Six Days (29 page)

Hussein summoned the ambassadors of the UK, USA, France and the Soviet Union to give them the same message he had sent Nasser. He begged them, on their own or through the Security Council, to arrange a ceasefire. The king said he would still prefer the ceasefire not to be announced. But if the Israelis wanted it done publicly, then that was fine too. On the way out of the palace, the American ambassador had to take cover as the air-raid sirens sounded. The Israelis were back again.

Jerusalem, 1230

Generals Narkiss, Dayan and Weizman arrived in East Jerusalem in a convoy of two half-tracks and a jeep. As usual on a windy open-top journey, Dayan had taken off his black eyepatch and put on a pair of dark glasses. Narkiss greeted Major Doron Mor, second in command of Battalion 66 of the paratroopers, who was an old friend. He told Mor they wanted to go to Mount Scopus. Mor told him they had not sent troops up to clear the road yet. Narkiss said, ‘So clear it now.' But all Mor's men were committed elsewhere. He took a risk. All he had were two jeeps mounted with recoilless rifles. Narkiss, Dayan and Weizman got into one of them. Mor, in the other, ‘took some grenades and told the driver to go as fast as he could. Narkiss and the others followed. It took a minute. The road was empty. No one shot at us. When we got to the barrier at Mount Scopus the soldiers started to kiss us.'

As Mor stood admiring the view, the first time he had seen Jerusalem from the east, he heard Narkiss and Dayan talking about capturing the Old City.

Dayan was also enraptured by what he could see. Narkiss thought his moment had come. With the two of them looking down on the breathtaking sight of Jerusalem on a beautiful day in early summer, Narkiss said softly, ‘Moshe, we must go into the Old City.' Dayan snapped back to business. ‘Under no circumstances.' He was not a man for small talk. He wanted to surround it and wait for it to surrender ‘like a ripe fruit'. He ordered Narkiss to take the heights behind Jerusalem that commanded the north and east sides of the Old City.

Israeli troops were also advancing on the Old City from the south. The district of Abu Tor, which straddled the border between East and West Jerusalem close to Government House, fell in the afternoon. The Jordanians fought hard as they retreated. A company of men from Israel's Jerusalem Brigade was caught in a bombardment as they crossed Hebron Road, near Jerusalem railway station. Casualties were left all over the street. Then a sniper killed all four members of a machine gun team as they crossed the road. When a bazooka man was sent to try to blast the sniper out of his position, which was only ten metres away, the sniper killed him while he was aiming. It took a grenade tossed in through the firing slits of his position to silence the sniper. As they pushed into Abu Tor, the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Michael Paikes, led his command group into a Jordanian trench that supposedly had been captured. Suddenly a Jordanian with a rifle dropped down next to them. He was as surprised as they were. The battalion's intelligence officer, Johnny Heiman, grabbed the man's rifle. Three more Jordanians jumped into the trench. Two saw what was happening and ran. The third shot Paikes dead before escaping and attacking Heiman. They grappled together on the floor of the trench until Heiman managed to empty his Uzi into his assailant.

Jenin, northern West Bank, 1300

It took until the afternoon to subdue the last Jordanian and Palestinian resistance in Jenin. Israeli troops had been in the town since 0730, after a night of hard and confused fighting. Sherman tanks, following standard Israeli doctrine for fighting in a built-up area, moved up and down firing in all directions, followed by infantry. Then, south of Jenin, Jordan's best commander, Brigadier-General Rakan al-Jazi and his 40th Armoured Brigade arrived. They were returning from a wild-goose chase to Jericho, where they had been sent to relieve the 60th, Jordan's other armoured brigade while it went to take part in the Egyptian offensive that never was against Beersheba. The Jordanians reoccupied the positions they had abandoned for their unscheduled trip to Jericho, controlling an important road junction at Qabitiyah.

Most of Jenin's civilians took to caves and hills around the town. But not all of them. Haj Arif Abdullah took his Bren gun and five armed men and went out to the 40th Brigade to continue the fight. He was a big and burly man, forty-five years old, with seventeen children. During the British occupation he had served with the RAF police. The Jordanians made him commander of the local national guard but he had a stormy relationship with the king's men because of his strong nationalist views. He supported the Ba'th party, the pan-Arab, left-wing political movement that swept through Syria and Iraq in the fifties and threatened to do the same in Jordan. Between 1957 and 1961 he was in and out of prison. The longest spell was two years, for trying to overthrow the monarchy. He was pardoned when tensions in the Middle East were rising, so he decided that his real enemy was Israel, not King Hussein. A year before the war, recognising that Haj Arif Abdullah was a necessary man in Jenin, the local Jordanian commander sent him his own Bren light machine gun and twelve boxes of ammunition.

The 40th Armoured Brigade was ready twelve hours before the Israelis expected them. They hit Brig. Gen. Elad Peled's armoured brigade with an ambush. Back in Jenin they heard the roar of tank fire. It inspired the defenders who were still fighting to counter-attack. Peled sent a relief column to rescue his tanks, which were trapped and low on fuel and ammunition. Al-Jazi's scouts told him that they were coming. Fifty to sixty Pattons were ready, hull down on a ridge, and blasted another batch of Israeli tanks when they came down the road towards them. Israel lost seventeen Super Shermans. Haj Arif Abdullah was disappointed that the Israelis did not send infantry with the tanks. He fired at the Israeli tank commanders, who as usual were fighting with their bodies exposed in their turrets. Another thrust from the Israelis was beaten off later in the afternoon. The Jordanians tried to chase them, but were pushed back by artillery and air strikes. By nightfall, the Jordanians still controlled the crossroads, cutting the main north–south road through the highlands of the West Bank and a major east–west artery.

Amman, afternoon

General Riad was calm enough in the face of the disaster to take regular naps in a special room set aside for him at the headquarters building. King Hussein was wide awake, though he felt the day was ‘like a dream, or worse yet, a nightmare'. He felt out of his depth at the headquarters in Amman: ‘Standing in front of maps in the operations centre, everything [seemed] abstract, vague and not very convincing.' So, driving a jeep with a two-way radio, the king left with his bodyguards for the Jordan valley. He saw for himself just how bad it was.

… 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, giving off that particular smell of metal and paint burned by exploding bombs – a stink that only powder can make. In the midst of this charnel house were men. In groups of thirty to forty, 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.

When he returned to Amman King Hussein was back on the phone to Findley Burns, the American ambassador, straight away. What had Israel said about the ceasefire? Burns went immediately to the palace to pass on the bad news from the Israelis. They were not interested in a ceasefire. Hussein had been given his chance to avoid the war on Monday morning. He had chosen to ignore Israel's warning. Now he was reaping his reward. The king was now more convinced than ever that the Israelis wanted to destroy his army. He told Burns about his own tour of the front lines that afternoon. The army had virtually ceased to exist. Some units were still fighting, even though they had been without air cover for the last twenty-four hours. The big question now was whether to abandon the West Bank. ‘If I evacuate tonight, I am told I will lose 50 per cent of my men and only limited equipment could be evacuated. If we do not withdraw tonight we will be chewed up. Tomorrow will leave only the choice of ordering the destruction of our equipment and leaving every soldier to look after himself.' General Riad, ‘who had been pretty much running the whole show', was telling him to withdraw. The decision had to be taken soon.

Gaza

Egyptians and Palestinians had fought hard and killed scores of Israeli soldiers. But two Israeli brigades had mastered an urban battlefield which, on the first day of the war, had been defended by 10,000 armed men. Now Israeli troops were mopping up scattered resistance. Much of it came from Palestinian civilians, who had been given arms by the Egyptian authorities. Some fought to the death. Some were shot out of hand after they surrendered. Twenty-eight young men from the Abu Rass family in Gaza's Zaytoun district were captured, taken away and summarily executed. Their bodies were dug up from a mass grave by their family and reburied after the war.

But, according to their families, men of military age who had not taken up arms were also deliberately killed. In Khan Younis, where fighting had been especially bitter, Shara Abu Shakrah, a woman of forty, was at home with her husband Zaid Salim Abu Nahia. He made his living selling tomatoes, potatoes and okra from a stall. Zaid's thirty-year-old brother Mustafa and his wife were there too, with Ghanem, another brother, and Mohammed, Zaid's son from an earlier marriage. They had all been sheltering inside, hoping that the fighting would pass them by.

Suddenly they heard loud voices outside the house, calling in broken Arabic for the men to come out. The men complied. The women were terrified. Their first thought was that the Israelis wanted to kill their men. Their fears were based on what had happened in the 1956 war. Then, on 3 November, the invading Israeli troops carried out a series of massacres in Khan Younis. They started in the centre of the town, then moved out into the suburbs. Between 500 and 700 Palestinians, mainly civilians, were summarily executed. The dead included children and the elderly. In one case, twenty-one members of a single family died together.

Shara and the other women in the house screamed and tried to push their way out into the yard outside. They thought it was happening again. The Israeli soldiers pushed them back inside and blocked the door. Inside, the women heard shooting. They pushed harder against the door, trying to get out. In a few minutes the door opened and they spilled out into the yard.

Mustafa was lying dead in the dust. He had three sons and two daughters. Next to him Mohammed was badly wounded, with a hole in his stomach which was bleeding profusely. A few yards further on, they found Ghanem's body. Shara could not see Zaid, her husband. She found his body on the other side of the house. He had been shot through the head.

The women washed and wrapped the bodies, preparing them for burial. But under Muslim law, they could not bury them. They waited three days for the curfew to be lifted long enough for neighbours to come round to do the job. Before that happened, while the bodies were decomposing rapidly in the heat and humidity of Gaza in early summer, more Israeli soldiers came to the house, asking Shara where the men had gone. ‘We screamed and threw sand at them, and scooped sand from the ground on to our faces. We said come to see them, they're dead.' Mohammed took two days to die. His stomach wound kept on bleeding. ‘We had no doctor, no medical treatment. We were all women, we didn't know what to do.'

Cairo, 1630

By Tuesday afternoon, a day and a half after the fighting started, news of the defeats in the desert overnight was coming in to Amer at GHQ in Cairo. It seemed to General Fawzi, the Egyptian army chief of staff, that Field Marshal Amer was ‘psychologically worn out … on the verge of nervous collapse'. Suddenly, he called Fawzi into his office and gave him twenty minutes to make a plan to pull the Egyptian army out of Sinai to the west bank of the Suez canal. It was the first direct order that Amer had given to his chief of staff since the war began. A fighting withdrawal is a legitimate and effective military tactic. It takes good organisation and a brave rearguard that will keep on shooting until the rest of the forces can pull back to a defensible position. At their military academy and staff college, Egyptian officers learnt about Britain's withdrawal to El-Alamein in 1942, when Montgomery and his commanders rallied their troops and forced them to hold on until they had rebuilt their strength for the offensive that turned the tide of war in North Africa. Some senior Egyptian officers even met Montgomery himself in Egypt in May 1967, when he came for the commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the battle of El-Alamein. Many Egyptian units, though battered, were still largely intact. A fighting withdrawal should have been possible.

After the order from Amer, Fawzi dashed off and with two other generals came up with a plan and a timetable for a withdrawal to the canal that would take four days and three nights. In his memoirs Fawzi describes what happened when they presented the plan to Amer and told him how long it would take. ‘He raised his voice and addressing me said, “Four days and three nights, Fawzi? I have already given the order to withdraw and that's that.” His face had become very red and he left, looking somewhat hysterical, for his bedroom, which was behind his office. The three of us were left completely taken aback by his condition.'

Amer claimed that Nasser had approved the decision. Nasser claimed the decision was Amer's. Whoever was finally responsible, Amer passed the order on in what had become his signature haphazard manner, mentioning it to everyone he spoke to in the field. According to Vice-President Abdul Latif Boghdady, Amer told them to dump their heavy weapons and pull out during the night, to try to get to the west side of the canal before dawn. When Boghdady visited Amer on Tuesday evening and heard what was happening he told Amer it was ‘a disgrace'. Amer replied, ‘It is not a matter of honour or bravery, but a matter of saving our boys. The enemy has destroyed two of our divisions.' Apart from getting involved in the war in the first place, Egypt's worst error in June 1967 was its shambolic withdrawal from Sinai, which led to the deaths of thousands of Egyptian soldiers and the loss of millions of dollars' worth of equipment.