by Jeremy Bowen
The Israelis pushed on, not always fast enough to catch up with the retreating Syrians. A senior Israeli officer grumbled, ‘It was very difficult to make contact with the retreating enemy. Whenever we arrived, they had withdrawn their forces and we could not make contact. We fired on a number of tanks only to discover that they had been deserted. Their crews had abandoned them.’
Cairo
Nasser withdrew his resignation. Senior Egyptian officers wanted Nasser back as much as the weeping crowds in the streets, but not for emotional reasons. They wanted Nasser to get them out of the mess he had got them into. They wanted Amer back too, not because they rated his military skills, but because if he was purged anyone could be. And, remarkably, he still inspired loyalty, even though his incompetence had been proved beyond doubt. General Fawzi, the chief of staff, announced that Amer would be appearing at GHQ to say farewell to his officers. Five hundred of them gathered in a hall inside the building to honour their chief. When Amer did not appear, the officers started to chant his name. The atmosphere was getting tense and ugly. General Hadidi, the commander of the Cairo military district, left the hall and went down into the basement complex of bunkers to find Fawzi. He told him he had to face the men upstairs, or ‘there would be a revolution’. When Fawzi reappeared, saying that Amer had telephoned to say he was not coming, there was uproar. Officers started to insult Fawzi, yelling at him to get out of their sight. He left. The demonstration, with some leadership, could have turned into a threat to the regime. But no leaders emerged. After another hour or so of shouting, the disheartened officers started to drift away.
On the radio news at 2:30 p.m. Nasser started to reassert himself, striking out at the potentially disloyal. The announcer read out a communiqué announcing the retirement of a dozen officers. More names, with more sackings, came in bulletins later in the afternoon. If there was going to be a coup against Nasser, this was the moment. He was very vulnerable. But it was a step that nobody was prepared to take. General Hadidi had no more troops left in Cairo to protect him. Every spare man had been sent to the Sinai. Nasser had the Presidential Guard, which would have been an obstacle.
But his best defence, which was formidable, was his aura. Nasser was still Nasser, the only leader the Arabs had. He was also protected by the convenient fact that the people who had wept for him in the streets still did not know the full extent of the disaster. As the survivors of the beaten divisions in the Sinai trailed back, the truth was spreading, but it would take weeks to filter through the barrage of propaganda that was coming from the official media. Newspapers, radio and television redoubled their accusations of collusion between Israel, the United States and Britain. They continued to hide the truth about the defeat. ‘Setback’, the word used by Nasser in his resignation speech, was the only way it was described. A week later, Michael Wall of the Guardian could still report that ‘the Egyptian people have no conception of the disaster that has overtaken their country’. But the news was leaking out. Soldiers back from the front were telling ‘appalling stories of casualties, of wounded being left where they fell, of the hundred mile struggle back in the burning sun, of Israeli planes trying to mow down each individual staggering towards the canal’.
In his office opposite Nasser’s residence, Sami Sharaf was sitting with Amin Howedi, the new minister of defence and head of general intelligence. Two officers came in to report to Sharaf that Egypt had 100 tanks left. Sharaf got up, threw his arms around Howedi and said they should give thanks that something had been saved. Howedi shook his head and pulled away. He told Sharaf that he seemed to have forgotten that a week earlier Egypt had more than one thousand tanks. ‘Amer’s got to go,’ he said, ‘or we’ll never sort this out.’ If there was going to be a fall guy, it was going to be Field Marshal Amer, not Nasser.
Nasser was back in power, but he was never the same man again. On the eve of the war he still hoped he had scored his greatest political victory, a bloodless defeat of Israel. After his armed forces were smashed he kept his job because there was no other convincing candidate. No one else had any chance of inspiring public confidence. In Cairo the CIA was told that if Nasser had simply disappeared there would have been ‘chaos and the collapse of the Cairo government’. Egypt, though, was now like a sinking ship. ‘The morale of the ship’s crew may be maintained by giving the appearance that the captain remains in command; however, the ship sinks and the captain sinks with it.’
Gaza
Major Ibrahim El Dakhakny had been in hiding since 6 June, in a hut near a dried up river valley called Wadi Gaza. Local Palestinians kept him fed and watered and tipped him off when the Israelis were about. On a small transistor radio they had given him, he heard that Nasser had resigned. Dakhakny was as angry as his brother officers in Cairo. Nasser, he thought, could not go because he had to face his responsibilities. He might have been responsible for the defeat, but there was no one else to replace him.
The Palestinians had put Dakhakny in touch with three of his soldiers, who were also on the run from the Israelis. As the resident chief of Egyptian military intelligence in Gaza he assumed the Israelis knew his name and were looking for him, along with their pilot who was downed by anti-aircraft fire on the first day of the fighting. The Israeli pilot had been sent to Cairo in one of the last cars to make it through Al-Arish before the Israeli takeover. Dakhakny was stuck. He was hearing stories from the Palestinians that the Israelis were shooting prisoners and civilians. Some of them claimed that the victims had been forced to dig their own graves before they were killed. He was determined not to be captured.
Dakhakny bought a camel from a Palestinian farmer. With his three soldiers, and the camel’s help, he was going to cross the Sinai and get home. They loaded the beast with water, flour, sugar and tea, enough they hoped to keep them going until they reached Egypt. They left after dark, moving down the Gaza Strip and into Sinai, avoiding Israeli patrols by staying off the roads and walking through fields and groves of oranges, bananas and olives. Dakhakny always liked to keep a low profile by dressing in civilian clothes, so he had not been wearing a uniform when the war started. His three soldiers had dumped their uniforms and been given new outfits by friendly Palestinians. They had all kept their Kalashnikov assault rifles.
Their plan, once they had slipped into the vastness of the Sinai desert, was to find a Bedouin guide. Luckily they had just been paid when the Israelis invaded, but most of their cash had gone on the camel. But they found a man who would take what was left. He even brought another camel. They stayed at least ten kilometres away from roads, moving at night because of the heat. ‘It was very, very hard. The sand was very hot. So was the air. We had no tents or shelter when we stopped during the day. We just covered our heads and sat and tried to rest.’ They walked for nearly three weeks, following their camels and their guide along a meandering route. Sometimes they had to turn back and take a looping detour when they met Bedouin who told them that the Israelis were ahead. As time went by, and more and more Israelis were demobilised and sent home, the desert seemed emptier.
With their supplies almost gone, they reached the territory of the Bayardia tribe of Bedouin, around forty kilometres from Suez. The tribe had made a camp from palm branches, a custom that went back to biblical times. (During the Jewish religious holiday of Sukkot, the faithful build small shelters of palm branches to commemorate the wanderings of Jews in the Sinai in the time of Moses.) Dakhakny and his party had passed other Egyptians as they moved through Sinai, all trying to evade the Israelis and get back home. Quite a few of them had been swept up by the Bedouin and brought to the camp made of palms. The Bedouin were in contact with the Egyptian military. They took small groups of fugitives to the beach at night, where they were picked up by boats that Egypt had sent from Port Said. The boats came full of flour and other staples the Bedouin needed, were unloaded and filled again with the thin, sunburnt and exhausted Egyptians. Dakhakny gave his camel to the guide who had saved him. ‘I felt I was already in t
he grave. Sinai was a grave, and I was reborn when I left it.’
Once the ceasefire held, the atmosphere along the canal was more relaxed, though still wary. Israeli soldiers who spoke Arabic sometimes shouted over to the Egyptians, bartering prisoners for watermelon. A rope was stretched between the two banks for prisoners who could not swim. Watermelon floats, so the Egyptians pushed them across.
Sinai
Amos Elon drove back north through an eerily silent desert after the ceasefire came into effect. Israeli salvage crews were going through the wreckage at the side of the roads. In the opposite direction were jams of huge supply convoys going south, further into Egypt. It felt odd to drive towards the back of Hebrew signs warning about mines and the approaching frontier. He did not reach Jerusalem until late in the evening. The city’s lights were blazing. It had been three days since they had had a black-out. Later, Elon looked back on ‘a victory notable for its lack of hate, but marked by more than a trace of arrogance’. Elon may have felt no hate, but that was not how it seemed to Egyptian prisoners.
Ramadan Mohammed Iraqi was captured on the second day of the war. With several hundred other prisoners he was forced to lie down in a number of long lines. The Egyptians were convinced they were going to be shot. Ramadan always believed their lives were saved by a passing Israeli officer who saw what was happening and ordered their captors not to execute them. They were taken to Al-Arish airfield, where they were kept in aircraft hangars. Eventually they were transferred to a prison camp in Beersheba and then to another in Atlit, south of Haifa. Ramadan, like a number of other prisoners, says that they were moved in open lorries. Some civilians would throw stones at them, spit and yell abuse. Conditions in Atlit were especially bad. The prisoners were given very little food, mainly bread and onions. Some prisoners were shot by guards in the first few weeks, before they were registered by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Conditions improved slightly once ICRC visits began. There was more food and no more killing, except one man who was killed when the prisoners rioted in August. The prisoners were not allowed to leave their sheds between 4 p.m. and 9 a.m. They snapped when guards fired at a prisoner needing water who broke the rules by stepping out of one of the sheds at the wrong time. The prisoners broke out of the sheds, tearing at the wire and throwing stones at the watchtowers. The Israelis brought an Egyptian general who spoke to them through a loudhailer and told them that he had been promised that conditions would be improved. There was a little more food and they received parcels from the Egyptian Red Crescent containing new underwear and pyjamas. Ramadan Mohammed Iraqi was able to send messages back to his family through the ICRC during the seven months he was a prisoner of war. One says, ‘Don’t worry, I’m alive, one day I’ll be home.’
Jerusalem
It was the Jewish Sabbath. General Narkiss, Mayor Kollek and General Herzog, the new governor of the West Bank, went together to the Wailing Wall, where Sabbath prayers were being said by Jews for the first time since 1948. When the Wall was captured they discovered a urinal had been installed along part of it, which was immediately removed. Now they were eyeing the Moroccan quarter, an area of small, densely packed houses that stood between the Wall and the Jewish quarter. The quarter’s history went back 700 years, when the Ayyubids and the Mamluks, who were the dominant powers in Jerusalem, set aside land for immigrants from North Africa. Many of the 150 families – more than a thousand people – who lived in its small houses and narrow alleys in 1967 had North African connections. The following Wednesday was an important Jewish festival. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis were expected to come to pray and to celebrate the victory. What Kollek called the Moroccan quarter’s ‘small slum houses’ would be in the way. Kollek, Narkiss and Herzog decided they had ‘an historic opportunity’ to pull them down. They decided to send in bulldozers as soon as the Sabbath ended at sunset. Herzog later said some with some pride, ‘We hadn’t been authorised by anyone and we didn’t seek authorisation.’ They were worried that if they did not act decisively it would become politically impossible to knock down the houses of so many civilians. ‘We were concerned about losing time and the government’s difficulty in making a decision. We knew that in a few days it would be too late.’
Abd el-Latif Sayyed was a twenty-year-old trainee teacher who had been born in the Moroccan quarter. In 1967 eighteen people from his family shared a five-room house, which was around fifteen yards from the Wall. His maternal great grandfather, an immigrant from Morocco, had been granted it around 1810 by the Moroccan religious authorities in Jerusalem. Not long after dark they were given half an hour to leave. Abd el-Latif’s family were very frightened. They guessed the house was going to be searched, but no one dared to ask the soldiers. They were too scared of the new occupiers to question their orders. The family assumed they would be allowed back in a couple of hours, so they left all their possessions in the house. At an aunt’s house, about a hundred yards away, on the other side of the Moroccan quarter, they waited for the order to go home. They could hear bulldozers grinding and squealing. Nervously, they tried to work out what the noise was all about. They told each other that the Israelis were building a road, but as the night went on they became more and more concerned. When they tried to go out to take a look soldiers, who were patrolling the alleys, ordered them back inside.
Nazmi Al-Ju’beh had a much better view. From the roof of his grandfather’s house he could see the bulldozers working away at the edges of the Moroccan quarter. Steadily, they started to flatten the buildings, then move deeper into the quarter. Lorries came to take away the rubble. It went on all night. Major Eitan Ben Moshe, an engineer officer from Central Command, who was in charge of the work, went about his job with gusto – and anger, because of the urinal the Jordanians had set up to desecrate the Wall, which he had already removed. A small mosque called al-Buraq, after the winged horse that brought Mohammed to Jerusalem from Mecca, stood near the wall. ‘I said, if the horse ascended to the sky, why shouldn’t the mosque ascend too? So I crushed it until nothing was left.’
The next morning Abd el-Latif Sayyed went down to where his home had stood. All that was left among piles of bulldozed rubble was a palm tree that had stood in their back yard. The family’s possessions were somewhere under the rubble. Nazmi’s parents decided it was safer for them to return to their house outside the city walls. They moved at first light, picking up bales of bedding then walking, as usual, down a narrow passage and a flight of steps to get to the Moroccan quarter. They turned the last corner. In front of them, instead of the narrow, congested streets they had been walking through for years, was a broad and open space. At one end the Wailing Wall had been exposed. Hundreds of soldiers and bearded, black-clad ultra-orthodox Jews had linked arms and were dancing on the ruins of houses that had been bulldozed flat. His mother and father stumbled in shock. ‘I started to shout, where’s Mohammed, where’s Abed – these were my friends from the Moroccan quarter. The soldiers came and gave me candy and then arrested my two older brothers. One was a teacher and one was a lawyer. They were held for two days, with hundreds of other young men, at the Aqsa mosque, then at a military base. They were released after a week. We walked on, across the ruined houses of our friends.’
A middle-aged woman called Rasmiyyah Ali Taba’ki was found in the rubble, badly injured. Her neighbours assumed she had not heard the orders to leave. An Israeli engineer who was supervising the demolition tried to revive her, but she was already dead. Major Ben Moshe told an Israeli journalist that he found at least three bodies ‘of people who refused to leave their homes’.
On Sunday morning the site was visited by cabinet ministers. According to Chaim Herzog, ‘they were astounded. All they saw was ruin and dust. Warhaftig, the minister of religion, who was also a jurist, claimed our actions were against the law. At any rate, what was done was done.’ Teddy Kollek was proud of the destruction of the Moroccan quarter and the creation of the great open air plaza that is there now. It was a dec
isive act to create new facts on the ground in the classic tradition of Zionism. ‘It was the best thing we did and it’s good we did [it] immediately. The old place had a galut [Diaspora] character; it was a place for wailing. Perhaps this made sense in the past. It isn’t what we want in the future.’ His men worked fast. ‘In two days it was done – finished, clean.’ Kollek claimed that all the evicted families were found decent alternative accommodation, something they deny. They received backdated eviction notices in 1968, along with an offer of compensation of 100 Jordanian dinars. Around half the families took the money. The rest, in a small gesture against the occupation, refused what was anyway a paltry sum.
Syria–Israel border
Rabin had ordered Elazar to press on to Kuneitra, the regional capital of the Syrian border province. But then, in the morning, perhaps having second thoughts about his sudden decision to attack Syria, Dayan ordered that all military operations were to stop. When Rabin passed the order on, Elazar claimed it was too late to recall an airborne brigade, which was already going into action. After Dayan repeated his order, Rabin called Elazar again, who said, ‘Sorry, following your previous order, they began to move off and I can’t stop them.’ Rabin knew that Elazar ‘didn’t feel an ounce of regret’. But something in his tone made the chief of staff suspicious. After the war he discovered that when Elazar told him the airborne brigade could not be recalled, it was still waiting for orders miles from the border. Elazar’s desire to move as far forward as fast as he could was shared by his commanders. Rabin admitted he did not try very hard to check whether Elazar was telling the truth about the airborne brigade or not, and whatever Dayan’s later regrets about the wisdom of taking the Golan Heights, during the fighting he turned his blind eye to Israel’s ceasefire violations.