After the Tall Timber (11 page)

The war for Israel was a costly one, brought on in part by the refusal of the Western nations, in a kind of displaced intellectual racism, to take any statements—including racist threats—made by the Arab nations seriously. Israel won, at great risk and with great sacrifice, alone. This time, it would not, for the sake of the good will of its friends (whose good faith had been tested and found wanting in events at the Gulf of Aqaba), subject itself to the same risks and sacrifices again. The victory would, with tact and statesmanship, lead to that cooperative revival of the Middle East which had always been one of the dreams of Zionism. Israel has much to offer the Arab states; and for Israel itself peace would mean an end to the strain of maintaining a constant posture of defense, of being forced to trade at a distance of thousands of miles instead of with its immediate and natural neighbors, and of being economically dependent on help from Jews in the Diaspora. But it is impossible to negotiate with someone who does not know where his own self-interest lies, and the radical regimes of Cairo and Damascus would have to negotiate reasonably, recognizing at last the existence of the Israeli state, or go.

It is also impossible to inhabit a geographical absurdity. The Gaza Strip, which leads like a boarding ramp into Israel along the southwest coast; the wedge of Jordan that protrudes into Israel from Jenin to the Dead Sea (and that made possible the shelling of Tel Aviv on Israel’s west coast from a point well beyond its eastern border); the division of Jerusalem, which leaves its civilian population virtually indefensible; and the Syrian positions above Galilee, which made impossible any accommodation over water rights (and which made the shelling of Israeli settlements, farmers, and fishermen such a common occurrence that for nineteen years northern Israelis have referred to mortar fire as “Syrian rainfall”)—in all these cases the boundaries would have to be redrawn. The Israelis would have to contribute to, and the Arab nations cooperate in, a resettlement of Arab refugees. But a simple (and, as recent events have proved, meaningless) guarantee by the United Nations would not do this time. All parties would have to work out the conditions under which they could live together and return from a twenty-year siege to their domestic concerns.

To this end, Israel did not settle for a simple military victory, as it had in the campaigns of 1948 and 1956. It persisted to the point of virtual annihilation of the Arab professional armies. The victory could bring—by force or by reason—stability in the Middle East. It could even, by preempting the news and capturing the popular imagination for a while, take some of the pressure off conflicts in other areas, notably Vietnam. The West, without risking a soldier—without even, in fact, honoring one of its firmest commitments—had shared in a resounding victory over a Russian-supported totalitarian regime. The balance of power, or even the idea of the balance of power, and the relationship of the great powers to the small had been altered in ways that have yet to be fully explored; the United States might have some new room, and Russia some new incentives, to negotiate. (The fact that the Russians should have been supporting the Arab countries at all was one of the historical ironies of the situation. The Arabs had originally opposed the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine not out of anti-Jewish fanaticism but out of the Arab chieftains’ reasoned fear of what effect the sight of prospering Socialist cooperatives might have on their feudal sheikhdoms and caliphates. Russia, expecting an ally, had been one of the first nations to recognize the State of Israel. Now the prospering immigrants found themselves viewed as colonialists, and the Arab regimes were using the arms of Moscow and some of the rhetoric of revolution.)

All this, of course, has been altered by the outcome of the Eventuality of Everybody. The speed and thoroughness with which this outcome was achieved make it seem in retrospect like a foregone conclusion. It was not. Even the fact that war should come, with anyone, in any form at all, at least so soon, did not seem, in the days preceding June 5th, anything like a certainty.

Thursday, June 1st: An American Jew of German descent who now makes his home in New York arrived at Lod Airport, in Tel Aviv, and got into a battered old taxi, which was already carrying a few passengers, for the ride to Jerusalem. His daughter was spending her junior year abroad at the Hebrew University, and he was going to try to persuade her to come home. He thought he recognized a pattern to events, and he was afraid. He had been merely depressed by previous violations of international guarantees to Israel—free passage through the Suez Canal, for example, or free access to the Old City of Jerusalem—but the blockade of the Strait of Tiran had made it impossible for him to sleep. While the great powers temporized and rationalized, he felt that a little country’s territory and morale were being worn away. It reminded him exactly, he said, of the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. Foreseeing, as he thought, its inevitable consequences, he wanted his daughter home. The taxi picked up several passengers along the road (which was nearly deserted but still lined with the carapaces of armored cars destroyed in 1948), and on the outskirts of Jerusalem the worried gentleman got out.

The city itself resembled, on that Thursday before the war, a sunny sparsely populated colony for the infirm. Even the taxi driver wore a leather glove concealing an artificial hand, and most of the pedestrians (there were few cars) were either old or lame or very young and scruffy and truant-looking. The King David Hotel was nearly empty, except for some journalists and a few indomitable tourists. Zvi Avrame, the large, middle-aged manager of the King David, engaged his guests in merry conversation, and new arrivals at the reception desk were offered rooms overlooking the Old City (“There you have the view”) or overlooking the YMCA on the Israeli side (“There it is more safe.”). The entrance to the YMCA—the scene of bitter fighting in 1948—was concealed by sandbags, but aside from these, and from the strange emptiness of the streets, Jerusalem had made no obvious preparations for a state of war. From some windows, the sound of radios tuned to Kol Yisroel, the Voice of Israel, drifted over the city. Since the early stages of mobilization, Kol Yisroel had been broadcasting only Israeli songs, Hebrew news, and (recognizing that few Israelis over twenty-five speak the national language perfectly) two news programs each day in French, Rumanian, Yiddish, English, Hungarian, Russian, and Ladino. On Thursday, June 1st, Kol Yisroel announced in eight languages that the Mapai Party of Premier Levi Eshkol had at last formed an emergency Cabinet with the Gahal Party and with Ben Gurion’s Rafi Party (although BiGi himself, as the Israelis call him, had remained aloof), and that the Rafi Party’s General Moshe Dayan had been appointed Minister of Defense.

Friday, June 2nd, in Tel Aviv was listless and stiflingly dull. The city was uncrowded, but it seemed as though everyone might merely be taking a siesta. In fact, quite a number of people were off at the beaches and swimming pools. Several international journalists, having exhausted their color stories about a proud, encircled people unafraid in the face of overwhelming odds, or the economic impossibility of maintaining a civilian army on perpetual alert, were preparing to go home. It began to seem that even the appointment of Dayan had been only a bit of stage business in the little off-Hot Line theatrical productions to which the small nations seemed now to be reduced. It appeared that Nasser’s production had all the angels, and that even
lack
of initiative had passed out of the hands of Israel to London, Paris, and Washington. The oppressive sense that nothing at all was going to happen created the feeling that access to the world’s attention was being closed along with passage through the Gulf of Aqaba. Israel seemed about to drop out of the news.

At the Chaim Weizmann Institute, in Rehovoth, on Friday night, however, people seemed both more active and less sanguine than in Tel Aviv. The Orthodox rabbis in Jerusalem had announced that for the Army the obligations of the Sabbath were temporarily suspended, and some of the inhabitants of Rehovoth felt that war might begin the following morning. (The rabbis had earlier suspended their campaign against autopsies, and this sort of concession had led some people to expect war on every Sabbath since the beginning of the crisis.) The Weizmann Institute—whose cornerstone was laid to the sound of distant gunfire in 1946—has become over the years a kind of dream haven for pure science, an intellectual aerie amid green lawns, orange groves, and bougainvillea between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Agricultural research at the Institute had contributed vitally to Israel’s unprecedented programs for reclamation of the soil. Theoretical research in nuclear physics and chemistry had succeeded so well that scientists were turning their attention to newer fields, like high-energy physics and research with RNA. One of the country’s crowning and yet most characteristic achievements, the Institute had for weeks been on an emergency footing. (For one thing, a prevailing myth among the Arab nations that an atomic bomb was housed there made it a prime target for enemy bombing.) Of forty-three men at work on constructing a new building for the Institute, forty had been called up into the Army. Those members of the scientific staff who had not been called up as soldiers or military advisers, or put to work on special scientific projects related to mobilization, were busy taping windows or wrapping up sensitive or explosive instruments against the threat of attack. The children of the community were taking first-aid courses. Research biologists who had taken medical degrees but never actually treated patients were setting up emergency clinics. Sandbags and supports for basement ceilings were being put up in all the buildings of the Institute. In addition to their other work, scientists with walkie-talkies strapped to their waists took part in patrolling the Institute’s grounds at night.

War, of course, did not break out on Saturday morning. Instead, wives and children took advantage of the Sabbath to join their men for picnics at the front. In effect, the front in a country of Israel’s size was everywhere. But border kibbutzim like Nir Yitzhak and Shalom Karem, at the edge of the Negev and the Gaza Strip, were particularly full of families reclining with picnic baskets under the trees near the webby, shapeless tents in which the soldiers had been living for two weeks. The station wagons parked by the side of the road, and the tanned, rangy aspect of the men, made it look as though there had been an unlikely suburban commute from Scarsdale to the land of Owen Wister. The men—masons from Beersheba, bank tellers from Haifa, curtain manufacturers from Tel Aviv—were all dressed in highly personal variations on the Army uniform. In an army where no officer may order his men to charge, but only to follow him, there is a great deal of informality. “Tell my mother I am beautiful in my uniform,” a soldier helping the civilians of Nir Yitzhak to harvest peaches said to a visitor from home. But, without any actual battle eagerness, the general attitude seemed to be “What are they waiting for?” and “Let’s get it over with.”

On Saturday afternoon, in Tel Aviv, Moshe Dayan held a press conference in which he apologized for having nothing to announce. He answered every question urbanely, with a crooked smile, looking confident and slightly sinister. He remarked that he would be “glad and surprised” if a diplomatic solution to the blockade could be found, and, in answer to a question about disposing of Egypt once and for all, he said, “I don’t think in war there is any such thing as ‘once and for all.’ I don’t think ‘once and for all’ can be applied to war.” Although Dayan had been able to infuse with all the drama of his person an interview that contained no news at all, the fact remained that there was no news and no clear way out, and that patience was wearing thin.

That evening at Rehovoth, some friends gathered for coffee in the living room of David Samuel, grandson of the first British High Commissioner for Palestine, and himself a professor of nuclear chemistry at the Institute. Three friends—Amos de Shalit, Michael Feldman, and Gideon Yekutieli—were professors there as well. One, Peter Hansen, was a young English research chemist, doing post-doctoral work at the Institute, who had chosen, for the duration of the crisis, against his embassy’s advice, to stay. Hansen said he had read in a column by an English correspondent that if Dayan had not been appointed he would have been brought to power by a military coup. Everyone laughed. “How can they say a military coup?” said Mrs. Yekutieli. “When an entire country has been called into the Army, a military coup would be an election.” There was a discussion of the restlessness of several men who had not been called up: a frogman, a paratrooper, and a middle-aged pilot. (The pilot subsequently offered his services as a crop duster.) Mrs. Samuel said that she thought an insufficiently hearty welcome was being accorded the volunteers who were coming into Israel from other countries to fight, to give blood, or to work. She felt there should at least be a poster to greet them at the airport. “It could be a tourist poster also,” someone suggested. “ ‘See Israel While It Still Exists.”’

On Sunday, June 4th, a number of soldiers—a tenth of the Army, according to some estimates—were given a day’s leave, and several of the North African soldiers (sometimes referred to euphemistically as the Southern French) took advantage of their leave to return for a day to their families in the port of Elath. Elath seemed confident that war would not break out there. In the first place, people said, the port was now too strongly fortified, and, in the second, at the first sign of trouble the soldiers would blow up the neighboring port of Aqaba, Jordan’s only outlet to the sea. In tents all along the beach, near the empty resort hotels, was the remnant of an international collection of waifs and strays with long hair and guitars whom one now finds in so many unlikely places, and who had long been making Elath a beatnik nomad’s rendezvous. When they needed money, they presented themselves in the morning at a café called Leon’s, where they were recruited to dig trenches or to work for a day in King Solomon’s Mines. At night, they gathered in a discothèque called the Half Past Midnight (where there were also several African students who had been stranded in Elath when their passage home through the Gulf had been postponed by the blockade). Asked why the nomads had not taken the advice of their various embassies and left the port, a long-haired guitar player from Stuttgart looked up cheerfully and said, “
Was? Wenn es grad lustig wird?
” (Soldiers emplaning on a civilian flight from Elath to Tel Aviv were asked to check their guns in the cargo section.)