A Durable Peace (23 page)

With each year’s harvest of propaganda, the reality of the Arab world’s war against Israel began to recede in the popular
mind, leaving only the image of Israel against the Palestinian Arabs. (Sad-dam’s missile attacks on Israel during the Gulf
War were a rude but brief reminder of this larger context.) The Arab Goliath was turned into the Palestinian David, and the
Israeli David was turned into the Zionist Goliath. Not only were size and power reversed, so was the sequence of events. In
the Reversal of Causality, it is not the Arabs who attacked Israel, but Israel that attacked the Arabs—
or more specifically, since the Arab states deliberately substituted “Palestinians” for “Arabs,” it was Israel that attacked
the Palestinians. In a nutshell, the new chain of reasoning went like this: All the problems in the Middle East are rooted
in the Palestinian Problem; that problem itself is rooted in Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands. Ergo, end that occupation
and you end the problem.

This elegant construct, nonexistent before Israel’s victory in the Six Day War, came into being with amazing speed. By the
1970s, it had made its way from Arab to Western capitals. I recall a conversation with a British diplomat, perhaps the foremost
Arabist of the British Foreign Office, in which I pointed out that Israel’s reluctance to cede the administered territories
to the Arabs was based in no small measure on its fear of being attacked from these territories again. His reaction startled
me. “Come now,” he sniffed, “you don’t seriously expect us to believe that. After all, it was you who started the Six Day
War.”

What are the facts? After their attempt to destroy the newborn Jewish state in 1948 failed ignominiously, the Arab regimes
resorted in the 1950s to a relentless campaign of cross-border terrorism. Attacks were leveled against Israel from all sides,
especially from terrorist bases that had been established for this purpose in the Gaza Strip, which was then under Egyptian
control. Ending these deadly raids was the primary aim of Israel’s foray into Sinai in 1956. The Sinai campaign eliminated
the Arab terrorist bases and temporarily brought the Sinai under Israeli control. It was returned to Egypt a few months later
under Soviet-American pressure, despite the absence of any indication by Nasser that he would renounce his oft-stated intention
of destroying Israel. (The Americans were especially irked that, unknown to them, Israel had coordinated its military action
with Britain and France, which had landed paratroops in the Suez Canal zone in an attempt to roll back Nasser’s takeover of
the international waterway.)

After a short respite, the Arab terror campaign began gathering steam again in the early 1960s. Attacks on Israelis from the
Syrian-controlled Golan Heights became a commonplace, and by
1966 the recently established PLO was launching escalating terrorist attacks from the Jordanian-controlled West Bank as well.
In November 1966, Israel launched a retaliatory raid on the village of Es-Samu (the biblical Eshtamoa), wiping out the terrorist
bases there. Tension increased. In April 1967 the Israeli air force downed six Syrian MiGs over a Syrian attempt to divert
the headwaters of the Jordan River—the source of much of Israel’s water. The Egyptian military had by then fully recovered
from its earlier defeat. Emboldened by the acquisition of the latest weaponry from the Soviet Union (and from Britain, in
Jordan’s case), Syria, Jordan, and Egypt prepared to attack Israel in May 1967. Arab states farther afield also readied their
military forces to be sent to what many of them confidently assumed would be the final assault on the Jewish state. Arab leaders
were not reticent in proclaiming their aims. “The problem before the Arab countries,” declared Nasser in May 25, “… [is] how
totally to exterminate the State of Israel for all time.”
¹
“Our goal is clear: to wipe Israel off the map,” declared President Aref of Iraq on May 31.
²
“The Arab struggle must lead to the liquidation of Israel,” explained Algerian president Boumédienne on June 4.
³
And on June 5, the day the war broke out, Radio Damascus exhorted simply: “Throw them into the sea.”
⁴

Six days earlier, on May 30, King Hussein of Jordan had gone to Cairo to sign a mutual defense pact with Egypt, effectively
fusing his army into a joint military command with Egypt and Syria and tightening the noose around Israel’s neck.
⁵
Egypt had already escalated the crisis into an outright state of war by cutting off Israel’s southern shipping through the
Gulf of Aqaba. Israel asked the Jordanians to stay out of any Arab assault, but on June 5, when the fighting began, King Hussein
joined in as well, shelling the entire Israeli frontier, including Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Israel’s international airport
at Lod. On June 7, Hussein broadcast this to his army: “Kill the Jews wherever you find them. Kill them with your arms, with
your hands, with your nails and teeth.”
⁶

What had led the Arabs to adopt this heady approach was a
combination of Soviet deception (the Soviets falsely told the Arabs that Israel was amassing troops along the Syrian border)
and the Arabs’ own belief that, having licked their wounds from their previous defeats and having stockpiled an enormous arsenal
in the interim, they could easily finish the job of overrunning the outnumbered and outgunned Israeli army. (The ratio of
artillery was five to one in the Arabs’ favor, planes 2.4 to one, and tanks 2.3 to one.)
⁷

The promise of victory was especially beckoning, since all the Arabs had to do was slice Israel into two at its narrowest
point, between the Jordanian border and the Mediterranean, where it was only ten miles wide. In a combined attack, with Egypt
in the south and Syria in the north, even a mediocre Jordanian tank commander could hope to cross that minuscule distance
swiftly and reach the sea. In fact, since the Jordanians probably had the best of the Arab commanders, the temptation for
Hussein to join the attack turned out to be irresistible. Moreover, Jordan had the full strategic backing of Iraq. As in 1948,
approximately one third of the Iraqi army crossed Jordan and by June 5 was approaching the Israeli border. Furthermore, after
Egypt flooded the Sinai with 100,000 troops in May (in flagrant violation of the armistice agreements of 1956, following the
Sinai campaign, which stipulated that the Sinai would be demilitarized), Nasser felt that from the old Egyptian-Israeli border
he was in easy striking distance of the densely populated Israeli coastal plain. Tel Aviv, after all, is only about forty
miles from the Gaza district, which was then under Egyptian control, and the Israeli city of Ashkelon is less than five miles
away. Finally, Syria, poised on top of the Golan Heights, from which it had tormented the Israeli settlements in the valley
below for nineteen years, could launch a quick assault from its superior high ground, penetrate the Israeli Galilee, and reach
the vital coastal plain from the north.

In hindsight, it is easy, as some do now, to dismiss the Arab military’s belief that with such promising starting conditions
they could overrun Israel. Indeed, the Arabs were encouraged in this
belief by political developments. Israel’s pleas to the United States, Western Europe, and the United Nations to help break
the siege that the Arab states had thrown up fell on deaf ears. Three weeks before the war, when Nasser closed the Straits
of Tiran, Israel’s vital sea outlet to the south, Israel turned to the United States and asked that it live up to its commitment
to keep that channel of water open (a promise that the United States and the European countries had given to Israel in exchange
for Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai in 1956). In Washington, no friendlier American administration could have been imagined.
The president was the sympathetic Lyndon Johnson, the undersecretary of state was the supportive Eugene Rostow, the UN ambassador
was the lifelong Zionist Arthur Goldberg. Yet when Israel asked that the written commitment that the Americans had given be
honored, this friendliest of all possible administrations hemmed and hawed and said it could not find a copy of the commitment.
⁸

The noose was tightening, and although public opinion was squarely behind Israel, the world’s governments did nothing. Israel
stood alone.

The mood of the country was somber. War was not new, and the threat of war still less so. But the last time Israel had experienced
a full-scale military conflict was eleven years earlier, during the battle over Sinai. Although I had been born and raised
in Israel, my own experience with that war was sharp but not traumatic. I remember as a seven-year-old taping the windows
and pulling the blinds in case the Arabs attacked Jerusalem. My clearest recollection from that war is of the father of the
boy next door, wearing dusty fatigues, sweeping into the neighborhood, splotches of sand still covering the floor of his army
jeep. “Here,” he said with an outstretched hand, “this is for you.” He gave the children of the neighborhood Egyptian chocolate
that he had brought from El Arish, a town in the northern Sinai that had just fallen to Israel. “I bought them,” he added
with extra emphasis, to make it clear to us that he hadn’t just taken them.

The Arabs didn’t attack our cities—that time. But now, eleven
years later, as war rushed toward us, the windows were taped again. This time it proved necessary. On the morning of June
5, I was awakened by a deafening noise outside the apartment. I ran to the roof and watched in fascination as Jordanian shells
exploded yards away from my building in the heart of Jerusalem. Most of the shells fell in open spaces, but a number slammed
into residences, killing twenty civilians and wounding hundreds. The parliament building of the Knesset and the Israel Museum,
housing the ancient Dead Sea Scrolls, were also targeted but were not hit.

This was a new sight for me. I was eighteen years old, and I had spent the last three years in an American high school in
Philadelphia, where my father was doing historical research. In the latter part of May, as the Arab intention to go to war
became clearer, I had taken my exams early and set off for Israel. My parents did not try to stop me. They merely asked, ’Are
you sure there will be a war?”

“Positive,” I answered. “The Arabs will go through with it. Besides, I want to see Yoni before the war starts.” Yoni was the
Hebrew nickname by which we called my older brother, Jonathan. This sealed the argument.

When I landed in Lod Airport near Tel Aviv on the evening of June 1, the airfield was enveloped in utter darkness, including
the runways. After staying overnight in an equally darkened Jerusalem, I set out to find my brother. At twenty-one, he had
been released a few months earlier from service as an officer in the paratroops. In the last week of May he had been mobilized
again (Israel’s army in wartime consists of virtually all of the able-bodied men in the country called up for reserve duty).
The problem was where to find him. “Look in the orchards around Ramleh,” I was told through the unofficial grapevine that
instantly and mysteriously spreads classified information to people who need to know in Israel, and to them alone. “That’s
where you’ll find Brigade Eighty.” The trouble was, there are an awful lot of orchards around Ramleh. The reserve paratroop
brigade was
bivouacked under its leafy shade, the better to hide it from possible aerial reconnaissance. I walked into one of the groves
along the road leading from Ramleh to Gedera. Several reservists were preparing coffee on a makeshift stove. They were in
their early thirties at most, but to me they looked far too old for this. They should have been home with their families,
I thought.

“Yoni?” One of them scratched his head. “Oh yeah, the young guy. Look in the next grove.”

I wandered through the next cluster of citrus trees, but I didn’t find him. Then, at the other end of a long row of trees,
I saw him staring at me in utter disbelief. “What are you doing here?” he asked, and broke into his broad grin as we ran toward
each other.

Over a cup of “military coffee” (a sickeningly sweet blend of coffee and residues of tea with which I was to become intimately
familiar over the next five years of my own army service), I asked him what he thought was going to happen. “We’ll win,” he
said simply. “We have no other choice.”

The next time I saw him was ten days later, in a hospital bed in Safed. His unit had landed in helicopters at Um Katef, behind
the lines of the Egyptian forces poised to choke the Negev, smashing their fortification and paving the way for the sweep
of Israeli armor into the Sinai. From there they were taken up to the foothills of the Golan, where they fought their way
up the steep incline nine hundred feet to the plateau above, on which the Syrian guns were still trained downward on the Israeli
villages that lay spread like a map beneath them.

Three hours before the end of the war, Yoni led a three-man advance squad to reconnoiter the storming of Jelabina, a Syrian
outpost. A sudden burst of machine-gun fire tore open the neck of the soldier next to him. As Yoni leaned forward to grab
the stricken man, his own elbow was shattered by a Syrian bullet, leaving the nerve exposed and causing horrific pain. He
later said that as he crawled back to safety on that scorched field, bullets whizzing past him, he felt for the first and
only time in his life that
he was going to die. When he reached Israeli lines, he stood up on his feet.

“Can you make it on foot to the field hospital?” he was asked. “No problem,” he answered, and promptly collapsed.

Now in Safed, with the war ended just a day earlier, I entered the long orthopedic ward. His was the last bed on the left.
His arm was in a heavy cast. He was the only patient in the ward who was not an amputee.

“You see,” he said with quiet sadness, “I told you we’d win.”

Seven hundred and seventy-seven Israeli soldiers died in the Six Day War. In less than a week they and their comrades had
purchased a brilliant military victory against those who sought to snuff out Israel’s life. King Hussein lost control of all
the territories his grandfather’s troops had forcibly seized in 1948—Judea, Samaria, and eastern Jerusalem. Syria lost the
Golan Heights; Egypt lost the Sinai and Gaza. Israel, which before the war had been a tiny country, now became a small country
(see
Map 7
). The border, which had previously been ten miles from the sea, was pushed back to the Jordan River forty miles
away. The Sinai provided a large buffer against Egypt, as well as supplying most of Israel’s oil needs. And on the Golan Heights
the tables were turned, with the Israelis gazing down at the Syrians for the first time.