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Michael Oren
Author, Six Days of War
The situation in the Middle East since the outbreak of what the Palestinians call the Second Intifada, back in September 2001, is precisely what happened in a three-week period from mid-May to early June 1967, leading up to what was later called the Six-Day War. Then, as today, a Palestinian terrorist organization, al-Fatah, run by Yasser Arafat, was conducting operations across the Israeli border with the immediate goal of causing a large number of casualities, and the long-term goal of destabilizing the entire Middle East and forcing a showdown between Arab armies and Israeli forces. In 1967 as today, Israel struck back, causing unrest in the Arab world, putting pressure on Arab leaders to take a more stalwart position against Israel. Then, as today, certain radical Arab governments - the Syrians for example - supported terror. More moderate regimes tried to forestall the showdown by convening Arab summit meetings in which Israel was condemned in strong terms.
Economic statistics for 1967 and 2002 are almost identical: 12.5 percent unemployment, zero economic growth. There were widening divisions within Israeli society, then as now, between religious and secular, between Jews from Eastern background, sephardim, and from Western background, ashkenazim. There was a growing feeling among the population that the government wasn't doing enough to defend them. The response in 1967, as in 2001-2002, was for politicians to gather in a national unity coalition. That healed some internal divisions within Israeli society, but internationally Israel found itself increasingly isolated. In 1967, as today, the Europeans, led by the French, condemned Israel's retaliation raids. Thirty-five years ago, the UN condemned Israel virtually on a daily basis. In 1967, as today, the U.S. was deeply engaged in a military commitment in the East, albeit not in the Middle East in 1967 but in the Far East, not against Islamic extremism, but against communism in Vietnam. Though Lyndon Johnson was empathetic to Israel's plight, he felt he could not offer aid because of America's deep engagement in Vietnam.
Since 1967, every milestone in the Arab-Israeli conflict - the War of Attrition, the Yom Kippur War, the Lebanon war, the peace process, the question of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, the status of Jerusalem - has been the direct result of six short days of intense fighting in June 1967. I don't think you can find an event in all of history that was so short, so limited in its geographical scope, that has had such profound ramifications not only for the region, but for the entire world. The Six-Day War, for statesmen and for military leaders in the region and beyond, never really ended. For historians it's just beginning, thanks to the declassification of tens of thousands of formerly top-secret documents. The picture emerges of a region caught in a context of conflict on many levels: internationally, in the Cold War; regionally, in the bitter rivalry between Arab rulers; and bilaterally, in the intractable Arab-Israeli conflict.
In such a context, you needed just a little spark to ignite a regional conflagration. One was kindled six months before the outbreak of the war, on November 11, 1966. That day an Israeli patrol, advancing along the border with the West Bank, then under Jordanian rule, stepped on a mine, planted by Yasser Arafat and his organization. The three Israeli soldiers were killed. On November 13, 500 Israeli paratroopers crossed the border into the West Bank with the goal of mounting a retaliation raid against an al-Fatah stronghold in the West Bank village of Samu'. En route, however, a battalion of Jordanian infantry that was not supposed to be in the vicinity crossed the Israelis' path. Shots were exchanged, and when the smoke cleared, 15 Jordanian soldiers lay dead. Almost instantly, Jordan's Palestinian majority rose up in riots, claiming that King Hussein of Jordan had not done enough to defend them, that he was secretly in league with the Zionists, and they called for his violent overthrow.
Hussein quickly sought to deflect this criticism beyond his borders by aiming it at his arch-nemesis, Nasser, the president of Egypt. He claimed that Nasser had not done enough to liberate Palestine, that Nasser was secretly in league with Israel and "hiding behind the skirts" of a UN peacekeeping force placed in the Sinai Peninsula as a buffer between Egypt and Israel during the previous Arab-Israeli war in 1956. He sought any pretext to get rid of these UN forces. It was supplied him by the Soviet Union on May 12, 1967, when the Soviets reported - falsely, as it turned out - they had learned of a secret Israeli plan to invade Syria and conquer Damascus. Nasser ascertained that this was a false report, but still sent 100,000 troops into Sinai, 1,000 tanks and 500 planes. He evicted the UN forces and closed Israel's vital southern port of Elat to shipping. It was a matter of circumstance and decision-making before Israel launched what it called a pre-emptive strike to meet the burgeoning Egyptian threat.
Those are the origins of the Six-Day War - all because of Israel's raid on the West Bank town of Samu'. Except now we know from the declassified documents that the raid on Samu' should never have taken place. Go back to November 11, 1966: King Hussein, in his rhetoric, was as anti-Israel as the next Arab leader of his generation. But secretly, Hussein had a modus vivendi with the Israelis, often meeting secretly with Israeli emissaries. When Hussein heard about the deaths of the three Israeli soldiers along the border, he wrote a personal letter of condolence to Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol in which he said we will work together to combat this terrorism. This letter reached the desk of respected American Ambassador Walworth Babour on November 11 - a Friday. Everything shuts down in Israel on a Friday, the Sabbath. Babour looked at his watch and decided it could wait until Monday.
On Sunday, Israel launched its attack on Samu'. Had Israel received that letter, there's no way they would have launched that attack, because the letter bore the imprimatur of the American government. The Six-Day War broke out not because of Israeli activism or Nasser's nefariousness, but because of procrastination of one American diplomat.
A similar random event prevented Egypt from launching the same type of surprise massive attack against Israel that Israel launched against Egypt on June 5. The Egyptian plan went by the code name Al-Fajr - "the dawn," in Arabic - and called for massive aerial bombings of Israeli strategic targets, followed by a large-scale armored thrust through Israel's southern Negev Desert to link up with the Jordanian border and literally cut the Jewish state in half. This was the brainchild of the de facto commander of the Egyptian army, Field Marshall 'Abd al-Hakim 'Amer. He had performed poorly as the commander of the Egyptian army in the 1956 war with Israel, failed again in Egypt's disastrous intervention in the Yemeni civil war and was anxious to find any way to restore his tarnished personal glory. On May 17 and May 24, Egyptian MiG aircraft penetrated Israeli airspace over the Negev and photographed Israel's most sensitive strategic sight, the Dimona nuclear reactor. Israel sent Hawk missiles up after the planes, but the Egyptians got away. 'Amer had proved that Israel was vulnerable to surprise attack.
Nasser did not want to start a war with Israel; we know this now from documents. He wanted to provoke Israel to start the war so that Israel would be saddled with blame for igniting this conflagration. But Nasser could not stand up to 'Amer, who was very powerful and also his best friend. So, H-hour for Operation Dawn was set effectively at dawn for May 27, 1967. Why didn't it happen? The previous day, Foreign Minister of Israel Abba Eban landed in Washington with the goal of ascertaining from the American administration its position in the event of the outbreak of war. As soon as Eban arrived, he was handed an ultra-secret cable directly from the Israeli government, and in it the information that Israel had learned of an Egyptian and Syrian plan to launch a war of annihilation against Israel within the next 48 hours. Eban met with Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Defense Secretary McNamara, finally with the president himself. The Americans said their intelligence sources could not corroborate the claim; that Egyptian alignment in Sinai remained defensive.
Eban left the White House distraught. Johnson sat around with his advisors and said, What if their intelligence sources are better than ours? Johnson decided to fire off a hotline message to his counterpart in the Kremlin, Alexi Kosygin, in which he said, We've heard from the Israelis, but we can't corroborate it, that your proxies in the Middle East, the Egyptians, plan to launch an attack against Israel in the next 48 hours. If you don't want to start a global crisis, prevent them from doing that. At 2:30 a.m. on May 27, Soviet Ambassador to Egypt Dimitri Pojidaev knocked on Nasser's door and read him a personal letter from Kosygin in which he said, We don't want Egypt to be blamed for starting a war in the Middle East. If you launch that attack, we cannot support you. 'Amer consulted his sources in the Kremlin, and they corroborated the substance of Kosygin's message. Despondent, 'Amer told the commander of Egypt's air force, Major General Mahmud Sidqi, that the operation was cancelled.
Israel launched the first surprise attack on June 5, with the goal of destroying the Egyptian air force on the ground. Israel's military operations were originally conceived as a 48-hour, limited, even surgical strike, that had only one other goal: eliminating the first of three Egyptian defense lines in Sinai. It was not about taking the whole Sinai Peninsula down to the Suez Canal, occupying the Gaza Strip, seizing the Golan Heights, entering the West Bank or liberating the Old City of Jerusalem. Israel did not want a war with Jordan; Israel had a working relationship with King Hussein. The Jordanian border is Israel's longest and most vulnerable. Strict instructions went to the Israeli forces that even if the Jordanians fired on Israel, even if King Hussein "had to loft a few shells to prove that he was an Arab ruler," Israel would not react to that fire.
Hussein didn't want a war with Israel, but was in a terrible dilemma. If Nasser went to war, Hussein didn't help and Nasser lost, Palestinians in Jordan and the entire Arab world would accuse Hussein of being a traitor and they'd kill him. But if Nasser won, if that Egyptian column cut across Israel's Negev Desert and went right to the Jordanian border and continued to Amman, then Nasser would kill him. To get out of that dilemma, Hussein decided to abrogate all personal responsibility for this crisis by placing his army under direct Egyptian command of General Riyad. June 5, the first day of the war, Jordanian howitzers in East Jerusalem opened fire on the Jewish half of the city. They lobbed thousands of shells, destroyed hundreds of buildings, killing 20 people. Jordanian planes began to strafe Israeli cities. More disastrously for the Israelis, Jordanian Long Tom guns situated around Jenin began to shell the outskirts of Tel Aviv and Israeli airfields. With all of this provocation, the Israeli orders stood.
But at 12:30 p.m. on June 5, Jordanian radio announced that Jordanian soldiers had attacked and captured Government House Ridge at the southern approach of the city of Jerusalem. It was a zone demilitarized by the UN in 1948 during the first Arab-Israeli war because it was such a sensitive site: Anybody who controlled that ridge controlled the entrance to all of southern and ultimately western Jerusalem. Israel had a secret observation point right off of the ridge, and when the central command of the Israeli army heard on Jordanian radio that Jordanian soldiers had captured the ridge, central command called the outpost and said, Do you see anything up there? The post reported, No, it's perfectly quiet.
But at 1:30, Jordanian soldiers invaded and conquered Government House Ridge. Jordanian radio announced that Jordanian soldiers were in the process of attacking the Israeli enclave in the northern part of Jerusalem, on Mount Scopus. Israeli central command called the garrison at Mount Scopus, and the answer was, It's perfectly quiet here. Israeli central command concluded that there was no coordination between Jordanian radio and the Jordanian army, and that the Jordanian radio was in effect announcing the army's movements about an hour ahead of time.
At 9:30 a.m., General Riyad received a telegram from Field Marshall 'Amer in Cairo that said 70 percent of the Israeli air force had been destroyed, that a large Egyptian column had broken through the Negev and would soon enter southern Jerusalem via Government House Ridge. It was therefore incumbent upon the Jordanian Army to take the ridge to cover the eastern flank of this advancing column. The Israelis knew that 70 percent of their air force hadn't been destroyed, they knew there was no Egyptian column advancing up the spine of the West Bank, but they did fear a recurrence of one of the great traumas of the 1948 war: the Jordanian siege on West Jerusalem. They quickly sent soldiers to Government House Ridge and brought paratroopers up from the Sinai to link up with Mount Scopus. The battle for Ammunition Hill was really the bloodiest battle of the whole war.
Two days later, most of the West Bank had fallen to the Israelis. The Israeli government paused and deliberated for 24 hours on whether or not to reach the Wailing Wall, because the Old City of Jerusalem contains not only Jewish holy shrines but also Christian holy shrines, in particular the Holy Sepulchre. Israeli ministers, led by Moshe Dayan, thought that if Israel conquered the Old City, Catholic countries, led by the Vatican, would sever relations with Israel, deepening Israel's international isolation at the worst possible time. The decision came down to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. He wrote a letter to King Hussein, saying that if you retake control of your army, if you accept an unconditional cease-fire, and agree to peace talks, we will not take the Old City of Jerusalem. Levi Eshkol was within a hand's grasp of realizing a millennial Jewish vision and was willing to forfeit it in return for a peace process with Jordan.
This letter went out about 9:30 a.m. There was no answer, ever. At 11:30 Israeli paratroopers broke through the Lions Gate in the Old City. Two hours later they reported, Har ha-Bayit be-Yadenu - in Hebrew, "The Temple Mount is in our hands" - and the paratroopers took their famous picture outside of the Western Wall.
The Six-Day War broke out because one letter from King Hussein to Levi Eshkol was not delivered; the West Bank and Jerusalem fell to Israel because one letter was delivered from Field Marshall 'Amer to General Riyad with false information; and another letter, a final letter, from Levi Eshkol to King Hussein was never answered. The basic conclusion has to be that rather than a logical reaction to events on the field, the Six-Day War appears the result of unanticipated vicissitudes, the vagaries of war, random chance, and often just plain dumb luck. That type of conclusion is particularly pertinent to the Middle East today, because it remains engaged in a context of conflict, and frankly the context is far more unstable today than it was in 1967.
