released 28 aug 05 / last mod 01 jun 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* The Zionist movement, an effort by European Jews to colonize the land of Palestine, began in the late 19th century. After the First World War, which resulted in Britain acquiring Palestine from the Ottoman Empire, Jews were encouraged to go to Palestine in large numbers. The result was communal strife between Palestinian Jews and Arabs. The British tried to keep matters under control, but after World War II Britain pulled out of the country, resulting in fighting between Arab and Jew and the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948. Arab attempts to crush the Jewish state failed, with the fighting fading back in an uneasy truce.
The truce ended in 1956, when the Egyptians nationalized the Suez Canal, leading the Israelis, British, and French to invade Egypt and take it back. The exercise, codenamed OPERATION MUSKETEER, was a tactical success but a strategic failure, with the superpowers ordering the invaders to leave. Matters returned once more to an uneasy truce, but in the early 1960s instabilities began to arise once again. In 1966, events began to build towards a crisis.
* The Zionist movement arose in the late 19th century, heavily driven by a Hungarian-born Jew named Theodor Herzl, who suggested that the Jewry of Europe return to their ancestral "Eretz Israel (Land of Israel)". Herzl helped organize the "First Zionist Congress" in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897. By the start of World War I, thousands of European Jews, mostly Russians trying to escape pogroms, had settled in Palestine. The Jewish population had risen from about 25,000 in 1880 to about 85,000 in 1914. The "Yishuv (Jewish community)" in Palestine suffered during the First World War under Ottoman rule, less because of their Jewishness than because of their Russianness. The Ottoman Turks had allied themselves with the Central Powers, making Russia the enemy and the Yishuv heavy with enemy aliens.
However, this would turn out to be to the advantage of the Yishuv over the long run. Britain and France were eyeing the territories controlled by the Ottomans and drawing up maps of who would get what parts if and when the Allies won the war. The British felt that having Zionism on their side in the conflict would be to their advantage, and so in November 1917 British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour issued a document that gave formal British government approval for Zionism and support for a national home in Palestine. The Allies did win the war, with the British taking possession of Palestine and other territories. The British presence was then legally confirmed in 1922 by a mandate from the League of Nations.
Although Palestine was a small country, the British perceived that it was at a strategic crossroads of their worldwide empire, and so a British-dominated Palestine would be in Britain's interests. The "Balfour Declaration" did include verbiage about even-handedness, stating that it was "clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country." The British had given assurances of various sorts to the local Arabs during the war and were trying to keep both sides happy. Under the Mandate, they allowed Jewish and Arab communities to be largely self-governing. In practice, the British would find maintaining a balance increasingly difficult.
The Jewry of Europe, first mostly from Poland and then from Germany, accepted Britain's invitation to come to Palestine. Major waves of immigration took place in 1920, 1921, and 1929, bringing the total Jewish population to about 160,000, and with each wave the reaction of the Palestinian Arabs to the prospect of being dominated by Jews grew angrier and more violent. The result was an uprising against the Jews and the British that began in 1936 and lasted for three years, with the British crushing the revolt and sending Arab leaders into exile. The British tended to be shrewd colonialists and knew that simply suppressing a rebellion by force was only part of the solution. Fearing that they had let loose a genie from a bottle that could do great harm in Britain's Arab sphere of influence, the British issued a White Paper that effectively nullified the Balfour Declaration, and put forth a plan for an independent Palestine in ten years.
* The problem was that the British had let loose the genie and there was no getting it back into the bottle. The outrage of Palestinian Arabs over Jewish encroachment on Arab lands and the revolt of the Palestinian Arabs put Zionism on a collision course with a rising Arab nationalism through the Middle East. The struggle against Zionism appealed to the Arab on the streets, and the weak leaders of Arab nations, fearing for their heads from the crowd, helped stoke the conflict.
Despite or maybe because of the hostility, the Yishuv had been growing stronger. The Palestinian Jews prospered, assisted by the wealth and skills of immigrants, and assistance from worldwide Jewish organizations. The Yishuv established new sorts of communities, including the communal "kibbutz" and the cooperative "moshav"; built up the apparatus of a government; and created a secret army, the "Haganah", to fight the Palestinian Arabs.
The British White Paper was a blow to the interests of the Yishuv, with the crackdown on new immigration effectively condemning many European Jews to death at the hands of Hitler's SS, though the Yishuv stepped up efforts to sneak in Jews illegally. With the outbreak of the war, the Yishuv, under their leader David Ben-Gurion, reluctantly threw in their lot with the British. After all, there was no way the Palestinian Jews could ally themselves with Hitler. The Palestinian Arabs did, which of course turned out to be a mistake, one of the first of many.
In the meantime, the British were trying to straddle the fence between Jew and Arab, helping with the establishment of the Arab League in 1945. However, they were trapped between grindstones. The full revelations of Hitler's atrocities against the Jews of Europe that came to light at the end of the war radicalized Zionism, leading to the emergence of Menachim Begin's extreme "Irgun" militia, which began attacks on the British. Presently, the mainstream Haganah joined in. Now both the British were being fired on by both Jews and Arabs.
Britain was exhausted by the Second World War and the British no longer felt that it was in their interests to be caught in the middle of a no-win situation. They proposed their own vision of a new state for Palestine, but it went nowhere. The new United Nations could take up the issue and be welcome to it, and the British passed the matter on to the UN for consideration in February 1947. The "UN Special Committee On Palestine (UNSCOP)" duly issued their own ideas in the form of General Assembly Resolution 181. This resolution described the formation of dual states, one Jewish and one Arab, in Palestine, with joint sovereignty over the holy city of Jerusalem. The US and the USSR voted in favor, while the British abstained. The Zionists approved, again reluctantly, but the Palestinian Arabs rejected the scheme. This had been their home, why would they want to discuss giving parts of it away?
In November 1947, Palestinian fighters began to attack Jewish settlements and block roads between them. Jewish leaders tried to encourage restraint in response in hopes of keeping the UN partition plan alive, but the provocations were too great, and in April 1948 the Jews hit back with great effectiveness. About three-quarters of a million Palestinian Arabs fled their homes in fear of their lives, becoming refugee populations in neighboring countries. About 160,000 remained to deal with life in a majority Jewish state.
There followed a short time in which various interested factions worked behind the scenes to come up with a political solution. The Jewish leaders talked quietly with Abdallah, the Hashemite monarch of Jordan, who had his own reasons to fear Palestinian nationalism, while the Americans promoted proposals of their own. However, the British Mandate for Palestine ran out on 14 May 1948, and the Yishuv declared the formation of the state of Israel. The declaration specified religious and cultural tolerance, and peaceful relations with Arab nations. The US and the USSR recognized the new provisional government, led by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and President Chaim Weizmann, a chemist who had made a major contribution to the British war effort during World War I and had lobbied the British government to aid Zionism.
Now the battle lines had been drawn. Palestinian Jews were now Israelis, while Palestinian Arabs were by default Palestinians. That same day Syria and Iraq attacked the newborn nation. They were followed by Lebanon and TransJordan, and finally Egypt. Many believed that Israel would be crushed. Jerusalem was put under siege, Arab forces approached the outskirts of Tel Aviv. However, Ben-Gurion managed to exploit various UN-mediated truces and the disunity of Israel's Arab opponents to buy time and slowly drive wedges into the invading forces. By 1949, all of the Arab forces had been forced to accept cease-fires.
Israel was now 30% bigger than it had been at its formation, and the only reason the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) hadn't seized Gaza and the West Bank was because of fear of antagonizing Britain, then the patron of Egypt and Jordan, and of acquiring a citizen base where Arabs outnumbered Jews. Egypt took over the Gaza Strip, and Jordan took over the West Bank. The resulting map almost bisected Israel at Jerusalem, and almost every place in the country was in artillery range of potentially hostile forces. The map did give access Israel access to the Red Sea. In March 1949, in one of the last Israeli military operations before the cease-fire took effect, the IDF seized Um al-Rashrash at the northern tip of the Gulf of Aqaba. The port, which was renamed Eilat, provided a door to India and East Africa. However, Israeli ships would have to pass through the Straits of Tiran to get out of the Gulf of Aqaba into the Red Sea, and the straits were controlled by Egypt on the west and Saudi Arabia on the east.
For the moment Israel seemed secure, or at least much more secure than the country had appeared in 1948. Young IDF officers like Yigal Allon and Yitzhak Rabin had won the fight against great odds, though the cost had been high. Six thousand Israelis had been killed, one of every hundred citizens, and there had been widespread destruction. In addition, the end of the war did not really mean peace: it was just a lull in fighting until the next war.
However, the serious shooting had stopped for the time being. The Israelis consolidated their country. The provisional government gave way to the first elected government in early 1949 with the formation of the first "Knesset" or parliament, with Ben-Gurion and Weizmann retaining their positions. Israel joined the United Nations. With no restrictions on Jewish immigration, hundreds of thousands of Jews came, doubling the population by 1951. Although many new hands were welcome, over the short run trying to settle them all was exhausting and expensive. Israel was greatly helped in 1952 when the country signed reparations agreements with West Germany to obtain compensation for Jewish properties seized by the Hitler regime.
* The General Armistice Agreements (GAA) signed by Israel with Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria in the first half of 1949 stopped the shooting and set up demilitarized zones (DMZs). Politically, a state of war continued. None of the Arab nations recognized the legitimacy of Israel. The Egyptians blocked the movement of Israeli ships through the Suez Canal, then still under British and French control, and shut down the Straits of Tiran in 1951.
What kept the conflict mostly theoretical and not practical for a few years was the fact that the Arab governments were in confusion. Syria entered into a phase where various dictators came to power on a yearly basis, with each deposed in his turn. King Abdallah of Trans-Jordan was assassinated by a Palestinian gunman in Jerusalem in July 1951. His grandson, Hussein, witnessed the murder, and to no great surprise the incident made a strong impression on him that would influence his actions when he came to the throne.
A year later, in July 1952, King Faruq of Egypt was overthrown by a group of "Free Officers" under General Muhammed Naguib, who was himself overthrown a year later by one of the prime movers of the group, Colonel Gamel Abdel Nasser. The charismatic Nasser arranged for the end of British occupation, establishing his prestige in Egypt and the Arab world. Nasser looked like he had some staying power, and so the Israelis engaged in a little secret correspondence with him. However, no Arab leader could officially regard Israel as anything but the enemy if he wanted to stay in control. Egyptian propaganda began to call for a "second round", and the Egyptians began to sponsor raids into Israel by Palestinian guerrillas, the "fidaiyyun (self-sacrificers)". That was as far as Nasser wanted to go for the moment, but of course the Israelis didn't take the raids casually, launching counter-raids into Egyptian territory that increased the pressure on Nasser to do something about Israel.
In the meantime, the various outside powers, following agendas of their own, were meddling in Middle Eastern affairs. The British and Americans wanted to promote an anti-Soviet alliance in the Middle East. Since the conflict with Israel was a distraction, they secretly floated a peace plan, unimaginatively codenamed "Alpha", in which the Israelis would give away large chunks of land in response for Arab pledges of peace. The Americans had some hope in the Alpha plan, since Nasser was on friendly terms with the US through his contacts with the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
The Soviets were doing some meddling of their own. In 1954 the USSR, having backed Israel in the past, realized that the USSR stood more to gain by promoting the new revolutionary Arab regimes and turning against the Israelis. The Soviets had also had some hope in their plans, as Nasser moved to declare Egypt a non-aligned state, as well as create an "Arab Socialism" that merged socialist ideology with Egyptian and Islamic nationalism. Islamic extremists were not happy with Nasser's tilt towards godless Communism and tried to assassinate him. The Americans were not happy with Nasser's leftward drift either, not just because of the American Cold War mindset, but because it put Nasser on a collision course with conservative Arab monarchies. The Americans had a long-standing friendship with the Saudis, and an enemy of the Saudis was not likely to be a friend of the Americans.
* In the summer of 1954, events began to drift towards the second round. Egyptian authorities seized the Israeli vessel BAT GALIM when it tried to enter the Suez Canal, creating an international outcry. The Israelis were concerned about rights of transit through the canal, with their concerns inflated by the fact that Nasser had signed an agreement with the British to allow the Egyptians to eventually take control of the waterway. In a half-baked attempt to keep the British there, the Israelis conducted a campaign of arson and vandalism in Egypt to destabilize the government. Egyptian security arrested eleven Egyptian Jews. Two were executed and the rest put away in prison.
Nasser was of course enraged, and increased support for Palestinian guerrilla raids into Israel. The Anglo-American Alpha plan was completely dead, and if it hadn't been, it was put down for good by a large-scale Israeli raid into Gaza on 28 February 1955. 51 Egyptian soldiers and eight Israelis were killed. It didn't take a gift of prophecy to see that things were going rapidly to hell. Nasser was loudly attacking the Israelis and the conservative Arab monarchies, and in September 1955 he concluded a major purchase deal for Soviet arms, obtained though Czechoslovakia.
Ben-Gurion realized that such a weapons purchase meant war, the only question being whether it was going to be war on Israeli or Egyptian terms. In the spring of 1956, Ben-Gurion worked with Moshe Dayan, the IDF's chief of staff, and Shimon Peres, director of the Defense Ministry, to come up with a plan to put Nasser in his place. The plan needed a great-power patron. The US was not very interested in Israel at the time, and the British had been leaning towards the Arabs, but the French were sympathetic to the Israelis and were fighting a colonial war against Arab nationalism in Algeria.
On 23 July 1956, after frictions with the US and Britain, Nasser unilaterally nationalized the Suez Canal. This action, along with Egyptian agitation against British-backed regimes in TransJordan and Iraq, pushed Britain into orbit with Israel and France. The US was promoting another secret peace deal with Egypt, codenamed "Gamma", once again featuring big land concessions from Israel, and was trying to resolve the crisis diplomatically, but US President Eisenhower was so disgusted with Nasser that the CIA was also pursuing ways to get him out of power by all means short of assassination.
The diplomatic initiatives went nowhere. Nasser remained in control. On 24 September 1956, representatives of Israel, France, and Britain met in Paris and signed a secret agreement for a plan to seize the canal. The Israelis would threaten the canal, and the French and British would then intervene to "protect" the waterway. The campaign was codenamed OPERATION MUSKETEER, in keeping with its three-party basis.
* MUSKETEER jumped off on 29 October 1956, with Israeli paratroopers seizing Mitla Pass, east of the canal, while Moshe Dayan's tanks penetrated Egyptian defenses into the Sinai and the Gaza Strip. The Egyptian commander, General Muhammed Abd Al-Hakin Amer, ordered his forces to retreat. The French and British formally joined in the operation on 4 November 1956. The Egyptians scuttled 40 ships in the canal to block it.
Militarily, Egypt was thrashed, but MUSKETEER quickly raised a storm of international protest, with the US and USSR in loud agreement that it was an act of blatant imperialism. The French and the British were forced to withdraw, and relations between them and America hit a low point. The Israelis were not so quick to buckle under to international pressure. Ben-Gurion remembered only too well how the 1949 GAA had not proven very useful to Israeli interests, and was determined to drive a harder bargain this time around. Diplomatic efforts to find a solution went on for four months, with Israel's ambassador to the US and UN, Abba Eban, haggling in Israel's behalf.
The solution was finally put together by Canadian Foreign Minister Lester "Mike" Pearson, recognized by all parties for his impartiality. Pearson suggested the creation of a multinational "United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF)" that would police the Gaza Strip, the border between Israel and Egypt, and the town of Sharm al-Sheik, which overlooked the straits of Tiran. Both the Egyptians and the Israelis balked. Nasser didn't like the idea of an occupation of Egyptian territory by a force of foreign troops, even a supposedly impartial multinational one, but UN Secretary General Dag Hammerskold assured Nasser that he would be able to order UNEF to get out, though the UN General Assembly would have to approve.
US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles managed to placate the Israelis by informing his Israeli opposite number, Foreign Minister Golda Meir, that any Egyptian attempt to block the Straits of Tiran would be recognized as an act of war to which Israel had every right to respond. This would prove to be a very important consideration in a decade's time. In any case, everyone was more or less agreeable to the arrangement, and the Israelis completed their withdrawal from the Sinai on 11 March 1957, with UNEF moving into the vacuum.
* Both Egypt and Israel had good reason to be pleased with how they had come out of the 1956 Sinai conflict. Although Egypt had lost the military battle, they had won the political war, with the Soviets and (more reluctantly) the Americans backing Nasser. The British and French invaders had been publicly humiliated. The Suez Canal was now indisputably in Egyptian hands, and Nasser had never seemed stronger.
The Israelis were happy because they had militarily humiliated the Egyptians, if with outside help; set back Egyptian war plans for years; and also opened the Straits of Tiran to Israeli vessels. There was another benefit, more abstract but possibly more important: Israel was now seen as a going operation, leading to international recognition, as well as increased French military and technical support. The IDF Air Force (IDF-AF) built up squadrons of modern French aircraft, while the French helped Israel build a nuclear reactor near Dimona, in the south of the country.
The military confrontation between Egypt and Israel went quiet again. Nasser, having redefined his "Arab socialism" concepts into the more extreme and egocentric "Nasserism", focused on undermining conservative royalist Arab states. The result was the overthrow of Iraq's King Faisal in 1958, with the king and his prime minister torn apart by a Baghdad mob.
That was not the end of the "Arab Cold War", as some called it. The Egyptians helped launched coups in Lebanon and Jordan that failed, with the Americans coming to the defense of Jordan against the country's Soviet-backed Arab enemies. However, in 1958, Nasser scored by creating an alliance with Syria, the "United Arab Republic (UAR)", which was a seeming triumph pan-Arabism and blow to the "Zionist Entity", as the they referred to the otherwise unspeakable Jewish enemy between the two Arab countries. He was also implementing Soviet-style development plans, including the Aswan High dam, which in completion was to be the biggest earth-fill dam in the world.
With his position seeming more secure, Nasser eventually began to turn his attention back towards Israel. In February 1960, Israel and Syria began trading artillery barrages when the Israelis tried to cultivate the DMZs in the north of their country. The DMZs were basically no-man's land, but the Israelis insisted on trying to farm them and kept Syrian farmers out. The Syrians took to firing on Israeli farm tractors, the Israelis shot back, and tempers rose. Soviet intelligence tipped Nasser off about an Israeli plan to attack Syria, and in response Nasser sent two divisions into the Sinai, warning UNEF to be ready to get out. The Israelis were caught flat-footed. After weeks of international negotiations, the Egyptians withdrew in March, with Nasser smug about having trumped the Israelis. The Israelis didn't forget the affair.
* However, by this time Nasser's failures were beginning to catch up with him. His economic development plans were almost all busts, and in 1961 the UAR alliance came unhinged. Syria was traditionally a land of enterprising capitalists, who had little appreciation of the UAR government's clumsy socialist bureaucracy. The UAR government also cut senior military officials out of the circles of power. In September 1961, a group of Syrian officers, including Salah Jadid and Hafez al-Assad, performed a coup and took control. The alliance with Egypt was abandoned and the joint government in Damascus, under General Amer, was told to pack up and go back to Egypt. Egypt, as if in denial, retained the UAR name.
That same year, Nasser was diagnosed with diabetes, and he was quarreling with Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev. Nothing seemed to be going right. The new US president, John F. Kennedy, saw an opening and offered Nasser aid in the form of shipments of grain and other basic commodities, the catch being that Nasser behave himself and not pick fights with the Saudis and other royalist Arab regimes.
That condition was hard to swallow. In 1962, a clique of Free Officers overthrew the royalist government of Yemen, and the Yemeni ruler, Imam Badr, fled north to Saudi Arabia. The Saudi government had no use for anti-royalist military juntas and supported Badr in an attempt to win back his country. The Yemeni officers turned to Nasser to counter the Saudi threat. In reality, senior Egyptian army officers were already supplying help to the revolutionary regime's forces, even without Egyptian government approval. Partly to keep the army distracted, Nasser went along. He also saw it as a way to grind his axe against the Saudis, and to harass the British in their colony of Aden. Kruschev saw the situation as favorable to Soviet interests and gave his approval to Egyptian involvement in the conflict.
The result was a grinding dirty little war that increasingly chewed up Egypt's military resources, bogging Egypt down in a struggle where atrocities became standard operating procedure for both sides and which nobody could really win. US President Kennedy tried to mediate a political solution, leaning on the Saudis to drop their backing of Badr, but the Egyptians increased their forces in Yemen and the agreement collapsed. Egyptian-American friendship, not strong to begin with, began to crumble.
To make matters worse for Egypt, a new revolutionary regime under the Ba'ath party took power in Iraq in a violent coup in February 1963. The new regime purged Nasserite sympathizers from the Iraqi Army and shot them in scores. After a failed coup against Syria in July 1963, the Syrian army suffered the same savage fate.
* The Israelis watched all this with satisfaction. They had more satisfaction to see the Kennedy Administration shifting American policy much more in favor of Israel. Partly this was to counterbalance Soviet influence in the Middle East, but the US presidential election of 1960 had been a close race, and Kennedy knew that American Jews had given him the swing vote that put him into office. Kennedy told Foreign Minister Meir that Israel had a "special relationship" with the US similar to that of Britain, hinted that the US would come to Israel's assistance if the country were invaded, and ramped up supplies of American military hardware to the country.
However, American support was by no means without reservations and conditions. Kennedy was not happy about Israeli retaliations against Arab provocations, or the country's refusal to allow the return of Palestinian refugees. He was particularly unhappy about the nuclear reactor at Dimona, suggesting regular inspections to ensure it was not making nuclear weapons. Ben-Gurion told Kennedy, not at all convincingly, that the reactor was strictly for peaceful purposes, while stating that what went on there was strictly Israel's business.
Such contradictions were fundamental to Israel's mindset. The Israelis were confident and prospering, while they continued to fight against Palestinian infiltrators and worry about the Arab armies threatening their borders. The mindset had been best expressed by Moshe Dayan when he first visited the Pentagon a decade earlier in 1953, saying in one sentence that Israel was faced with total destruction, but that the IDF could thrash all the Arabs in weeks. The statement was also pure Dayan, blustering, the left and right hands with seemingly different agendas.
Israel was in fact well-armed and well-trained, with every healthy male either in the ranks or the reserves. There was the nagging worry that the Arabs still greatly outnumbered them, but Israeli confidence was such that the citizenry allowed David Ben-Gurion to resign in June 1963. The issue that led to his exit from office was the bungled sabotage campaign against Egypt back in 1954. There had been a running controversy over who had ordered it. An internal government board had released a report that Ben-Gurion labeled a whitewash, and he insisted that an investigation be conducted by an independent legal board. He was politically outmaneuvered, and handed in his resignation as a protest.
He was replaced by Levi Eshkol, former minister of finance and agriculture. Eshkol had the public persona of a colorless bureaucrat, and even he himself thought he was only an interim prime minister: Ben-Gurion would be back soon enough. Eshkol surprised himself and everyone else by having much more staying power. Ben-Gurion never became prime minister again.
* Eshkol saw the relations between Israel and the country's neighbors as just as much a confrontation as had Ben-Gurion. As far as the Arabs cared, whether Israel was led by Ben-Gurion or Eshkol made no difference, the Israelis were still the enemy. Fortunately, the Arabs were very much divided. As much as the Arab governments hated Israel, they were still unable to put aside their own antagonisms. The hostile propaganda between Syria and Egypt, always hot, grew increasingly bitter, each accusing the other of being soft on the Zionist Entity and failing to come to the aid of the Palestinians.
When the Israelis announced that they were planning to irrigate the Negev desert, allowing the country to support a bigger population, the Syrians called for a "People's War" to liberate Palestine. Jordan and Saudi Arabia approved of the idea. Nasser then trumped the Syrians by calling for an Arab summit meeting in Cairo, officially for the sake of the Palestinian cause. The idea proved popular, and the summit took place in Cairo in January 1964.
Nasser's unofficial agenda was to derail the prospect of another war with the Israelis in the near future, which he felt would be a military disaster, and to mend fences with the Saudis to get Egypt out of Yemen. Nasser seemed to have his own way at the conference. A plan was created to divert the sources of the Jordan river, cutting the flow of water to Israel, and to create a "United Arab Command (UAC)" to deal with the predictable military backlash from the Israelis when the Jordan began to dry up. The UAC, which was in principle to coordinate military actions between the Arab nations, came up with a plan for taking on Israel in 1967. There was another summit in September 1964, and a third in Casablanca, Morocco, in 1965. The last saw the creation of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), under a lawyer named Ahmad al-Shuqayri. He would be gradually eclipsed by one of his lieutenants, Yasir Arafat.
There was less to all this than met the eye. The UAC remained largely a paper concept. The Syrians continued to snipe at Nasser, and the summit did not give Nasser a deal on Yemen. Other Arab nations saw the PLO as an instrument of the Egyptians, and it was denounced by other Palestinian organizations. The only end result of the creation of the UAC and PLO was to frighten and provoke the Israelis, while doing nothing to actually improve the chances of the Arabs of winning a fight with the Zionist Entity.
To compound Nasser's problems, the deteriorating relationship between Egypt and the US had finally collapsed completely in November 1964 after a series of provocations, including an incident where a crowd attacked the US embassy in Cairo. When the American ambassador, Lucius Battle, complained to Nasser and said that shipments of American wheat were at risk unless the Egyptian attitude changed, Nasser told him off sharply, concluding: "We are not going to accept gangsterism by cowboys!"
The wheat shipments stopped, and worse for Egypt, the Americans began to work behind the scenes against Nasser's attempts to obtain international aid. Nasser suspected that the new US president, Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), was plotting to assassinate him. Egypt's economy continued to sink while its population boomed. The only growth industry in the country seemed to be the government security service, the "al-Mukhabarat", as Nasser increased his grip on the state and suppressed dissent.
* As mentioned, the Israelis were thoroughly alarmed by the Arab summits of 1964 and 1965. The Arabs publicly said they were planning to start another round of war in 1967 or so, and the Israelis of course took them at their word, even though the reality was that the 1967 deadline was a complete fiction. The Israelis started their own preparations for another war.
The biggest immediate provocations were taking place on the northern frontier with Syria. The squabbles over cultivation of the DMZs continued, while sniping took place on the Sea of Galilee. The Syrian attempt to divert the sources of the Jordan was a particular escalation, and when the Syrians bombarded the DMZs, the Israelis often used it as an opportunity to fire on bulldozers working on the diversion project, far behind the battle lines.
The fighting took a major step up on 13 November 1964, with the Syrians dropping heavy barrages on Israeli settlements outside of the DMZs. Eshkol considered hitting the Syrian guns with airstrikes, but worried that it might provoke a war and distress the Americans. Yitzhak Rabin, now chief of staff, lobbied for the airstrikes, reasoning that the Arabs were not ready to get involved in a real war, and that since the Americans were now conducting air strikes as reprisals against North Vietnam, they would not be in a position to object to Israel taking the same measure in the face of provocations.
The air strikes went ahead, with the IDF-AF clearing Syrian fighters out of the sky and pounding Syrian tanks. The Syrians found themselves outclassed by the Israelis. In response, Syria obtained 60 modern MiG-21 fighters from the Soviets, very comparable to the Israeli French Mirage IIIs, and began to increase support for Palestinian terrorist raids on Israel. The "al-Asifa (Storm)" wing of the al-Fatah group conducted dozens of attacks on Israel in 1965.
Nasser was not happy with the situation. He didn't feel that Egypt was ready for a war with the Israelis, and the Syrian-backed Palestinian groups were a challenge to the Egyptian-dominated PLO. He quietly arrested al-Fatah activists in Egypt and Gaza.
King Hussein of Jordan was not happy either, since he was trapped between a largely Palestinian citizenry that wanted to fight Israel, and an Israel that he knew could reach out and crush him like a bug if the need arose. The Israelis understood his dilemma, and there were secret diplomatic exchanges between the two governments, assisted by the fact that both nations shared the same American patron. The Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad, even tipped Hussein off about an assassination plot in 1962. Many of the al-Fatah raids of 1965 were launched from the West Bank. Hussein did what he could to quietly discourage such activities, but he did not placate the Israelis, and they conducted a series of small-scale reprisal raids into the West Bank in May 1965. The end result was an expanded round of recriminations between Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and the PLO, with a general rise of tempers.
The Israelis were not looking forward to another round, either. Their military preparations were not in place, and the relationship with the French had cooled over the last few years. De Gaulle was building bridges to Arab states and arms deliveries to Israel declined accordingly. As far as the Americans were concerned, Lyndon Johnson proclaimed himself a good friend of Israel and provided substantial civilian aid, but he was reluctant to supply weapons. The US had tried, if not always with great success, to steer a middle course in the Mideast. Johnson did not want to escalate tensions in the region, all the more so because he was finding himself increasingly bogged down in the conflict in Vietnam. One troublesome war was enough.
* There were elections in Israel in October 1965. Eshkol's government withstood the vote, but Eshkol himself was exhausted by the campaign and suffered a heart attack. He recovered and returned to office, only to be confronted with a stagnant economy and rising unemployment.
The border security problem remained, in fact it was clearly getting worse, with rising numbers of attacks through 1966. Early in that year, the Syrian government had been overthrown by yet another coup, which installed Chief of Staff General Salah Jadid and Syrian Air Force Commander Hafez al-Assad as the new leadership. They had been among the leaders of the previous government but had now triumphed over rivals, a process of elimination that would continue until the shrewd and absolutely ruthless Hafez al-Assad became the undisputed top boss in 1970.
The new Ba'athist government was even more extreme than its predecessors. It was dominated by Alawites, members of a small Muslim sect in a nation that was mostly Sunni Muslim, and supported mostly by oppression. Escalating terrorist attacks on Israel seemed to be a good way to establish some popular legitimacy. If it led to a war, so what? The new Syrian regime hated Nasser and King Hussein, who would take the brunt of the conflict. Syria was receiving massive Soviet military support and would be able to ride out the storm, or so the line of thinking went.
The Soviets had been providing plenty of military hardware to Egypt, but the new Syrian regime was even more left-leaning and the Soviets poured in aid. Egypt was a Soviet ally in the Middle East; Syria was becoming something that looked more like a satellite.
In the past, the Soviets hadn't been enthusiastic about Syria's attempts to provoke the Israelis and had tried to counsel restraint, but now the Kremlin's attitude was shifting. By mid-1966, Soviet rhetoric against Israel was becoming hotter and more abusive, and the Syrians felt perfectly free to support terrorist attacks against Israel.
The Israelis found Syria's Soviet backing unsettling. After all, the Americans were not providing Israel with any comparable level of military support, and so the Israelis became cautious about provoking the Syrians. On 25 May 1966, the Soviet Foreign Ministry indignantly informed the Israeli ambassador to the USSR that intelligence had been received showing Israel was preparing to invade Syria. It wasn't true and Israeli officials from Eshkol on down denied it loudly, but the Israelis were intimidated, which was very likely the point of the exercise, and became even more cautious.
There was no reason to be so cautious over reprisals against Palestinian raids from the West Bank, and IDF forces made several forays across the border, killing a number of Palestinians. The Israelis also had to respond to direct provocations from Syria, and continued to trade shots with the Syrians along the northern border.
The border clashes occasionally escalated again. On 7 July 1966, IDF-AF forces flew north of the border and got into a fight with Syrian MiGs. The result was an embarrassment for the Syrians, with one MiG shot down. The Syrians tried to retaliate on 15 August, when an Israeli patrol boat ran aground on the demilitarized eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee. The result was two more MiGs shot down, though the Israelis were forced to sneak the boat out at night.
In short, tensions were rising whether the Israelis liked it or not. Chief of Staff Rabin, a notably mild-mannered person, was becoming hawkish and suggested publicly that Syria needed to be dealt with. Although Rabin and Eshkol were close friends, Eshkol reprimanded him for the statement. Eshkol felt the best thing to do for the moment was to press complaints against the Syrians through the UN Security Council, though in fact all attempts to push through a resolution criticizing Syria were quickly shot down by Soviet vetoes.
* Nasser remained cautious of a war with Israel, and the result was a bout of secret diplomatic meetings in Paris between Egyptian and Israeli representatives, with the two sides raising proposals to ease tensions. However, the Egyptians became worried that the secret meetings might become public, and cut off the contacts before anything could be made of them.
Nasser was having a bit better luck with his diplomacy with Syria. He proposed a new alliance, which could be publicly displayed as a joint effort against Israel but would allow Egypt to exert some restraint on the Syrians. The new Syrian regime had been loudly abusing Nasser in their propaganda, but the confidence of the Syrians had been rattled by their bad showing in the air battles with the Israelis. In addition, there had been yet another coup attempt in Syria in September, leading to a purge of the army and still greater insecurity among the leadership.
An Egyptian military delegation was in Damascus by mid-October 1966, and a treaty of mutual cooperation was signed on 4 November. One of the results was that Nasser's relations with King Hussein, which had been thawing, went frosty again, with Egyptian propaganda blasting Hussein as an "agent and stooge of imperialists and Zionists."
Unfortunately, Nasser's ability to reign in the Syrians proved limited, and Syrian-backed Palestinian attacks on Israel continued. They were mostly launched from Jordan, with Israeli intelligence reporting that Hussein was doing little to restrain the attacks. Israeli tempers rose.
* They snapped on 10 November 1966, when an Israeli border police vehicle ran over a mine, killing three and wounding one. Hussein was quick to write his condolences to Eshkol and state that border security would be improved. The message was relayed through the American embassies in Amman and Tel Aviv, a common conduit for communications between Jordan and Israel.
Unfortunately, the US ambassador to Israel, Walworth "Wally" Barbour, did not forward the message on to the Israeli government immediately. Barbour was generally an efficient person, but it was Friday and he judged it unlikely that the Israelis would do anything rash over the weekend. It could wait until Monday, 13 November. Barbour had underestimated the frustration of the Israelis. Before dawn on 13 November, the IDF sent ten tanks, 40 half-tracks, and 400 troops across the border into the West Bank around the town of Hebron. OPERATION SHREDDER, as it was called, was the biggest military operation since the 1956 war, and it had been unanimously approved by the government. Even Foreign Minister Abba Eban, normally pacifistic, agreed it was necessary.
SHREDDER was supposed to be limited display of force, a demonstration, with the troops getting in, hitting their assigned targets, and pulling back out again. It didn't work out that way. A convoy of Jordanian troops were spotted coming up on the town of Samu at about 0730 hours, and the Israeli troops set up an ambush for them. 15 Jordanians were killed and 54 wounded, but they fought back as best they could, killing an Israeli officer and wounding ten Israeli soldiers. Jordanian Hawker Hunter fighters scrambled in support, with one was shot down by the IDF-AF.
This was in addition to the killing of three Palestinians, with 94 wounded as well. West Bank Palestinians rioted, burning Hussein in effigy and demanding that he be overthrown. Israel was denounced in the UN. Worst of all, the Americans were furious: Israel was being baited by the Syrians, Hussein was a moderate backed by the US -- why did the Israelis try to undermine Hussein instead of punish the Syrians? It seemed as though the Israelis were scared of the Syrians and so chose to bully the weaker Hussein instead.
President Johnson's national security advisor, Walt W. Rostow, even went so far as to suggest that the Israelis were trying to ensure that they were completely surrounded by Soviet-leaning regimes. That would eliminate the inconvenience of dealing with an American-backed Jordan, and also force the US to throw its weight behind Israel. Rostow was reading too much into things.
Some Israelis tried to put a good face on the botch-up, but Rabin offered to resign. Eshkol turned him down. In hindsight, the raid on Samu had set the gears turning towards war.