by Sandy Tolan
To the outside world, Israel had made it clear, once and for all, that it would never grant the Palestinian refugees the right of return. The year before, the Israel Lands Administration had destroyed some of the last remaining Arab villages in a campaign known as "Leveling Villages," and Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, in response to criticism from an Arab Knesset member, replied, "Not destroying the abandoned villages would be contrary to the policy of development and revitalization of wasteland, which every state is obliged to implement." For Israel it was clear, eighteen years after its War of Independence, that these lands could never be returned. Outside the state, it was increasingly clear that the land would be restored to the Arabs only through "armed struggle." As Nasser's strength grew with the rise of pan-Arab nationalism, and threats emerged from the Arab Nationalist Movement and a new group called the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the relative quiet between Israel and the Arab world seemed doomed.
By the spring of 1967, as Dalia began to hear chilling threats on the radio from Arab broadcasters speaking bad Hebrew, the world around her darkened. She could sense it. War, it seemed, would be impossible to avoid.
Eight
WAR
ON MONDAY MORNING, June 5, 1967, Bashir Khairi stood before a judge in civil court, arguing a case on behalf of his client, a Mr. al-Abed. Bashir was now twenty-five and a recent graduate of Cairo University Law School, specializing in labor matters. The court had convened in Ramallah in the Jordanian-controlled West Bank, the territory King Abdullah had annexed to his kingdom seventeen years earlier. His grandson Hussein was now Jordan's king and head of state.
Ramallah had changed completely since the day in late 1948 when Ahmad and Zakia had taken Bashir and the other children to Gaza. Gone was the desperation of a refugee population sleeping under the trees. Gone, too, were thousands of well-to-do Ramallans, mostly Christians, who had fled the West Bank into the United States in the years following the Nakba. At the edges of town stood the concrete dwellings and narrow, refuse-strewn lanes of the UNRWA refugee camps. Each year, the UN refugee agency was required to submit a budget for renewed funding. Receiving long-term funds or building more permanent-looking housing would imply a UN admission that the refugees were not going home. This position was still unacceptable for the "host" governments, the grassroots political factions that were based in the camps, and most of all the refugees themselves. For Palestinians, resistance meant no compromise on the right of return, no matter how firm Israel's position. Bashir, like most Palestinians, believed there was only one way the land would come back to his people. Force expelled us from our land, he reasoned, and only force will get it back.
Bashir faced the judge and made the case for Mr. al-Abed. In his opening argument he stated that Abed, a mechanic at a Ramallah garage, had been fired from his job unjustly and that at the very least he should be given his back pay. Bashir sat down, and the attorney for the repair shop began to speak. As he did, a young man darted through the courtroom door, strode swiftly over to Bashir, and began whispering in his ear. It was a little before noon.
For nineteen years, Palestinian refugees had been waiting for the moment when they would return to their homes. At first they had thought this would happen in a matter of weeks. When Israel barred them from coming back, hopes shifted to the UN resolution advocating the right of return. Years later, still in exile, the refugees began to put their faith in "armed struggle." Increasingly they turned to Egypt's Nasser. For more than a decade, the Egyptian president had electrified the Arab world with his anticolonial speeches and his aspirations for a great Arab nation.
Bashir, studying law in Cairo, was inspired by Nasser's dream of unifying the Arabs. His focus on return now had a vehicle, and he set aside all other personal ambitions. "He never bought anything expensive, shirt, shoes, nothing for himself," Khanom recalled. "Our father would ask him, 'Do you want money?' and Bashir would say, 'No, I have enough.'" Bhajat, Bashir's younger brother by a year, was completely different. "He was spending three or four times what Bashir spent," Khanom said. "Bashir never spent money on shoes, never bought himself a suit. We used to call Bashir the son of the beggar and Bhajat the son of the lord. People couldn't even believe they were brothers." Bashir believed his discipline would be rewarded, and his people delivered, by the heroic Nasser.
Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal, to the anger of the United States, Great Britain, France, and Israel, was a source of deep pride for Bashir and millions of others on the Arab streets. Nasser had become a leader, with Nehru of India and Tito of Yugoslavia, of the "non-aligned movement" that sought an independent, third path between the superpowers. Most important for Palestinians, Nasser's recent championing of their cause had stirred hopes in the diaspora for a great Arab rebirth to avenge the defeat of 1948. Unlike the UN and its resolutions on paper, Bashir believed, Nasser could end the long exile of the Palestinians by force of arms.
In the early 1960s, Bashir had grown deeply involved in student activist politics in Cairo, particularly with the Arab Nationalist Movement. The ANM was led by George Habash, a refugee from Lydda whose sister had been killed by Israeli soldiers in July 1948 and who walked in the heat through the hills to Ramallah. Palestinian political leaders like Habash, and the leaders of the newly formed Palestine Liberation Organization, were rallying around Nasser, urging him to prepare for war. The PLO and its small Palestine Liberation Army would march under Nasser's command. The Egyptian president, however, would say repeatedly that he had no intention of liberating Palestine: The time was not right, especially for attacks on Israel launched from Arab states. For many Palestinians, though, by the mid-1960s the urgency had deepened; the Negev was filling up with new Jewish immigrants, and rumors were everywhere that Israel was developing a nuclear weapons program.
Bashir and his fellow student activists in Cairo believed Arab unity was the key to return, and they watched this maneuvering closely. Some students began guerrilla training in secret "special forces" camps in Egypt and elsewhere. They learned how to plant mines and fire antitank weapons. They jumped from airplanes, waded through swamps, slept on hard ground, ate snakes, and went without food for days.
Two young men emerged from the growing guerrilla movement: Yasser Arafat and Khalil al-Wazir, known as Abu Jihad. Arafat and Abu Jihad believed return would come only if it was led by an autonomous Palestinian political and military organization devoted to armed struggle. Neither Abu Jihad, who had been expelled from al-Ramla in 1948, nor Arafat trusted in deliverance from the Arab states, which they believed had sold out the Palestinians in 1948. Together the two men had founded the guerrilla group Fatah in the wake of the Suez conflict.
On New Year's Day 1965, after nine years of relative quiet between Israel and the Arab world following the Suez crisis, Fatah planned its first attack on Israeli soil. Guerrillas were to cross the Lebanese border and lay explosives alongside water pipes near the Sea of Galilee, Israel's main source of water. The control of water was a key source of tension between Israel and the Arab states. Israel had diverted much of the headwaters of the Jordan River away from downstream Arab lands. Israeli jets had bombed Syrian waterworks in the Golan Heights, across from the Galilee, so that Syria could not divert those same waters. When Israeli tractors moved into the demilitarized zones of the Golan to plow disputed land, they drew Syrian fire, which, in turn, brought swift Israeli response. Israel wanted nothing to interfere with its plan to support more immigrants with a pipeline to the Negev desert. Fatah, the small band of guerrillas, sought to foil Israel's pipeline plan; after all, the Negev was part of old Palestine, to which the rebels and their followers intended to return. Their attack on the pipeline was a failure, thwarted by Lebanese security before it began, but Fatah issued a "military communique" proclaiming success by "detachments of our strike forces" and warning Israel of future actions.
Throughout 1965 and 1966, Fatah, along with a new group called Abtal al-Awda (Heroes of Return), launched dozens more attacks
from the West Bank and Lebanon on mostly isolated targets inside Israel. The attacks sharply raised anxieties in the Jewish state, and, as designed, sparked tensions between Israel and its Arab neighbors. By late 1966 these attacks, and the Israeli reprisals, had drawn a reluctant King Hussein deeper into the conflict, and closer to the point of no return.
Before dawn on November 13, 1966, Israeli planes, tanks, and troops attacked the West Bank village of Samu, blowing up dozens of houses and killing twenty-one Jordanian soldiers. The invasion, especially in its massive scale, shocked even some supporters of Israel. U.S. officials immediately condemned the attack. In Washington, the head of the National Security Council, Walt Rostow, in a memo to President Johnson, declared that the "3000-man raid with tanks and planes was all out of proportion to the provocation"—in this case, a Fatah land mine that had killed three Israeli soldiers on November 11. Rostow said of the Israelis, "They've undercut Hussein. We're spending $500 million to shore him up as a stabilizing factor. . . . It makes even the moderate Arabs feel fatalistically that there is nothing they can do to get along with the Israelis no matter how hard they try. It will place heavy domestic and external political strain on King Hussein's regime. . . ."
Rostow believed the Israelis, in attacking Jordan rather than Soviet-backed Syria, which was supporting the Palestinian guerrilla factions, had struck at the wrong target. When Eshkol, in a conciliatory note, wrote to President Johnson asking for his support in this "difficult hour for us," the president didn't respond. Instead, a week after the attack, Johnson wrote to King Hussein of his "sense of sorrow and concern. . . words of sympathy are small comfort when lives have been needlessly destroyed." The president assured the king that "my disapproval of this action has been made known to the government of Israel in the strongest terms." He also addressed a fear King Hussein had expressed since the raid. Regarding "Your Majesty's concern that Israel's policies have changed and that Israel now intends to occupy territory on the West Bank of the Jordan River," the president assured the king, "we have good reason to believe it highly unlikely that the events you fear will in fact occur. Should Israel adopt the policies you fear it would have the gravest consequences. There is no doubt in my mind that our position is fully understood and appreciated by the Israelis."
The king's fears of an Israeli occupation of the West Bank, however, were secondary to his worries at home. American officials in Amman had already warned Washington that "the monarchy itself is in jeopardy." The CIA, in a special memorandum to the president, wrote that the Samu attack "badly damaged Hussein's position at home. It made him vulnerable to attack by disaffected elements of his population, who argue that his policy of peaceful coexistence with Israel has been dictated by the U.S. and has proved a failure." The king, according to the American assessment, would now be under great pressure to appear more militant toward Israel, especially as his kingdom grew more restive.
In Amman, the Samu raid had already provoked waves of violent protests against the king's regime. Palestinians accused the army of being weak and unprepared and demanded arms to fight Israel. A PLO broadcast from Cairo called upon the Jordanian army to overthrow the king. Riots broke out in Jordan and the West Bank, Jordanian troops fired at Palestinian demonstrators in Jerusalem, hundreds were arrested, and the king dissolved the parliament, imposed martial law, and secured additional military aid from the United States.
Now the split in the Arab world became more obvious than ever: Egypt and its ally Syria stood in favor of "pan-Arab unity," while King Hussein was labeled a pro-Western "imperialist agent" and "ally of Zionism." In the spring of 1967, Syria called for Hussein's overthrow, and Nasser declared that the king was "ready to sell the Arab nation in the same manner as Abdullah [the king's late grandfather] sold it in 1948." Bashir, now twenty-five years old, stood firmly on the side of Nasser and the pan-Arab movement.
As Arab leaders sniped at one another, tensions were rising in the demilitarized zone of Syria's Golan Heights. The DZs were narrow bands of land between the Sea of Galilee and the westernmost edge of the Golan. Syrian and Israeli forces had been exchanging sporadic fire over farming operations and the Syrian waterworks diversions, and Syrian mortar fire had fallen on Israeli kibbutzim. On April 7, 1967, Israeli air force pilots shot down six Syrian fighter jets in a dogfight above the Golan; one of the Israeli planes roared over Damascus in a public display of humiliation for the Syrians and their ally, Nasser. Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli army's chief of staff, soon threatened to destroy the Syrian regime. Syria, with its backing of Palestinian guerrillas and its confrontation with Israel in the Golan, was antagonizing Nasser.
The Israeli actions were an embarrassment for Nasser, champion of the pan-Arab cause, and King Hussein seized the moment to shed his image as a lackey for the West. If the Egyptian president really wanted to stand up for the Arabs, Jordan Radio challenged, he should send an unmistakable message to Israel: Close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli vessels. After all, the broadcast intoned, some of those vessels would inevitably be transporting weapons to be used against Arabs in any coming conflict. The challenge from Jordan may have been meant simply to divert criticism from the beleaguered king to Nasser, but like the Fatah raids and the Israeli reprisal attack on Samu, it helped drive the region closer to war. Closing the Straits of Tiran would cut off Israel's access to the Red Sea and Africa beyond. Israel would still be able to ship freely from its Mediterranean ports, which accounted for more than 90 percent of its maritime trade, but nevertheless, closing the straits would be a grave step. Indeed, the last time Nasser closed the straits, during the Suez crisis of 1956, he provoked an Israeli attack.
Privately, Nasser had sent signals to supporters and diplomats that he didn't want war with Israel. By May, however, he was under growing pressure from the millions of people across the Arab world who looked to him for action. On May 15, the Egyptian president sent thousands of troops into Sinai toward the Israeli border. On May 18, he ordered UN peacekeeping troops out of Sinai. The next day, Israel began to mass thousands of its own troops along the border with Sinai.
Three days later, on May 22, 1967, Gamal Abdel Nasser announced the closure of the Straits of Tiran, declaring, "The Jews threaten us with war and we say to them, ahlan wa sahlan [you are welcome]. We are ready!"
As far as Israeli leaders were concerned, this was a declaration of war. That day, May 22, the Israeli government sent a request to the U.S. military for twenty thousand gas masks, and the cabinet went into crisis deliberations. For Israelis, the paralyzing time known as the "period of waiting" had begun.
Dalia Eshkenazi unfurled the last square of black construction paper and taped it onto the window next to the other black squares. Now no light would escape. Outside, in the carport near the front gate, the family's two-cylinder "Deux Chevaux" Citroen was similarly darkened. A day or two earlier, the police had stood on Herzl Street with brushes and cans of blue-black paint, stopping cars passing between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and swabbing their headlights. Blackened headlights would still cast a dim path but not emit light that could be detected by enemy aircraft. Whether those jets would ever come, whether a single shot would ever be fired, no one knew. Across the country, Israelis were mobilizing: Schools were turned into shelters as citizens and soldiers dug trenches, stepped up blood drives, prepared hospital beds, made plans to send their children to Europe, and dug ten thousand graves.
Dalia was nineteen years old, but during this "period of waiting" she often felt like crawling under a blanket. She had never felt like this, yet she understood that for others something terrible and familiar was reawakening. Later she would recall it as a "collective fear of annihilation." Her mother's face wore an expression of perpetual worry. As the waiting period stretched out, the family sat in excruciating silence, listening for a siren. In the Ramla shops people would engage in conversation readily, looking to one another for reassurance; other times, on the streets, they would glance at one another quickly, furtively, one nervous face fl
ashing into the mirror of another.
The radio picked up broadcasts of a serene Egyptian voice, saying, "Why don't you go back to where you came from? You don't stand a chance." Dalia would lie on the blue silken cover of her parents' bed, listening to the threats of the Arabs in their accented Hebrew. In the newspapers, Dalia had read about the Arabs promising to push the Jews into the sea. At times she thought she should listen to her Western friends who insisted that the taunting voice from Cairo represented bravado and "Oriental exaggeration." She knew that the Israeli army, in whose officers' training corps program she now served, was strong. But in a community where people were still walking around with numbers on their arms, Dalia believed, "one had to take sick fantasies seriously." She was petrified; so were her parents; so were Aunt Stella and Aunt Dora. Ma-ihey-yiheh? everyone was desperate to know. What will happen?
On May 23, the day after Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran and taunted the Israeli public, Israel's cabinet sent Foreign Minister Abba Eban on a diplomatic mission to Paris, London, and Washington.
Officials in the Johnson administration were trying to keep Israel from attacking Egypt, while assessing whether Nasser truly wanted war, and, if he did, what the outcome would be. A CIA assessment on May 26—part political review and part psychological analysis—surmised that Nasser's threats against Israel were made partly in response to Israel's threats to Syria, Egypt's ally: "He probably felt he had to identify himself with Arab nationalist interests and that some action on his part would refurbish his image in the Arab world." The CIA memorandum also suggested the Soviets had encouraged Nasser, in part because of the "bad blood" with the U.S. over Vietnam, and that perhaps Nasser believed his forces were now strong enough to withstand an attack from Israel. In addition, the CIA report concluded, "There may have been some element of desperation in Nasser's attitude, arising from . . . perhaps a fatalisitic conclusion that a showdown with Israel must come sooner or later, and might best be provoked before Israel acquired nuclear weapons."