The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (6 page)

As for Dayan, Ben-Gurion promoted him to military chief of staff, so that he became the hero of 1956’s quick victory in Sinai against Egypt. From the army, he went directly into Mapai as Ben-Gurion’s protégé. Impulsive, individualistic, Dayan seemed naked of political philosophy—qualities that may have boosted his appeal to Israelis tired of ideological bombast. When Ben-Gurion broke with Mapai in 1965, Dayan followed him and found himself out of power. The crisis of May 1967 opened a way back.

On May 31, Eshkol was about to give in to pressure from his own Mapai and Ahdut Ha’avodah ministers, who sought to make Allon defense minister. But the National Religious Party (NRP), a pillar of Eshkol’s coalition, insisted on Dayan as defense minister, and on bringing his Rafi party and Menachem Begin’s right-wing Gahal bloc into a “national unity government” to shore up morale.
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As Allon saw it, the NRP’s preference for Dayan was simple: The religious Zionist party was dovish, and Allon himself was a known expansionist.
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On the other hand Dayan’s mentor, Ben-Gurion, opposed war. The next day, Eshkol agreed to Dayan.

The change allowed Dayan to stride onstage as a savior. But it left the prime minister weak, physically sick at heart, half deposed, distrustful of party comrades who betrayed him, with a political enemy in charge of his military. The government reassuringly included everyone, and therefore lacked any common ground. It was capable of deciding to go to war, but not of defining the war’s purpose or deciding what goals to pursue after victory—issues that would permanently shape the Jewish state.

Besides, Dayan’s appointment did not prevent expansionism. When the crisis erupted, Chief of Staff Rabin’s first battle plan was limited: Israel would conquer the Gaza Strip, and use it as a bargaining chip to convince Egypt to reopen the Straits of Tiran. That was the plan that the cabinet had postponed when it agreed to give the United States time for a diplomatic solution.
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Dayan, though, argued that Egypt would not want Gaza’s refugees back. He sought a wider offense, aimed at destroying the Egyptian army and taking much of Sinai, though stopping short of the Suez Canal.
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History cannot tell us if Rabin’s plan would have worked, but it was tailored to the strategic purpose at hand: defending the country and reopening the straits. Whatever Dayan’s military arguments, his plan had another obvious goal: repeating his previous victory, retaking the land he had conquered and lost to diplomacy.

At the same time, Jordan and Iraq joined the Arab alliance, and the fever of “liberating Palestine” rose in the Arab world. Syria appeared ready for an offensive. Now there was a risk of war on three fronts.

For some generals, that represented an opportunity. Uzi Narkiss, who had fought in Jerusalem in 1948, had his own unfinished business and wanted to exploit any Jordanian attack to take the West Bank. Dayan wanted to keep the war to one front, but he could not count on the choice being his. Each day, the avalanche widened the potential conflict.

In Israeli cities, high school students dug trenches in public parks, volunteers filled sandbags, citizens cleaned bomb shelters and taped windows as protection against bomb blasts: all statements of vast vulnerability.
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Memory magnified fear. Just five years had passed since the trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, architect of Nazi Germany’s genocide of six million Jews. The trial, in which over one hundred witnesses described the Holocaust, brought to the surface the horrors that survivors had held silently within, and from which native-born Israelis had been protected. The identity of nations, like that of individuals, is built out of stories—told in past tense but perceived as timeless, as “who we are,” as scripts that will be reenacted in the future unless by an immense effort of will they can be rewritten with new endings. The Eichmann trial confirmed the old story of Jewish persecution, amplified its terror, scarred a new generation. Abba Eban would later recall that as Arab tanks gathered on the borders, “In many places…there was talk of Auschwitz and Maidenak.”
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In the Negev, facing Egypt, reservists yanked from normal lives alternated between boredom and unnatural seriousness. “It’s no longer a game that you do everything to avoid,” a reservist tank commander named Kobi Rabinovich wrote to his girlfriend about his men’s attitude toward their Centurion. “They’ve finally realized that without this machine, nothing will help them.” Rabinovich, a broad-shouldered, gentle-faced twenty-two-year-old with thick wavy hair, wrote about his tank—“I gave this machine all my heart”—with the affection another young man might feel for a Harley-Davidson, or for a horse. A child of Kibbutz Na’an, southeast of Tel Aviv, he was the exemplar of a social experiment’s second generation: disciplined, speaking in the slogans of his movement, devoid of the rebelliousness that had given birth to the kibbutz movement in the first place. After finishing his regular army service the year before, he had begun his prescribed year of “volunteer” service to the United Kibbutz, leading youth movement activities in Tel Aviv, but in front of children he felt like a bolt screwed into the wrong nut. The call-up notice had brought him back to work “that fits my inclinations and abilities,” he admitted in his letters. “Expectations are high,” he wrote on May 30, the day Hussein flew to Cairo, and in the next line, “The strong desire is that nothing will happen.”
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Hanan Porat, back in his paratroop unit with some of his yeshivah friends, had no mixed feelings. Those who had been at the Independence Day dinner believed they had special information about what was coming. Kook’s speech “echoed in us, as if…the spirit of prophecy had descended upon him,” he recalled. On the Sabbath, they began to sing the traditional song, “Next Year in Jerusalem.” Their commander, joking, answered in tune, “Next week in the Sinai.” The student-soldiers responded, “Next
week
in Jerusalem.”
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Haim Gouri’s brigade of middle-aged reservists consisted entirely of Jerusalemites, men with children, with two wars or three behind them. The unit he personally commanded was known as “the professors’ company” for the four Hebrew University scholars who convinced the brigade commander to let them join though they had not received call-up notices. “Men feared they would be left out of the war that was approaching by the minute,” Gouri wrote for his paper. His soldiers waited on the northeast edge of the city. Behind them was an ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, apartments crowded with children. In front, beyond “the barbed wire fences [that] we thought would rust till the end of all generations,” stood a Jordanian police academy. A few dozen meters separated the houses and the heavily fortified academy. “Everything testifies that this time the fire will take hold of Jerusalem,” Gouri wrote, without need for a prophet. “For now, no one knows D-Day or H-Hour.”
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D-DAY WAS JUNE
5, set by the cabinet the morning before. Military Intelligence chief Aharon Yariv reported that the Arab buildup was continuing on all fronts, so each hour increased the danger. The United States was still focusing on reopening the straits, not on the potential for an Arab invasion—and the American effort to organize an international convoy was going nowhere. Johnson had sent another cable warning Israel not to “go it alone.” In the cabinet, the National Religious Party’s ministers were among the last holdouts wanting to wait. But at last they came around. Israel would announce that Egypt had attacked, and strike first.
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Nasser had succeeded in one thing—frightening Israel. The decision to attack rested on the principle that offense would be the best defense, and the hope that it would be necessary only to fight Egypt. What followed shows that even the most successful offensive is a return to primeval chaos. It is shaped by what military theoretician Carl von Clausewitz called “friction”—all the unpredictable events that shatter plans and yield unimagined results.
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The day of the decision, Eshkol sought to control one kind of friction, the will of individuals. In a letter to Dayan, he laid down rules for their relationship. “The defense minister will not act without the prime minister’s approval in anything involving: beginning…warfare against a particular country; military action within war beyond the general guidelines set down….”
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Eshkol’s concerns proved justified, his note ineffective.

H-hour was 7:10
A.M
., set by the military high command. Waves of Israeli warplanes took off, swept beneath enemy radar, and struck Egypt’s air bases. Before 8:00 the ground assault began in Sinai. Only then did the air-raid sirens begin wailing inside Israel, sending frightened civilians to bomb shelters.

At the Knesset, legislators met that day in the parliamentary bomb shelter to discuss a bill financing the war effort, as Jordanian artillery shells fell on West Jerusalem. “Our people faces a fateful war…as the Hitlerite-Nasserist barbarianism sets for itself the goal of exterminating us,” said the Finance Committee chairman as he presented the legislation, still caught in the fear of a new Holocaust, unaware of the progress of the fighting.
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That morning the BBC correspondent in Israel, Michael Elkins, a personal friend of several Israeli leaders, got a scoop unknown even to the country’s legislators: Israel had destroyed the Egyptian air force, virtually ensuring victory. The news coming over the BBC would have shocked King Hussein, who heard that morning from Nasser that Egypt was smashing Israel’s military. But Elkins’s item was held up for several hours by the Israeli military censor, then by disbelieving BBC editors, who broadcast it only that evening.
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Israel broke its own news blackout on the battles only at 1:00
A.M
. the next day, with a radio announcement by Rabin.
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No one can know if an early report on Egypt’s debacle from the respected British network would have convinced the young Jordanian king to stay out of the war, saving half his kingdom. Through the war’s first morning, Israel was sending Hussein warnings via third parties to keep his army out. Yet while Hussein feared Israel, he also feared the pro-Nasser frenzy in his own population. Jordanian artillery shells fell on Israel’s narrow waist, on an air base near the northern edge of the West Bank, on West Jerusalem. In early afternoon, the ground assault began, as Jordanian troops took the U.N. headquarters on a hilltop in the no-man’s-land between East and West Jerusalem. The battle for the West Bank had begun.

Initially, the Israeli counterattack was defensive. One goal was to seize a slice of the northern West Bank, around the town of Jenin, to end the fire at the northern air base. In Jerusalem, the army sought to take U.N. headquarters, and also to link up with Mount Scopus, a threatened Israeli enclave in northeast Jerusalem that had been surrounded by Jordanian land since 1948. The latter task was assigned in part to Colonel Mordechai Gur’s paratroop brigade, quickly bused to the city from the southern front. Among the soldiers were Hanan Porat and his yeshivah friends. After midnight the paratroops moved past Haim Gouri’s overage soldiers and began their assault on the police academy fortress.
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Yet once the troops crossed the Green Line, the logic of the avalanche took over. On the ground, commanders seized opportunities. In the cabinet, politicians renewed dreams unconnected to defense. By the war’s first afternoon, Menachem Begin and Yigal Allon—rightist and leftist made partners by territorial desire—arrived at Eshkol’s office and pressed the prime minister to take Jerusalem’s Old City.
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A cabinet meeting that night postponed a decision; Eshkol was nervous about diplomatic fallout and the walled city’s symbolism to other faiths. The next morning, arriving on Mount Scopus via ground conquered by the paratroopers in bitter fighting, Defense Minister Dayan refused to give Uzi Narkiss permission to enter the Old City. Surround it, Dayan said, but keep out of “all that Vatican.”
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But by the predawn hours of June 7, with a U.N. cease-fire call expected, Eshkol gave the go-ahead to exploit opportunity, and Dayan ordered Colonel Gur’s paratroopers to conquer Old Jerusalem.

Gur rode the lead half-track himself that morning, through the gunfire and smoke at St. Stephen’s Gate on the east side of the Old City, through narrow alleyways and another gate onto the wide plaza in the shadow of the Dome of the Rock. At precisely 10:00
A.M
. he radioed Narkiss, “The Temple Mount is in our hands.” Narkiss’s jeep pulled up moments later, followed by Rabbi Goren, who arrived on foot carrying a Torah scroll in one hand and a ram’s horn in the other, recited biblical verses, and let loose with the horn’s wild wail while the troops began singing “Jerusalem of Gold.”
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Hurrying on, some of the soldiers descended from the Mount into the alleyways and found the courtyard of the Western Wall.

On the army’s advice, Eshkol delayed visiting the Wall that afternoon, leaving the stage to Dayan to appear at the holy spot as conqueror, with a brief speech hinting neither at his hesitations about conquering the Old City nor at military goals: “We have reunited the dismembered city…. We have returned to our most holy places, returned in order never to be separated from them again.” Goren’s speech at the spot, which appeared the next morning on the front page of the National Religious Party’s daily paper, expressed more cosmic expectations, rooted in prophecies he believed were being fulfilled before his eyes. “This is the most exalted moment in the history of the [Jewish] people,” he proclaimed, describing the conquest as “heralding redemption.”
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