Oren Michael B. Six Days of War. June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East

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22 SIX DAYS OF WA R

So ended U.S. aid to Egypt. By 1965, Washington was working sedulously

to undermine Cairo’s efforts to reschedule its international debt and to gain credit

in world monetary funds. The shipments of American wheat that accounted for

60 percent of all Egyptian bread were suspended. Nasser was convinced that

Johnson was out to assassinate him. While some of its colossal loss was made up

by the $277 million economic and military aid promised by Khrushchev during

his May 1964 visit to Cairo, nothing could remedy the country’s woefully chronic

ills: a population of 29.5 million growing at 3.5 percent annually, poor (about

$140 per capita per year, 40 percent inflation), unhealthy (average male life ex-

pectancy thirty-five years), and to a large extent (45 percent) illiterate. Brutal

crackdown of dissidents, the arbitrary nationalization of property, a suffocating

bureaucracy: This was Egypt in the mid-1960s, a police state. Even the High

Dam at Aswan, Nasserism’s grandest symbol, proved toxic, spreading the dreaded

bilharzia disease throughout the countryside.

This depressing picture was not Egypt’s alone, however. Rampant popula-

tion growth, dwindling employment opportunities, low levels of health care

and education were endemic to most of the Arab world.

Patriarchal, capped

by totalitarian regimes, Arab society was hardly ripe for progress. And even the

basic goal of unity—retribution against the arrogant West and the noxious Jewish

state it had forced upon them—continued to elude the Arabs.

Disappointment and frustration helped impel al-Fatah’s marauders as they

crossed into Israel on the first night of 1965. That action, though abortive, had

a rippling effect throughout the region—scarcely perceptible at first but ulti-

mately tectonic. Held in abeyance during much of the Arab Cold War, the

Arab-Israeli conflict had resurfaced with a vengeance. The context was nearly

complete.

Failures though they seemed to the Arabs, to Israelis, the Arab summits of

1964–65 appeared nothing short of volcanic, the reification of their neighbors’

desire to eradicate them. IDF intelligence, which had previously denied that

the Arabs would go to war over the water issue, suddenly changed its tone.

“This desire had always been abstract—until now,” explained an IDF intelli-

gence estimate from the period, “For the first time we know of a plan . . . with

clear stages; a date has been set for the showdown. Thus, in 1967–8, we are

liable to face a renewed Arab initiative. The practical expression of this may

come in the form of another attempt to divert the Jordan, the encouragement

of terrorist attacks . . . border incidents . . . closing the Straits of Tiran.” To

restore its deterrence power, Israel would have to strike on more than one

front and at a time not of her choosing, enabling the Arabs to counterattack

overwhelmingly, IDF intelligence warned.

The Context 23

The downhill course toward war, from the Israeli perspective, was marked

by Arab acts on the ground. The northern border erupted in November 1964

with Syria’s unilateral efforts to divert the Jordan headwaters and then to pre-

vent Israeli cultivation of the DZ’s (see map, p. 285). The latter, it will be

recalled, had been created by the Armistice Agreements in areas of Israel evacu-

ated by the Syrian army. Divided into three main sectors totaling some 66.5

square miles, the DZ’s contained archipelagos of irregularly shaped plots—

each had a nickname: the Legume, for example, and De Gaulle’s Nose—over

which Israel claimed total sovereignty. Pressing this claim, the Israelis denied the

Mutual Armistice Commission any jurisdiction over the DZ’s (Syrian represen-

tatives sat on the MAC) and declared them off-limits to Syrian farmers. But the

Syrians just as adamantly opposed Israeli attempts to control the plots, and, from

their emplacements atop the Golan Heights, fired on any tractors plowing them.

At the epicenter of these tensions was the Sea of Galilee itself, which was

wholly within Israeli sovereignty, but just barely. A 10-meter strip along the lake’s

northeastern bank technically belonged to Israel, but, falling directly under the

Syrian guns, was virtually impossible to defend. Syrian snipers regularly fired at

Israeli fishing boats while Israeli patrol craft just as frequently violated a 250-

meter demilitarized zone extending from the eastern shore into the lake itself.

The two issues, land and water, were inextricably linked in the Israeli mind.

By affirming their sovereignty over the DZ’s, the Israelis sought to deter the

Syrians from diverting the Jordan. “Without control over the water sources we

cannot realize the Zionist dream,” Eshkol had told the government, “Water is

the basis for Jewish existence in the Land of Israel.” Tactically, too, there was a

connection, as Israel exploited DZ incidents as pretexts for bombing the diver-

sion project. Increasingly proficient at hitting long-range targets, Israeli tanks

could zero in on Syrian bulldozers miles behind the border. But then the Syr-

ians upped the ante.

North of Tel Dan on November 13, near a DZ, an Israeli patrol came

under Syrian fire. Israeli tanks, camouflaged nearby, opened up in return. Ar-

tillery atop the Golan Heights leveled a blanket of shells on Israeli settlements

across the Hula Valley. With the enemy’s cannons out of range, Israel’s obvi-

ous riposte was to bombard them from the air, but Eshkol hesitated, fearful of

starting a war and of jeopardizing Israel’s attempts to purchase American air-

craft. “Is it a question of just a few more holes in the roof or no roof and walls

at all?” he asked Yitzhak Rabin, now the chief of staff.

Rabin favored hitting Syria and hitting it decisively. With the Arab world

divided and the USSR unlikely to intervene, he explained, retaliatory action

would not lead to war. The United States, moreover, busy as it was bombing

North Vietnam, could hardly assail a similar strike against Syria. Convinced,

Eshkol deferred to Rabin’s reasoning, and the IAF took to the air.

The ensuing three-hour battle resulted in four Israeli dead and nine wounded;

settlements were seriously damaged. The Syrians’ losses were also extensive—at

24 SIX DAYS OF WA R

least two tanks and several earth-moving machines—but their deepest wound

was psychological. Syria’s air force was simply no match for Israel’s. Though

work on the diversion would continue through the spring of 1965, five miles

from the border and out of tank range, it could never be completed as long as

Israel ruled the skies. Syria’s answer was to procure more planes—some sixty

Soviet MiG-21s—and fast, while embarking on a new and less risky endeavor.

Palestinian guerrilla raids, first used by Nasser in the 1950s, had proven a

viable means of goring the Israelis while scoring points in Arab public opinion.

Their operations were cheaply financed and, in face of charges of government

collusion, plausibly denied, especially when mounted from neighboring coun-

tries. Nor was there any difficulty in recruiting fighters from the Palestinian

organizations disgusted with Ahmad Shuqayri and his PLO sinecure. These

rejectionist groups now shared Syria’s interests in fomenting tensions with Is-

rael. Over the course of 1965, The Storm (al-‘Asifa), the armed wing of al-

Fatah, received Syria’s support in carrying out thirty-five attacks according to

Israel’s reckoning, 110 by Palestinian accounts.

These operations again embarrassed Nasser, upstaging his leadership on

Palestine and renewing the danger of an Israeli reprisal to which Egypt, now

committed to the UAC, would have to respond—in other words, war. The

guerrillas’ appearance came at the worst possible time, with Egypt’s army stalled

in Yemen and its economy plummeting. Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Iran had

banded in an Islamic League for the purpose of limiting Nasser’s influence.

Denouncing the league as a joint plot of the U.S. and the Muslim Brother-

hood, Nasser canceled his participation at the next Arab summit, scheduled to

be held in Algeria. “We could annihilate Israel in twelve days were the Arabs to

form a united front,” he strove to explain, “Israel can only be attacked from . . .

Syria and Jordan.” Then, declaring his intention to “liberate Palestine in a revo-

lutionary and not a traditional manner,” he quietly arrested all the al-Fatah

activists in Egypt and in Gaza.

Nasser was not the only Arab leader threatened by Syria-sponsored terror. More

immediately imperiled was Jordan’s King Hussein. Having successfully resisted

the UAC’s plans for stationing Saudi and Iraqi troops on his territory, certain

the Israelis would use the move as a pretext for seizing the West Bank, Hussein

now faced a similar situation as a result of the al-Fatah’s raids. Over half of

these originated in the West Bank, where Hussein had been resisting Shuqayri’s

influence and Shuqayri was now forced to rival al-Fatah by forming his own

guerrilla groups. The Jordanian monarch went to considerable lengths to stifle

these activities, but there was a limit, he knew, to suppressing legitimate Pales-

tinian resistance, and a limit to Israel’s restraint.

The Israelis had told him as much. Since 1960, when Ben-Gurion con-

gratulated him on surviving an Egyptian-orchestrated bomb attack (“Your

Majesty will continue to defy with courage and success all treacherous attempts

to subvert law and order”), Hussein had been in occasional contact with Israeli

The Context 25

representatives. Another assassination attempt, also traced to Egypt, was foiled

by the Mossad intelligence service two years later. Like his grandfather before

him, Hussein proceeded cautiously with these talks, conducting them in Lon-

don and under the strictest secrecy. Though unreceptive to Eshkol’s offers of a

full peace treaty, unwilling to break with the Arab consensus, he was open to

practical measures, such as quiet cooperation on sharing the Jordan’s waters.

The contacts helped conciliate the Israelis—and the Americans, their common

ally—during the period of the Arab summits when Jordan’s anti-Zionist pro-

paganda easily rivaled the Syrians’. But propaganda was one thing, terror an-

other, and the Israelis warned Hussein that terrorism had to stop.

It did not,

however, and in May 1965, after the killing of six Israelis, the IDF struck back.

Three reprisals followed, on Qalqilya, Shuna, and Jenin, in the West Bank.

These were small-scale attacks by IDF standards, aimed at water installations,

an ice factory, and a flour mill. Nevertheless, they provided the rhetorical am-

munition Shuqayri needed to castigate the “colonialist rule” of the Hashemites

and to demand its overthrow as the first step toward Palestinian liberation.

Hussein, vowing to “sever any hand raised against this struggling country and

to gouge out any eye that glances at us with hate,” retorted by arresting some

200 “subversive” elements in Jordan and closing the PLO office. “The purpose

of the PLO is the destruction of Jordan and everything we have achieved

throughout these long years for our nation and for Palestine,” the king wrote

to Nasser, but Nasser remained unsympathetic, unwilling to defend a “reac-

tionary” monarch against Palestinian freedom fighters. The Syrians condemned

both Hussein and Nasser—Nasser because he had failed to come to the Pales-

tinians’ rescue, to cast off UNEF and initiate the “third round.”

Al-Fatah’s

strategy had thus far worked: Having provoked Israel into retaliating against

Arab states, the Arab states were gradually goading one another to war.

The Israelis observed this process unfolding with a growing sense of helpless-

ness—in spite of their impressive victories in the North. Eshkol, for one, sus-

pected that the Arabs would not wait until 1967 to strike. “Okay, okay,” he

protested when presented with optimistic intelligence estimates, “but what if

intelligence is wrong?”

Haunted by the specter of an all-Arab assault, the IDF initiated Anvil (He-

brew: Sadan), a comprehensive defense plan designed to rebuff attacks on all

fronts and then enable the army to take the offensive. But the plan would take

another year, until July 1966, to implement, and meanwhile the country lay

vulnerable. Horrified, Eshkol learned that the tank corps had only enough am-

munition for three days’ fighting—he ordered it doubled to six—and one-third

the number of planes necessary to take on Egypt’s air force alone. Adding to

these anxieties was the capture in January 1965 of Eli Cohen, alias Kamal Amin

Thabet, a Mossad agent who had insinuated himself into the upper ranks of

Syria’s military establishment. With Cohen’s execution in May, Israel lost an

irreplaceable source of information on Syria’s deployment in the Golan Heights

and its bounteous support for al-Fatah.

26 SIX DAYS OF WA R

An even greater cause of worry for the Israelis was the state of their alliance

with France. This had cooled considerably since Ben-Gurion’s ouster and the ad-

vent of de Gaulle, since the end of the Algerian war and the implication of certain

pro-Israeli generals in anti-Gaullist coups. Though seventy-two Mirage III fighter

jets had been supplied to Israel in 1961, further deliveries had lagged as France

sought to put Suez in the past and rebuild its Middle Eastern bridges. By 1965,

Egypt’s General ‘Amer was being welcomed as an honored guest in Paris.

For Israel, then, the only answer to these concerns lay with the United

States, and with its well-disposed president. “You have lost a very great friend.

But you have found a better one,” Johnson reportedly told an Israeli diplomat

after Kennedy’s assassination. That friendship was manifest in June 1964 when

Levi Eshkol became the first Israeli prime minister to be officially received in

the White House. “The United States is foursquare behind Israel on all mat-

ters that affect their vital security interests,” the president assured his guest,

“just as it is [behind] Southeast Asia . . .” The two, of a similar age and farming

background, got along famously. Baring his trepidation, Eshkol replied, “We

cannot afford to lose. This may be our last stand in history. The Jewish people

have something to give to the world. I believe that if you look at our history

and at all the difficulties we have survived, it means that history wants us to

continue. We cannot survive if we experience again what happened to us under

Hitler . . . I believe that you should understand us.”

Johnson understood and gave Israel $52 million in civilian aid, but military

support was another story. American M-48 Patton tanks had been sold to Is-

rael—albeit indirectly, through Germany, with a counterbalancing tank sale to

Jordan—and forty-eight A-4 Skyhawk fighters, due for delivery in December

1967. But Germany succumbed to Arab pressure to stop selling Israel arms

while Egypt’s acquisition of long-range Soviet bombers meant Israel needed

the planes at once. While American arms sales to the Middle East multiplied

during the Johnson administration, from $44.2 to $995.3 million, Israel’s share

was negligible. “The United States had much good will for Israel and desired

Israel to have an adequate deterrent,” read a joint memorandum of February

1965, but Johnson refused to be Israel’s primary arms’ supplier.

That refusal reflected America’s traditional reluctance to identify itself to-

tally with one side in the Arab-Israeli conflict or to get entrapped in a Middle

East arms race. Beyond that, though, was Johnson’s preoccupation with the

Vietnam War and opposition to it at home, both of them escalating.

The

U.S. simply could not commit itself in any other area of the globe, Johnson

stressed, and to another confrontation with the Soviets. Appreciation of this

fact brought meager solace to Eshkol, especially as the USSR seemed to have

the wherewithal for supplying both the North Vietnamese and the Arabs.

The Israeli prime minister, moreover, had domestic problems of his own.

Ben-Gurion, still reeling from his resignation from office, realized finally that

Eshkol was no mere understudy. Together with acolytes Peres and Dayan, he

The Context 27

formed his own breakaway party, Rafi (Reshimat Poalei Yisrael—Israel Workers’

List), which performed poorly in the October 1965 elections. But if Rafi failed to

take power, it succeeded in eroding Mapai’s majority and exhausting its leader,

literally giving him a heart attack. Eshkol recovered only to be hit by an economic

depression caused by the falloff of immigration and the end of Holocaust repara-

tions from Germany. Unemployment skyrocketed to 12.4 percent while annual

growth contracted to a single percent. For the first time since the grim days of

1948, a sense of national listlessness set in, particularly among Israel’s youth.

All this occurred while the security situation went from worse to insuffer-

able. Over the course of 1966, Israel recorded ninety-three border incidents—

mines, shootings, sabotage—while the Syrians boasted seventy-five guerrilla

attacks in the single month of February-March.

Those same months also

brought a new government to power in Damascus—typically, through vio-

lence—as General Jadid and Air Force Commander Hafez al-Assad installed a

Ba’thist regime even more radical than its predecessors. Comprised almost solely

of Alawites, a heterodox sect abhorred by the Sunni majority, the regime was

sorely lacking in popular support and obsessively afraid of Nasser. The panacea

for these problems lay in manufacturing enemies such as Arab reaction and

Western imperialism, though none more sinister than Zionism:

The Palestine question [is] the main axis of our domestic, Arab, and interna-

tional policies . . . The liberation battle can only be waged by progressive

Arab forces through a popular war of liberation, which history has proved is

the only course for victory against all aggressive forces . . . It will remain the

final way for the liberation of the entire Arab homeland and for its compre-

hensive socialist popular unification.

The latest Ba‘thist coup brought to a climax the process that had begun in

1964 when, insecure at home and in fierce competition with Egypt and Jordan,

Syria’s rulers had tried to earn prestige by picking fights with Israel. The plan

foundered, though, when the IDF thwarted Syria’s diversion plan and its at-

tempts to dominate the DZ’s. Damascus then turned to the Palestinian raids

that had the triple advantage of hurting Israel, shaming Nasser, and weakening

Hussein. The possibility that the raids might confirm Israel’s assessment of an

Arab buildup to war was irrelevant to the Syrians, to whom war seemed a no-

lose situation, resulting in either Israel’s defeat or that of their Egyptian and

Jordanian rivals. No harm, meanwhile, could come to Syria, protected by its

unwavering alliance with the USSR.

The Soviets had indeed invested massively in the Middle East, about $2 billion

in military aid alone—1,700 tanks, 2,400 artillery pieces, 500 jets, and 1,400 ad-

visers—since 1956, some 43 percent of it to Egypt. Nasser, “a noncapitalist revo-

lutionary democrat,” in Soviet parlance, was seen as the Kremlin’s main hope

for defeating the West in the aftermath of the Cuban missile debacle. Moscow

would not be disappointed. While warfare raged in Southeast Asia, NATO was

28 SIX DAYS OF WA R

outflanked from the south and its oil supply threatened by pro-Soviet Arab re-

gimes. In return for these services, Nasser and ‘Amer were in 1964 both desig-

nated Heroes of the Soviet Union, an award never before granted to foreigners.

Yet the extent of Soviet largess in the region was also a source of dissent.

Party and army leaders disagreed in their assessment of the Arabs’ qualities as

soldiers and their openness to Marxist ideas. Some observers even linked

Khrushchev’s ouster in October 1964 to disenchantment with his overgenerosity

toward Egypt. His replacements, however—the triumvirate of Premier Alexei

Kosygin, President Nikolai Podgorny, and L. I. Brezhnev, the Communist party

secretary-general—proved no less giving. Invited to Moscow the following

month, ‘Amer was told that “we will give you everything, even secret weap-

ons,” to which he reportedly replied, “and we will keep those secrets.”

Soviet philanthropy reached an unprecedented high following the Ba‘th

revolution in Syria. In contrast to Egypt, where the Communist party was ille-

gal and relations with Moscow accordingly complex, the new regime in Dam-

ascus included for the first time Syrian Communists. Aid poured in—$428

million in 1966 alone—refurbishing the country’s infrastructure and financing

construction of a Euphrates River dam even costlier than Aswan’s. Russian

became a second language taught in the schools. But Soviet-Syrian relations

rested on more than ideology. Third World policy, once an unmitigated suc-

cess for the USSR, had suffered serious setbacks with the overthrow of Sukarno

in Indonesia and Ghana’s Nkruma, and with the spread of Chinese influence in

Asia and Africa. Syria was compensation.

Moscow and Damascus appeared to concur on all outstanding issues, with

the notable exception of Palestine. For all their invective against Zionism and

relentless condemnations of Israel, the Soviets had always stopped short of ad-

vocating violence. War in the Middle East, so close to their southern border,

and with the U.S. Sixth Fleet in the Eastern Mediterranean nearby, was not

among the Soviets’ interests. Kremlin leaders had opposed Syria’s attempts to

divert the Jordan and, instead, proposed peace talks on the basis of the Parti-

tion plan. Slowly, however, by mid-1966, this reluctance had begun to wane. A

joint communiqué issued after the visit of a high-level Syrian delegation to

Moscow described Israel as “a military arsenal and a base for aggression and

blackmail against the . . . Arab people,” and pledged full Soviet backing for the

Arabs “in their just cause against colonialist Zionism.”

This shift in Soviet policy may have stemmed from internal struggles—

Marshal Andrei Antonovich Grechko, deputy defense minister, was making a

power play with Brezhnev’s backing, and needed to flex military muscle—or a

desire to exploit America’s immersion in Vietnam. The outcome, however,

was irrefutable that spring, as a fortified Syria expanded its support for guer-

rilla attacks against Israel. “We want a full-scale, popular war of liberation . . .

to destroy the Zionist base in Palestine,” Dr. Nureddin al-Atassi, Syria’s fig-

urehead president, told troops stationed on the Israeli border, “The time has

come to use these arms for the purpose for which they were created.”

The Context 29

Thus challenged, the Israelis might have been expected to retaliate directly

against Damascus. They had the military capability certainly, and even tacit

support from the United States. But overriding these advantages was the dan-

ger of sparking a much larger confrontation, playing into Syria’s hands and

provoking the Soviet Union. Like many of his generation, Eastern Europeans,

Eshkol knew and feared the Russians. War with Syria was risky enough; with

the USSR, it would be suicidal.

The precariousness of Soviet-Israel relations was underscored on May 25,

1966, when the Soviet Foreign Ministry informed the Israeli ambassador, Katriel

Katz, of a Zionist plot to invade Syria. IDF troops, “the secret weapon of impe-

rialism and colonialism in the Near East,” were massing on the northern bor-

der even as they spoke, he was told. Katz’s vehement denials—and Eshkol’s, to

the Soviet ambassador, Chuvakhin, in Tel Aviv—could not dissuade the Sovi-

ets, nor could Israel’s assurances of respect for Syria’s territorial integrity. The

crisis passed two days later with the Soviet news agency Tass trumpeting the

“timeliness of the exposure . . . as proof of the Soviet Union’s solidarity with

the Arab countries in their struggle against . . . foreign powers and domestic

reaction.” But the message was also noted by the Israelis, who from that mo-

ment became particularly jittery about provoking the Syrians, even by so little

as a reconnaissance flight.

For Israel, then, the only viable target for retaliation remained the West

Bank. The IDF struck twice there, both times in the Hebron area—eight civil-

ians were killed—and traded shots with Jordan’s Arab Legion. These actions

may have served some purpose in mollifying Eshkol’s critics, but they hardly

deterred Damascus. Tank and artillery duels continued to rage along the bor-

der as the Syrians again moved their diversion work out of Israeli range, and

intensified their shelling of Israeli settlements. Again, Rabin felt there was noth-

ing to do but call in the IAF. Israeli planes went into action on July 7, downing

a Syrian MiG.

The Syrian response was not long in coming. When, on August 15, an

Israeli border patrol boat ran aground on the demilitarized eastern shore of the

Sea of Galilee, Syria sent planes of its own. The attack, intended to “prove to

the Arab people . . . the untruth of the Israeli claim of air superiority,” accord-

ing to Hafez al-Assad, backfired as two of the MiGs went down in flames. But

Syrian gunmen nevertheless prevented IDF divers from dislodging the boat,

which was extricated only with great difficulty at night.

Yet the Palestinian raids continued, with credit now claimed by some

twenty-six guerrilla groups with names like Youths of Revenge and Heroes of

the Return. Israel’s fury was once again directed at Jordan where, on April 30,

IDF paratroopers blew up twenty-eight houses in the northern West Bank

village of Rafat, killing eleven civilians. The reprisal failed to satisfy Rabin,

however. He warned of the dangers of the weakening Hussein, and of the need

to strike at the terrorists’ source—Syria—on the model of the Sinai Campaign.

30 SIX DAYS OF WA R

With the Egyptians in Yemen and the Arab world split, the timing would be

ideal. “The reaction to Syrian acts, whether they be terrorism, diversion or

aggression on the border, must be aimed at the perpetrators of that terrorism

and at the regime that supports it,” Rabin told Bamahane, the army’s magazine,

on September 9. “The problem with Syria is, therefore, essentially a clash with

its leadership.”

The remarks only angered Eshkol, who feared that such an assault on Syria

would bring in the Soviets and unite the Arabs in full-scale war with Israel. The

country’s cities could be bombed, he warned, and even the Dimona reactor.

He sharply reprimanded Rabin; Israel must not be seen to be meddling in in-

ternal Syrian affairs. Rather than attacking Syria head-on, the prime minister

counseled an indirect route: extending compulsory army service for men an

additional six months, and prosecuting Syria’s crimes in the Security Council.

Both actions boomeranged, however. Rather than reinforcing public mo-

rale, the extended service further corroded it, while the Council’s attempts to

condemn the Syrians were repeatedly vetoed by the Soviets. In Damascus, the

tone of Prime Minister Yusuf Zu‘ayyin was unremittingly bellicose: “We are

not resigned to holding back the Palestinian revolution . . . We shall set the

area afire, and any Israeli movement will result in a final grave for Israel.”

Events were coming to a head, and not only for the Israelis. Egypt also looked

with consternation at Syria’s campaign to drag the region into war. “Nasser may

well fulminate against Israel but we believe there is practically no possibility that

he will attack or provoke the Israelis within the foreseeable future,” read the

State Department’s assessment to President Johnson.

Improbable as it seemed,

Israel and Egypt shared an interest in reining in the Syrians.

In recognition of this convergence, Nasser agreed to the renewal of secret

contacts with Israel, the first since the Suez crisis. The connection ran through

Mossad chief Meir Amit and General ‘Azm al-Din Mahmud Khalil, head of

Egypt’s nonconventional weapons projects, who reported directly to both Nasser

and ‘Amer. Through an intermediary known only as “Steve,” the two met clan-

destinely in Paris and discussed arrangements virtually identical to those pro-

posed in the 1950s: Israeli assistance in procuring international aid for Egypt in

return for a lessening of anti-Israeli propaganda in Egypt and an easing of the

Suez Canal blockade. The Egyptians also offered to release the Jews accused of

spying in 1954, upon receipt of a $30 million Israeli loan. Khalil went so far as

to invite Amit to Cairo in June 1966, but Eshkol quashed the idea, unwilling to

trust Nasser with the head of Israel’s top-secret security force. Thereafter, the

Egyptians, fearing that the contacts would be exposed and revealed to their

Arab detractors, closed down the channel entirely. The Israelis would try to

reopen it exactly one year later, in the throes of an even darker crisis.

Secret diplomacy might help mollify the Israelis, but calming Syria meant

dramatic démarches. What Nasser proposed was a mutual defense treaty which,

while enhancing Syria’s ability to lure Egypt into a conflict, would also enable

The Context 31

Egypt to limit Syria’s maneuverability: the lesser of evils. Syria’s leaders, more-

over, seemed amenable to the idea. Shaken by the loss of their jets, they were

further stunned in September by a coup attempt by one Major Salim Hatum, a

Druze, and the subsequent purging of the officer corps. An agreement with the

most powerful Arab country was far from the worst way of shoring up the

regime.

The first move came in mid-October 1966 with an Egyptian military del-

egation to Damascus (“We are confident that we are making fast strides toward

the realization of our common goal—the elimination of Israel and full unity,”

declared its head, General Sa‘ad ‘Ali ‘Amer) and a reciprocal visit by Zu‘ayyin to

Cairo. There, on November 2, Nasser told the Syrian prime minister that Israel’s

technological edge and American aid made it almost invulnerable to Arab at-

tack. Yet when Zu‘ayyin protested that the Arabs would then have to wait 100

years, Nasser assured him: “You won’t have to wait 100 or even 50, you just

have to know that you can’t achieve your goal except with a long-range gun.”

The Egyptian-Syrian defense treaty signed two days later restored all mili-

tary and diplomatic ties between the two countries and committed them to

come to one another’s assistance in the event of battle. Secret codicils to the

agreement provided for Egyptian strikes against Israeli targets in the South,

should Israel attack in the North. The Egyptian and Syrian air forces, pro-

claimed Syrian Foreign Minister Ibrahim Makhous, “are now flying in one

sky.” The treaty also occasioned the breakup of the tacit alliance between Egypt

and Jordan, founded as it was on common opposition to Syria. Damascus Ra-

dio and Cairo’s Voice of the Arabs harmonized in vilifying Hussein as “reac-

tionary” and “an agent and stooge of imperialism and Zionism,” promising

him “the same treatment given [assassinated Iraqi Premier] Nuri al-Sa‘id.”

But if Nasser thought he could assuage the Syrians with talk of war in the

not-too-distant future, events soon proved him mistaken. Eleven guerrilla at-

tacks, most of them launched from Jordan, ensued in rapid succession—seven

Israelis died and twelve were wounded. “The notepad is open and the hand is

writing,” Eshkol told the generals who demanded reprisals, assuring them that

none of the murders were forgotten and would shortly be avenged. But he also

implored the United States to intercede with Syria and Jordan. “There is a

public to think about,” he reminded Walworth (Wally) Barbour, the American

ambassador. “I want you to know that the situation may lead to clashes. Some-

times we have to take action after rethinking more than once.” The prime

minister rejected the assessment of the Chief UN observer, a Norwegian gen-

eral with the improbable name of Odd Bull, that Hussein was doing his utmost

to prevent hostile infiltration. According to Israeli intelligence, the king was

merely detaining the terrorists and releasing them days later.

Then, on November 10, on the Israeli border opposite the West Bank city

of Hebron, a paramilitary police vehicle struck a mine. Three policemen were

killed, one wounded. Aware and wary of Israel’s wrath, Hussein penned a