Six Days (19 page)

Qalqilya, West Bank, 0900

Seventeen-year-old Fayek Abdul Mezied was extremely excited. The Cairo radio station Voice of the Arabs had just announced the start of the war. The news raced around the town. Israeli aircraft were falling like flies. Victory seemed to be approaching fast, just as Ahmed Said and all the other commentators had predicted. Fayek was in the civil defence network. They were going to help the doctors at the four first aid centres that had been set up. Some of his friends, who had linked up with Yasser Arafat's faction, Fatah, were being given weapons. They were old guns left over from 1948, but they were guns. Finally they were going to have a chance to fight the Israelis to restore the land and the dignity that had been lost.

The small town of Qalqilya made Israelis feel vulnerable. It was right on the Jordanian border, at the foot of the mountains that form the spine of the West Bank. From Qalqilya to the Mediterranean was around ten miles. Israel's strategic nightmare was a thrust from Qalqilya to the sea that would cut the state in two. Since 1948 there had been plenty of cross-border violence in and around the town. The bloodiest battle was in 1956, when Israel mounted a reprisal raid into Qalqilya to blow up the fortified police station. Seventy to ninety Jordanian legionnaires and eighteen Israeli paratroops were killed in the fighting. On 5 June Jordan had only two battalions from the Princess Alia Brigade to cover the border between Qalqilya and Tulkarem, another border town about fifteen miles away. But facing them were roughly the same number of troops. A thrust to split Israel might have been possible. But the Jordanians did not take their chance. Instead they sat tight, trading bursts of gunfire across the border and opening up with their artillery – two batteries of 25-pounders and two batteries of 155 mm ‘Long Tom' long-range guns. The Israelis saw the big guns as a real threat. They sent warplanes after them as soon as they had finished off the Arab air forces.

As well as the Jordanian army around 200 men from the local detachment of the National Guard were dug in around Qalqilya. They were commanded by Tawfik Mahmud Afaneh, a 39-year-old who had fought the Israelis in 1948. The National Guard was made up of local men with light weapons. They were a sort of home guard, almost untrained locals with a scattering of old soldiers, who were supposed to help the army defend the frontier and to raise the alarm if Israel attacked. Like all the Palestinians along the border, after every Israeli incursion they demanded weapons from the Hashemites to defend themselves. The king always refused, because he thought Palestinians with guns would turn them either on him or on the Israelis, neither of which he wanted. The result was that on the morning of 5 June, Tawfik Mahmud Afaneh's men dug in to fight Israeli tanks and heavy artillery with Bren and Sten guns, two British standbys from the Second World War. They had nothing heavier, not even mortars. They fought bravely against impossible odds. In two days in the front line, twenty-five of Tawfik's men were killed.

Memdour Nufel had always wanted to strike a few blows of his own. He was a young Palestinian man who had grown up during the border wars of the 1950s. As a small boy he sneaked across the border to put stones on the railway line, hoping he might derail a train. After 1965, like hundreds of other young Palestinians, he decided he wanted to be part of the armed struggle against Israel. Nufel linked up with two groups with the dramatic names of ‘heroes of return' and ‘youth of revenge'. In a society where young people were supposed to defer to their elders, a few eyebrows went up when he organised fourteen men of his father's age to spy on Israeli positions and military movements. He chose them because they knew well the ground on the Israeli side of the border. They were experienced infiltrators, who usually earned a living smuggling or rustling cattle. Some of it used to be theirs. Eighty per cent of Qalqilya's land had been lost to the Israelis in 1948. Nufel passed on their information to Palestinians in the Jordanian army, who told him they sent it to Cairo.

On the morning of 5 June, Nufel's middle-aged guerrillas came to his house to ask the young man what they should do. He told them they should take their weapons (Nufel had acquired an elderly Karl-Gustav machine gun) to fight alongside the Jordanian army. They all thought it was a bad idea. Once the war was over, the Jordanians would throw them into prison. It was a fair point. In June 1967 hundreds of Palestinian nationalists languished in King Hussein's prisons. The Hashemite regime saw them as greater threats to itself than they were to Israel. Various estimates put the number of captives from Yasser Arafat's faction, Fatah, at anything from 250 to 1000, or put another way up to eighty per cent of its strength. Abu Ali Iyad, the local Fatah leader, was on the Jordanians' wanted list. But Nufel persuaded them that this would be different. After checking on their families, who were heading out of town into caves and olive groves in the hills, Nufel's little band moved forward to the front line.

Tel Aviv, 1000

Israel wanted to keep its success quiet for the time being. The deception plan for the offensive was drawn up as carefully as the offensive itself. At the very start the priority was to deny that Israel had attacked. According to Meir Amit, the head of Mossad, ‘[General Moshe] Dayan did a very clever thing. He made a mask of fog about what we were doing at the moment that Egypt was announcing the enormous success of its army. Even my wife said to me, what's happening, they're killing us? For forty-eight hours Dayan kept it ambiguous. The whole world was listening to Egypt. It gave us another advantage.'

An official first version of how the war started was released, saying Egypt had fired the first shots: ‘This morning Egypt has started an air–ground attack. Egyptian armoured forces advanced at dawn towards the Negev. Our own forces advanced to repel them. At the same time a large number of radar tracks of Egyptian jets were observed on the screen. The tracks were directed towards the Israeli shore line. A similar attempt was also executed in the Negev area. IDF air force aircraft took to the air against enemy aircraft. Air battles are still going on. The Prime Minister has called an urgent meeting with a number of ministers.'

But a journalist was already looking for the real story. An Israeli officer who had been in the desert stopped off at a friend's house in Jerusalem to wash off the dust before he went to Prime Minister Eshkol's office to brief the cabinet. The friend was Michael Elkins, who was the correspondent in Israel for CBS, Newsweek and the BBC. The officer was cheerful, serenading the Elkins household from the shower. Elkins, a New York Jew who had turned to journalism after he fought in the 1948 war, could not persuade his friend to tell him anything, but he guessed something big had happened. Elkins hurried over to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, to see what he could find out. He went into the basement and started listening to the excited conversations going on among the politicians.

Jordanian Military Headquarters, Amman, 1130

General Odd Bull of the United Nations was put through to King Hussein. On the telephone from Jerusalem he passed on a message from Eshkol. Israel, it said, was engaged in operations against Egypt. If you don't intervene, Jordan will not be attacked. But for Hussein the message came far too late. His experience after the Samua raid, which came a day after he had received an unsolicited secret message from Israel telling him that Jordan would be left alone, had taught him not to trust Israeli assurances. He had made his decision days earlier. And, at that moment, with reports coming in from Cairo that the Israeli air force was being pulverised, it did not seem such a bad one. Hussein told Bull ‘they started the battle. Now they are receiving our reply by air.'

Jerusalem

The Jordanians opened fire along the confrontation line. Its artillery fired into West Jerusalem, mainly, though not always and not accurately, at military positions. The UN observer force, that had maintained the armistice for a generation, tried unsuccessfully to arrange several ceasefires. Bullets narrowly missed Britain's senior diplomat in Jerusalem, the consul-general Hugh Pullar, and crashed into his offices. At 1130 he cabled: ‘Very heavy automatic fire … Jerusalem totally engulfed in war. Guns and mortars…' Pullar had just returned from a meeting with a senior Jordanian official. He had asked him if the Arabs' basic intention was to eliminate Israel. In a ‘distinctly chilly' way, the official said it was.

John Tleel, a Palestinian dentist, never liked Mondays. He had been at work at his dental surgery in the Christian quarter of the Old City since 6:30 a.m., as usual. Among the patients waiting for him was a schoolteacher, Miss Elisabeth Bawarshi, who was planning a trip to Lebanon. She needed a set of false teeth. At eleven o'clock when he had seen his other patients, he decided to walk across the Old City to pick up Miss Bawarshi's teeth.

‘Are you mad?' his brother, who was also a dentist, asked him. ‘Haven't you heard the war's started?'

Tleel told his brother not to worry, and set out. The streets, he thought, looked calm and peaceful. But then he realised the shops were closed and he was the only person around. Nobody was there. Garo the Armenian goldsmith, Suleiman the Muslim watch-maker, all the shopkeepers who normally kept their businesses open whatever was going on were all closed. The street leading to the church of the Holy Sepulchre, which is built on the quarry where Christians believe Jesus was crucified and buried, was empty too. Then he saw two men, talking loudly and carrying automatic rifles. They had come from the local police station, where, at the last minute, weapons were being handed out. It was still quiet, so he walked into the big open square just on the inside of Jaffa Gate. A few bystanders had gathered. Jordanian soldiers were trying to move them on. Tleel walked across the square, to check his post office box. It was empty.

Opposite the Jaffa Gate on much higher ground on the Israeli side of the city was the King David hotel. Tleel saw it perched there ‘like a giant'. Suddenly, there were great bursts of gunfire. Bullets whizzed past Tleel's head. Terrified, he ran for his life, out of the square, through the narrow, empty streets of the Old City, sheltering sometimes from ‘the whining gunfire' until he reached his home. Tleel and his brother were bachelors. They crowded, with some neighbours, into a small room which they thought was more protected than the others. They taped up the windows with sticking plaster, to stop them shattering if there was an explosion, and stretched a blanket across the window frames. The power went off. By candlelight they listened to their transistor radios. They went back and forth along the dials: ‘Amman, Cairo, Israel, London, Voice of America. We even tried Athens and Cyprus.' They were hoping to find an honest account of what was happening. ‘Soon we realised there were losers and winners and that the losing side was not broadcasting the truth. We argued all the time among ourselves about which side to believe, the Arab or the Israeli.'

Anwar Nusseibeh heard the news that the war had started on his car radio. He was a member of one of Jerusalem's most prominent Palestinian families. Nusseibeh moved in Jordan's royal circles. He had just finished a stint as King Hussein's ambassador in London. He had risen early, to drive to Amman from his home on the Jordanian side of Jerusalem. When he heard what had happened, he turned the car round to go home to his wife and children. Two days before the war, he sat with his brother Hazem, a former Jordanian foreign minister, having lunch on the balcony of their family home, which overlooked Israeli positions in West Jerusalem. They saw a big artillery piece was pointing straight at them. They were not unduly worried, because they assumed that Arab forces were as strong as the radio news claimed. Hazem remembers ‘excitement, expectation, enthusiasm and hope. Fear was the last thing, if it existed at all … We were seeing Israeli helicopters throttling over our skies and watching them from the balcony and simply smiling.'

Back in Jerusalem, Anwar tried to ring Ahmed Shukairy, the leader of the PLO, who had been staying at the Ambassador hotel in the Sheikh Jarrah district. But Shukairy, who specialised in rabble-rousing, blood-curdling speeches about the destruction of Israel, had checked out. Now that the hour of which he had spoken endlessly had come, he was on his way to Damascus. Then Nusseibeh went to volunteer his services to the Jordanian governor of Jerusalem, Anwar al-Khatib, who was at the police headquarters. ‘I went there and they were still talking about organising groups of resistance, issuing rifles, things like that. The day the war was on! Well, there wasn't much that one could do in that kind of situation. I told them that I was at home, you can telephone me. And I came back home.'

One crackpot scheme that was being discussed was a plan to arm the men of Isawiya, the nearest Palestinian village to the Israeli enclave on Mount Scopus, a high point on the escarpment to the east of Jerusalem that overlooked the Old City. With artillery support, untrained civilians would advance uphill and throw themselves on the Israeli defences. It would have been suicidal. Since 1948 Israel had been prohibited by the armistice from bringing in military supplies to its garrison on Mount Scopus. But over nineteen years they smuggled enough military contraband on the fortnightly resupply convoys to turn the enclave into a fortress. They even broke down jeeps armed with anti-tank guns into their constituent parts to get them in. Once when UN inspectors confiscated a suspicious-looking barrel Israel retaliated by confiscating the building in which the barrel was stored.

Jerusalem, 1130

Israel was keeping its success quiet because it did not want to do anything to encourage the Arabs and their friends to accept a ceasefire motion at the UN. But the BBC reporter Michael Elkins worked the story out for himself after a morning spent eavesdropping and asking questions in the basement of the Knesset. ‘I heard enough bits and pieces to put it together. Then I went to Ben-Gurion in the basement of the Knesset and told him what I had. He said, yes, it was accurate. I asked him if he would record a message to the Jewish people because Eshkol was busy and wouldn't see me. The only thing he would say was, “Tell the Jewish people not to worry.”'