Arabs (71 page)

At exactly the same time, Vice President Husayn al-Shaf ‘i of Egypt was taking the Iraqi prime minister, Tahir Yahya, on a tour of the Suez Canal Zone. They touched down in the Fayed airport at 8:45, just as the first wave of Israeli planes attacked. “Our plane was able to land,” Shaf ’i wrote,

As the delegation made its way back to Cairo by car, columns of smoke were seen rising above each of the air bases it passed.

In less than three hours the Israeli air force had achieved air supremacy over Egypt, eliminating all of its bombers and 85 percent of its fighter aircraft, and inflicting such damage on radar systems and runways as to prevent other aircraft from using Egyptian airspace. Indeed, Nasser requested that the Algerian government lend its MiGs to his air force before he realized that the extent of the damage to Egypt’s air bases prevented their deployment.

With the Egyptian air force out of commission, the Israelis went to work next on Jordan and Syria. King Hussein had put his armed forces under Egyptian command in keeping with the defense agreement he had concluded with Nasser six days earlier. The Egyptian commander now ordered Jordanian artillery and the Jordanian air force to attack Israeli air bases. The small Jordanian air force had made its first sorties and returned to base to refuel when it was struck by Israeli jets shortly after noon. In two waves, the Israelis eliminated the entire Jordanian air force—planes, runways, and bases. They turned next to attack the Syrians, eliminating two-thirds of Syria’s air force in the course of the afternoon.

Once they had achieved control of the skies, the Israelis dispatched their ground forces in a bid to eliminate their Arab adversaries—Egypt, Jordan, and Syria—in quick succession so as to avoid fighting on more than one front at a time. They began in the Sinai, deploying some 70,000 infantry and 700 tanks against a total Egyptian force of 100,000 in the Sinai. After intensive fighting on June 5, the Israelis had captured large parts of the Gaza Strip, broken through Egyptian lines on the Mediterranean coast, and seized the strategic crossroads of Abu ’Uwigla in eastern Sinai by nightfall.

The Egyptians fought back. The next morning the Egyptian commanders ordered one of their armored divisions to retake Abu ’Uwigla. General El-Gamasy was a witness. “I saw one of our armoured brigades under attack. It was heartbreaking. The Israeli planes had complete freedom of the skies. The tanks were moving across open desert in daylight, which made them easy targets with no effective means of defense.”
²⁵
By afternoon, the Egyptian assault was abandoned. Field Marshal Amer, without consulting his officers on the ground, gave orders for a general retreat from the Sinai to regroup his forces on the west bank of the Suez Canal. Disorganized and uncoordinated, this retreat turned Egypt’s defeat into a rout. El-Gamasy recalled watching the troops “withdraw in the most pathetic way . . . under continuous enemy air attacks, which had turned the Mitla Pass into an enormous graveyard of scattered corpses, burning equipment, and exploding ammunition.”
²⁶

Now that Egypt’s military had been neutralized, the Israelis turned to the Jordanian front. After the successful air strikes of June 5, the Israelis used their air supremacy to good effect, bombing the Jordanian armored units that had mounted a serious defense of the West Bank. Concerted Israeli attacks on Jordanian positions in Jerusalem and Jenin continued through the night before the air force could resume its strikes at dawn. By June 6 the Jordanian ground forces were besieged in the Old City of Jerusalem and on the retreat from Jenin. King Hussein went to the front to assess the situation for himself. “I will never forget the hallucinating sight of that defeat. Roads clogged with trucks, jeeps, and all kinds of vehicles twisted, disembowelled, dented, still smoking,” he recalled. “In the midst of this charnel house
were men. In groups of thirty or two, wounded, exhausted, they were trying to clear a path under the monstrous coup de grace being dealt them by a horde of Israeli Mirages screaming in a cloudless blue sky seared with sun.”
²⁷

Hussein continued to hold out, both to avoid incrimination from his fellow Arabs for breaking ranks and in hopes of a UN cease-fire, which might save his position in Jerusalem and the West Bank. But the cease-fire came too late for Jordan. The Old City of Jerusalem fell on the morning of June 7, and Jordanian positions in the rest of the West Bank crumbled before the Israelis agreed to a cease-fire with the Jordanians. Syria and Egypt agreed to a cease-fire with Israel on June 8, but the Israelis pressed their advantage and attacked Syria, occupying the Golan Heights, before bringing the Six Day War to an end on June 10, 1967.

 

Stunned by their losses, the Egyptian commanders resorted to fantasy to buy time. On the first day of fighting, Cairo reported the downing of 161 Israeli planes.
²⁸
The Syrians followed suit, claiming to have shot down 61 Israeli aircraft in the opening hours of the war. It was the beginning of a concerted disinformation campaign broadcast over the radio waves and reproduced in the state-controlled newspapers that led the Arab world to believe that Israel was on the verge of total defeat. “We heard about the war from the radio,” one Egyptian intelligence officer recalled. “The whole world thought that our forces were at the outskirts of Tel Aviv.”
²⁹

To the extent the Arab leadership was willing to acknowledge setbacks, they blamed them on American collusion with the Israelis. On the first day of the war, the Voice of the Arabs broadcast the accusation that “the United States is the enemy. The United States is the hostile force behind Israel. The United States, oh Arabs, is the enemy of all peoples, the killer of life, the shedder of blood, that is preventing you from liquidating Israel.”
³⁰
Nasser actually contacted King Hussein of Jordan, notorious in progressive Arab circles for his close relations with both Britain and the United States, to coordinate statements pinning the blame for Israeli gains on an Anglo-American collusion. In an indiscrete telephone conversation intercepted by Israeli intelligence, Nasser was delighted by Hussein’s acquiescence. “I will make an announcement,” Nasser explained, “and you will make an announcement and we will see to it that the Syrians will make an announcement that American and British airplanes are taking part against us from aircraft carriers. We will stress the matter.”
³¹
The fact that Britain and France had gone to war with Israel against Egypt in 1956 only gave credence to the rumors of conspiracy.

The disinformation campaign perpetrated by the Arab leadership did nothing but postpone the awful day of reckoning when they would have to present their citizens with the magnitude of their losses: the total defeat of the armies and air forces of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, and the occupation of vast Arab territory: the whole of
Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula; the Palestinian Gaza Strip; the West Bank, including Arab East Jerusalem; and the Syrian Golan Heights.

Yet during the first week of June, the deluded Arab masses were still celebrating. Jubilant crowds organized victory celebrations across the Arab world, never once suspecting that their leaders were lying to them. Anwar Sadat recalled his sense of despair as he watched the spontaneous parades “applauding the faked-up victory reports which our mass media put out hourly. The fact that they were rejoicing in an imaginary victory—rejoicing in what was in effect
defeat
—made me feel sorry for them, pity them, and deeply hate those who had deceived them and Egypt as a whole.” Sadat dreaded the inevitable moment of truth when the Egyptian people “realized that the victory they had been sold was in fact a terrible disaster.”
³²

That moment came on June 9, when Nasser took to the airwaves to assume full responsibility for the “reversal”—Nasser gave the war its Arabic name,
al-Naksa
—and to tender his resignation. He maintained the accusation of Anglo-American collusion with Israel. The war, he argued, was but the latest chapter in a long history of imperialist domination of Egypt and the Arab world, with the United States now taking the lead. As Sadat recalled, Nasser argued that the United States “wanted to be in sole control of the world and to ‘rule’ Egypt into the bargain. As Nasser could not grant this wish, he had no option but to step down and hand over power.”
³³

Immediately after this broadcast, the streets of Cairo filled with demonstrators, “men, women, and children from all classes and walks of life,” Sadat recalled in his memoirs, “united by their sense of crisis into one solid mass, moving in unison and speaking with the same tongue, calling on Nasser to stay on.” It was enough for the people of Egypt to come to terms with the shock of defeat. They did not want to do so without Nasser. For the Egyptians, keeping their leader was part of resisting defeat and foreign domination—“the United States this time, not Britain.” For seventeen hours, Sadat claimed, the people refused to leave the streets until Nasser agreed to rescind his resignation.
³⁴
Though he agreed to remain in office, Nasser never recovered from “the setback.”

 

The losses of 1967 ushered in a radical new age of Arab politics. The magnitude of the defeat, combined with the deliberate deception of the Arab public, set off a crisis of confidence in Arab political leaders. Even Nasser, back by popular acclaim, was not spared public scorn. Sadat, not always generous to his predecessor, recalled how after the defeat of 1967, “people everywhere sneered at [Nasser] and made him a laughing stock.” The other Arab leaders enjoyed a moment of respite as Nasser, the Arab colossus, was knocked off his plinth. They no longer had to fear the tirades of Nasser’s propaganda machine broadcast over the Voice of the Arabs when they failed to toe Egypt’s line. Nevertheless the moment did not last long. Internal threats swiftly mounted against Arab leaders in the aftermath of “the setback.”

Public disenchantment set off a wave of coups and revolutions against governments across the Arab world, just as had happened after the 1948 war. President Abd al-Rahman ‘Arif of Iraq was toppled by a coup led by the Ba’th in 1968. King Idris of Libya was overthrown by a Free Officers coup headed by Colonel Muammar al-Qadhafi, and Ja’far al-Numayri wrested power from the Sudanese president in 1969. In 1970, Syrian president Nur al-Din Atassi fell to a military coup that brought Hafiz al-Asad to power. Each of these new governments adopted a radical Arab nationalist platform as the basis of their legitimacy, calling for the destruction of Israel, the liberation of Palestine, and triumph over imperialism—this time epitomized by the United States.

The 1967 war would utterly transform America’s position in the Middle East. It was then that the special relationship between the United States and Israel began, commensurate with Arab antagonism toward the United States. The split was bound to happen, given the differences in their respective geostrategic priorities. The Americans could not convince the Arabs to take their side against the Soviet menace, and the Arabs could not get the Americans to respect their views of the Zionist threat.

During the 1967 war, U.S. president Lyndon Johnson’s administration abandoned neutrality in the Arab-Israeli conflict and tilted in favor of Israel. Believing that Nasser and his Arab socialism were taking the Arab world into the Soviet camp, they were pleased to see him discredited in defeat. Nasser, for his part, came to believe his own disinformation. What had started as a smokescreen to deflect domestic criticism—the claim of U.S. participation in the war on Israel’s side—grew into a conviction that America was using Israel to advance its own domination over the region in a new wave of imperialism. Throughout the Arab world, the alleged collusion between Israel and the United States served to explain a defeat that none could have imagined. All but four Arab countries (Tunisia, Lebanon, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia) severed relations with the United States for its alleged role in the 1967 war.

With hindsight we know Nasser’s claims that the United States actually took part in the war on Israel’s side were unfounded. In fact, the very opposite was true. On the fourth day of the war, Israeli air and naval forces attacked a surveillance ship, the U.S.S.
Liberty
, killing thirty-four U.S. servicemen and wounding 171. The Israelis never provided a public explanation for their attack, though it is apparent that they wanted to disable the ship to keep the Americans from monitoring Israeli communications from the battlefield. The fact that such an unprovoked attack, incurring so many American casualties, could so easily be forgiven reflected the nature of the new special relationship between Israel and the United States.

Arab attitudes toward Israel also underwent significant hardening in the aftermath of the Six Day War. There had been some overtures by Arab states over the two decades since the creation of the Jewish state in 1948, and some secret diplomacy between Arab and Israeli leaders. Nasser had engaged in secret exchanges with the Israelis
in 1954, and King Hussein opened direct channels with the Jewish state in 1963.
³⁵
The Arab defeat in 1967 put an end to all covert negotiations with Israel. Nasser and Hussein, who had lost the most in the war, hoped to recover Arab territory through a postwar negotiated settlement with Israel. However, they were marginalized by the hard line adopted during the meeting of Arab heads of state in late August and early September 1967. Held in Khartoum, Sudan, the Khartoum Summit is best known for the adoption of the “three nos” of Arab diplomacy: no recognition of the Jewish state, no negotiation with Israeli officials, and no peace between Arab states and Israel. Henceforth the moral high ground in Arab politics would be defined in terms of adherence to the resolutions of the summit.