released 28 aug 05 / last mod 01 jun 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* By 8 June 1967, the Israeli offensives against Egypt and Jordan were winding down, though the Israelis were still fighting hard, in fact overenthusiastically shooting up a US Navy signals intelligence ship, the LIBERTY, by accident. International pressure was building for a cease-fire, but the Israelis felt the Syrians still needed to be taught a lesson, beginning an offensive on 9 June and continuing it to the last moment when a cease-fire took hold on 10 June.
The sniping between the Israelis and Arabs continued for the next few years, resulting in a second war in 1973 that was much less one-sided, paving the way for a US-brokered peace agreement between Egypt and Israel. That was only one of the ways in which the Six-Day War, as it would become generally known, would rearrange the landscape, with the shifts in terrain continuing into the 21st century.
* At dawn on the 8 June, the fourth day of the fighting, the Israelis made clear who owned the West Bank by blowing most of the bridges over the Jordan. Some IDF units crossed to the East Bank to provide cover for the engineers while demolition charges were set. The Israeli troops had no intention of staying and pulled back over the river before the charges were detonated, but their presence turned the screws hard on the already overstrained Hussein, who thought they Israelis now meant to conquer all of Jordan.
They could have done so if they had wished to. Hussein didn't have much left to fight them with. He begged US Ambassador Findley Burns: "For God's sake, get them to stop!" Hussein made similar pleas to the British. Neither the Americans nor the British did much in response, but they didn't have to: the Israeli blitzkrieg against Jordan was over, with the IDF now taking up defensive positions to block any possible Jordanian counterstrokes.
The IDF had lost 200 men in the conquest of the West Bank. Israel troops had not been impressed with Jordanian leadership but admired the courage of Jordanian troops, many of whom had fought to the last in Jerusalem under hopeless circumstances when nobody could have faulted them for surrendering. At one gravesite dug for the defenders, IDF troops put up a marker praising their bravery.
Back in the Sinai, the Egyptians were still being chewed up. With Israeli armor blocking the Mitla and Giddi Passes, Egyptian forces had lost their escape route and had no way to escape marauding IDF-AF fighters. Amer had at least come to his senses, after heavy prodding by his generals, and ordered a defensive line set up on the west bank of the Suez Canal and the bridges blown. Israeli units were probing towards the canal, even though Dayan had threatened to court-martial anybody who touched it. The IDF forces fighting in the Sinai were feeling a bit upstaged by the capture of the Temple Mount, were becoming a little over-eager for some glory of their own.
* In the meantime, to the north the Syrians were remaining an extreme nuisance, continuing their bombardments of Israeli settlements, some of which had been completely flattened. US Ambassador to Israel Barbour reported to Washington that he expected an Israeli counterstroke in the north at any time, judging that the IDF would push across the border about 20 kilometers (12 miles) to dislodge or destroy Syrian artillery and armor.
The Syrians were not as aggressive as they seemed, however. While they pressured Lebanon to join the war, they took no actions beyond the shelling. Yasir Arafat was on the Golan front with a group of Palestinian infiltrators and found no evidence that the Syrians were serious about fighting the Israelis. Arafat concluded that Syria and Israel had cut a deal. As far as the Lebanese went, they intelligently decided to distance themselves from the conflict, likely sensing that the Syrians were eager to fight to the last drop of Lebanese blood.
The Israeli government debated whether a counterstroke against the Syrians was necessary or not, with Eshkol taking a middle view between the two factions. Chief of the IDF Northern Command, David Elazar, called Rabin and bitterly complained about the inaction. Rabin asked him if he wanted to go ahead with his own forces and Elazar gave him an angry NO, since that would be the worst of all possible worlds: piling up casualties without having the force to do the Syrians any serious harm.
That was what Rabin felt himself. Elazar took a helicopter to Tel Aviv to confer with Eshkol, Rabin, and others. They were sympathetic to him, but Dayan remained opposed to taking on the Syrians for the moment. However, IDF units freed up by the capture of the West Bank, as well as some units from the Sinai front, drove north to prepare for the day of reckoning with the Syrians. The Americans seemed to waffle on the matter, worrying about expanding the war but not exactly opposed to seeing the obnoxious Syrians, who had done so much to provoke the conflict, get a well-deserved thrashing. The Israelis heard the second part of the message much more clearly than they heard the first.
* While the US had been nothing more than an observer to the conflict to that time, the war was just about to reach out and touch the Americans hard.
The US Navy signals intelligence ship LIBERTY was just off the northern coast of the Sinai at dawn that morning, monitoring the fighting. The LIBERTY was in international waters but close enough to shore to see evidence of fighting. The vessel's skipper, a Commander McGonagle, was nervous about being so near to the shooting and requested that Sixth Fleet command send a destroyer escort. He was turned down since, since as a clearly marked US ship in international waters, there was no reason for anyone to attack him. Neither McGonagle nor Sixth Fleet brass knew that orders had already been sent from the Pentagon instructing the LIBERTY to withdraw at least 160 kilometers (100 miles) out into the Mediterranean. The orders had become tangled up in communications and wouldn't actually arrive until 9 June, by which time they would be far too late.
Several Israeli aircraft spotted the LIBERTY that morning. The vessel was identified and its position marked on a naval situation map. The Israelis were feeling jumpy, since much of Israel's population and industry was close to the coast, and even a fairly small warship could inflict a great deal of damage. Furthermore, Israeli forces had been fighting hard for over three days by now and exhaustion was sure to be playing an increasing role in their actions.
At 11:00 AM, the Israeli duty officer who had logged the position of the LIBERTY went off his shift. Since he had heard nothing more about the vessel, he assumed it had gone back out to sea and removed the marker from the situation map. Then, at 11:24 AM there was a tremendous explosion at al-Arish, on the north coast of the Sinai. It was actually an ammunition dump cooking up, but Israeli observers in the area reported seeing two vessels offshore and concluded that Egyptian warships were shelling the area.
At 12:05 PM, three Israeli Navy torpedo boats were dispatched to find the enemy warships and deal with them. The Israeli Navy had been slow to react to the matter and the Israeli general staff reprimanded the navy. At 1:41 PM, the torpedo boat crews spotted what seemed to be an enemy vessel moving fast towards Egypt. The torpedo boats had spotted the LIBERTY, and gave chase at pursuit speed, but the target seemed to be outpacing and drawing away from them. The LIBERTY's top speed was nowhere close to that of a torpedo boat, and it appears that the Israeli crews, possibly misled by one of the odd optical illusions that can take place at sea, grossly misjudged its range.
In any case, they called for IDF-AF air power to intercept and destroy the intruder. At 1:57 PM, Mirages attacked the LIBERTY, raking it with 30 millimeter cannon fire. The Mirages made three passes. McGonagle, wounded in both legs, ordered the vessel out to sea. Shmuel Kislev, the chief IDF-AF air controller back on land, asked several times if the ship was shooting back, but the fighter pilots seemed focused on their attacks and didn't respond. The Mirages ran out of ammunition and departed, only to be replaced by Mysteres that were returning from a strike on Egyptian ground forces. The Mysteres were armed with napalm tanks, not a very good weapon for attacking a ship, but attack they did and scored hits, setting fires on board the vessel. Kislev was still bothered by the fact that the vessel didn't seem to be returning fire, which would definitely be odd behavior for a warship that had just been firing on the shoreline.
On receiving assurances from the Israeli Navy that they had no vessels in the area, Kislev authorized another pass; then he had second thoughts and requested that the Mystere pilots check for a flag. One fighter flew close and read back the designation code "Charlie Tango Romeo Five [CTR5]". Kislev, shocked, told them to immediately break off the attack. He knew that Egyptian vessels were always marked with Arabic characters, not Roman characters. He had a nasty feeling that the IDF-AF had been working over an American vessel. When the news reached Rabin and his staff, Rabin was more frightened that it was a Soviet ship, and that the USSR had just been given a substantial provocation to enter the war against Israel.
Unfortunately, things continued to go to hell at sea. The three Israeli torpedo boats finally arrived at the scene at 2:44 PM. Confused by smoke pouring from the ship, they misidentified it as an Egyptian supply vessel and closed to attack. McGonagle tried to have hand blinker signals sent to the Israeli vessels -- his searchlights were shattered -- and ordered his sailors not to shoot at the approaching torpedo boats, but one sailor didn't get the message and opened up with one of the LIBERTY's four machine guns. The torpedo boats promptly launched five torpedoes, one of which scored a devastating hit, and then closed to rake the LIBERTY with automatic cannon and machine gun fire. The crews of the torpedo boats reported that they had confirmed the vessel was a hostile -- until they picked up one of the ship's shot-up life rafts from the sea and saw it had US Navy markings. They broke off the attack and reported the error. The LIBERTY limped back out to sea, with 34 dead and 171 wounded.
* Rabin was somewhat relieved that the vessel hadn't been Soviet, but he was hardly pleased that it was American. Things sorted themselves out over the next few hours, with Eshkol hurriedly sending a message to Lyndon Johnson expressing deep regrets over the incident. The Israeli government would later offer to pay compensation, with an ultimate settlement of $12 million USD.
LBJ was also somewhat relieved, because when the first reports of the attack on the LIBERTY had arrived he had assumed the attackers were probably Soviets. A "friendly fire" attack by the Israelis, though of course unwelcome in itself, was politically much less troublesome. At the time, Washington was eager to gloss the matter over, since the presence of a US Navy vessel so close to the war zone would be taken by the Arabs as proof that the Americans really were in military collusion with the Israelis. In fact, the Egyptians would later claim that the LIBERTY had been jamming their communications.
However, as the details came in, showing just how persistent the Israelis had been in their blunder, the Americans began to smolder. The negligence shown had been astounding, all the more so because the Israelis were proving themselves ultra-competent on the battleground. Many American officials suspected that the attack was deliberate.
Israeli reports on the attack unsurprisingly concluded it was a friendly-fire incident and detailed the various blunders that had led up to it. Many American officials saw the exercise as a coverup. Comments in the reports that the LIBERTY had failed to identify itself -- though it was flying the American flag and had tried to communicate with blinker signals -- and that it shouldn't have been where it was -- arguably true, but it was still in international waters -- only fed American resentment, which was greatly compounded when no disciplinary action was taken against any of the Israeli military officers involved.
Still, although the attack on the LIBERTY was an astounding screwup, anybody who's ever been in the military knows better than to underestimate the ability of even the best military forces to make such screwups. More to the point, the Israelis could have sunk the LIBERTY had they wanted to but broke off the attack in the end, and furthermore, nobody has ever been able to identify any compelling reason why the Israelis would have wanted to attack the vessel in the first place. Various conspiracy theories have been put forward, but all suffer from the usual pitfalls of such contraptions: an arguable reading of the facts of the case, and no identification of a motive for the action that comes close to balancing its potential drawbacks. In short, a deliberate attack would have been even more astoundingly stupid than an accidental one.
* One effect of the LIBERTY incident was to help encourage the US government to push harder to get things under control as soon as possible. The UN Security Council reconvened that afternoon to discuss a cease-fire. There were some frictions between the Americans and the Israelis, with the Americans uneasy with hints that the Israelis meant to keep some of the lands that they had conquered. This was not such a big deal compared to the hostility of the Soviets, with Soviet UN Ambassador Federenko comparing the Israelis to "Hitler's executioners", a remark that drew a sharp reply from Israeli UN Ambassador Rafael.
Things were going nowhere again, and since most of the concerned parties believed that the Egyptians would not come to their senses and agree to a cease-fire of any sort, few thought they were going to go anywhere in a hurry. Egyptian UN Ambassador El Kony didn't know what to do and could only wait on instructions from Nasser.
Nasser had all but dropped from public sight at the beginning of the war and stayed out of sight while events ran out of control. Anwar Sadat had tried to persuade him to fire the hysterical Amer and take charge himself, but got nowhere. Nasser finally emerged at midday on 8 June, appearing self-assured and confident, saying that help was on the way from the USSR and other allies, and that Egypt would carry on the fight. It sounded good, but Nasser was grossly out of touch with reality. Egyptian troops in the Sinai were no longer really an army. About 11,000 had managed to escape over the Suez Canal when Amer ordered General Abd al-Munim Khalil to blow the bridges. General Khalil did as he was told but didn't like it: "These were the last words that I heard from him, his last disgraceful command."
About 20,000 Egyptian troops had been left stranded and at the mercy of the IDF. One Egyptian officer described the scene over the Sinai: "The broken pieces of the army strewn over the sand ... burnt out tanks ... destroyed vehicles .. charred bodies that looked like statues." Many soldiers who made it to the canal simply dropped their weapons or abandoned their vehicles and swam across. There was simply nothing else they could do. Mothers and other family members went to the military to try to find out what had happened to their sons, and got few answers. The bewildered Egyptian military was simply in a collective state of shock.
Nasser spoke to Amer and the generals and was forced to accept reality. Nasser, crushed, ordered that El Kony be immediately informed that Egypt was to accept an unconditional cease-fire. El Kony got the call at the Egyptian embassy in New York at 9:00 PM local time. He was shocked and refused to believe it. Thinking it was an Israeli trick, he got in touch with Nasser personally. Nasser replied, warmly but sadly: "You did well by calling, Muhammed, but yes, you are to accept the cease-fire."
El Kony went to the Security Council at 9:35 PM. Weeping with stress and humiliation, he declared that Egypt would accept the cease-fire. Many present thought this was a ploy of some sort until Egyptian supreme headquarters issued a public communique that a cease-fire had been accepted.
* With the clock now close to running out, Dayan ordered IDF forces to make one last quick push in the Sinai before they were forced to stop. Since the Israeli conquest of the Sinai was effectively complete, this was simply putting the finishing touches on the operation. The fighting in the Sinai would sputter out by noon the next day.
The matter of the Syrians remained. The IDF would be soon free to turn their undivided attention north, but if the Syrians accepted the cease-fire they would get away all but unscathed. The Soviets were making very threatening noises to Tel Aviv over the possibility of Israeli "aggression" to the north, further complicating the situation. Eshkol conducted a meeting of his cabinet in his office. One faction pressed for immediate action against the Syrians; another faction encouraged restraint. Dayan was part of the second faction and argued against taking action. Eshkol was split on the matter and no decision was made.
* By the end of 8 June 1967, it might have seemed to most observers that the war was all but over. The Sinai and the West Bank were quiet, and at 3:10 AM on 9 June the Syrians announced that they would accept the cease-fire. Defense Minister Dayan had already told Rabin earlier that night that the Syrians would only be attacked if they kept up their bombardment of northern Israel.
Rabin, coming down off his tension jag, went home for the first time in four days and went promptly to sleep, but not before wondering if the ever-volatile Dayan wouldn't change his mind again, as he had done again and again during the war. Rabin didn't really care much; whatever bad things happened to the Syrians were OK with him. In fact, by the time the sun came up on the morning of 9 June, Dayan was already well into making another about-face.
Aerial reconnaissance photos showed the Syrians were clearing forces out of the border areas, and Israeli signals intelligence picked up a wire from Nasser to Syrian President Atassi encouraging him to accept the UN cease-fire with all haste. Suddenly Dayan saw the last opportunity to punish the Syrians slipping away from Israel. At 6:00 AM, Dayan called David Elazar of the IDF Northern Command and asked him simply: "Can you attack?"
That was exactly the question Elazar had been waiting for. He replied: "I can, and right now."
Dayan replied: "Then attack." Dayan tried to explain why he had reversed himself, but Elazar didn't care in the least and said as much, concluding: "We're attacking. Thank you very much. Shalom. Shalom."
Some Israeli staff officers were thunderstruck by the quick reversal in plans. Eshkol was downright offended when he was phoned the news, fuming: "That's despicable! That's despicable!" Still, the prime minister made no attempt to stop Dayan, saying fatalistically: "If he thinks he can do whatever he wants, let him do it."
In the north, the IDF Northern Command was conducting an intense bombardment of Syrian positions, and in midmorning the IDF-AF added their bombs, rockets, and cannon fire to the pounding. The Syrians were heavily dug in, however, and though minefields were blown away, the defenders were suffering no serious harm. The IDF went forward at midday in the central section of the border north of the Sea of Galilee. The terrain was rugged, the Syrians fought doggedly, and the Israelis suffered badly. They pushed on anyway. By evening, Syrian frontline defenses had cracked, though second-level defenses remained intact. Both sides had suffered serious losses.
The Syrians complained bitterly at the United Nations about the Israeli breach of the cease-fire. Egypt's Mohammed El Kony and the USSR's Federenko chimed in with even greater anger, and Rafael answered the accusations thrown at him in the same hot tone -- as well he might, since it was obvious that as long as the Arabs and their Soviet patron continued to waste their time ranting, the Israeli offensive could go on unhindered. However, the Syrians had the presence of mind to push for an immediate, totally unconditional cease-fire -- only to be derailed by Federenko, who insisted that the resolution also condemn the Israelis and require that the IDF pull back to the borders. Now it was the turn of the USSR to deny reality. The UN debate ground down into quarrels once more, much to the satisfaction of Gideon Rafael.
Tel Aviv wasn't so satisfied with the messages they were getting from Washington. Johnson was angry with the Israelis for breaking the cease-fire. Secretary of State Rusk contacted Ambassador Wally Barbour in Tel Aviv with instructions to get in touch with Foreign Minister Abba Eban immediately and tell him, in so many words, that the US government was not happy with the Israelis and that they were to stop the crap.
That evening there was a meeting of Eshkol, Dayan, and senior ministers. Dayan, under fire, defended his latest change of mind, even hinting that Eshkol had approved. Eshkol denied that he had been consulted, but however unhappy he was with Dayan, he was not unhappy about what the IDF was doing to the Syrians. The charges flew back and forth, but the final conclusion was that the operation should continue into the next day. After that, there would be no way to go on with it in the face of international opposition.
To the north, David Elazar was operating on every assumption that the fight would continue. He was funneling reinforcements into the battle, pushing on towards the Golan Heights. The Syrians even believed that the IDF was getting ready to grab Damascus and prepared for a back-to-the-wall defense.
* The war was effectively over for Egypt, and now it was time for the leadership to face the music. Early that morning, Nasser got a report that Amer had tried to commit suicide, and went over Supreme Headquarters to investigate. Amer was actually just drunk and raving. Nasser managed to calm him down, and then told him that the government should step down, suggesting that vice-president Zakkariya Muhiedden take over.
Later on that morning, Nasser spoke with Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, editor of the Al-Abram newspaper and an old friend. Nasser, who looked like he had aged ten years, explained that he felt responsible for the disaster that had fallen on Egypt, and gloomily added that he would even willingly submit to execution if that was the will of the people. He and the senior military leadership would announce their resignations that evening. He would have to resign because the leadership would have to deal with the Americans, and he couldn't bring himself to do it. He then got a call from Amer, who ranted that the Israelis were pouring across the canal. Nasser sighed: "He's completely lost his nerve. And that's how he lost the army."
Nasser went on the radio at 6:30 PM to announce in muted tones that he took full responsibility for the defeat, though he blamed it on Anglo-American interference, and tendered his resignation, selecting Muhiedden as his successor. The moment he did so, an uproar began in the streets of Cairo, with people pouring out of their homes crying out that he should stay. Gunners began firing their antiaircraft cannon. Similar spontaneous demonstrations occurred in Alexandria and other cities across the Arab world. Muhiedden refused the appointment, and King Hussein went on Radio Jordan to plead for Nasser to remain. Nasser had led Egypt to disaster and the people had cursed him for it, but in the end he was still the father of his nation. He couldn't walk out on them. They wouldn't let him.
The whole thing was regarded as a stage-managed farce in the West, but the fact of the matter was that such major demonstrations couldn't have possibly been organized on such short notice and under such confused circumstances without leaving clear evidence of their direction from the top. Nasser accepted the resignations of Amer and the senior military leadership, but announced that he would stay on to continue the struggle against the Zionist entity. He had managed to win a political victory that could give him some satisfaction.
* Although the Syrians fought stubbornly through the night, by early morning on 10 June they were beginning to cave in. Israeli troops advanced to find little or no opposition, with large quantities of equipment abandoned intact. The Syrians were running, though some Syrian soldiers were found chained to their positions. At 8:30 AM, the Syrians began blowing up their bunkers.
The debate at the UN started up again very early that morning in New York. It was as noisy and confused as it had been the day before. The Arabs and the Soviets traded accusations with the Israelis. Back at the White House, LBJ got a message from Kosygin that strongly hinted that the USSR would pursue military options if the Israeli blitz wasn't stopped.
Johnson did not want to make counterthreats. He discussed the matter with his advisors before replying that the US was doing everything possible to get the Israelis to stop fighting, and the Soviet Union should do the same with their Syrian client, though by that time the Syrians had effectively given up the fight. LBJ also suggested that the USSR should take measures to deflate the lies being told by the Arabs that the British and Americans were directly involved in the war. He then quietly ordered the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean to turn around and steam to within 160 kilometers (100 miles) of the coast of Israel. LBJ did not want to make a direct threat, but he wasn't above making an implied one.
LBJ was telling the truth about American efforts to get the Israelis to stop shooting. Wally Barbour was taking a hard line with Abba Eban, brushing away Eban's attempts to stall him. At the UN, Arthur Goldberg was giving Gideon Rafael much the same treatment. The American protests quickly filtered up to Eshkol. He was then handed threatening messages from the Kremlin, followed up by a visit from a highly agitated Ambassador Chuvaikin, who informed Eshkol that Moscow was breaking diplomatic relations. Eshkol tried to placate Chuvaikin, suggesting that the difficulties between the USSR and Israel might be better addressed by working on improving relations, not severing them. Eshkol concluded: "If there were complete harmony, it would only be a question of cocktail parties."
Chuvaikin calmed down, but replied: "What your excellency is saying is logical, but I haven't been sent here to be logical. I have come here to tell about the rupture of relations." Then, to put one more twist on the roller-coaster ride Eshkol had been put through over the last week, Chuvaikin, overwhelmed by stress, broke down and wept.
Nine other Communist countries broke relations as well. Tel Aviv probed Washington for assurances that Americans would help if Israel were attacked by the USSR. The White House did not reply. Let the Israelis squirm a while, no doubt the thinking went, and maybe they'll come to their senses. If that was the idea, it was working. Eshkol promptly called a meeting with Dayan and other cabinet officials. The war had to be wrapped up quickly, but the military needed a few more hours to consolidate their gains. The group finally agreed to stall for four more hours. After that, Dayan said, he would go to General Bull and accept the cease-fire. Dayan concluded: "Don't even ask for air cover after 2:00 PM."
The Syrian army was in full flight by that time, with their escape complicated by tens of thousands of civilians fleeing the fighting as well. Everyone believed that Israeli tanks would be in Damascus at any minute. The Syrian general staff ran out of the city, followed by the government ministries. There were still a few Syrians who wanted to fight: David Elazar's helicopter was attacked by a Syrian jet fighter, but the helicopter escaped by hiding in the rough terrain. However, the IDF met with very little resistance and moved forward rapidly, consolidating the conquest of the border region and the Golan Heights.
Dayan kept to his custom of saying one thing and then doing another, not meeting with Odd Bull at 3:00 PM. The formal cease-fire didn't actually go into effect until 6:00 PM. Barbour noted that the stalling for time had gone to a "hair-raising proximity to the brink." Such was the way Moshe Dayan, the Israeli action hero, did things.
* The war was over after about 132 hours of fighting. The Israelis had lost hundreds of men, the Arabs tens of thousands. The Israelis captured almost 6,000 Arab prisoners, along with two Soviet military advisors. The Israelis used the prisoners as bargaining chips to get back Israeli agents rotting in Arab prisons, though the Egyptians and the Syrians would only deal with the Israelis through intermediaries.
The Egyptians had been almost completely disarmed, with the Israelis capturing vast quantities of Egyptian equipment, much of it in perfect shape. US intelligence would find analysis of the catch very interesting. 469 Arab planes were lost, compared to 36 Israeli aircraft.
While the fighting had cost surprisingly few civilian lives, it did create yet another mass exodus of refugees from territories the Israelis had seized. There was a smaller exodus the other way as Arab states expelled thousands of their Jewish citizens. The Israeli occupation of the territories was, by the standards of such unpleasant things, relatively mild, with local civil and religious leadership remaining in place and no acts of retribution against civilian populations. Still, it was an occupation, and it was the beginning of another festering problem.
There were few misgivings for the Israelis at the time. They had won a smashing victory, and the mood was exultant. It was Yitzhak Rabin who, typically low-key, gave the conflict the name it would be best known by: The Six-Day War. He chose this over several much more gloating titles, but it was still too much for Arab states, implying the rapid speed of their humiliation, and they called it the June War, or more melodramatically the Disaster or the Setback.
Whatever the war was called, it led the Arabs to a long session of introspection. Over the long run, it would effectively kill off the whole notion of "Arab nationalism", a concept that had always been more theatrics than substance anyway. One reaction was that Arab countries needed to embrace true democracy and reform. Much more significantly, another reaction was to turn to Islamic radicalism. The Arab governments having proven to varying degrees inept, authoritarian, and corrupt, the only seeming alternative was to fall back on the bedrock of Islam.
Over the short run, Nasser continued to blame Egypt's defeat on the British and the Americans. More helpfully, the Egyptian military set out on a hard road back up to recreate itself into a combat force that could fight and win, learning to use the new Soviet weapons that began arriving even before the shooting stopped. However, the weapons came with a string attached: Egypt was to pursue a political settlement with the Israelis. Nasser could barely stand the idea. He intended to do no more than make meaningless cosmetic gestures while pursuing a harassing low-level war of attrition.
King Hussein more fatalistically accepted the reversal as "Allah's will", but the antireligious Syrian government not only did not see the hand of Allah in the defeat, they denied that there had actually been a defeat, declaring that they had fought the IDF back from the gates of Damascus and won a great victory. When a junior officer suggested that the reality was something different and asked for an investigation, he was reportedly ordered shot by Hafez al-Assad. That might have been true, might not, but either way it had the flavor of the way things were done in Damascus.
An Arab summit was planned for late August in Khartoum, the Sudan, to hash things out. However, before Nasser left for Khartoum, he had to deal with unrest at home. Amer had not taken well to his enforced resignation. He wanted to be restored to authority as commander in chief. Nasser only offered him the vice-presidency, no doubt as meaningless a post as elsewhere. Amer began to build up stockpiles of arms and form a network of disaffected officers. It looked like a coup, smelled like a coup, and apparently a coup was being planned. Egyptian security swept in and arrested the lot of them.
Amer committed suicide by taking poison. Nasser was saddened, since he and Amer had once been close friends, but Anwar Sadat was pleased, saying it was "the best decision Amer has ever taken. If I were him I would have done it on June 5." Some of the other conspirators got hefty prison sentences, but many were acquitted. For whatever Egypt's failings it wasn't Syria, where all the suspects would have been executed without much process or delay, along with a hefty number of others not guilty of anything but seeming suspicious.
The Khartoum conference went off as planned, with Nasser arriving on 29 August and dominating the proceedings, though he was far from well in body and spirit. The conference led to a consensus, to the extent that the Arab states could lay claim to such a thing, on "no recognition of Israel, no negotiations, no peace." There was of course somewhat less to this than met the eye. King Hussein was interested in quiet negotiations, but he could not publicly come out and say so. For the time being, he had to accept the "three nos" in public.
Levi Eshkol really wanted peace and did what he could to pursue it. Dayan also spoke out for peace, but the British Embassy in Tel Aviv noted that in six weeks Dayan managed to come out with six distinct positions on the matter. As far as many other Israelis were concerned, the three nos suited them just fine. They now had control over the Biblical towns of the West Bank, and most important of all they controlled a united Jerusalem. If the Arabs weren't going to negotiate, then that made hanging on to the conquests all that much easier.
The Johnson Administration was not happy with this notion. LBJ and his people had hoped the war would lead, eventually and not necessarily in any straight line, to peace talks between Arabs and Israelis. The formula was "land for peace", and Arthur Goldberg led off the push for a framework for such an agreement before June was out. The Arabs were not interested in compromise -- they wanted the whole loaf, all their lands returned unconditionally, not half -- and the effort went in circles, disappearing in the face of Arab hostility and then returning in the form of a resolution by Latin American states; disappearing again to be brought up in a similar form by the Soviets. The Arabs, feeling betrayed by the Soviets, shot the proposal down again. This was Federenko's last gasp at the UN, as the Kremlin then relieved him. Ambassador to Israel Chuvaikin was also relieved.
The war of attrition went on in the meantime. On 20 October 1967, three Soviet-built Styx-class antiship missiles launched by Egyptian missile boats hit the Israeli destroyer EILAT in port, breaking it half and killing a quarter of her crew. The Israelis responded by shelling Egyptian oil refineries across the canal. Although it looked like a full-blown shooting match was about to start again, the Arabs were in no condition to take such a step, and Lyndon Johnson was withholding arms shipments from Israel. Under such circumstances, nobody wanted a full-blown war.
Arthur Goldberg saw an opportunity to return to and push for his "land for peace" ideas. The British fronted the proposal and all the parties gradually came over, if in some cases very grudgingly, and approved it. The document emerged with unanimous Security Council approval on 22 November 1967 as Resolution 242, "Concerning Principles for a Just and Lasting Peace in the Middle East".
Not surprisingly, Resolution 242 was a funny sort of document, very ambiguous in many ways, ambiguities that did not really create controversy so much as reflected it. Still, it would prove an enduring roadmap for all the hideously painful attempts to create a Middle East peace to the turn of the century and beyond.
* In 1967, however, Resolution 242 was just a scrap of paper, and the fighting went on at a low rumble. With a major military confrontation not in the cards for the time being, guerrilla and terrorist actions were the best option the Arabs had. By 1969, Yasir Arafat had taken over the PLO and was organizing a much more ambitious and international campaign of terrorist operations.
1969 was the same year Levi Eshkol died of a heart attack. Moshe Dayan, always baffling, rushed in to his deathbed, cried out "Eshkol!", and then ran out of the room, weeping. In a bizarre testimony to the extreme difference between statements and reality in the Middle East, the Syrian-based al-Fatah Palestinian group claimed they killed Eshkol in a rocket attack.
By this time, the two sides were clearly building up to another shooting match. The Nixon Administration, goaded by heavy Soviet arms shipments to Egypt and the USSR's other Arab allies, threw out LBJ's policy of restraint and provided large quantities of the latest American weapons to Israel. On 4 October 1969, two of Israel's new American-made F-4 Phantom fighters zoomed in low over Egyptian defenses and streaked towards Cairo, pulling up over Nasser's residence to produce a sonic boom that shattered windows all over the city. It was equivalent to reaching out and giving Nasser's nose a good twist, while simultaneously brandishing the powerful new military hardware provided by Uncle Sam.
In January 1970, Nasser went to Moscow to ask for even more military hardware, and the Kremlin agreed. The escalation of tensions led to a mad dogfight on 30 July 1970 between Israeli Phantoms and Mirages on one side and Soviet-piloted MiGs on the other. Much to the surprise of the IDF-AF the Soviet pilots were generally inexperienced, and the Israelis walked off with the contest, score five kills to zero. After that, the tensions fell off again.
Nasser finally died of a heart attack on 28 September 1970. History might have given him a mixed report card as a charismatic and visionary leader whose revolution failed to live up to its potential, but the outpouring of grief of Egyptian citizens for the loss of the father of their country was widespread and sincere. Anwar Sadat followed him as president and built up the Egyptian military for the next round.
King Hussein seemed to be moving in the other direction for the moment. In 1970, the PLO clashed with King Hussein's forces, and in 1971 Hussein, seeing that he could not ignore the Palestinian challenge to his authority, ordered the movement suppressed, regardless of the public reaction. It was done and the survivors fled to Lebanon. They had some revenge, however, assassinating Jordanian Prime Minister Wasfi al-Tall in Cairo on 28 November 1970. The increased presence of the Palestinians in Lebanon helped destabilize the country, with civil war breaking out in 1975 and reducing the country to chaos until the Syrians intervened to restore order in 1989.
Despite the setback for the PLO in Jordan, the organization expanded its operations internationally, leading to the high-profile killing of 11 Israeli athletes in Munich in September 1972. The incident was an international shock and the most visible incident in a murderous secret little war between Palestinian terrorists and the Israeli Mossad intelligence service that went on throughout Europe.
* In the meantime, the pressure towards war was building up towards the breaking point once again. On 6 October 1973, the Egyptians and the Syrians launched a coordinated attack on Israel. The Egyptian army in particular was a much more formidable organization than it had been. If it wasn't up to Israeli levels of quality, its troops knew how to use their weapons and were willing to fight, and put the IDF under severe pressure.
Moshe Dayan, still defense minister, suffered a collapse similar to that suffered by Rabin in 1967, and David Elazar, then IDF chief of staff, would be severely criticised for Israel's military setbacks, though he had pleaded with the government of Golda Meir to authorize a preemptive strike. After the conflict he would be forced to resign and would die in 1977. Dayan would follow him in 1981, dying of cancer.
The Americans would not let the Israelis lose and conducted a massive airlift, Operation NICKEL GRASS, to pour supplies into the country. In midmonth the IDF counterattacked and defeated the Arab armies before a cease-fire took effect. The Egyptians would, however, claim they had won the Yom Kippur / Ramadan War, and in many senses they had. They had put up a stiff fight, and the fact that they had been defeated in the end did not reduce the massive boost in morale the war gave to the Egyptian military and the public. It also gave the Egyptians a better bargaining position with the Israelis, which increased further when Anwar Sadat decided to turn to the US as Egypt's foreign patron and discard the Soviets.
Yitzhak Rabin, who had left the IDF and become the Israeli ambassador to Washington, became prime minister from 1974 to 1977 and implemented a separation of forces agreements for the Sinai. This was the basis for further agreements with the Egyptians, leading to a groundbreaking visit by Sadat to Jerusalem in 1977 and to an American-brokered peace treaty between Egypt and Israel in March 1979. Sadat aroused deep hatred for his diplomacy with the Israelis and his authoritarian rule, and was assassinated by Muslim extremists on 6 October 1981. He was replaced by Hosni Mubarak, who had been a fighter pilot during the Six-Day War.
Despite peace with Egypt, conflict in the region continued. In 1982, in response to terrorist attacks, the IDF invaded southern Lebanon, raising a storm of international criticism and beginning a wasting occupation that would sap the morale of the IDF. The mastermind of the occupation was said to be Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, who as an IDF officer had led armored columns through the Sinai in 1967.
Rabin was back in the prime minister's office in 1992, where he won the Nobel Peace Prize for pushing a peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinians. Jordan followed Egypt in being the second frontline Arab state to sign a peace treaty with Israel, in 1994. However, a Jewish extremist shot and killed Rabin on 4 November 1995, and the squabbling between Israelis and Palestinians repeatedly climbed up to a full boil.
As of late 2003, the Middle East can still be hardly regarded as a peaceful place. Still, before 1967 it would have been hard to see any of the positive changes in the situation in the future. Exactly what the future holds now remains just as unpredictable.