Six Days (35 page)

Bombing continued in and around Jericho. Sami Oweida, who worked for the local council, saw what it could do. Iraqi soldiers attacked by napalm ‘threw themselves in front of the water hoses. But they kept burning, uttering piercing screams.' Still, he thought he was safer at home. Oweida's seventeen-year-old daughter Adla, who had just graduated from high school, begged her father to change his mind. They left home at half past two.

On the way to the bridge we saw no less than 200 bodies of soldiers and civilians. Whoever could do so covered the bodies with any kind of cover available.

We crossed the King Hussein bridge, walking … We tried to avoid big crowds, thinking that the planes would bomb the crowds. At that moment, about four o'clock, I saw a plane coming down like a hawk directly at us. Directly. We threw ourselves on the ground and found ourselves in the midst of fire. Children were on fire. Myself, my two daughters, my son and two children of my cousin … I tried, but I couldn't do anything. Fire was all around. I carried my burning child outside the fire. The burning people became naked. Fire stuck to my hands and face. I rolled over. The fire rolled with me.

At that moment another plane was coming directly at us, coming down. I thought it was the end of us. I could not lie on my face. My hands and face were burning. I saw the plane come down over me. I thought the wheels of the plane would hit me. I saw the pilot lean over and look at me.

Sami Oweida and his family had been hit by napalm, a highly flammable jelly which is made by mixing a thickening agent with petrol. They picked up their wounded children, and kept walking towards Amman. Oweida's four-year-old daughter Labiba died that night. Adla died four days later. His son was also badly burnt, but survived.

The Israeli air force used napalm extensively in 1967. As the Americans proved in Vietnam in the 1960s, and NATO proved again in Kosovo in 1999, bombing moving traffic on the roads is an inexact science. It is very easy for high-performance aircraft to destroy what is below them. It is harder, though by no means impossible, for pilots to work out if they are killing soldiers or civilians. Sharif Zaid Ben Shaker, the cousin of King Hussein who commanded one of Jordan's two armoured brigades in the thick of the air attacks, believed until his death in 2002 that Israel did not differentiate between civilian and military traffic on the roads. As he was retreating to the East Bank on the day before Sami Oweida's family was attacked by napalm, he saw a bus full of civilians coming out of Jericho and heading for the Allenby bridge. He saw the bus again about ten minutes later, after it had been attacked from the air with napalm. ‘Women, men and children – there were no soldiers on that bus – were all sitting in their places all burnt up – and you could see the driver with his hands on the steering wheel. They didn't differentiate at all. I will never forget the smell when I passed them … They used everything they had without differentiation … they had all the time to look. They were having fun. They were overhead and choosing their targets.'

The first wave of refugees – around 125,000 people – crossed the Jordan from the first day of the war to 15 June. The Jordanian government was horrified by the arrival of so many people whom it had no way of supporting. The government, British diplomats reported, was as ‘stunned and disoriented' as its people, ‘incapable of organising the reception and distribution of relief supplies'. Radio Amman kept telling Palestinians on the West Bank to stay in their homes or their camps. When the director of public security was ordered to stop them coming, if necessary by force, he refused. The Jordanian government and UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, ran out of places to house so many people. A serious health hazard developed in UNRWA schools, where five or six families were living in every room. Camps, most of which had almost no facilities, started to spring up.

When they crossed the Jordan, people searched for news of their families and friends. All conventional communications with the West Bank were cut, so they had only alarming rumours. Exaggerated stories of military and civilian deaths in Jenin, Jerusalem, Jericho and Ramallah raced around, ratcheting up the anxiety and tension. Enterprising boys made money carrying messages to the West Bank by swimming or fording the Jordan. Palestinians abroad inundated foreign consulates in Jerusalem asking for help in tracing West Bank families who had fled.

Save the Children's senior nurse in Jordan, Mary Hawkins, was consumed by frustration. Reports of what was happening at the crossing points of the river Jordan were reaching Amman and she wanted to act. Hawkins was a vastly experienced British woman of fifty-five, for whom the word indomitable could have been invented. At the siege of Monte Cassino in the Second World War she was awarded the Croix de Guerre by the Free French forces after three days and nights under fire treating the wounded. In 1948 she worked with the first wave of Palestinian refugees, the 750,000 who lost their homes in Israel's war of independence. In 1956 she left Jordan's refugees to go to Austria. Soviet forces had crushed the Hungarian uprising. In midwinter families were being shot at by border guards and Soviet troops as they tried to get through the Iron Curtain to Austria. Some of them took their chances swimming the freezing Einser canal or crossing on rubber dinghies or inflated inner tubes. The refugees gave their children heavy doses of bromide so they kept quiet when they were passing border guards and Soviet troops. Hawkins treated the people who got over for frostbite and gave the drugged children sweet coffee to keep them conscious.

But Hawkins and the British staff of the Save the Children fund in Jordan had been under what amounted to self-imposed house arrest since the second day of the war. They had been warned that going out in public was dangerous, because so many people believed the story that British and American aircraft had intervened decisively on Israel's side. Their local colleagues had kept their operations going. They spent ‘two endless days' playing Scrabble in one of their flats in Amman.

London

The British and the Americans started an immediate propaganda counter-offensive against the accusation that they were fighting on the same side as the Israelis. Thirty years before Western governments became obsessed with the twenty-four-hour news cycle, one official complained bitterly when the Ministry of Defence in London took fourteen hours to come up with a rebuttal. Official denials were circulated widely to radio and TV stations. Conscious that denials alone would not do the job, they decided to do all they could to attack Nasser – discreetly, or their words would rebound on them. Nasser had to be shown to be responsible for the disaster that was enveloping the Arabs. The Americans had similar ideas. An official called Chet Cooper was given the job of countering the Arab accusations. He wanted to find ‘a prominent Arab willing to expose Egyptian mendacity for what it was'. Failing that, he suggested that ‘greatly increased publicity for the Egyptian use of poison gas in the Yemen might help to discredit Nasser in Arab eyes'.

In London an official recommended ways of spinning the news to give the impression that Britain was more sympathetic to the Arab side than was actually the case. Israel's official account of the way that the war started – an Egyptian attack to which it responded – should be subtly challenged. Although the British and the Americans knew that Israel's statement that it attacked on 5 June in response to an Egyptian strike was untrue, they had not publicly questioned Israel's version. Now the BBC should be urged to quote unofficial British sources reporting that the Israelis crossed the frontier first. The BBC should, the official went on, also stress Britain's arms embargo and Israel's protest against it. (In fact Britain was delivering arms to Israel until the morning the war started.)

But it was all a little late for that. The ‘big lie' stuck. By the last day of the war it was still believed firmly by almost every Arab who read the papers or listened to the radio. In Saudi Arabia senior foreign ministry officials, receiving politely formal written and spoken denials from diplomats, ‘profess to believe them but nevertheless appear sceptical'. Within two weeks some of the dust settled when the movements of British and American aircraft carriers were made public, showing they had not been involved. King Hussein accepted that he had no proof that American and British warplanes had intervened on the Israeli side. But Nasser's accusations were widely believed on the Arab street. Among many older people they still are, even though Nasser withdrew his accusations in March 1968. He told the American magazine
Look
that they had been based on ‘suspicion and faulty information'.

What was certain was that Britain and America were hoping for an Israeli victory and relaxed about Israel's intentions and even plans they might have to extend their territory. Britain's Prime Minister Harold Wilson telephoned Lester Pearson, his counterpart in Canada, on Wednesday 7 June. After expressing his surprise that the Russians had voted for the ceasefire resolution in the UN, this is how the conversation went:

WILSON
: Well, there are rumours of a
coup d'état
in Cairo. I don't know if it's true.

PEARSON
: Really.

WILSON
: It's only in the newspapers so far … What I feel is that there is a good chance now that the Israelis are generous and pretty magnanimous. They want to be settled there with everyone recognising their existence and right to live, and obviously they want Aqaba. [It is unclear whether he means access to the Gulf of Aqaba or capturing the Jordanian port of Aqaba itself.] But I understand now that they are prepared to settle the refugee problem once and for all.

PEARSON
: Well, that would be a step forward.

WILSON
: And this would help the Arabs not to lose too much face and the Israelis are conscious of this …

West Bank

By the evening Israel's job was done. Jerusalem and the West Bank were captured. The war against Jordan was over. At first the Jordanians claimed they had lost 6094 killed and missing. Later Jordanian army figures were much lower. The best estimate is around 700 dead and 2500 wounded. Israel lost 550 killed against Jordan with 2400 wounded. King Hussein, who had lived on cigarettes, caffeine and adrenaline since the war started, was exhausted. He went on Amman radio to acknowledge the defeat. ‘Our soldiers have defended every inch of our earth with their precious blood. It is not yet dry, but our country honours the stain … If in the end you were not rewarded with glory, it was not because you lacked courage but because it was the will of God.'

The speed of the Israeli advance into the West Bank was breathtaking for some of the men who took part in it. After the war an Israeli journalist called Igal Lev turned the experiences of the unit he commanded into a novel called
Jordan Patrol.
It is a revealing snapshot of the self-image of what seems to have been a typical Israeli reserve unit. In his preface Lev writes: ‘Wars were what I was born to. That is why I hate them.' War, he accepts, is foul and violent, but necessary for Israel's survival and for the construction and expansion of the state. As they advance, the soldiers are struck with the realisation that the land they are occupying was theirs.

We penetrated into the heart of the West Bank like a knife cutting into a loaf of bread … the vastness of the area and the swiftness of our advance were intoxicating. Only as we moved ahead did it occur to us how artificial and compressed Israel was. We who were born there and had never travelled overseas had looked upon the size and extent of Israel as the infinite. All of a sudden we came upon other vistas and so discovered our country anew – a lovely green land of hills and dales with pastures in between. Our country.

As the men move forward they come upon Arab villages, which they search for weapons and soldiers. They are humane, standing in ‘awkward confusion' when a baby bursts into tears, ‘frightened by the sight of our sweaty figures, our steel helmets and Uzis at the ready'. Lev recognises the child's tears as a ‘protest against the madness'. They demand that the village headman finds the baby's mother so it can be cared for properly. But moments later they show their strength, which is as important to the way they see themselves as their embarrassed reaction to the baby. One of the soldiers, ‘with nerves of steel and great strength' interrogates the village elders to find where they keep their weapons. ‘… at first I was surprised by the brutality with which he carried out the searches.' But then, as the soldier beats the truth out of ‘a sweating, pale frightened man' and ‘a yellowish stain' spreads out on the front of the Arab's robe, the violence is shown to be necessary. He confesses that they do have weapons and blurts out where they are. The soldier gives him a final blow – then rushes out of the Arab's house, ‘retching horribly … I realised then what a strain the searches and the interrogations were for him.'

Washington DC

The Americans were turning their minds to what would happen after the war. A State Department paper stated that the US needed peace in the Middle East and ‘reasonably friendly relations with both Israel and the Arab states'. But any US peace plan faced big obstacles. There was the ‘stubborn Arab refusal to recognise that Israel is here to stay'. The Arabs regarded the Americans as Israel's ally and their ‘imperialistic arch enemies'. But Israel's attitude was another obstacle. ‘Through years of experience, the Israelis have come to believe that the Arabs understand only force and that it is hopeless to negotiate with them on any other basis. While they talk of an overall peace settlement with the Arabs, they have understandably been reluctant to offer serious concessions for that purpose. Their leverage in US domestic politics can limit our flexibility.'

President Johnson was not as exhilarated about Israel's rapid-fire victories as some of his subordinates. Glumly, he told them he was ‘not sure we were out of our troubles'. America's objective should be to ‘develop as few heroes and as few heels as we can … It is important for everyone to know we are not for aggression. We are sorry this has taken place.' He warned them that by the time the US had finished, ‘with all the festering problems we are going to wish the war had not happened'.