Six Days (48 page)

The key post-war meeting of the Israeli cabinet on the future of the occupied territories was held in the run-up to the General Assembly session over four days from 16 to 19 June. Prime Minister Levi Eshkol and his leading cabinet ministers agreed to return captured Syrian and Egyptian land, as long as it was demilitarised under a proper peace treaty. But the West Bank was different. At no time did they want to return it to Jordan. From the very beginning, there were powerful pressures to absorb all or most of it. It was seen as a different kind of land, to which Israel had rights, part of the unfinished business of 1948 that could have been captured any time since if it had been prepared to go to war with Jordan.

Westerners tried to understand Israeli politicians by classifying them as ‘hawks' or ‘doves'. It was a false distinction. ‘Doves' like Eshkol had almost identical instincts to ‘hawks' like Yigal Allon, especially when it came to the West Bank. Both were in favour of Jewish settlement. Eshkol, Allon and the entire cabinet wanted Israel's eastern border to be along the river Jordan. Abba Eban explained that Israel's desire for security and peace meant it had to keep land: ‘No one at all in Israel was ready to return all of Jordan's territories. They would not redivide Jerusalem nor would they again expose Israel's narrow waist to the danger of shelling from Jordanian guns.' Beyond that, there were differences. Eban talked of ‘security men', led by Allon, who would not return any land in return for a settlement with King Hussein. The ‘politicians' in the cabinet believed Israel would have serious problems if it tried to absorb the Palestinians. Some of them wanted to carve an autonomous Palestinian entity out of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Eban was against the idea because he thought it would become an independent state. The justice minister Ya'acov Shimshon Shapiro protested that it was wrong to talk about colonising occupied territory, at a time when the rest of the world was decolonising.

Realising that trying to resolve the matter would cause a damaging public split, the cabinet made no final decisions and postponed any more debate. The government's first instinct was to keep what it was contemplating secret. After all, Israel's spokesmen had said repeatedly that they had no territorial ambitions in the war and absorbing Palestinian land might not go down well in Washington. When, on 18 June, two Israeli papers tried to report a plan to create a Palestinian canton that would eventually be absorbed into Israel, the military censor tried to hold up publication, a decision overturned the next day after furious protests from newspaper editors.

Various schemes for the future of the West Bank existed. Forty-eight hours after the final ceasefire, the army produced two. Three days later a memo was prepared for the prime minister about using water from the occupied territories for agriculture. In the parched Middle East, water is a critical strategic resource. In Gaza, the memo said, they were using too much. The most influential plan was put forward by Yigal Allon. It was never formally approved by the cabinet, but it is more or less what happened. Today's Israeli ideas to enclose Palestinians in small cantons are the direct descendants of what is still known in Israel as the ‘Allon Plan'. He wanted Israel's eastern border on the river Jordan, to give the country's defences strategic depth and to enclose the Palestinians in the West Bank. They would live in autonomous districts centred on their main towns, the most important of which would be surrounded by a ring of Jewish settlements and army bases, on land that Israel would annex as part of its sovereign territory. Gaza would also be absorbed by Israel once its refugees had been moved out.

Allon pressed hard for his plan to be approved because, he argued, Israel faced dangers if it did not make the running in the territories. In 1948 ‘political considerations' had stopped it finishing the job and capturing all of the West Bank and Jerusalem. Now it had to work fast or the Americans might try to impose a peace plan. Worse still, ‘the Arabs in the West Bank are recovering from their shock and they may start deluding themselves about bringing Israel back to its former borders'. Allon complained that Israel was not asserting itself enough in East Jerusalem. If it showed weakness by letting refugees back or hesitating over building settlements in the territories it would send a signal that it would pull back from the land it had captured, damaging its own bargaining position. In fact Israel had already annexed East Jerusalem and it was letting only a trickle of refugees back. Authorisation for building settlements was only two months away.

Egypt and Syria did not respond to Israel's overtures, not just because they did not take them seriously. To do so would have been political and perhaps personal suicide for an Arab leader in 1967. Even Nasser believed he would be ousted if he negotiated. Israel's insistence on direct talks was rejected on principle. Face-to-face meetings implied recognition of the Jewish state, which was why Israel wanted them and the Arabs did not. And as for the Israeli assumption that they had finally learnt their lesson, the Arabs were, the CIA warned, ‘absolutely unwilling to face reality in the Western sense, i.e., that they, as losers of the war, must pay some price and make the best deal they can with the victors'.

The leaders of Egypt and Syria might have made progress had they been prepared to swallow their pride, risk the fury of their own people and negotiate with Israel. But King Hussein would not have got very far if he had taken up Dayan's offer to pick up the phone and talk about the West Bank and Jerusalem. In late July Abba Eban told George Brown, the British foreign secretary, that ‘there was no firm Israeli government decision about the terms that could be offered to Hussein, nor even whether it was in their interests to negotiate seriously with him at all'. Brown concluded from Eban's comments that ‘if Hussein embarks on separate negotiations with Israel at this moment, through whatever channel and however discreetly, the odds are that he will not get a settlement he can live with and may well destroy himself and his regime in the process'. A CIA informant said that he would be ‘absolutely alone, nobody would support him and he would be killed as his grandfather was killed'. The British ambassador in Amman agreed. Hussein was risking ‘an assassin's bullet'. Only Nasser was capable of making a deal with Israel. ‘If he takes the lead in seeking peace, Jordan could and would come along, and the radical Arabs would be helpless.'

At the end of August the Arabs held their official inquest into the disaster at a summit in Khartoum. The Sudanese capital, which stands at the place where the Blue Nile meets the White Nile, almost cut off from the outside world by exceptional summer rains, was running out of food, petrol and aviation fuel. The people were cheerful, though. Everywhere Nasser went, he was greeted as a hero by chanting crowds. The first item on the summit's agenda called for a resumption of the war. The conference room went silent as Nasser brought a little reality to the discussion. Looking round the room he said Egypt was in no position to fight. Which other country, he asked, would like to take up arms? No one replied.

They produced a communiqué that, among other things, agreed there would be no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel and no negotiations with Israel. Western diplomats in Khartoum saw the ‘three noes' as the usual ritualistic sloganeering. Britain's representative in Khartoum, Norman Reddaway, did not even mention them directly in his report to London. Nasser, he said, was being forced by economic and military weakness ‘to seek a peaceful solution and try to rebuild his country's shattered strength'. Arabs still hated Israel, but seemed prepared for negotiations through the United Nations: ‘It is a step forward that the Arabs are ready to seek a political solution short of a direct settlement with the Israelis.'

The UN Security Council hoped Resolution 242, which it passed on 22 November 1967, would become the basis for peacemaking in the Middle East. It emphasised ‘the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war'. Israel would give up occupied territory in return for peace deals with the Arabs. A crucial piece of drafting, by the British permanent representative at the UN, Lord Caradon, was vague about the amount of land to be given up by Israel. The English language version of the resolution spoke of ‘territories' to be given up, rather than ‘the territories' or even ‘all the territories'. Caradon wanted it vague to ‘to leave room for negotiation on frontier adjustments'. Withdrawal had to be linked to a ‘just and lasting peace'. But it was not, Caradon believed, a licence for Israel to keep large amounts of land. He had been ‘greatly concerned' about the question of withdrawal since the war ended. As early as 12 June, he wrote: ‘In these days we surely cannot defend acquisition of territory by conquest … The Israelis themselves said at the beginning of their campaign that they had no aim of territorial conquest. It seems to me clear that we must say nothing which could possibly be regarded as an admission from us that they are entitled to keep what they have won by force of arms.'

The Arabs signed up to 242, fully realising that it was a tacit acknowledgement of Israel's right to exist. But Israel held up the ‘three noes' of Khartoum as proof that the Arabs did not want any settlement at all. Anyway, Israel did not take the beaten Arab leaders very seriously. A CIA source in Israel, whose name is still classified, expected Nasser to be ousted in six months while King Hussein did not ‘merit respect'. Israel needed to ‘call their bluff, stand firm and keep its nerve. Thereafter new Arab regimes must appear which can approach problems realistically.' In the meantime, the Palestinians would be useful workers. ‘A new Arab population would be superior as raw material to Iranian and Turkish peasants.'

Resolution 242 might have had immediate results if President Johnson had put his weight behind it. Making a push for peace was discussed inside the White House. Pessimists said there was no point. The Israelis were already, according to LBJ's national security aide Harold Saunders, running a ‘campaign to blacken Hussein's image and paint the bleakest picture of Nasser's intentions'. They would scuttle any settlement – and even if they did not, the Arabs would not make the compromises that were necessary for it to work. The other school of thought said that Johnson should try, even if it ended in ‘honest failure'. But Israel would have to be pressed ‘pretty hard' to get a fair settlement and 1968 was an election year. Johnson's Democrats could suffer at the polls. Saunders reflected that ‘a lot of people here and in the Arab world doubt we have the heart to try when it means leaning on Israel'. In the end there was no American peace plan. The war in Vietnam and the convulsions it was causing at home took all President Johnson's waning political energy. In March 1968, exhausted and disheartened, he decided to leave politics.

As ever in the conflict between the Jews and the Arabs, the leaders on both sides failed to display any empathy with or real understanding of the other's position. Neither side was really serious about starting a dialogue and paying the price peace entailed. Israel's destruction of the Arab armies gave it enormous confidence. They might have done a deal if it was on their terms. But, as victors, they were not prepared to make concessions of the kind that Arab leaders would need to sell peace agreements to their sullen and humiliated people – or even to try secret negotiations through an intermediary. By the end of the year, Hadow in Tel Aviv believed that, ‘If the Arabs were suddenly to announce their readiness for “direct negotiations”, the wrangling at the conference table would be as nothing to the convulsions which would shake and even split the Israeli cabinet.'

For both sides, it was still a game of winner takes all. Arab propaganda before the war about destroying the state of Israel was only fantasy because the Arab armies could not do it, not because they didn't want to. Israelis usually expressed the idea more subtly to Western listeners than the Arabs did, but the same idea, that they could only prosper if the other lot suffered, was still there. The unsubtle General Ezer Weizman laid it out to the British journalist Winston Churchill. ‘Don't allow yourself to be fed bullshit about Israel not being built at the expense of the Arabs. If I was a Palestinian Tel Aviv would be blowing up every ten minutes.'

Israel digs in

The Israeli cabinet's decision not to set a firm and public policy on the territories left a vacuum. It allowed people with strong beliefs to push hard for what they wanted. One such person was Hanan Porat, who had fought with the Israeli paratroopers from Ammunition Hill to the Wailing Wall. He wanted to return to his first home, a kibbutz called Kfar Etzion. Its ruins were deep in the West Bank, between Bethlehem and Hebron. The kibbutz was started by religious nationalists in the 1930s who bought land in an area that the UN later allocated to Arabs in its plan to partition Palestine. During the 1948 war 151 Jews died in a long siege of what was known as the Etzion bloc. Before the end, the women and children, including a six-month-old Hanan Porat, were evacuated. The kibbutz and neighbouring Jewish settlements were looted and destroyed. For the Israelis, it was a catastrophe. Hanan Porat's father only survived because he had been sent out to organise supply convoys from Jerusalem.

The children were brought up to believe that they would return. In the fifties and sixties they went to summer camps together. They would travel to a spot overlooking the West Bank where they could see a tree that stood near their old home. When Israel captured the West Bank, their first thought was to go back. Victory had filled Hanan Porat and the others with religious zeal. They did not regard themselves as occupiers. The biblical heartland of the Jews was not Tel Aviv and the coast. It was the mountains of Judea and Samaria – in other words, the West Bank – and now, through God's will, it was back in Jewish hands. The Arabs could stay if they lived by Jewish consent in a Jewish state, or they could get out.