by Jeremy Bowen
* * *
As well as Rusk and Clifford, many other senior American officials did not buy Israel’s explanations. Richard Helms, the director of Central Intelligence in 1967, believed the attack was intentional: ‘No excuse can be found for saying it was just a mistake.’ Lucius Battle, an assistant secretary of state in the Johnson administration, concluded there was a cover-up. Admiral Thomas Moorer, who later became chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote that responsibility for the cover-up should be shared between the US government and the Israelis. He could not accept the Israeli claim of mistaken identity: ‘I have flown for many years in both war and peace on surveillance flights over the ocean, and my opinion is supported by a full career of locating and identifying ships at sea.’
Many of their doubts are based on the fact that the IDF seemed so efficient in everything else it did that it was inconceivable that it could make such a grotesque series of ‘mistakes’ in broad daylight. Perhaps their view of the IDF in 1967 was wrong. It was daring, well organised and highly motivated. It was also used to fighting appallingly prepared and ill-led armies, which allowed it to get away with mistakes when they were made. Israeli fire discipline is another factor. It has always been sloppy. A serviceman on one of the motor torpedo boats that attacked the Liberty now accepts they were ‘inexperienced and probably a little trigger happy and it was a war zone’.
Still, if Israel did in fact know what it was doing when it destroyed an American ship, as so many veterans of the Johnson administration believed, why did it do what it did? Some theories revolve around the theme of collusion between Israel and the United States. They speculate that pro-Israel elements in the United States military had plotted with Israelis to create an incident that could draw the US into the war. Greg Reight, a former US air force man, claimed on a BBC documentary that he was part of a US photo-reconnaissance team that flew covert missions on behalf of the Israelis from a base in the Negev desert. The crews wore uniforms without badges and ‘there was a hurry-up paint job done to the aircraft so they would be like Israeli aircraft’. If his allegations are true, it means that Nasser’s accusations of collusion between Israel and the US were correct.
For Assistant Secretary of State Lucius Battle the most likely explanation is that Israel feared the Liberty was ‘listening in to some conversations and other things that were going on that they didn’t want us to know about … they had been engaged in some pretty outlandish stuff in the course of the war. I don’t think they wanted us to know the detail of that.’
Kuwait
As the size of the defeat became clearer, Arab leaders started to feel vulnerable. The Amir of Kuwait seemed dazed when he received G. C. Arthur, the British ambassador. Arthur asked him for the latest on the fate of the Kuwaiti troops who had been sent to Egypt. ‘He said he had no idea. He did not seem to care.’ Instead, he ‘kept asking what I thought would happen to King Hussein.’ The Saudi ruling family had similar fears. The Amir said he did not believe that the British and the Americans had intervened on Israel’s behalf. Perhaps he was starting to feel the need for Britain’s well-established role as guarantor of his family’s power. Kuwait had a big and hard-working Palestinian population. In the 1950s it included Yasser Arafat, who founded his faction Fatah there in 1957. Wealthy native Kuwaitis needed them but the Palestinians made them nervous. Before the fighting started, a serious suggestion was made in the National Assembly that Kuwait’s contribution to the war effort could be to conscript its Palestinians and to send them into battle. British diplomats asked who would run the country in their absence. Twenty-four years later, after the Gulf War in 1991, the Kuwaitis seized their chance to expel thousands of Palestinians who had spent their lives in Kuwait, because of Yasser Arafat’s support for Saddam Hussein.
Tel Aviv, 1900
General David Elazar, head of Israel’s Northern Command, was ‘beside himself with anger and frustration’. On Thursday evening he went to Tel Aviv to see Rabin, to press yet again for the order to do to Syria what was being done to Egypt and Jordan. Elazar could not believe that Syria, Israel’s most bitter enemy before the war, had not been attacked. It was now or never. If Syria was not dealt with, the war was over. Prime Minister Eshkol summoned the cabinet defence committee. They had to decide. Eshkol and most of the cabinet were in favour. Moshe Dayan argued the case against attacking Syria in what he called ‘the most extreme terms’. If Israel attacked Syria, he told them, it risked a war with the Soviet Union. Moscow would protect its friends in Damascus. A less than veiled threat had been made by the Soviet ambassador Sergei Chuvakhin on 6 June. He told the West German ambassador in Tel Aviv that Israel should stop its attacks immediately. If the Israelis, ‘drunk with success’, did not, ‘the future of this little country will be a very sad one’. The West German, worried, passed the information straight to the Israelis, with a warning not to do anything more than seize the high ground near the border. America’s ambassador Barbour thought the West Germans were getting over anxious. He thought the Israelis would penetrate twenty-five kilometres into Syria.
Much to Dayan’s irritation, a deputation from the thirty-one front-line Jewish settlements close to the border with Syria was ushered into the cabinet room. They had been lobbying hard for war with Syria and now had the chance to argue their case in person. Dayan pretended they were not there. He ‘went to sit in the back of the room, put his feet up and fell asleep’. Yaakov Eshkoli, one of the kibbutz leaders, could see it would be risky to attack Moscow’s closest ally in the region. But it was a risk worth taking. He told the cabinet that if the IDF did not push the Syrians out of the Heights that overlooked their settlements, he would tell all his people to pack their bags and leave. Levi Eshkol, the prime minister, and most of the other elderly men around the cabinet table were Zionists who had come to Palestine when they were young men fresh out of Eastern Europe. Many of them had spent their lives pushing out the frontier of the Jewish settlement by establishing pioneering communities in hostile areas that they made their own. The settlers’ words hit home. Eshkoli saw some of the ministers wiping away tears after he and the others had spoken emotionally about how their families had been forced by shelling to spend days in shelters. But Dayan refused to allow an attack on Syria. He was not persuaded by the settlers, who he said later were just interested in grabbing good farmland.
Elazar was astounded when Rabin told him there would be no attack on Syria. ‘What has happened to this country? How will we ever be able to face ourselves, the people, the settlements? After all the trouble they’ve caused, are those arrogant bastards going to be left on top of the hills riding on our backs?’ Rabin, on Dayan’s orders, denied his request to evacuate non-combatants from the border, though he allowed children out of the front line.
Late on Thursday evening a frustrated David Elazar called Elad Peled, who was supposed to command the main effort in the attack on Syria. Elazar had been pushing hard for permission to start the offensive, but now he was ready to give up. He told Peled to sleep in his headquarters in Nablus. The war is nearly over, he told him, they’ve decided not to attack Syria. Just before dawn, Yaakov Eshkoli stopped at Elazar’s bunker on his way home and told him about the meeting with the cabinet.
Eshkol was starting to relax. During the day he made a euphoric speech to the leaders of Mapai, his political party. He agreed with a newspaper headline that said ‘Israel Reborn’, only he hoped not to have to go through such a traumatic rebirth again. ‘Maybe it’s a decisive time from which a new order should be born … so we’ll be able to sit safely in our homes on our land.’ But the war was not over yet. Moshe Dayan had other ideas.
New York, 2035
Egypt accepted the terms of the ceasefire resolution passed by the Security Council the day before. At least 10,000 Egyptian soldiers and 1500 officers became casualties, probably split evenly between men killed and wounded in battle and those who died of heat stroke or thirst in the desert. Eighty per cent of the Egyptian army’s e
quipment was destroyed or captured. That included 10,000 trucks, 400 field guns, 50 self-propelled guns, 30 155 mm guns and 700 tanks.
DAY 5
9 June 1967
Ministry of Defence, Tel Aviv
After the cabinet meeting, Moshe Dayan went to the army headquarters. He spent most of the night in the Pit, the underground war room. It was quiet. None of the senior commanders was there. The war seemed almost over. Dayan was still holding forth about why Syria should be left alone. But sometime around 0600 he read a telegram intercepted by Israeli intelligence on its way from Cairo to Damascus, in which Nasser told Syria’s President Atassi that he was about to accept the UN ceasefire and he recommended that Syria do the same. Other intelligence reports said that the Syrian army was collapsing, and that Damascus was grabbing at the chance of a ceasefire so it could avoid what had happened to Jordan and Egypt. Dayan debated the point for a few minutes with some of the junior officers, who told him not to miss a historic chance.
Dayan changed his mind. Without bothering to tell Prime Minister Eshkol or Chief of Staff Rabin, he picked up a secure phone and called Brigadier-General Elazar direct. When Dayan asked him if he could attack, he nearly fell out of his chair. Elazar said he could, ‘right now’. ‘Then attack,’ Dayan ordered.
Rabin never knew exactly what was going through Dayan’s mind that night. Assuming that the cabinet decision not to attack Syria meant the war was more or less over, he had gone home to sleep. The first he knew of Dayan’s conversion was when Ezer Weizman phoned him at seven in the morning to tell him that, fifteen minutes earlier, Dayan had ordered Elazar on to the offensive. As minister of defence, Dayan should have told his chief of staff first. But even if the decision had been taken the wrong way, Rabin had ‘no desire to quibble when the Syrians were about to get their just deserts for malicious aggression and arrogance’. Eshkol also found out at seven. He was angry. Dayan had violated the agreement they had made when he was appointed that was supposed to rein him in. But since Eshkol had wanted to capture the Golan Heights all along, he accepted it.
Nonetheless, when the cabinet defence committee assembled at 9:30, Dayan had some explaining to do. The interior minister Haim Moshe Shapira fiercely criticised Dayan and demanded the attack be stopped immediately. But however much the rest of the committee resented Dayan’s high-handed decision-making, they liked the decision too much to try to unpick it. Later, Dayan said it was one of the worst decisions he ever made. (The other was allowing Jewish settlers into the West Bank town of Hebron.)
Elazar passed what for him was the best news he had heard all week to Peled’s divisional headquarters in Nablus. Peled told him he would move north as quickly as he could. It was going to take a few hours to get his forces to their start lines. His men were going to take the southern sector. Two other thrusts would come further north. Israeli sappers were already clearing paths through minefields on the border. It was harder on their own side. The heavy rain that fell every winter washed the mines away, so in spring they had to be replaced. The Israelis had been more conscientious about doing it than the Syrians, who had left great holes.
All week the Syrians had shelled Israeli border settlements. By Thursday evening they had hit 205 houses, 9 chicken coops, 2 tractor sheds, 3 clubhouses, a dining-hall, 6 barns, 30 tractors and 15 cars. They had also managed to burn down 175 acres of fruit orchards and 75 acres of grain. Two Israelis had been killed and sixteen wounded. But since Syria had accepted the UN ceasefire at 5:20 p.m. the previous day, there had been a lull. Orders had gone out from Damascus to cease fire. Armour was pulled back from the front towards Damascus. The danger from Israel seemed to be receding, so the Syrian regime returned to its standard operating procedure of guarding against the actions of its own people or discontented officers.
Israel was going to have to violate the ceasefire to attack Syria, but no-one on their side minded. One Israeli paratrooper commented: ‘We all wanted to have a go at the Syrians. We didn’t much mind about the Egyptians. We have a certain respect for the Jordanians, but our biggest score was with the Syrians – they had been shelling our kibbutzim for the past nineteen years.’ The air strikes restarted, and so, in response, did the Syrian shelling. Elazar’s forces had been kept in the rear, out of range of Syrian artillery. On Friday morning they moved forward towards their start lines for the attack.
Suez, 0800
The town of Suez was in a state of complete confusion. The remnants of units that had escaped from the Sinai were mixed up with individual soldiers who had somehow found their own way back to relative safety. Brigadier Abdel Moneim Khalil, commander of a brigade of paratroops that he had pulled out, relatively intact, from the Sinai, called Field Marshal Amer at GHQ in Cairo. Only twenty-four hours earlier Amer, panicked and desperately improvising, had tried to give him the command of two brigades, one armoured and the other of mechanised infantry. Khalil had ignored Amer’s orders, which now seemed to have been forgotten by the field marshal. When Khalil described the chaos in Suez, Amer immediately told him he was in command. Khalil decided that not much was to be gained by more conversations with Amer. He deployed his paratroops in defensive positions around the town and called the chief of staff General Fawzi to tell him what he had done.
Cairo Radio was playing emotional, sad music. Song after song was about tragic love of country, about the place reserved for Egypt in the blood and hearts of its people. Abd al-Hamid Sharaf, the Jordanian information minister, heard the broadcast in Amman. ‘Listen to what they’re playing,’ he told his wife Leila. ‘They’re preparing the people.’ He was convinced Nasser had killed himself. For millions of Arabs across the Middle East who idolised Nasser, the reality was almost as bad. He was going to resign. Mohamed Heikal, the editor of al-Ahram and Nasser’s long-serving voice, was already writing the resignation speech. Nasser’s advisers were horrified. In the Arab world, when the leader goes, his court tends to go with him. Around midday an announcement was made that the president would address his people at 7:30. Across the Arab world people turned on their televisions and tuned in their radios, prepared for something momentous.
Sinai
Winston Churchill, grandson of Britain’s wartime leader, who was covering the war for the London Evening News and the News of the World, was flown to Bir Gifgafah to visit Brigadier General Sharon. After lunch, Sharon took him on a tour of his positions in the desert, his driver racing at the highest speeds possible along bumpy desert tracks. Suddenly, in the distance, they saw a line of exhausted-looking Egyptians walking in the general direction of the Suez canal. Sharon leapt to the heavy machine gun that was mounted on the jeep. ‘He was like a demon possessed … firing as we careered over the desert. We were bumping so much that he probably didn’t connect … but the intention was there…’ Later, an ebullient Sharon tried a pun: ‘Winston, we have peace – a piece of Egypt…’
Thousands of Egyptians surrendered. Many were released to find their own way back to the Suez canal. Some injured men were well treated. A few weeks after the war, Uri Oren wrote a piece for Israel’s mass circulation daily, Yediot Ahronoth, describing how he came upon a wounded Egyptian soldier who had been abandoned by his unit. (Every Israeli reader knew that the IDF had an unshakeable policy of never leaving their wounded on the battlefield.) The wounded man looked at Oren ‘in supplication’, begging for his life. ‘I knew immediately,’ Oren wrote, ‘that I would not dare to cut it off. There were too many corpses lying around, and the man – the odour of decay already came from him. I had no greater desire than to return him to life. It was not “one soldier less”, the slogan of battle, but “one corpse less”, the rule of life.’ Oren rescued the man and turned him over to the medics. A few days later, when he tried to visit him in hospital, he was told that the man had been transferred to the Red Cross for repatriation. He had left for Oren the photographs of his wife and children, which had kept him going for three days while he was waiting to be rescued. On the back he dedicated them to ‘my b
rother fighters, restorers of life’.
But according to Israeli witnesses and historians, and Egyptian survivors, Oren’s new friend was an exception rather than the rule. Aryeh Yitzhaki, an Israeli historian, said that after the war, while he was working in the army’s history department, he collected testimonies from dozens of soldiers who admitted killing prisoners. Yitzhaki claimed around 900 Egyptian and Palestinians were killed after they surrendered. The worst massacre, Yitzhaki says, was on Friday and Saturday, the fifth and sixth days of the war, at Al-Arish. He says it started when Egyptian prisoners opened fire after they had surrendered, killing two Israeli soldiers. That made the Israeli soldiers angry. They ‘fired at every Egyptian and Palestinian for several hours. Commanders lost control over the force.’ Yitzhaki says his evidence is locked in a safe at Israeli military headquarters. ‘The whole leadership, including defence minister Moshe Dayan and chief of staff Rabin and the generals knew about these things. No one bothered to denounce them.’ Some of the soldiers alleged to have taken part in the massacre were in a unit commanded by Binyamin Ben Eliezer, who became the leader of the Israeli Labour Party and defence minister in Ariel Sharon’s first coalition government in 2001. Another Israeli historian, Uri Milstein, said many Egyptians were killed in other incidents after they had surrendered. ‘It was not official policy, but there was an atmosphere that it was OK to do it. Some commanders decided to do it, others refused. But everyone knew about it.’