The Lion's Gate: On the Front Lines of the Six Day War Page 4

  I have been an army wife for almost thirteen years and have come to hate the word “operational.” It means that my husband is somewhere across the border, usually at night on a reprisal operation, or in some other position where he may be wounded or killed. Uzi has already been shot twice, once by our own forces. Not even Israeli wives get used to that.

  Uzi fought in the Sinai Campaign in ’56, the victory that all of Israel believed had bought us a decade or more of peace. Even when our forces were compelled by the Americans and the Russians to withdraw from Sinai in 1957, Israelis acceded to the necessity with cautious optimism. UN peacekeepers took over our soldiers’ posts in Sinai. The desert became a demilitarized zone, a buffer between us and the Egyptians. Nasser could no longer move bombers or tanks close to our border. The Great Powers guaranteed it. They would hold their shield over Israel. Beneath this, we dared to feel safe.

  Suddenly in ’67 everything changed.

  On May 15, Israel’s Independence Day, the radio reported Egyptian divisions moving into Sinai. Neighbors and friends reacted with shock. Nasser can’t do that, can he? The UN is supposed to stop him.

  But each day brought further Egyptian incursions.

  On May 18, Nasser ordered the United Nations out of Sinai entirely. Our ambassadors appealed to the Security Council. Surely Secretary-General U Thant will stand up to these Egyptian provocations. But two days later UN peacekeepers were packing up their equipment and pulling out.

  More Egyptian divisions rolled into Sinai. Nasser had long since nationalized the Suez Canal; now he sent paratroopers to seize Sharm el-Sheikh, closing the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping. Our port of Eilat had been cut off by this clear and flagrant act of war.

  The Arab world exploded with joy. Nasser’s boldness ignited anti-Israeli passions across North Africa and the entire Middle East. Mobs filled the streets in a dozen Arab nations, chanting, “Kill the Jews!” and “Death to the Zionists!” Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia pledged troops to Nasser. So did Lebanon, Libya, Tunisia, and Morocco.

  How could this be happening? Where were our allies? The Americans, mired in Vietnam, dilated and demurred. The State Department claimed to have literally lost the 1956 letter in which Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had guaranteed Israel’s territorial integrity.

  France, after her costly war in Algeria, had adopted a strategy of befriending the Arabs. When our foreign minister, Abba Eban, called upon Charles de Gaulle to honor France’s post-Sinai pledge to stand by Israel, the French president rebuffed him with contempt. “That was 1957,” he said. “This is 1967.”

  That same night, France cut off all arms shipments to Israel.

  As for Great Britain, the hearts of her people may have been in the right place, but the nation’s politicians had tied their hopes for Middle East oil and influence to their former client states Jordan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. Whitehall was not keen to shed British blood in defense of a couple of million pain-in-the-neck Jews who had last made headlines in London in 1946 when their underground fighters blew up British military headquarters in Jerusalem’s King David Hotel.

  In the suburb of Yehud, where Uzi and I lived, homes started emptying as husband after husband was called up for war. I drove into Tel Aviv one morning and found Allenby Street so deserted that I could walk across at midblock, an act that would have been suicidal two weeks earlier.

  Families were leaving the country. I knew two in our neighborhood. The airport at Lod was so busy with outbound flights that a grim joke began circulating: “Will the last one out please turn off the lights?”

  Along Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv, shopkeepers were shuttering their businesses. Doorways had been sandbagged, windows taped or shielded by roll-down iron gates. I had been nine years old during the War of Independence in 1948. I remember Egyptian Spitfires attacking Tel Aviv unopposed (Israel had not even a single antiaircraft gun), dropping bombs and making strafing runs down civilian streets.

  This time would be far worse. Nasser had Soviet bombers, Ilyushins and Tupolevs. If the city started to burn, who or what could stop it? Half the fire trucks had been mobilized. Even the city buses were gone. Almost all had been activated as transport for the troops. Taxis had been called up as well, along with bread vans, milk trucks, even dump trucks and panel vans. The one truck I saw from the Tnuva Dairy was carrying reservists.

  City parks and soccer fields were being consecrated as graveyards. There seemed to be blood drive tables in every office building. Hotel lobbies had been made over into casualty collection centers. In a drugstore I was handed a mimeographed sheet—instructions for the identification and burial of the dead.

  Uzi dug a trench in our backyard. He is an engineer so he did it exactly per specifications, with a zigzag at the halfway point so that if a bomb or mortar shell landed at one end, the blast wouldn’t kill you at the other.

  Digging trenches at Gan Shmuel.

  The first morning when the sirens sounded, I was alone in the kitchen with the baby. I grabbed her, in her diaper, and dashed out to the trench in my robe. I had left the coffee percolator going. I remember thinking, Do I dare go back inside to turn it off?

  Finally, after about fifteen minutes sitting there in the trench, just me and the baby, I decided it was silly and went back into the house. Later we learned that the civil defense people had not yet figured out that they were supposed to blow the all-clear siren when the air raid alert was over.

  Our quiet suburb was only seven or eight kilometers from the international airport, but the surrounding fields and hills were wilderness. The armistice line was so close that Jordanian raiders crossed almost every night. My medical responsibilities included two Yemenite villages, Bareket and Tirat Yehuda. These were settlements for Jews from Yemen who had been expelled from their home country by Muslim pogroms, airlifted to Israel by our own pilots and planes, and settled on land belonging to the state. Poverty was extreme but the newcomers bore it with patience and dignity. I was the only Western person providing medical aid—and the first woman physician my patients had ever seen. The most common injury I treated was burns, inflicted on the flesh of ailing villagers by their native healers as a means of driving out dybbuks, or evil spirits. This, so close to the airport that we could see planes passing close overhead, bearing our countrymen evacuating to London or New York.

  My superiors at the health department had determined that it was too risky for me to drive to these villages alone, because of the fedayeen who would cross from Jordan, so each morning two soldiers picked me up in a jeep and provided an armed escort. These soldiers had now been returned to active duty. So I drove myself in our old Peugeot.

  Every morning the newspapers said we were going to war. Then they said we weren’t. This went on day after day. The state of suspense became unbearable. Every twenty-four hours that passed without a decision produced greater stress on the nation’s already struggling economy, not to mention its collective sanity.

  So we citizens very much wanted to hear what Prime Minister Eshkol had to say in his address to the nation. We were anxious. We were frightened. We wanted our minds set at ease, one way or the other.

  A Jew’s worst enemy is often himself. We think too much. Will we now second-guess ourselves into annihilation? As a physician I knew that decisions must often be made without perfect knowledge. I wanted to scream to the politicians: Do something! Make up your minds!

  7.

  ZAHALA

  What Americans speak of as the IDF—the Israel Defense Forces—we Israelis call Zahal. The word is an acronym for Zva Haganah L’Israel. In the early 1950s the government built a colony of housing outside Tel Aviv exclusively for officers of the army. The settlement is called Zahala. My house is at 11 Joab Street. In the Bible, Joab was King David’s nephew and commander of his army.

  General Moshe Dayan achieved worldwide renown in 1956 with Israel’s spectacular victory ov
er Egypt in what became known as the Sinai Campaign. As chief of staff, Dayan was considered the architect of this triumph. Now, in May 1967, he has been out of the army for ten years. He is a civilian, a member of the Knesset from a small, out-of-power opposition party.

  The combat arms of Israel are constituted, organized, and commanded according to a doctrine different from that of other nations. The Israel Defense Forces include as essential elements that other militaries consider unnecessary, and deliberately do without components (such as medium- or long-range bombers) that other armed forces view as indispensable. The reason is that the IDF was created for, and has evolved to wage, a very specific type of war, to be fought in a very specific place, against a very specific enemy.

  In 1962, when the first French-built Mirage IIICJ fighters arrived in Israel (designated by their builders “J” for Juif, the French word for “Jew”), they had been modified at air force chief Ezer Weizman’s insistence to suit the IAF’s unique combat mission.

  Gone was the rocket booster engine designed to catapult the interceptor into the stratosphere. Relegated to auxiliary use was air-to-air missile armament. Ezer and his chief test pilot, Danny Shapira, demanded guns: two DEFA 30-millimeter cannons. Also added were hangers for two 500-kilogram bombs.

  Why these alterations? Because high-altitude interception is not a priority in a nation whose enemies’ military runways lie within twenty-five minutes’ flying time of her population centers. Our air force instead needed jets that could bomb and destroy enemy airfields, strafe armored columns and troop concentrations, and take on opposing fighters in old-fashioned dogfights in the sky.

  Israel possesses none of the strategic geographical advantages of, say, the United States. Our nation does not have a 3,000-mile-wide body of water on one coast and a 5,000-mile-wide ocean on the other. She does not enjoy friendly relations with states along her borders, nor does she possess military alliances upon which she can depend.

  Israel’s frontiers are not borders, recognized by her neighbors and by the international community, but armistice lines, which may be declared null and void and overthrown arbitrarily at any hour.

  I was military commander of the Jewish-controlled half of Jerusalem in 1948, when the Green Line was drawn, separating the infant state of Israel from her enemy Jordan. I drew the line in concord with Lieutenant Colonel Abdullah al-Tell, my counterpart from the Arab Legion. The instrument we used, a chinagraph pencil, happened to be green. Where the line chanced to pass along neighborhood streets, one side became Israeli, the other Jordanian. When the pen passed over a house, one half of that dwelling fell under the jurisdiction of the Hashemite kingdom, the other half under that of the Israeli military command. In effect the home had to be abandoned. It became, inevitably, one of scores of blockhouses and bricked-up strongpoints lining the corridor of minefields and barbed-wire entanglements that divided Jerusalem.

  A strategy of defense-in-depth is not possible in a nation that is only nine miles wide at its waist and whose commercial concentrations and population centers lie within artillery range of its enemies. Offense is the only effective posture. War, if war comes, must be fought on the enemy’s territory, not our own.

  The IDF and IAF have been built upon the principles of speed, aggression, and audacity. An Israeli lieutenant or captain in the field does not expect the luxury of being able to appeal for instructions to higher command. He is on his own and has been trained to fight that way. “To the commander of an Israeli unit,” I wrote in Diary of the Sinai Campaign,

  I can point on a map to the Suez Canal and say: “There’s your target and this is your axis of advance. Don’t signal me during the fighting for more men, arms, or vehicles. All that we could allocate you’ve already got, and there isn’t more. Keep signaling your advances. You must reach Suez in forty-eight hours.” I can give this kind of order to commanders of our units because I know they are ready to assume such tasks and are capable of carrying them out.

  I arrive home from visiting units of the Southern Command late on the afternoon of May 28. Prime Minister Eshkol will address the nation this evening. I have no clue what he will say. Will he announce a resolution to the crisis? Will he proclaim an accord guaranteed by the United Nations or the Great Powers? Will he declare war?

  My wife, Ruth, is preparing dinner. I tell her I have spoken with our daughter, Yael, and ask about our two sons, Assi and Udi, both of whom have been mobilized with their reserve units, and about my nephews Uzi and Jonathan. Jonathan, the son of my sister Aviva, is in the navy. Uzi is the son of my brother Zorik, who was killed in the War of Independence; he is an officer in the Sayeret Matkal, Israel’s special forces.

  I myself have been in the field with the troops for the past five days. On Friday I visited Avraham Yoffe’s division, facing Sinai, and reviewed battle plans with him and two of his brigade commanders, Colonel Yissachar “Yiska” Shadmi and Colonel Elhanan Sela. A message came for me that morning from Prime Minister Eshkol. I flew back from Beersheba and met him at the Dan Hotel in Tel Aviv. He said he wanted to form a committee, Ministerial Defense and Foreign Affairs, on which I would serve.

  I refused. I will accept no “advisory” position. I insist upon a combat command. If none can be found for me, I will drive a tank or a truck. I will not permit Eshkol or his government to neutralize my voice by sidelining me into a ceremonial role.

  What I hate most about the dallying and dithering of the cabinet is that they stem from lack of faith in our fighting men and commanders. Our troops are young lions. It is catastrophic in terms of spirit and morale for the nation to be overtaken by hysteria and go beating at the doors of the Powers, begging to be rescued.

  At the level of state—meaning the deliberations of the prime minister and the cabinet—a clear and decisive intention must be agreed upon. This must be beyond tactical and strategic, beyond local or regional, and beyond the time frame of the present.

  It must answer the question: Where does the country need to be at the end of this crisis?

  Remember, we can destroy the army of Egypt to the last man and last tank, and that force will be reconstituted within eighteen months, by draft or conscription from that nation’s limitless manpower and by resupply of weaponry and training from its sponsor, the Soviet Union.

  Egypt and Syria are client states of the Russians, whose interests in the Middle East are in their view essential and permanent.

  For us, victory, in the sense that the Allies achieved over the Axis in World War II, is not possible. We cannot defeat the Arabs. There are too many of them and their sponsor states are too powerful.

  Within such limitations, then, what is possible? The prime minister and the cabinet must answer this. I despair of Eshkol because he is not thinking in these terms. In his view, the issue is “How can Israel be preserved?” This is the wrong question to ask, because it permits such an answer as “By a negotiated settlement imposed by the Powers.” Such an outcome will save Israel for the moment, but it will do so at the expense of deterrence, which is the only true basis for security for a nation of 2.7 million surrounded by enemies whose numbers are greater than 120 million.

  At the same time Chief of Staff Rabin, whom I respect, is thinking in penny packets, proposing to seize the Gaza Strip and use it as a bargaining chip in dealing with Nasser. Bargaining chip for what? Egypt knows that Gaza, with its quarter of a million refugees, is a nest of hornets. She wants it even less than we do.

  The proper question to ask is not “How can Israel be preserved at any cost?” but “How can Israel be preserved into the future?”

  To this question at this time, no reply is possible except by the sword. The enemy must be dealt such a blow that he will be deterred from striking again, or threatening to strike, for as long as possible.

  Therefore our objective cannot be mere seizure of land or the swapping of territories of dubious value. It must be the destruction of the
Egyptian Army, not in part and not in detail, but totally and in a straight-up fight—tank against tank, plane against plane, man against man.

  There are jacks for ten telephones in my house, from my days as army chief of staff, but only two are hooked up now, and those are manned by Ruth, between household chores and affairs of business, and whatever helpful neighbor happens to have stopped by.

  I sit with my wife now for a light supper of salad, fish, and bread with olive oil. The radio on the counter is already tuned to Kol Israel, over which Levi Eshkol’s speech to the nation will be broadcast, but I check it again, twice, to be sure the dial is right.

  “How much longer till the prime minister speaks?” asks Ruth.

  I check my watch.

  “Twenty minutes.”

  8.

  A SECOND SHOAH

  In May of ’67 when a reservist was called up, his car was also recruited. The army didn’t have enough vehicles. I was in seventh grade then. The strangest part of that whole strange month was the way cars kept disappearing. You’d walk out each morning and the street would be emptier than it was the night before.

  Haim Koren is a thirteen-year-old in the working-class neighborhood of Bat Galim in Haifa. He will earn his PhD in Middle Eastern studies from Ben-Gurion University in 1993. In 2012 he will be appointed Israel’s ambassador to South Sudan.

  Throughout the waiting period, we listened to Kol Ha’Raam, the Voice of Thunder, out of Cairo. The station’s leading announcer, respected throughout the Arab world, was Ali Ahmad Said. Said did not rant or bluster. His broadcasts were more frightening because they were delivered in a reasonable and unemotional tone. He spoke as if he were reporting the news.