Six Days (46 page)

The next morning, 14 September, he sent a message to his family asking for books and for medical preparations he needed for toothache. They heard nothing more until the next day, when a messenger arrived telling them to travel to Minya, Amer's home village in Upper Egypt. As his wife, four daughters and three sons drove into the village they were greeted by crowds of wailing women. They realised Amer must be dead. They were taken to the graveyard, where he had already been buried. Eleven-year-old Salah never forgot that the cement on the stone over the grave was still wet. An official communiqué was issued. Field Marshal Amer had taken poison and killed himself.

Operation Johnson had succeeded. Amer was no longer a threat to Nasser's regime. The question is whether Amer was murdered, as his family believe, or whether he killed himself. Certainly, Amer had reasons to end his life. He faced personal and professional ruin. He was being blamed for a catastrophic defeat. He faced trial for the capital crime of conspiring to bring down the government. And Cairo's drawing rooms were buzzing with the scandal, which had just leaked out, that he had secretly made his mistress, a famous actress, into his second wife. Thirty-five years on, Howedi and Sharaf, surviving members of the team that ran Operation Johnson, insist that the field marshal obtained a deadly poison called Aonitine from stocks held by the army. Howedi says that when Amer's body was examined, unused capsules of the poison were found taped behind his testicles. He claims that on 26 August, the day after his house arrest began, Amer was visited by the head of the army's poisons department who later confessed he prepared capsules of Aonitine for the field marshal.

Amer's family insist that he was murdered on the orders of Nasser. They say he collapsed after drinking a glass of guava juice that had been spiked with Aonitine. A week before he died, on 7 September, Amer completed a last political testament, which was smuggled out of Egypt to Lebanon after his death and published in
Life
magazine. In it he wrote that his enemies were closing in. He said he no longer felt safe from Nasser, his ‘friend and brother … I am receiving threats because I asked for a public trial. Some two hours ago I was visited by an intelligence officer whom I would not bother to look at in the time of my glory. He threatened to silence me forever if I ventured to talk. When I said I wanted to contact the president he said: if you think your friendship with the president can protect you, you are mistaken. I tried to contact the president by telephone … for three days I was told that he was busy. I feel sure that a conspiracy is being prepared against me…'

Aonitine was found in Amer's body at the autopsy. The question is how it got there. The saga, his family insist, has all the signs of a cover-up. If he was planning suicide, they say, why did he ask his family a few hours before he allegedly killed himself to send him books and ointment for toothache and sore gums? It took six hours for Nasser's men to tell the attorney-general that Amer was dead. It was another six hours before forensic scientists came to the villa where he died. By then, his corpse had been dressed in clean pyjamas, and the glass that his family believe contained a lethal cocktail of guava juice and poison had been washed, dried and put away.

The official report into his death, signed by the Egyptian attorney-general, said that Amer had killed himself with two doses of poison, on the day he died and the day before. But in 1975 Anwar El Sadat, who assumed the presidency of Egypt after Nasser died in 1970, reopened the files. Dr Ali Diab, a professor and toxicologist at Egypt's top institute for scientific research, re-examined all the evidence. He said it was physically impossible for Amer to have taken two separate doses of Aonitine a night apart. A fraction of the dose contained in one of the capsules would have killed him instantly. Dr Diab concluded that Amer could not have killed himself. Someone must have administered the poison.

Even without Amer, the CIA believed that the Egyptian army was Nasser's ‘main source of danger'. Even his life could be at stake. Nasser was prepared to take the risk. It was good for him to have Amer out of the way. The remaining Amer loyalists were purged from the army. The creeping fear of a coup led by his old friend left him for the first time since at least 1961. General Fawzi, who owed Nasser everything and who was lacking even an ounce of the charm and charisma that had made Amer so popular, was firmly in control of the army. Nasser travelled to the Arab summit in Khartoum at the end of August knowing that he would have a job to which he would be able to return. Even though he had led Egypt and millions of Arabs who idolised him to disaster, he was more secure than he had been in years.

The new Goliath

The British foreign correspondent James Cameron was exhilarated by Israel's victory. The following Monday he reported that ‘many are saying that Zion was born not nineteen years ago with the birth of the state of Israel, but today, in its great and rather frightening exultation, with the Jewish nation suddenly translated from David into Goliath'. In fact Israel had been Goliath for years. It simply had not had the chance to use its strength properly.

Washington suddenly found Israel much more attractive. The 1967 war transformed its entire approach to the Middle East. Israel had always come first. But the United States had tried, not always successfully, to have a relationship with Arab countries too. It was prepared to restrain Israel, to criticise it in public and even vote to censure it in the UN Security Council. The Eisenhower administration made Israel disgorge the land it captured in the 1956 war. All that changed after the lightning victory in 1967. Some senior officials in the Johnson White House realised what was happening. On 31 May, before a shot had been fired, Harold Saunders, a senior national security aide, warned that in the two weeks since Nasser mobilised, ‘We have reversed the policy of twenty years … Israel may really be the big winner. For twenty years Israel has sought a special relationship – even a private security guarantee – with us. We have steadfastly refused in order to preserve our other interests in the Middle East.' Now the US had emphatically and irreversibly taken sides.

The Americans expected Israel would win quickly. But when they saw it happening, Israel became a much more interesting prospect as an ally. Vietnam was bleeding the Johnson administration to death and the Israelis were making war look simple. Better still, they had used Western weapons to crush Soviet allies and Soviet weapons. The president's envoy Harry McPherson wrote to Johnson that ‘after the doubts, confusions and ambiguities of Vietnam, it was deeply moving to see people whose commitment is total and unquestioning'. Like most Westerners in 1967, he was deeply impressed by the macho, self-reliant sabras. ‘Israel at war destroys the prototype of the pale, scrawny Jew; the soldiers I saw were tough, muscular and sunburned. There is also an extraordinary combination of discipline and democracy among officers and enlisted men; the latter rarely salute and frequently argue, but there is no doubt about who will prevail.' In the US, Israel had enormous public support. America fell in love with its tough young friend.

The US had always had enemies in the Arab world. But now it took on the role Britain had filled earlier in the century, as the Arabs' bogey-man, the cause of all their problems. The CIA's exceptionally well-connected staff in Amman reported that ‘the time has passed when it would have been easy for the US government to recoup its prestige with the Arabs by uttering a few proper phrases … The US government should make no mistake, it is hated in the Arab world; innate courtesy, apathy from the shock of defeat, and the memory of kindnesses by individual American friends lead most educated Jordanians to conceal this hate, but it is there.' The only way to reverse matters would be to force Israel to leave the conquered territory.

The risks of a long occupation were clear to Secretary of State Rusk. On 14 June, four days after the war ended, Dean Rusk warned the special committee of the NSC at the White House that if Israel held on to the West Bank ‘it would create a revanchism for the rest of the twentieth century'. At the beginning of the twenty-first, revanchism, the desire of the Palestinians to regain lost territory, is stronger than ever.

But Johnson, even though he saw ‘festering problems' ahead, made his choice. On 19 June he delivered a speech accepting Israel's view that a return to the situation as it was on 4 June was ‘not a prescription for peace, but for renewed hostilities'. Before the war Israel had feared that they might, as in 1956, be forced to give up the spoils of victory. But Eshkol and Eban's patience and restraint in the weeks before the war paid off. Until there was a peace deal, Israel could stay where it was.

Occupation

A 25-year-old Israeli soldier back from the war predicted that Israel was going to be changed irrevocably by the huge territories it had captured. He told his comrades, ‘We've lost something terribly precious. We've lost our little country … our little country seems to get lost in this vast land.' All the issues that are now depressingly familiar to anyone who sees news reports about the Arabs and the Israelis – violence, occupation, settlements, the future of Jerusalem – took their current form as a result of the war. The shape of the occupation emerged very quickly. Warnings about the dangers that lay ahead were ignored.

Just after the war ended, David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, warned Israel against the seductive charms of victory. In a speech at Beit Berl, the think-tank of the Israeli left, he said that staying in the territories would distort the Jewish state and might even destroy it. Israel must keep Jerusalem, but everything else should go back to the Arabs immediately, with or without a peace agreement. But Ben-Gurion, the architect of Israeli independence, seemed way out of touch. He was old, bad tempered and ignored. Abba Eban, the foreign minister, was alarmed by new maps of Israel that showed it stretching from the Golan to Suez and running along the entire length of the river Jordan. They were ‘not a guarantee of peace but an invitation to early war'. Eban believed that Israel's legitimacy derived from the fact that it had accepted that British-ruled Palestine would be partitioned between the Jews and the Arabs. He wanted to use the captured territory as a bargaining chip for negotiation, not as a place for expansion or settlement.

But the mood in Israel blew away any suggestion of caution as decisively as the Israeli army had dealt with the Arabs. In just under a week of war the Israeli public went from despair to the joy of deliverance. Israelis were never in as much danger as they thought they were, thanks to their military strength and the Arabs' weakness. But although Israeli generals knew it, the public did not. Abba Eban, more and more worried about the way the new post-war Middle East was developing, felt as if he was ‘in an isolated realm of anxiety while the noise of unconfined joy kept intruding through the window'.

The 1967 war made Israel into an occupier, which more than anything is why it still matters. Overnight it gained control of the lives of more than one million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The experience has been a disaster for Israelis and Palestinians. By 2003 Israel had become a coloniser of land in which the Palestinian population had trebled. Abba Eban predicted that Palestinians would not lose their ‘taste for flags, honour, pride, and independence', but the Israeli occupation still seeks to make them into a subject people. The occupation has created a culture of violence that cheapens life and brutalises the people who enforce and impose the occupation and those who fight it. Human rights and self-determination are denied to Palestinians. With nowhere else to go, more and more of them have turned to the extremists.

The signs were there from the beginning. After Israel's victory was secured, some of the fighting soldiers found occupation duties distasteful. Being a conqueror, one complained, ‘destroys human dignity … I felt it happening to me, felt myself losing respect for people's lives.' When they were relieved, they were just as dismayed by the effect that occupation had on rear-echelon soldiers who ‘suddenly considered themselves tough … [and] found this a good opportunity to play top dog'. In November 1967 a British reporter visited the burial place of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their wives in Hebron. It is a holy place for both Jews and Muslims. The soldier on the door asked him to cover his head, out of respect for the Jewish faith. When the reporter offered to take off his shoes too, in deference to Muslim sensibilities, the soldier told him not to bother. The mutual hatred has deepened ever since. Anyone who doubts how little respect most Israeli soldiers have for Palestinians after nearly forty years as occupiers – and how much sullen hatred they receive in return – need only spend a couple of hours at a checkpoint. Of course there was hatred on both sides before the war. The difference afterwards was that the two sides came into daily contact.

In June 1967, with a political career still only a gleam in his eye, General Ariel Sharon left his headquarters in Sinai and flew back to Israel in a small helicopter. He told the pilot to sweep low along the coast. As they passed places Israel had captured – Jebel Libni, Al-Arish, Rafah, Gaza – Sharon tried to shout something over the thumping of the engine to his travelling companions, who included Yael Dayan, the daughter of the minister of defence. ‘He was stretching one hand as if showing us the view, in case we hadn't noticed it, and murmuring something. On a piece of paper – as it was obvious we couldn't hear – he wrote, “All of this is ours”, and he was smiling like a proud boy.' While they were still in the desert, they had all talked about what the scale of the victory meant. They agreed that ‘the previous borders and armistice agreements were annulled by the war'. Yael Dayan, who went on to become a Labour politician closely identified with the peace movement, concluded at the end of the war that Israel had become ‘something new, safer, larger, stronger and happier'. Sharon was part of the government that presided over the return of Sinai to the Egyptians after the two countries made peace. The biggest question about his time as prime minister, which began in 2001, is whether he will do the same for the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights.