by Jeremy Bowen
Nasser and Hussein’s plan was bearing fruit. During the next two hours, similar reports were broadcast from Amman and Damascus. Dan Garcia, a diplomat from the US Embassy, promptly pinned up a press release. It said the allegation was a ‘total fabrication’. As the journalists gathered round to read it, the Egyptian press officer Kamal Bakr tore it down. The reporters had pestered Bakr to meet some of the Egyptian army’s senior officers. They wanted to see evidence of the military success that the communiqués were trumpeting. Now they were told there would be no briefings and they were not allowed to go out on their own. It did not matter, for the time being anyway. The allegation that the United States and Britain were involved in the war was big news. They filed their stories. But Westerners in Cairo were starting to feel very conspicuous. In Washington the CIA reported to the president: ‘Cairo may be preparing to launch a campaign urging strikes against US interests in the Arab world. Both Egyptian and Syrian domestic broadcasts this morning called on the “Arab masses” to destroy all US and “imperialist” interests in the Arab homeland.’
Their stories filed, the journalists followed their professional instincts and disobeyed the official request to stay in the press centre. A man pulled up in a Land Rover and spat at them. They noticed that the police guard on the American Embassy compound had been doubled. Inside, the staff were burning their classified papers. The tension in the building went up another notch when, at 10:40 a.m., Cairo Radio broadcast that ‘beyond a shadow of doubt’ the US and Britain had intervened on Israel’s side, flying combat missions from aircraft carriers against Israel and Jordan. They expected the crowd outside would try to break in. An hour later a mob torched the British Consulate and the US library in Alexandria.
The accusations that the British and the Americans had intervened on Israel’s side raced around the world. British diplomats immediately dubbed it ‘the Big Lie’. Britain’s ambassador in Kuwait went to the foreign ministry to protest that it was all a fiction. He was ‘dumbfounded’ to discover that the ministry’s most senior official believed the reports were true. After Britain’s collusion with Israel and France to make war on Egypt in 1956, they seemed highly credible. Arab oil-producing countries were meeting in Baghdad. They decided to stop selling oil to any country that supported Israel. In Damascus the US ambassador Hugh Smythe went to the foreign ministry to deny the accusations. He was greeted by an official who pulled out two small pages of hand-written notes. The official read out a statement breaking off diplomatic relations because of America’s ‘historical’ position towards the Arabs and its collusion with Israel. The Embassy staff were given forty-eight hours to leave the country. A junior administrative type was allowed a week to ‘clear up’.
Amman, 0900
King Hussein was exhausted. The night had been disastrous for Jordan and he had not slept. He could not find many straws to clutch. Twenty-four hours into the war, it had already come down to limiting the size of the defeat that he always knew was coming. He warned the Americans that Egypt was going to blame them for starting the war. He did not pass on his side of the conversation with Nasser. The king was in constant contact with foreign embassies, especially the Americans and the British, his two most important foreign allies. If they could intercede with the Israelis there might be a chance of salvaging something from the mess. He told the Americans that his forces had suffered a night of ‘purely punitive attacks’. If they did not stop, Jordan would be ‘finished’. Reports of appalling losses were coming in from his field commanders. Casualty reports were, in fact, consistently inflated, perhaps because of the confusion of battle, perhaps because they wanted an excuse for Israeli success.
Ordinary Jordanians still had no idea how badly the war was going. Leila Sharaf went to give blood with her friend Mrs Shakir. Jordan still had a bad case of war fever. The streets were full of excitement, overwrought chatter and wild rumours. Claims that Israel had destroyed most of the Egyptian air force were laughed off as propaganda. Someone told Mrs Sharaf that Nasser had built underground airstrips, which would soon be launching a new wave of attacks on the Jews. Someone else said the Syrian army had penetrated deep into northern Israel. Mrs Sharaf listened with horror. Her husband, the minister of information, who was in the operations room most of the time, had told her what was really happening. But not one of the people she overheard exchanging excited gossip, stories and speculation doubted what they were hearing on the radio about an Arab victory. The message that Voice of the Arabs in Cairo had pumped out to the rest of the Arab world – that Nasser, their inspiration, had created a mighty army – was deeply ingrained. The mood was so unreal that when Leila Sharaf heard bangs and explosions near her house she assumed they came from fireworks, let off in honour of a victory that would come if only Arabs believed in it hard enough. Her husband had to pull her inside. It was not fireworks, it was anti-aircraft fire, and Israeli planes were coming in low.
Thanks to Voice of the Arabs, the Arab delegations at the UN in New York were as ill-informed as the people on Amman’s streets. Since they had heard that fighting had started on Monday, all of them kept their short-wave radios tuned to Cairo. They believed what they heard, rejoicing as the Arab victory seemed to unfold. In Amman the Jordanian foreign minister Ahmed Toukan realised very early on that the fighting had to be stopped as soon as possible or Jordan would lose Jerusalem and the West Bank. But Dr Muhammad al-Farra, Jordan’s ambassador to the UN, would not believe him when he called. At first he refused to press for a ceasefire because Cairo Radio was telling him that what they really needed to organise was a victory party.
The British military attaché in Amman, Colonel J. F. Weston-Simons, had been watching events over the previous three weeks with something approaching disgust. Arab propaganda had tried to ‘lift its listeners with ever increasing speed to a sublime state of religious intoxication. Martial music, interspersed with stirring words encouraging the holy war, blared from radios. The Jordanian armed services prepared to ride on white and chivalrous steeds to battle.’ General Khammash, the chief of staff, was one of very few ‘sophisticated and far thinking officers’. The rest, ‘intoxicated’ by the pact with Nasser and ‘blinded by their infinite capacity for self-deception … simply assumed without any justification, that they were more than a match for the Israelis’.
But by the second morning of the war, there were no more illusions left at army headquarters. The war was lost and the king was in despair. What made matters even more complicated was that he did not feel ready to tell the people the truth. ‘We must stop the fighting, but for God’s sake the Israelis must not announce anything publicly, or there would be anarchy here,’ he told the American ambassador.
Jerusalem, 1000
Narkiss was keeping the pressure on the Israeli general staff to authorise an attack on the Old City. He told them that they would be blamed for the failure if they did not do it. The Israelis were mopping up most of the built-up part of East Jerusalem outside the city walls. There was still isolated, freelance resistance, from soldiers who had been cut off from their units who stayed to fight and die, or from a few handfuls of Palestinian men who were using the weapons that had been distributed at the last minute. Around 100 armed Palestinian civilians died in the fighting. Soldiers and a few volunteers still manned the city walls, and put down deadly fire on the Israelis below them.
Rubi Gat, an eight-year old Israeli boy, was with his family in their basement. He was excited. Now he would have a war, his war, to talk about. He had always been jealous of the way that his older sisters told stories about the 1956 war, about how their father looked when he went off to join his unit. In the last few weeks Rubi and his friends at school had been told what to do when the fighting started. They had rehearsed how they would walk home, as quickly as they could, keeping close to the walls in case shells fell. The day before a Jordanian shell had landed close to Rubi’s house. He had picked up fragments of shrapnel afterwards. He fingered them as he listened to the muffled explos
ions coming from the Mount of Olives.
On the Jordanian side of Jerusalem the American journalist Abdullah Schliefer had moved his family into three small rooms off the stairwell of his building in the Old City. The streets were almost empty. Sometimes he would see an army patrol, or a civil defence team racing boxes of ammunition to where they were needed. Inside the ancient walled city it felt medieval, like ‘an old-fashioned garrison under siege in a war fought with supersonic jets, napalm and tanks’.
Amman, 1230
General Riad and King Hussein agreed they had three choices. First, hope the UN Security Council or one of the big powers could stop the fighting; second, evacuate the West Bank in the coming night; or third, hang on to the West Bank for another twenty-four hours, which would lead to ‘the total destruction of the Jordanian army’. It was a grim menu. Riad put it into a telegram for Nasser, while the king sent one of his own. ‘The situation is deteriorating rapidly. In Jerusalem it is critical. In addition to our very heavy losses in men and equipment, for lack of air protection, our tanks are being disabled at the rate of one every ten minutes.’ Rightly, the king did not trust Nasser. He wanted him to be implicated in any decision he had to take, not just through General Riad, but personally. Just as his coded message was being transmitted to Cairo, the answer to Riad’s telegram arrived from Field Marshal Amer: ‘We agree to the retreat from the West Bank, and the arming of the civilian population.’ Hussein and his chief of staff Amer Khammash suspected a trick. Khammash warned the king that the Egyptians might pounce on a Jordanian withdrawal as an excuse to pull out of the Sinai. The Egyptians might then try to present their defeat as a Jordanian betrayal. If a story like that stuck, Hussein’s throne would be in even more jeopardy. The sad truth for the Jordanians was that withdrawal from the West Bank was looking like the least bad option. But to pull out on Cairo’s orders could be a serious error. They decided to hang on longer. Even at moments of great crisis, the Arab leaders could not trust each other
Hussein summoned the ambassadors of the UK, USA, France and the Soviet Union to give them the same message he had sent Nasser. He begged them, on their own or through the Security Council, to arrange a ceasefire. The king said he would still prefer the ceasefire not to be announced. But if the Israelis wanted it done publicly, then that was fine too. On the way out of the palace, the American ambassador had to take cover as the air-raid sirens sounded. The Israelis were back again.
Jerusalem, 1230
Generals Narkiss, Dayan and Weizman arrived in East Jerusalem in a convoy of two half-tracks and a jeep. As usual on a windy open-top journey, Dayan had taken off his black eyepatch and put on a pair of dark glasses. Narkiss greeted Major Doron Mor, second in command of Battalion 66 of the paratroopers, who was an old friend. He told Mor they wanted to go to Mount Scopus. Mor told him they had not sent troops up to clear the road yet. Narkiss said, ‘So clear it now.’ But all Mor’s men were committed elsewhere. He took a risk. All he had were two jeeps mounted with recoilless rifles. Narkiss, Dayan and Weizman got into one of them. Mor, in the other, ‘took some grenades and told the driver to go as fast as he could. Narkiss and the others followed. It took a minute. The road was empty. No one shot at us. When we got to the barrier at Mount Scopus the soldiers started to kiss us.’
As Mor stood admiring the view, the first time he had seen Jerusalem from the east, he heard Narkiss and Dayan talking about capturing the Old City.
Dayan was also enraptured by what he could see. Narkiss thought his moment had come. With the two of them looking down on the breathtaking sight of Jerusalem on a beautiful day in early summer, Narkiss said softly, ‘Moshe, we must go into the Old City.’ Dayan snapped back to business. ‘Under no circumstances.’ He was not a man for small talk. He wanted to surround it and wait for it to surrender ‘like a ripe fruit’. He ordered Narkiss to take the heights behind Jerusalem that commanded the north and east sides of the Old City.
Israeli troops were also advancing on the Old City from the south. The district of Abu Tor, which straddled the border between East and West Jerusalem close to Government House, fell in the afternoon. The Jordanians fought hard as they retreated. A company of men from Israel’s Jerusalem Brigade was caught in a bombardment as they crossed Hebron Road, near Jerusalem railway station. Casualties were left all over the street. Then a sniper killed all four members of a machine gun team as they crossed the road. When a bazooka man was sent to try to blast the sniper out of his position, which was only ten metres away, the sniper killed him while he was aiming. It took a grenade tossed in through the firing slits of his position to silence the sniper. As they pushed into Abu Tor, the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Michael Paikes, led his command group into a Jordanian trench that supposedly had been captured. Suddenly a Jordanian with a rifle dropped down next to them. He was as surprised as they were. The battalion’s intelligence officer, Johnny Heiman, grabbed the man’s rifle. Three more Jordanians jumped into the trench. Two saw what was happening and ran. The third shot Paikes dead before escaping and attacking Heiman. They grappled together on the floor of the trench until Heiman managed to empty his Uzi into his assailant.
Jenin, northern West Bank, 1300
It took until the afternoon to subdue the last Jordanian and Palestinian resistance in Jenin. Israeli troops had been in the town since 0730, after a night of hard and confused fighting. Sherman tanks, following standard Israeli doctrine for fighting in a built-up area, moved up and down firing in all directions, followed by infantry. Then, south of Jenin, Jordan’s best commander, Brigadier-General Rakan al-Jazi and his 40th Armoured Brigade arrived. They were returning from a wild-goose chase to Jericho, where they had been sent to relieve the 60th, Jordan’s other armoured brigade while it went to take part in the Egyptian offensive that never was against Beersheba. The Jordanians reoccupied the positions they had abandoned for their unscheduled trip to Jericho, controlling an important road junction at Qabitiyah.
Most of Jenin’s civilians took to caves and hills around the town. But not all of them. Haj Arif Abdullah took his Bren gun and five armed men and went out to the 40th Brigade to continue the fight. He was a big and burly man, forty-five years old, with seventeen children. During the British occupation he had served with the RAF police. The Jordanians made him commander of the local national guard but he had a stormy relationship with the king’s men because of his strong nationalist views. He supported the Ba’th party, the pan-Arab, left-wing political movement that swept through Syria and Iraq in the fifties and threatened to do the same in Jordan. Between 1957 and 1961 he was in and out of prison. The longest spell was two years, for trying to overthrow the monarchy. He was pardoned when tensions in the Middle East were rising, so he decided that his real enemy was Israel, not King Hussein. A year before the war, recognising that Haj Arif Abdullah was a necessary man in Jenin, the local Jordanian commander sent him his own Bren light machine gun and twelve boxes of ammunition.
The 40th Armoured Brigade was ready twelve hours before the Israelis expected them. They hit Brig. Gen. Elad Peled’s armoured brigade with an ambush. Back in Jenin they heard the roar of tank fire. It inspired the defenders who were still fighting to counter-attack. Peled sent a relief column to rescue his tanks, which were trapped and low on fuel and ammunition. Al-Jazi’s scouts told him that they were coming. Fifty to sixty Pattons were ready, hull down on a ridge, and blasted another batch of Israeli tanks when they came down the road towards them. Israel lost seventeen Super Shermans. Haj Arif Abdullah was disappointed that the Israelis did not send infantry with the tanks. He fired at the Israeli tank commanders, who as usual were fighting with their bodies exposed in their turrets. Another thrust from the Israelis was beaten off later in the afternoon. The Jordanians tried to chase them, but were pushed back by artillery and air strikes. By nightfall, the Jordanians still controlled the crossroads, cutting the main north–south road through the highlands of the West Bank and a major east–west artery.
Amman, after
noon
General Riad was calm enough in the face of the disaster to take regular naps in a special room set aside for him at the headquarters building. King Hussein was wide awake, though he felt the day was ‘like a dream, or worse yet, a nightmare’. He felt out of his depth at the headquarters in Amman: ‘Standing in front of maps in the operations centre, everything [seemed] abstract, vague and not very convincing.’ So, driving a jeep with a two-way radio, the king left with his bodyguards for the Jordan valley. He saw for himself just how bad it was.
… I will never forget the hallucinating sight of that defeat. Roads clogged with trucks, jeeps and all kinds of vehicles twisted, disembowelled, dented, still smoking, giving off that particular smell of metal and paint burned by exploding bombs – a stink that only powder can make. In the midst of this charnel house were men. In groups of thirty to forty, wounded, exhausted, they were trying to clear a path under the monstrous coup de grace being dealt them by a horde of Israeli Mirages screaming in a cloudless blue sky seared with sun.
When he returned to Amman King Hussein was back on the phone to Findley Burns, the American ambassador, straight away. What had Israel said about the ceasefire? Burns went immediately to the palace to pass on the bad news from the Israelis. They were not interested in a ceasefire. Hussein had been given his chance to avoid the war on Monday morning. He had chosen to ignore Israel’s warning. Now he was reaping his reward. The king was now more convinced than ever that the Israelis wanted to destroy his army. He told Burns about his own tour of the front lines that afternoon. The army had virtually ceased to exist. Some units were still fighting, even though they had been without air cover for the last twenty-four hours. The big question now was whether to abandon the West Bank. ‘If I evacuate tonight, I am told I will lose 50 per cent of my men and only limited equipment could be evacuated. If we do not withdraw tonight we will be chewed up. Tomorrow will leave only the choice of ordering the destruction of our equipment and leaving every soldier to look after himself.’ General Riad, ‘who had been pretty much running the whole show’, was telling him to withdraw. The decision had to be taken soon.