ‘tongue-lashing’. Then the others lined up to condemn Eshkol. Sharon said, ‘Our own actions have cancelled out the IDF’s power to deter. We have removed our own principal weapon – fear of us.’ Israel Tal demanded ‘a clear war … The government’s decision is not clear enough. We are entitled to clear instructions.’ Uzi Narkiss mocked the Egyptians: ‘They are soap bubbles – a pin will burst them … I don’t know your views on the army. We here are all twenty years and more in the army and I want to tell you, this is a fantastic army. There is no need for concern.’ Avraham Yoffe, called out of retirement to command a division, told the prime minister that he was stopping the army doing the job for which it was created. He and Brig. Gen. Matityahu Peled, the quartermaster-general, who told Eshkol he was insulting the IDF by not sending them to war, used aggressive, highly pejorative language comparing the government to leaders of Jewish communities in the Diaspora who were forced to beg like slaves.
Eshkol tried to get a grip on what was happening. ‘We need to take a deep breath … We need patience. I don’t accept that the fact that the Egyptian army is sitting in Sinai means that we have to go to war … Will we live forever by the sword?’ He tried to tell what he had done for the army. ‘You needed more equipment? Fine. You wanted 100 planes? You got them. You also got tanks. You got everything so that we could beat the Egyptian army. You didn’t get it so that one day you could come and say: now we can destroy the Egyptian army – so let’s do it.’
Eshkol wanted to crack the whip of civilian control over the generals. But the meeting was turning into a feeding frenzy. The atmosphere was ‘extremely hard, almost unbearable’. The men staring at Eshkol, with the exception of Yoffe, were in their late thirties and early forties. Eshkol was old, and looked it, and liked speaking Yiddish and Russian, the languages of his youth, as much as Hebrew. Most of the generals had been born in Israel. They had fought in all Israel’s wars. Eshkol was in the way. In their minds he embodied the weakness of the Diaspora. It was desperately unfair, because he had arrived in Palestine as a young man and had spent his life building the Jewish state. But he looked weak, and in the generals’ world weakness was worthy only of contempt. Threats were to be faced and enemies dispatched. Brigadier-General Elad Peled, who was one of the four divisional commanders, was at the meeting. ‘The mental generation gap was very important. We were the cowboys, frontier people. We looked at the older generation as people who were not free, they were not liberated … The minister of education asked me, “what if you’re wrong? You’re playing with the existence of the state.” I told him I am one hundred per cent confident about the result of the war.’ Yitzhak Rabin said they should discuss a declaration of war. Eshkol refused. Yigal Allon suggested a breather. Eshkol got up and walked out, furious, stunned by what had happened. He interpreted it as ‘practically open mutiny’.
Yeshayahu Gavish insisted they were doing their duty by dishing out hard truths to the civilians: ‘My purely military position was that we could not afford to let Egypt start the war. We had to push the government hard. It wasn’t comfortable, but it wasn’t a putsch. At no time did we discuss taking over. But as officers we had to tell the government what we thought – and if we hadn’t, it would have been disastrous … and we were sabras and very confident. The ministers were all immigrants, and very hesitant.’ After Eshkol left, Rabin stayed on with the generals. Waiting around for the war to start was telling on the soldiers’ nerves before Eshkol’s broadcast. Now they believed they had a serious morale problem.
It seemed as if all of Israel had been listening to Eshkol’s broadcast and his stumbling, incoherent delivery reinforced all the worst fears about him. In the desert south of Beersheba a group of soldiers lay under a camouflaged Centurion tank around a transistor. According to one of them, Amos Elon, they were intensely frustrated. After Eshkol finished speaking, an officer said their real problem was not Nasser, but Eshkol’s generation of Eastern European pioneers, who had dominated political life in Jewish Palestine and then in Israel since the 1920s. Letters criticising Eshkol’s performance poured into his office. One, signed ‘a loyal citizen’, suggested he ask a radio announcer to read his speeches for him in future. Mrs Miriam Smolansk wrote about ‘the imminent disaster … our state and people are being lost. Don’t shed the blood of thousands or maybe all of us with your speeches which lack any spirit or power. Please hand over the command to someone who can inspire the people with power and strength.’ Moshe Dayan’s daughter, Yael, heard Eshkol’s speech on a car radio as she drove through the desert towards the headquarters of General Ariel Sharon where she was attached as a military journalist. She was embarrassed by Eshkol’s performance. ‘Slow, uncertain, noncommittal, uninspiring, it gave the listeners anything but an answer, even a provisional one, even the courage to continue the wait…’ Most Israelis thought her father would provide the courage they needed.
Dayan
‘Overnight,’ according to Moshe Dayan’s close ally Shimon Peres, ‘the leadership of the nation became a problem of supreme concern.’ He was already orchestrating a vicious political campaign to oust Eshkol as defence minister and possibly even prime minister on the grounds that his failure to take Israel to war was putting the state in danger. The press tore into Eshkol. Editorials demanded that Moshe Dayan be drafted into the cabinet as defence minister. Dayan was the one-eyed general whose black eye-patch and swashbuckling reputation had made him, as far as the outside world and much of the Israeli public were concerned, the archetypal Israeli fighting man. Dayan noted with some relish that Eshkol’s broadcast had been ‘catastrophic. Public doubt and derision gave way to an overwhelming sense of deep concern.’ The Israeli people wanted to have a strong military man at the top. Eshkol did not fit the bill. Dayan did. In the eyes of the Israeli public, Dayan was everything Eshkol was not. He was a winner – a war hero, flamboyant, macho, and charismatic. He had two hobbies – women and archaeology. He could be a good friend, but only to people who were not in his way. Dayan had a reputation as a great strategist, which was not entirely deserved. Israel would have won the 1967 war without him.
Moshe Dayan was fifty-two. He was the first child to be born in Degania, the first Israeli kibbutz. His parents were immigrants from Russia. Life was hard. In 1921 they moved to a new agricultural settlement called Nahalal, where the main threats to life were malaria, trachoma and the local Palestinian Arabs. As a teenager Dayan joined the Haganah, the underground Jewish militia. It co-operated with the British army during the ‘Arab revolt’, a guerrilla insurgency against the Jewish settlers and Britain.
As the sun was setting one evening in the spring of 1938, a British officer called Orde Wingate joined them. Wingate ‘walked in with
a heavy revolver at his side, carrying a small Bible in his hand’. He was a deeply religious Christian, who believed it was his duty to God and the British Empire to teach the Jews how to fight Arabs. He ended a lecture about guerrilla tactics and night fighting with the suggestion that they go off to set up a real ambush. Dayan and the other young Jewish fighters had a new hero. He taught them how to fight and to move at night, how to use the terrain and about the devastating power of speed and surprise. Before an operation, Wingate would inspire himself by reading passages in the Bible that related to the chosen battle ground. After a hard night’s fighting, they would return for breakfast. As the young Jewish soldiers made omelettes and tomato salad, Wingate would sit in the corner of the cook house stark naked, reading his Bible again and ‘munching raw onions as if they were the most luscious pears’. Wingate was transferred back to Britain in 1939 because he was seen as out of control and too close to the Zionists. In 1944 Wingate became a hero in his own country, when he was killed leading the Chindits against the Japanese in Burma.
Dayan learnt Wingate’s lessons well. He lost his eye fighting with the Australians against the Vichy French in Lebanon in 1941. A rifle bullet hit a pair of field glasses he was using, splintering a lens and its metal casing, which embedded themselves in his eye socket. David Ben-Gurion, who had established the tradition of holding the defence portfolio as well as the office of prime minister, made him IDF Chief of Staff in 1953. Dayan stated his essential philosophy at the funeral of Roy Rothberg, who was killed at a kibbutz near Gaza in 1956. Over his grave he said, ‘It is the fate of our generation that our life requires that we be always prepared and armed, strong and determined, for if the sword be struck from our grasp, we shall die.’ For Dayan, force was not just the best option for Israel, it was their only chance.
In May 1967 Dayan wanted a job. The army gave him a jeep and a driver. He wore a uniform without his general’s badges and moved through the units that were lined up in the Negev desert, discussing battle plans with the commanders and glad-handing the troops. Eshkol’s military aide, Israel Lior, was immediately suspicious. ‘It was clear to me that he was playing politics. It was also clear to me that he would exploit the opportunity of touring IDF units to get headlines and to try to return to national leadership.’
The high command of the army openly joined the campaign for Dayan to replace Eshkol as minister of defence. The pressure behind him became irresistible. Eshkol’s preferred candidate was Yigal Allon. But nothing could stop the Dayan steamroller. Ministers and MPs wanted him. Women, dubbed by Eshkol ‘the Merry Wives of Windsor’, were demonstrating for Dayan every day outside the headquarters of Mapai, the ruling party in Tel Aviv. The party functionaries inside could hear them chanting.
Eshkol fought for his job. On the evening of 30 May he addressed his parliamentary faction with what his aide Colonel Lior called ‘a thundering voice, the roar of a wounded lion’. It did not work. Eshkol hung on for another day. He offered Dayan the job of deputy premier. Dayan refused. He wanted the ministry of defence or a command in the army. So Eshkol decided to make Yigal Allon defence minister. He told the cabinet on the 31st that Dayan would take over Southern Command from Brigadier-General Gavish.
Nobody had told Gavish. He was a popular commander, a handsome man of forty-two who walked with a limp because of a serious leg wound he had picked up in the 1948 war. He had no idea that Dayan was after his job. Before dawn on 1 June Rabin summoned him to GHQ in Tel Aviv. Neither Brigadier-General Ezer Weizman, the head of operations, or Brigadier-General Haim Bar Lev, newly appointed as deputy chief of staff, would look him in the eye. Gavish went in to see Rabin, saluted and sat down. They had been colleagues since the days of the Palmach in the 1940s. Rabin said he was sorry. Dayan wanted the Southern Command. Gavish, staggered, managed to say that Dayan was ten times the soldier that he was so if he wanted the job he ought to have it. But when Rabin asked him to stay on as Dayan’s deputy, he snapped. It was impossible. He wouldn’t do it.
The generals outside asked him what had happened. You know what happened, Gavish snarled, and walked out. Bar Lev followed him out and flew back to Beersheba with him by helicopter. He tried to sympathise. Dayan, he said, didn’t care who he stepped on. He told Gavish it would be a ‘catastrophe’ if he did not stay on as Dayan’s deputy. Gavish had been working on the plans for a campaign in the Sinai for at least three years. Dayan was coming out of retirement. He knew nothing. Gavish still refused. He rang his wife and told her to expect him for dinner.
Gavish made one last tour of his front. He met his divisional commanders, Sharon, Tal and Yoffe and, without telling them what was happening, approved their final plans for the assault. But Eshkol’s plan to save himself by sacrificing Gavish was not working. The National Religious Party ministers in his coalition government wanted Dayan as defence minister, not Allon. Eshkol was forced to change his decision.
Miriam Eshkol was on the road from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv in her husband’s official car. The phone rang. It was Eshkol. ‘He said, “Come quickly to Tel Aviv,” so I thought he must have had a heart attack or something … When we came to the office in Tel Aviv he said, “Look, don’t be angry and don’t worry. I’ll have to give up the ministry of defence to Moshe Dayan and I’ll manage and work with him.” Then he said, “You go and find Dayan. We can’t find him.” I knew exactly where he was. He was with a girlfriend…’ Losing the ministry of defence on the eve of the war was a political and personal blow from which Eshkol never recovered. His widow believes it finished him. He died two years later.
As well as Dayan, Eshkol brought in two ministers from the right to form a government of national unity. One of them was Menachem Begin, regarded by the British as a terrorist. In 1946 he ordered the bomb attack on the British headquarters in the King David hotel in Jerusalem that killed more than ninety people. The British police chief in Haifa at the time described Begin as a ruthless thug who made Al Capone look a novice. In the first meeting of the new cabinet Begin looked very much at home: ‘He acted quite naturally, as if he had sat at that table for many years.’
General Gavish was relieved he had his job back. But he was staggered that politics had come before the security of the state. ‘It wasn’t just a personal insult, it was more than that. There were 1000 tanks facing us in the Sinai. How could they have considered removing the commander on the eve of war?’
Eshkol also felt a massive sense of injustice. He had taken his responsibilities as defence minister very seriously. Brigadier-General Weizman, who had yelled at Eshkol with the rest of them for delaying the war, even tearing his badges of rank off his shoulder and throwing them down on a table in disgust, later recalled, perhaps guiltily, that in the years before the war he ‘delighted us repeatedly with his alertness, his sensitivity and his wide interest in logistic problems’. Just before the war started, the director general of the defence ministry sent him a note. ‘The IDF has never been so well equipped. I have just seen the Quartermaster’s branch, and there were practically no problems. The air force has almost no problems. All he asked for was six engines.’ But Dayan’s appointment boosted morale in the army and on the home front immeasurably at a time when it was flagging. Even Colonel Lior, Eshkol’s loyal military assistant, detected a new sense of purpose in the cabinet room once Dayan was on board.
Arab dreams and nightmares
Many Arabs spent the last week of peace dreaming about the celebrations they would have when the war was won. In such a febrile atmosphere there was no room for anyone who suggested that victory was not certain. Abdullah Schliefer, an American Jew who had converted to Islam, was working as a journalist in Jordanian Jerusalem. He was horrified by the complacency of Palestinians who listened, entranced, to Voice of the Arabs. ‘Arab confidence hung in the air like some horrible omen … No one did anything but stand around, congratulate each other, and praise Gamal Abdul Nasser. Somehow this one man, by sheer weight of his audacity, was going to overwhelm the enemy in an amaz
ing manner that could in no way affect the lifestyle or the activities of people most intimately involved in the struggle…’ When he wrote an editorial on popular resistance to an Israeli invasion in his local English-language newspaper, he was accused of being defeatist and his piece was spiked.
King Hussein kept his doubts inside his own tight circle. Adnan Abu Odeh, a major in Jordanian intelligence, tried to raise the alarm. Since the Samua raid he had been convinced that a war was coming and that the Israelis would snap up the West Bank. He was too junior to know that King Hussein felt the same way. Odeh was so certain that in January 1967 he moved his wife and four children out of his home town of Nablus on the West Bank to the other side of the Jordan. On the last weekend before the war he wrote a paper warning that Jordan was facing a disaster and that the West Bank would be lost. He went into the office of the director of intelligence, saluted, and presented his report. The director was sitting with two men, a relative of his and a government minister. As Abu Odeh stood there, the director leafed through his report. As he read it he kept up a sarcastic running commentary about its contents. He handed it to the minister, who added a few jibes of his own about wrong-headed people who doubted that victory was certain. He threw the report back across the desk at Abu Odeh. Furious and humiliated, he left the room and put his report through the shredder.
In Beirut the cafés and restaurants were as full as ever. The summer had started and the best beaches were packed. In the late 1960s the rich parts of the Lebanese capital were a cosmopolitan oasis, dedicated to making money and finding pleasure (not always in that order). The seismic shock of the June crisis helped, eight years later, to destroy the old Lebanon, to push it into civil war and years of slaughter and isolation. But in 1967 Beirut was still the Middle East’s great crossroads. Passing through it was Robert Anderson, an American oil man, veteran of the Eisenhower administration and now on his way as President Johnson’s unofficial envoy to a highly secret meeting with Nasser. In Beirut he realised how much support Nasser had. As well as Lebanese, Anderson saw Saudi Arabians, Kuwaitis and Iraqis, the kind of people a wealthy American businessman and diplomat would expect to meet. All of them applauded what Nasser had done. ‘I am impressed,’ Anderson reported, ‘more because of the quality of the people who made these assertions than the fact they were made.’ They were ‘generally moderate with a tendency to oppose Nasser’. The middle classes, the people Americans assumed were their natural allies, believed in what Nasser was doing as much as the uneducated masses. Anderson’s friends told him that closing the Gulf of Aqaba was just and that United States policy was yet again being dictated by Israel and its friends. Arabs wanted someone to redress the balance. In the last week before war broke out in 1967, Nasser seemed to be their saviour.