Six days that shook the world
By MAX HASTINGS
25th May 2007
Daily Mail
Most British schoolchildren, even in these dark days for historical knowledge, learn that seven centuries ago, the longbow enabled our fore-fathers to inflict overwhelming defeats upon the French at Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt.
Rather fewer children ever get to hear that, in the end, the English lost the Hundred Years’ War.
Some 40 years after Agincourt was fought in 1415, the English army was obliged to quit France with its tail between its legs.
Here is a notable example of a great historical reality: winning battles, even for decades on end, does not necessarily pave the way to a happy ending for their victors (another good example is the American War of Independence in which the British won two-thirds of the battles).
General Moshe Dayan, whose appointment as defence minister contributed to the Israeli success
It is a message which, this year, the people of Israel must consider with pain. Their army is preparing a new bloody incursion into Gaza to stem Hamas rocket attacks. The nation, as well as the Israeli government, is racked by divisions about future policy.
The Arab world’s hatred seems as implacable as ever. Yet this is the 40th anniversary of one of the most smashing military victories in history, in which Israel established a dominance that stunned the world.
Many Israelis today find it hard to understand what has gone wrong since, what has transformed their 1967 conquest of 42,000 square miles of territory and defeat of three Arab armies into the thankless stalemate - a landscape of walls, wire and checkpoints punctuated by suicide bombers - which prevails in the 21st century.
Most foreigners, indeed many Israelis, have forgotten how the Middle East looked on the eve of war 40 years ago.
Israel’s Arab neighbours had tried to strangle the country at birth in 1948, when the Jewish state was created by the withdrawal of the British mandate in Palestine.
The UN partition plan that divided the territory roughly equally between Arabs and Jews was rejected by the Arab League, which immediately declared war on the fledgling state of Israel.
It won its war of survival in the War of Independence, followed by another clash in 1956. Yet after 19 years, its existence still remained precarious.
It remained besieged by three Arab neighbours. From the Golan Heights in the north, Syrian artillery fired at will on farm settlements.
The West Bank, administered by the Jordanians and home to hundreds of thousands of embittered Palestinian refugees with Hussein, and Iraqi troops moved into Jordan. In May, Egypt announced the closure to Israeli shipping of the Straits of Tiran, gateway to the Red Sea.
Amazingly, Egypt’s president seems sincerely to have supposed that he could indulge in brinkmanship on this scale without provoking Israel to act.
And until the last moment, he was almost right. Israel’s generals were fearful of risking war. But the imposition of the Red Sea blockade tipped the balance.
Premier Levi Eshkol and defence minister General Moshe Dayan reluctantly decided that they must fight. Israel’s conscript army was mobilised.
One young tank commander, Avigdor Kahalani, who later became a general, described his brigade commander’s electrifying briefing on June 4, 1967: "Tomorrow is war. I want you to empty your machine-guns on them. Leave no one alive. Run 'em over with your tank treads. Don’t hesitate! If you want to live, wipe them out.
"They’re your enemy - you’re not going to be shooting at barrels any more. They hate us. We should have gone into Egypt long ago and given them the smashing they deserve! It’s a historical moment.
Let us exploit it."
Commanders sometimes find it hard to motivate their men for battle, but this was not a problem for the Israeli Army of 1967.
Its citizen-soldiers shared an iron commitment, for they believed that failure would signal the extinction of their society - and they were probably right.
Syria’s chief-of-staff said: "Every soldier in our army feels that Israel must be wiped off the map." This was the declared policy of every Arab nation.
At 7.10am on Monday, June 5, the first Israeli aircraft took off to attack Egypt’s airfields. At the outset, the government’s intention was merely to break Arab air power, then to wreck Nasser’s army in Sinai.
By noon, almost the entire Egyptian airforce had been destroyed on the ground. In the hours that followed, the Jordanians’ and Syrians’ squadrons suffered the same fate.
All along the Sinai border, Israel’s tank spearheads raced forward, smashing through Egyptian positions, driving Nasser’s divisions to flight.
Everywhere, the Israelis were swiftly victorious.
The Egyptian commander-in-chief compounded the chaos by ordering his entire army to fall back on the Suez Canal. This transformed defeat into rout.
By the third day of war, the leading Israeli units had reached the eastern end of the passes guarding the Suez Canal and were still advancing.
King Hussein was reluctant to join the war, but made the fatal error of attempting to satisfy Nasser with a gesture. His long-range artillery fired on Israeli airfields.
This was enough to provoke the Israelis to attack in the old city of Jerusalem, held by the Jordanians since 1948. The holy places became the scene of the fiercest fighting of the war, and some 200 Israeli paratroopers died to achieve their capture.
By the third evening, victorious invaders were being photographed in emotional scenes at the Wailing Wall. Other Israeli formations drove eastwards across the West Bank to the Jordan River, repulsing Jordanian counter-attacks. Hussein’s army was as comprehensively defeated as that of Nasser.
For the first four days of war, in the north the Israelis and Syrians contented themselves with an artillery duel. Only on June 9, when Israel had become confident of victory, was the decision made to seize the Golan Heights from Syria.
Troops, rushed by bus from other fronts, scaled the Golan escarpment that night and overran the Syrian defences.
The next day, June 10, they drove forward across the plateau beyond, seizing the town of Kuneitra as Syrian forces fled towards Damascus.
Then, at last, Israel had achieved its war aims and was ready to accept the ceasefire which the UN had been struggling for days to impose.
On the night of June 10, Israeli forces stood on the bank of the Suez Canal, in possession of all Sinai, Jerusalem, the West Bank and Golan.
The disparity in casualties between the two sides was astounding: 679 Israelis had died, against some 10,000 Egyptians, 700 Jordanians and 700 Syrians. The Arab nations had lost 469 aircraft, Israel 36; 650 tanks, against Israel’s 100.
While the war was being fought, the world was slow to perceive the magnitude of Israel’s triumph. At the outset, the odds seemed overwhelmingly to favour the Arabs, who broadcast fantastic claims of losses inflicted on their foes, which some foreigners half-believed.
Cairo Radio sought to excuse catastrophe by claiming that the Americans and British were fighting alongside the Israelis.
Only when the shooting stopped, the smoke cleared, and foreign correspondents were belatedly allowed to visit the fronts did the truth become apparent.
Eye-witnesses beheld the sands of Sinai strewn with hundreds of boots - discarded by their Egyptian owners as they fled before Dayan’s tank columns. A photograph appeared on the cover of Life magazine of an Israeli soldier swimming in the Suez Canal.
This was still an era in which the world thought of Jews as victims. It was only a quarter of a century since six million had filed submissively into the Nazi gas chambers. It was almost 2,000 years since the Jews of Palestine had possessed a reputation for martial skill.
Suddenly, on that June day in 1967, a host of people from presidents and prime ministers downwards found themselves obliged to rethink all their ideas about the Jews and their young state.
The Americans, in particular, embraced the Israelis as victors of the 1967 war with a warmth which they had never before displayed. American Jewry discovered a pride in its brethren of the Promised Land, which contributed mightily to Israel’s post-1967 fortunes.
The Russians, of course, were beyond rage and humiliation at the fate which had befallen Nasser, their foremost Arab client.
For some time after the war ended, much of the world seemed content to indulge the Israelis’ euphoric joy and relief; their long-denied freedom to worship in their holiest places; release from years of close encirclement.
Yet among the first to perceive the perils of conquest for Israel was her greatest prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, by then a voice crying in the wilderness of Israel’s turbulent politics.
Even before the war ended, he warned that his country must prepare to hand back - conditionally, of course - the lands that had been won.
He perceived that for Israel to become an occupying power, overlord of millions of embittered and vengeful Palestinians, would be both morally and politically disastrous.
Levi Eshkol, the 1967 prime minister, had initially opposed seizure of the West Bank and Jerusalem, because he said it was inevitable that Israel would have to give them back.
Yet Israel’s tragedy in the months and years following victory was that the nation fell prey to hubris.
Israelis have always had a good conceit of themselves, but after the Six-Day War, this swelled embarrassingly.
Success convinced them that they could defeat any Arab army, any time, without really trying - a delusion that would cost them dear when the Arabs attacked in 1973 in an attempt to undo the outcome of 1967.
Having gained so much land, purchased in blood, it seemed to most Israelis unnecessary to give back the parts which both they and the Arabs cherished most: the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and above all Jerusalem.
Some liberal voices cautioned against expansionism. But these were drowned out - as they have been ever since - by the powerful, vociferous minority who will never countenance surrendering Jerusalem, and have been committed since 1967 to the remorseless expansion of Israeli territory and settlements across whatever Palestinian land Israelis see fit to take.
We can see that Ben-Gurion was entirely right about the poisoned chalice of victory. Israel, in 1967, held the moral high ground in the face of Arab aggression. Today, instead, what was once a victim nation is branded by much of the world as an oppressor.
Most Israelis desperately want peace. But they cannot bring themselves to make the concessions - to surrender the gains of 1967 - which might, just might, make peace possible.
The Palestinians sink ever deeper into internecine conflict and despair, in their enclaves where terrorism and the cultivation of grievances are the only thriving industries.
Israel’s right to exist is undisputed outside the Muslim world. But the moral legitimacy of its policies has never been more deeply doubted.
That great military victory of 40 years ago seems shockingly hollow. Most of the Arab world will willingly sustain a Hundred Years’ War to undo its consequences. It would be a rash man who today predicted its outcome.
dailymail.co.uk
By MAX HASTINGS
25th May 2007
Daily Mail
Most British schoolchildren, even in these dark days for historical knowledge, learn that seven centuries ago, the longbow enabled our fore-fathers to inflict overwhelming defeats upon the French at Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt.
Rather fewer children ever get to hear that, in the end, the English lost the Hundred Years’ War.
Some 40 years after Agincourt was fought in 1415, the English army was obliged to quit France with its tail between its legs.
Here is a notable example of a great historical reality: winning battles, even for decades on end, does not necessarily pave the way to a happy ending for their victors (another good example is the American War of Independence in which the British won two-thirds of the battles).
General Moshe Dayan, whose appointment as defence minister contributed to the Israeli success
It is a message which, this year, the people of Israel must consider with pain. Their army is preparing a new bloody incursion into Gaza to stem Hamas rocket attacks. The nation, as well as the Israeli government, is racked by divisions about future policy.
The Arab world’s hatred seems as implacable as ever. Yet this is the 40th anniversary of one of the most smashing military victories in history, in which Israel established a dominance that stunned the world.
Many Israelis today find it hard to understand what has gone wrong since, what has transformed their 1967 conquest of 42,000 square miles of territory and defeat of three Arab armies into the thankless stalemate - a landscape of walls, wire and checkpoints punctuated by suicide bombers - which prevails in the 21st century.
Most foreigners, indeed many Israelis, have forgotten how the Middle East looked on the eve of war 40 years ago.
Israel’s Arab neighbours had tried to strangle the country at birth in 1948, when the Jewish state was created by the withdrawal of the British mandate in Palestine.
The UN partition plan that divided the territory roughly equally between Arabs and Jews was rejected by the Arab League, which immediately declared war on the fledgling state of Israel.
It won its war of survival in the War of Independence, followed by another clash in 1956. Yet after 19 years, its existence still remained precarious.
It remained besieged by three Arab neighbours. From the Golan Heights in the north, Syrian artillery fired at will on farm settlements.
The West Bank, administered by the Jordanians and home to hundreds of thousands of embittered Palestinian refugees with Hussein, and Iraqi troops moved into Jordan. In May, Egypt announced the closure to Israeli shipping of the Straits of Tiran, gateway to the Red Sea.
Amazingly, Egypt’s president seems sincerely to have supposed that he could indulge in brinkmanship on this scale without provoking Israel to act.
And until the last moment, he was almost right. Israel’s generals were fearful of risking war. But the imposition of the Red Sea blockade tipped the balance.
Premier Levi Eshkol and defence minister General Moshe Dayan reluctantly decided that they must fight. Israel’s conscript army was mobilised.
One young tank commander, Avigdor Kahalani, who later became a general, described his brigade commander’s electrifying briefing on June 4, 1967: "Tomorrow is war. I want you to empty your machine-guns on them. Leave no one alive. Run 'em over with your tank treads. Don’t hesitate! If you want to live, wipe them out.
"They’re your enemy - you’re not going to be shooting at barrels any more. They hate us. We should have gone into Egypt long ago and given them the smashing they deserve! It’s a historical moment.
Let us exploit it."
Commanders sometimes find it hard to motivate their men for battle, but this was not a problem for the Israeli Army of 1967.
Its citizen-soldiers shared an iron commitment, for they believed that failure would signal the extinction of their society - and they were probably right.
Syria’s chief-of-staff said: "Every soldier in our army feels that Israel must be wiped off the map." This was the declared policy of every Arab nation.
At 7.10am on Monday, June 5, the first Israeli aircraft took off to attack Egypt’s airfields. At the outset, the government’s intention was merely to break Arab air power, then to wreck Nasser’s army in Sinai.
By noon, almost the entire Egyptian airforce had been destroyed on the ground. In the hours that followed, the Jordanians’ and Syrians’ squadrons suffered the same fate.
All along the Sinai border, Israel’s tank spearheads raced forward, smashing through Egyptian positions, driving Nasser’s divisions to flight.
Everywhere, the Israelis were swiftly victorious.
The Egyptian commander-in-chief compounded the chaos by ordering his entire army to fall back on the Suez Canal. This transformed defeat into rout.
By the third day of war, the leading Israeli units had reached the eastern end of the passes guarding the Suez Canal and were still advancing.
King Hussein was reluctant to join the war, but made the fatal error of attempting to satisfy Nasser with a gesture. His long-range artillery fired on Israeli airfields.
This was enough to provoke the Israelis to attack in the old city of Jerusalem, held by the Jordanians since 1948. The holy places became the scene of the fiercest fighting of the war, and some 200 Israeli paratroopers died to achieve their capture.
By the third evening, victorious invaders were being photographed in emotional scenes at the Wailing Wall. Other Israeli formations drove eastwards across the West Bank to the Jordan River, repulsing Jordanian counter-attacks. Hussein’s army was as comprehensively defeated as that of Nasser.
For the first four days of war, in the north the Israelis and Syrians contented themselves with an artillery duel. Only on June 9, when Israel had become confident of victory, was the decision made to seize the Golan Heights from Syria.
Troops, rushed by bus from other fronts, scaled the Golan escarpment that night and overran the Syrian defences.
The next day, June 10, they drove forward across the plateau beyond, seizing the town of Kuneitra as Syrian forces fled towards Damascus.
Then, at last, Israel had achieved its war aims and was ready to accept the ceasefire which the UN had been struggling for days to impose.
On the night of June 10, Israeli forces stood on the bank of the Suez Canal, in possession of all Sinai, Jerusalem, the West Bank and Golan.
The disparity in casualties between the two sides was astounding: 679 Israelis had died, against some 10,000 Egyptians, 700 Jordanians and 700 Syrians. The Arab nations had lost 469 aircraft, Israel 36; 650 tanks, against Israel’s 100.
While the war was being fought, the world was slow to perceive the magnitude of Israel’s triumph. At the outset, the odds seemed overwhelmingly to favour the Arabs, who broadcast fantastic claims of losses inflicted on their foes, which some foreigners half-believed.
Cairo Radio sought to excuse catastrophe by claiming that the Americans and British were fighting alongside the Israelis.
Only when the shooting stopped, the smoke cleared, and foreign correspondents were belatedly allowed to visit the fronts did the truth become apparent.
Eye-witnesses beheld the sands of Sinai strewn with hundreds of boots - discarded by their Egyptian owners as they fled before Dayan’s tank columns. A photograph appeared on the cover of Life magazine of an Israeli soldier swimming in the Suez Canal.
This was still an era in which the world thought of Jews as victims. It was only a quarter of a century since six million had filed submissively into the Nazi gas chambers. It was almost 2,000 years since the Jews of Palestine had possessed a reputation for martial skill.
Suddenly, on that June day in 1967, a host of people from presidents and prime ministers downwards found themselves obliged to rethink all their ideas about the Jews and their young state.
The Americans, in particular, embraced the Israelis as victors of the 1967 war with a warmth which they had never before displayed. American Jewry discovered a pride in its brethren of the Promised Land, which contributed mightily to Israel’s post-1967 fortunes.
The Russians, of course, were beyond rage and humiliation at the fate which had befallen Nasser, their foremost Arab client.
For some time after the war ended, much of the world seemed content to indulge the Israelis’ euphoric joy and relief; their long-denied freedom to worship in their holiest places; release from years of close encirclement.
Yet among the first to perceive the perils of conquest for Israel was her greatest prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, by then a voice crying in the wilderness of Israel’s turbulent politics.
Even before the war ended, he warned that his country must prepare to hand back - conditionally, of course - the lands that had been won.
He perceived that for Israel to become an occupying power, overlord of millions of embittered and vengeful Palestinians, would be both morally and politically disastrous.
Levi Eshkol, the 1967 prime minister, had initially opposed seizure of the West Bank and Jerusalem, because he said it was inevitable that Israel would have to give them back.
Yet Israel’s tragedy in the months and years following victory was that the nation fell prey to hubris.
Israelis have always had a good conceit of themselves, but after the Six-Day War, this swelled embarrassingly.
Success convinced them that they could defeat any Arab army, any time, without really trying - a delusion that would cost them dear when the Arabs attacked in 1973 in an attempt to undo the outcome of 1967.
Having gained so much land, purchased in blood, it seemed to most Israelis unnecessary to give back the parts which both they and the Arabs cherished most: the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and above all Jerusalem.
Some liberal voices cautioned against expansionism. But these were drowned out - as they have been ever since - by the powerful, vociferous minority who will never countenance surrendering Jerusalem, and have been committed since 1967 to the remorseless expansion of Israeli territory and settlements across whatever Palestinian land Israelis see fit to take.
We can see that Ben-Gurion was entirely right about the poisoned chalice of victory. Israel, in 1967, held the moral high ground in the face of Arab aggression. Today, instead, what was once a victim nation is branded by much of the world as an oppressor.
Most Israelis desperately want peace. But they cannot bring themselves to make the concessions - to surrender the gains of 1967 - which might, just might, make peace possible.
The Palestinians sink ever deeper into internecine conflict and despair, in their enclaves where terrorism and the cultivation of grievances are the only thriving industries.
Israel’s right to exist is undisputed outside the Muslim world. But the moral legitimacy of its policies has never been more deeply doubted.
That great military victory of 40 years ago seems shockingly hollow. Most of the Arab world will willingly sustain a Hundred Years’ War to undo its consequences. It would be a rash man who today predicted its outcome.
dailymail.co.uk
