Six Days (28 page)

The Syrian army had about 70,000 soldiers, organised into ten brigades. Seven of them were infantry (half of them motorised), two had tanks and there was one artillery brigade. Syria also had an anti-aircraft artillery division, which was dispersed around the country, and a national guard, which was parcelled out among regular units on the border with Israel. Major Ibrahim Ali, the commander of a ‘People's Army' of 1000 civilians, claimed it was armed and ready. An American military analysis commented that ‘their effectiveness in a combat situation is questionable'.

On the eve of the war the Syrian army was still in the throes of a debilitating purge. It had started in September 1966, following the failure of yet another attempted military coup. Once the coup was crushed, Syria's ruler Salah Jadid and his right-hand man, Major-General Hafez al-Asad, the commander of the air force and defence minister, began what turned into the biggest ever purge of the Syrian armed forces. On the eve of war in 1967, it was still going on. Salim Hatum, who led the attempted coup, arrived back at the border saying that he had come home to fight. He was arrested and tortured. The head of the secret police, Colonel Abd al-Karim al-Jundi, broke his ribs before he was shot.

The other coup leaders included Major-General Fahd al-Sha'ir, graduate of a Soviet military academy, deputy chief of staff and commander of the south-west front, the only one that mattered to the Syrian army because it faced Israel. He was arrested and among other indignities reportedly had to ‘get down on all fours like an animal and was ridden by his tormentors through dirty water'. Four hundred officers were dismissed. While Israel was training new officers and making sure they exercised regularly with the men they would be commanding in battle, the only Syrian manoeuvres were political.

Imwas, 0800

Hikmat Deeb Ali, from his position in the church, watched the Israeli soldiers going from house to house as the sun came up. They moved carefully. No shots were fired. Israeli jeeps fitted with loudspeakers told everyone to assemble in the centre of the village. A soldier who spoke Arabic told them: ‘You have one road to leave. It's the Ramallah road. We don't want to see one of you pass by your home. You leave from here.' An old man asked the soldier if he could go home to get his shoes, because he was barefoot. ‘If you do that,' the soldier told him, ‘you will die. You should head for Ramallah.' No one was allowed to pack belongings or to search for missing relatives.

In Beit Nuba, Zchiya Zaid, the wife of the Moukhtar, the village headman, saw some of her neighbours coming out of their houses when the soldiers moved in. ‘The soldiers did not harm civilians and they distributed food, sweets and cigarettes. The ones who wouldn't leave willingly were forced out. The soldiers called “Go to Hussein! Go to Hussein!” We couldn't take anything with us, only our children.'

The column of refugees moved off. Watching from the church, Hikmat Deeb Ali saw his own family walking between lines of soldiers. With his wife were their six children. The youngest was a week old. When they had gone Hikmat and his two cousins crept back to their family house. It was still intact. A patrol found them there and they left. On the edge of the village ‘we saw hell. Young children, elderly, the ill, the handicapped, kids that couldn't walk, an old lady, all being accompanied out. Every time I think of it I want to lose my mind. Everyone left in what they stood up in, pyjamas, suit, anything you had on, that's the way you left.' He heard one of the villagers protesting to an Israeli soldier. The soldier told him that, ‘If anyone remains, you will die.'

Cairo, 0900

Cairo Radio was still making up news and broadcasting threats. Its morning report said: ‘We have defeated Israel on the first day of the battle, we will defeat it every moment and every hour. We will conquer it in the air and on the land and destroy it for ever … bid farewell to life, Israel.' After their disturbed night, the American journalists in the Hilton did not get any breakfast. The bell captain said Israeli planes were coming back, so meals were suspended. On every corner, loudspeakers were blaring ‘strike, strike, strike'. The journalists went to the press centre and looked at the morning papers.
Al Akhbar,
one of the Cairo dailies, splashed ‘Our Armoured Forces Advance Deeply Inside The Enemy Lines'. The English language
Egyptian Gazette
had a similar headline. Inside there was a shot of what the caption said was ‘the wreckage of the wicked raider'. Its horoscope told readers ‘to take action along technical lines if you would realise better than average gains today'.

Another air raid started at 9:05 a.m. A few minutes later the Middle East News Agency ticker ‘chattered out a communiqué marked “urgent, urgent”': ‘It has been definitely proved that the United States and Britain are participating in the Israeli military aggression. Some US and British aircraft carriers are undertaking large scale activities in supporting Israel…'

Nasser and Hussein's plan was bearing fruit. During the next two hours, similar reports were broadcast from Amman and Damascus. Dan Garcia, a diplomat from the US Embassy, promptly pinned up a press release. It said the allegation was a ‘total fabrication'. As the journalists gathered round to read it, the Egyptian press officer Kamal Bakr tore it down. The reporters had pestered Bakr to meet some of the Egyptian army's senior officers. They wanted to see evidence of the military success that the communiqués were trumpeting. Now they were told there would be no briefings and they were not allowed to go out on their own. It did not matter, for the time being anyway. The allegation that the United States and Britain were involved in the war was big news. They filed their stories. But Westerners in Cairo were starting to feel very conspicuous. In Washington the CIA reported to the president: ‘Cairo may be preparing to launch a campaign urging strikes against US interests in the Arab world. Both Egyptian and Syrian domestic broadcasts this morning called on the “Arab masses” to destroy all US and “imperialist” interests in the Arab homeland.'

Their stories filed, the journalists followed their professional instincts and disobeyed the official request to stay in the press centre. A man pulled up in a Land Rover and spat at them. They noticed that the police guard on the American Embassy compound had been doubled. Inside, the staff were burning their classified papers. The tension in the building went up another notch when, at 10:40 a.m., Cairo Radio broadcast that ‘beyond a shadow of doubt' the US and Britain had intervened on Israel's side, flying combat missions from aircraft carriers against Israel and Jordan. They expected the crowd outside would try to break in. An hour later a mob torched the British Consulate and the US library in Alexandria.

The accusations that the British and the Americans had intervened on Israel's side raced around the world. British diplomats immediately dubbed it ‘the Big Lie'. Britain's ambassador in Kuwait went to the foreign ministry to protest that it was all a fiction. He was ‘dumbfounded' to discover that the ministry's most senior official believed the reports were true. After Britain's collusion with Israel and France to make war on Egypt in 1956, they seemed highly credible. Arab oil-producing countries were meeting in Baghdad. They decided to stop selling oil to any country that supported Israel. In Damascus the US ambassador Hugh Smythe went to the foreign ministry to deny the accusations. He was greeted by an official who pulled out two small pages of hand-written notes. The official read out a statement breaking off diplomatic relations because of America's ‘historical' position towards the Arabs and its collusion with Israel. The Embassy staff were given forty-eight hours to leave the country. A junior administrative type was allowed a week to ‘clear up'.

Amman, 0900

King Hussein was exhausted. The night had been disastrous for Jordan and he had not slept. He could not find many straws to clutch. Twenty-four hours into the war, it had already come down to limiting the size of the defeat that he always knew was coming. He warned the Americans that Egypt was going to blame them for starting the war. He did not pass on his side of the conversation with Nasser. The king was in constant contact with foreign embassies, especially the Americans and the British, his two most important foreign allies. If they could intercede with the Israelis there might be a chance of salvaging something from the mess. He told the Americans that his forces had suffered a night of ‘purely punitive attacks'. If they did not stop, Jordan would be ‘finished'. Reports of appalling losses were coming in from his field commanders. Casualty reports were, in fact, consistently inflated, perhaps because of the confusion of battle, perhaps because they wanted an excuse for Israeli success.

Ordinary Jordanians still had no idea how badly the war was going. Leila Sharaf went to give blood with her friend Mrs Shakir. Jordan still had a bad case of war fever. The streets were full of excitement, overwrought chatter and wild rumours. Claims that Israel had destroyed most of the Egyptian air force were laughed off as propaganda. Someone told Mrs Sharaf that Nasser had built underground airstrips, which would soon be launching a new wave of attacks on the Jews. Someone else said the Syrian army had penetrated deep into northern Israel. Mrs Sharaf listened with horror. Her husband, the minister of information, who was in the operations room most of the time, had told her what was really happening. But not one of the people she overheard exchanging excited gossip, stories and speculation doubted what they were hearing on the radio about an Arab victory. The message that Voice of the Arabs in Cairo had pumped out to the rest of the Arab world – that Nasser, their inspiration, had created a mighty army – was deeply ingrained. The mood was so unreal that when Leila Sharaf heard bangs and explosions near her house she assumed they came from fireworks, let off in honour of a victory that would come if only Arabs believed in it hard enough. Her husband had to pull her inside. It was not fireworks, it was anti-aircraft fire, and Israeli planes were coming in low.

Thanks to Voice of the Arabs, the Arab delegations at the UN in New York were as ill-informed as the people on Amman's streets. Since they had heard that fighting had started on Monday, all of them kept their short-wave radios tuned to Cairo. They believed what they heard, rejoicing as the Arab victory seemed to unfold. In Amman the Jordanian foreign minister Ahmed Toukan realised very early on that the fighting had to be stopped as soon as possible or Jordan would lose Jerusalem and the West Bank. But Dr Muhammad al-Farra, Jordan's ambassador to the UN, would not believe him when he called. At first he refused to press for a ceasefire because Cairo Radio was telling him that what they really needed to organise was a victory party.

The British military attaché in Amman, Colonel J. F. Weston-Simons, had been watching events over the previous three weeks with something approaching disgust. Arab propaganda had tried to ‘lift its listeners with ever increasing speed to a sublime state of religious intoxication. Martial music, interspersed with stirring words encouraging the holy war, blared from radios. The Jordanian armed services prepared to ride on white and chivalrous steeds to battle.' General Khammash, the chief of staff, was one of very few ‘sophisticated and far thinking officers'. The rest, ‘intoxicated' by the pact with Nasser and ‘blinded by their infinite capacity for self-deception … simply assumed without any justification, that they were more than a match for the Israelis'.

But by the second morning of the war, there were no more illusions left at army headquarters. The war was lost and the king was in despair. What made matters even more complicated was that he did not feel ready to tell the people the truth. ‘We must stop the fighting, but for God's sake the Israelis must not announce anything publicly, or there would be anarchy here,' he told the American ambassador.

Jerusalem, 1000

Narkiss was keeping the pressure on the Israeli general staff to authorise an attack on the Old City. He told them that they would be blamed for the failure if they did not do it. The Israelis were mopping up most of the built-up part of East Jerusalem outside the city walls. There was still isolated, freelance resistance, from soldiers who had been cut off from their units who stayed to fight and die, or from a few handfuls of Palestinian men who were using the weapons that had been distributed at the last minute. Around 100 armed Palestinian civilians died in the fighting. Soldiers and a few volunteers still manned the city walls, and put down deadly fire on the Israelis below them.

Rubi Gat, an eight-year old Israeli boy, was with his family in their basement. He was excited. Now he would have a war, his war, to talk about. He had always been jealous of the way that his older sisters told stories about the 1956 war, about how their father looked when he went off to join his unit. In the last few weeks Rubi and his friends at school had been told what to do when the fighting started. They had rehearsed how they would walk home, as quickly as they could, keeping close to the walls in case shells fell. The day before a Jordanian shell had landed close to Rubi's house. He had picked up fragments of shrapnel afterwards. He fingered them as he listened to the muffled explosions coming from the Mount of Olives.

On the Jordanian side of Jerusalem the American journalist Abdullah Schliefer had moved his family into three small rooms off the stairwell of his building in the Old City. The streets were almost empty. Sometimes he would see an army patrol, or a civil defence team racing boxes of ammunition to where they were needed. Inside the ancient walled city it felt medieval, like ‘an old-fashioned garrison under siege in a war fought with supersonic jets, napalm and tanks'.

Amman, 1230

General Riad and King Hussein agreed they had three choices. First, hope the UN Security Council or one of the big powers could stop the fighting; second, evacuate the West Bank in the coming night; or third, hang on to the West Bank for another twenty-four hours, which would lead to ‘the total destruction of the Jordanian army'. It was a grim menu. Riad put it into a telegram for Nasser, while the king sent one of his own. ‘The situation is deteriorating rapidly. In Jerusalem it is critical. In addition to our very heavy losses in men and equipment, for lack of air protection, our tanks are being disabled at the rate of one every ten minutes.' Rightly, the king did not trust Nasser. He wanted him to be implicated in any decision he had to take, not just through General Riad, but personally. Just as his coded message was being transmitted to Cairo, the answer to Riad's telegram arrived from Field Marshal Amer: ‘We agree to the retreat from the West Bank, and the arming of the civilian population.' Hussein and his chief of staff Amer Khammash suspected a trick. Khammash warned the king that the Egyptians might pounce on a Jordanian withdrawal as an excuse to pull out of the Sinai. The Egyptians might then try to present their defeat as a Jordanian betrayal. If a story like that stuck, Hussein's throne would be in even more jeopardy. The sad truth for the Jordanians was that withdrawal from the West Bank was looking like the least bad option. But to pull out on Cairo's orders could be a serious error. They decided to hang on longer. Even at moments of great crisis, the Arab leaders could not trust each other