Arabs (70 page)

Nasser readily acknowledged that he saw the Yemen War as “more a political operation than a military one.” What he failed to appreciate was the Yemen War’s impact on Egypt’s military preparedness to confront the more immediate threat of Israel.

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n the decade since the Suez Crisis, Israel and its Arab neighbors had been engaged in an arms race in preparation for the inevitable next round of war. The United States began to overtake France as the primary source of military hardware for Israel, Britain supplied the Jordanians, and the Soviets armed Syria and Egypt. The Soviets were not above using their position in Egypt and Syria to pressure their rival, the United States, in an area of strategic interest to both superpowers.

War was inevitable because Israel and the surrounding Arab states were dissatisfied with the status quo and unwilling to consider peace on the basis of the status quo. The Arabs were so unreconciled to Israel that they refused to refer to the country by name, preferring to speak of “the Zionist entity.” Having lost wars to the Israeli army in 1948 and 1956, the Arabs were determined to settle the score. The Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and the Gaza Strip served as a daily reminder of the Arabs’ failure to live up to their promises to liberate Palestine.

The Israelis were also intent on war. They feared that the country’s narrow waist between the coastline and the West Bank—at points only 7.5 miles, or 12 kilometers, wide—left Israel vulnerable to a hostile thrust dividing the north from the south of the country. In addition, the Israelis had no access to the Western Wall and the Jewish Quarter of the old city of Jerusalem, which remained in Jordanian hands. And Syria held the strategic Golan Heights overlooking the Galilee. Moreover, the Israelis believed that their strategic advantage—holding more and better quality weapons than their Arab neighbors—would diminish over time as the Soviets provided weapons systems of the latest technology to the Egyptians and Syrians. The Israelis needed one good war to secure defensible boundaries and inflict a decisive defeat on the Arabs to impose peace on terms with which Israel could live.

In the spring of 1967 the Israelis began to complain of Palestinian infiltrators crossing from Syria to attack Israel, and tensions between the two countries escalated rapidly. The Israelis and Syrians put their armed forces on alert. Prime Minister Levi Eshkol threatened offensive action against Damascus if the Syrian provocations did not stop. Threats gave way to hostilities in April, when Israeli jets engaged the Syrian air force in dogfights over Syrian airspace. The Israeli air force downed six Syrian MiG fighters. Two of the planes crashed in the suburbs of Damascus. As Egyptian journalist Mohamed Heikal recalled, “The situation between Syria and Israel became very dangerous.”
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The sudden escalation of hostilities placed the whole region on a war footing.

At this moment of heightened tension, the Soviet Union chose to leak a false intelligence report to the Egyptian authorities alleging a massing of Israeli troops on the Syrian frontier. The Soviets no doubt were smarting from the ease with which the Israelis with their French Mirage fighters had downed the state-of-the-art MiG 21s the USSR had provided the Syrian air force. Egypt had a mutual defense pact with the Syrians, which meant that if the Israelis initiated hostilities with Syria, Egypt
would have to go to war. Perhaps the Soviets hoped to mobilize the Egyptians with false intelligence and contain the Israelis with the prospect of a two-front conflict.

Although Nasser was in possession of good intelligence, including aerial photographs, suggesting that the Israelis were not in fact mobilizing on the Syrian frontier, he continued to act publicly as though there were an imminent threat of war. Perhaps Nasser hoped to claim a victory over Israel without having to fire a shot: first, by circulating the Soviet intelligence of an Israeli threat to Syria, then by deploying his troops to the Israeli frontiers as a deterrent, subsequently claiming the absence of Israeli troops on the Syrian frontier as proof the Israelis had withdrawn in the face of Egyptian pressure. Whatever his reasoning, Nasser continued to act on the basis of the false Soviet intelligence and ordered his army across the Suez Canal on May 16 to mass in the Sinai near the Israeli frontier. This miscalculation would prove the initial step to war.

The first challenge Nasser faced was to mount a credible threat to the Israelis. With 50,000 of his best troops still tied down in the Yemen War, Nasser was forced to call up all his reservists to muster the necessary manpower. He needed to make his soldiers appear more formidable than they actually were, both to generate enthusiasm among the Egyptian people and to pose a credible threat to the Israelis. Nasser gave his troop deployment a dramatic twist by parading soldiers and tanks through central Cairo for the benefit of the cheering crowds and the international press. “Our troops were deliberately marched through the streets of Cairo on their way to Sinai,” General Abd al-Ghani al-Gamasy complained, “in full view and for all to see—citizens and foreigners alike. The mass media covered these movements, contrary to all principles and measures of security.”
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The constant stream of soldiers to the front raised public expectations of an imminent war that might redeem Arab honor and liberate Palestine. None of Nasser’s millions of supporters doubted for a moment that the Egyptian army would lead its Arab allies to victory over Israel. However, the Egyptian forces were sent into the Sinai with no clear military objective, as though their sheer mass would intimidate the Israelis. Meanwhile, al-Gamasy reflected, “Israel quietly prepared for war under optimal circumstances.” Its strategists had full knowledge of the numbers and equipment of the Egyptian deployment. Not only had they spent the previous months gathering detailed intelligence, but they had seen it all on TV.

When the Egyptian units reached the Sinai, they came face-to-face with the United Nations Emergency Force. The UNEF had been posted to the Sinai in the aftermath of the 1956 Suez War to keep the peace between Egypt and Israel. It was comprised of 4,500 international soldiers posted to forty-one observation points in the Gaza Strip, along the Israeli-Egyptian frontier, and at Sharm al-Shaykh at the southern tip of the Sinai.

The UN forces were now an inconvenience, coming between the Egyptian troops and the Israeli frontiers. How could the Egyptian army pose a credible threat to the Israelis so long as there was a buffer force between them? The Egyptian chief of staff wrote to the commander of the UNEF to request the withdrawal of UN troops from the eastern frontiers between Egypt and Israel. The UN commander relayed the request to the secretary-general, U Thant, who responded that it was within Egypt’s sovereign rights to request the withdrawal of UN troops from its territory, but that he would only approve a total withdrawal of UN forces. The UNEF, U Thant argued, was an integral unit, and it made no sense to withdraw part of the force from the eastern frontier while preserving peacekeepers in the Gaza Strip and the Strait of Tiran. Egypt reflected on the secretary-general’s response and, on May 18, requested a total pullout of all UN troops from the Sinai. The last UNEF unit withdrew on May 31. Suddenly there was no buffer between the Egyptians and Israelis at all, heightening tensions between the two countries to fever pitch. This was Nasser’s second miscalculation, which took him much closer to war.

The withdrawal of UN forces created an unforeseen diplomatic problem for Nasser. Since 1957 the UN had kept the Strait of Tiran open to all shipping, regardless of the flag or destination of vessels. This had given Israel a decade of free access to the Red Sea from its port of Eilat. Once the UN had been withdrawn, the strait returned to Egyptian sovereignty. Egypt came under tremendous pressure from its Arab neighbors to close the strait to all Israeli shipping, as well as to vessels destined for Eilat. As Anwar Sadat recalled, “Many Arab brothers criticized Egypt for leaving the Tiran Strait . . . open to international, particularly Israeli, navigation.”

In the heated climate of May 1967, Nasser succumbed to the pressure. He convened a meeting of the Supreme Executive Committee that brought together the commander in chief of the armed forces, Field Marshal Abd al-Hakim Amer; Prime Minister Sidqi Sulayman; Speaker of the National Assembly Anwar Sadat; and other leading Free Officers. “Now with our concentrations in Sinai,” Nasser reflected, “the chances of war are fifty-fifty. But if we close the Strait [of Tiran], war will be a one hundred percent certainty.” Nasser turned to the commander of his armed forces and asked, “Are the armed forces ready, Abdel Hakim [Amer]?” Amer was positive: “On my own head be it, boss! Everything’s in tiptop shape.”
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On May 22 Egypt declared the closure of the Strait of Tiran to Israeli shipping and to all oil tankers destined for Eilat. Nasser was correct in his assessment of the probability of conflict. For Israel, this threat to its maritime routes was grounds for war.

By late May, the Arab world had abandoned any effort to avoid war. Arab public opinion, still smarting from the lost wars of 1948 and 1956 and a string of lesser attacks, was impatient to see Israel dealt a decisive defeat. The well-televised mobilization
of Egyptian troops had raised expectations that the moment of reckoning was at hand. And inter-Arab cooperation meant that Israel would face attacks on three fronts. Syria and Egypt were already bound by a mutual defense pact, and on May 30, King Hussein of Jordan flew to Cairo to throw in his lot with Nasser. Modern weapons, unity of purpose, strong leadership: surely the Arabs had all they needed to deal the Israelis a comprehensive defeat. Yet behind all the bluster, the Arabs were less prepared for war than ever.

Egypt and the other Arab states had not learned the lessons of 1948. They had undertaken no meaningful war planning, and despite their mutual defense pacts, there was no military coordination between Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, let alone a strategy for defeating so determined a foe as Israel. To make matters worse, Egypt had squandered its wealth and military resources on an unwinnable war in Yemen, where one-third of its armed forces remained pinned down in May 1967. It was as though Egypt were going to war with one arm tied behind its back.

War with Israel must have been the last thing Nasser wanted in 1967, yet he was hostage to his own success. The people of Egypt and the Arab world at large had responded to his propaganda and believed in him. They had every confidence in his stewardship and felt confident that he would deliver. Nasser’s credibility and his claim to leadership in the Arab world were at stake. As each of his miscalculations took him closer to war, he had ever less room for maneuver to avoid conflict.

 

The military mobilization in Egypt provoked a deep crisis in Israel. The Israeli public, increasingly fearful of encirclement by Arab enemies, looked to their government for reassurance—and grew yet more anxious. Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol wanted to exhaust all diplomatic means before risking all-out war. His generals, headed by chief of staff Yitzhak Rabin, disagreed. They were confident they could prevail over each of the Arab armies if they acted quickly, before their adversaries could establish secure positions and coordinate a plan of attack. Cabinet meetings grew increasingly divided. Eshkol feared entering a three-front war with Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Even the hawkish former premier, David Ben-Gurion, now retired, expressed reservations to Rabin over his mobilization for war. “You have led the state into a grave situation,” he admonished Rabin. “We must not go to war. We are isolated. You bear the responsibility.”
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The two weeks between the closure of the Strait of Tiran and the outbreak of war were a period of great tension, known as the “waiting period” in Israel. The Israeli public feared for the very existence of their state and had no confidence in their prime minister, whom they saw as indecisive.

The turning point came at the end of May. Isolated within his own coalition government, Eshkol was forced to bring the belligerent retired general Moshe Dayan into his cabinet as defense minister. Dayan’s entry into the government tipped the
scales in favor of the war party. With reassurances from the United States that it would stand by Israel in the event of war, the Israeli cabinet met on June 4 and made the decision to go to war. The generals swung into immediate action.

At 8:00 A.M. on June 5, 1967, an early-warning radar station in ’Ajlun, Jordan, detected waves of aircraft setting off from Israeli air bases and heading to the south-west. The Jordanian operator immediately broadcast a warning to the Egyptian air defense operations center in Cairo and to the Egyptian Ministry of War. His warning fell on deaf ears. The corporal on duty in the main receiving station had set his radio to the wrong station, and the duty officer in the ministry failed to inform the minister. Israel went to war with the advantage of total surprise.

While waves of Israeli bombers were heading toward Egyptian airspace, the commander in chief of Egyptian forces, Field Marshal Amer, was in a transport plane with several senior officers, flying to the Sinai to review air force and infantry positions. The head of the advanced command center in Sinai, General Abd al-Muhsin Murtagi, was waiting on the ground at Tamada Air Base to receive the Egyptian military’s top brass. “At forty-five minutes past eight,” he recalled, “Israeli planes attacked the airport, destroying all aircraft and bombing runways to render them inoperational.” Incapable of landing, Amer’s plane was forced to return to Cairo, as all of the Sinai air bases were under simultaneous attack.
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