347. The Six Day War (Part 2)

19:44Anita:But just before we get to the break, is it with eyes wide open then that King Hussein of Jordan decides the thing that we are going to do is open fire on West Jerusalem? Because in the second half, we're going to talk about how consequential that decision is. Does he do it knowing how weak the position is of the Arabs? or does he do it thinking, actually, you know, we've got a chance? I think you're going to find that as he launches the first artillery salvos, he believed he was engaging in a war that the Arab side still intended to win. It would only be subsequently that Hussein would realize how fateful that decision would prove and how high the cost would prove.

20:33Anita:welcome back so just before the break eugene i was asking you whether it was with eyes wide open that king hussein of jordan decides to you know send the artillery to open fire on west jerusalem and you say actually he thought it was a war that the arab world could still win the impact of that is so consequential because within hours, doesn't Israel have a justification to take the West Bank now and East Jerusalem? I think that the Israelis had always looked on Jordan as a country they could live with. And we have, through the work of my colleague Avi Shlaim and others, real evidence of the collusion that had taken place between Jordanian and the Israelis to strike a modus vivendi.

21:15William:That being the title of his famous book, Collusion Across the Jordan. collusion across the Jordan. Absolutely. So good to get a plug in for Avi. You know, Hussein could not afford to stay out of what was going to be the total Arab effort to achieve the liberation of Palestine. Not least because the majority of his own population was Palestinian. He had integrated all of the West Bank into Transjordan. It becomes a kingdom of Jordan. And even on the East Bank, you have large concentrations of Palestinians who have lived in Jordan since 1948 as refugees. So he is aware that if the Arab world is engaging in total war with Israel, he cannot afford to stay out.

21:58And in that sense, that roll of the dice was taken very consciously, knowing his fate was linked to the collective Arab war effort, no matter what he did.

22:07William:We think today of Israel as this incredibly competent military that sort of breaks all before it. But at this point, is there a sense of amazement among Israeli troops when they break through into East Jerusalem? Is there a sense of amazement, or is this something that they've been planning and waiting for? It's so hard to know what was going through the minds of Israelis. We talked in the last episode about the high anxieties that accompanied the lead-up to war. So we know that Israelis were themselves very fearful that their Arab neighbors could prove more than a paper tiger, that they could, through a collective effort of several countries making war against Israel on, let's say, three fronts at once, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, that it would be more than the forces of the IDF could handle.

23:00And I think the speed and magnitude of victory caught Israelis by surprise as well. We have all those amazing photographs of the first paratroopers who actually enter the old city of Jerusalem. At the Western Wall. At the Western Wall.

23:14William:One of the most famous photographs of the 1960s. They have succeeded where Israel failed in 1948, and they have secured the Jewish quarters of the old city of Jerusalem. They're standing at the foot of the Western Wall, and they look completely astonished to be there. And I think that might actually be a photograph that captures a public mood. I can't say I wasn't there, but I have the sense that the Israelis were just astonished by the degree of success that they achieved in taking on and defeating all their neighbors in quick order in so little time.

23:50Anita:And what about the Palestinian experience? Because we're talking about people who have now been driven from one home who have thought this will be their next home, and now this happens. Well, I think that for Palestinians in diaspora, you have this kind of bipolar experience of having all their hopes raised by the broadcasts of Egypt and its allies that the Arabs were achieving a historic victory against Israel that was crumbling in the face of the Arab onslaught and that the total liberation of Palestine was at hand. And we have all these accounts by Palestinian guerrillas who are looking for ways that they can volunteer for this war effort and get to the front to be part of the liberation of their country.

24:37And they're listening to the radio as they're driving across the desert from Baghdad and Kuwait and Damascus, heading towards the front. But of course, the closer they get as the days pass by, the -

24:49William:More obvious that this is rubbish. Yeah. Sooner they come to the moment of reckoning where eventually the defeated Arab governments have to own up to the Arab world that far from having delivered the liberation of Palestine, they have suffered total defeat. And not only have they lost all of their air forces, not only have all their armies been defeated, not only do they have tens of thousands of their soldiers Israeli prisoner of war, but they've lost the Golan Heights. They've lost the West Strip, and they've lost all the Sinai Peninsula. A loss on this order of magnitude coming on the very high expectations of the imminent delivery of Palestine to the Palestinian people was a shock from which I believe the Palestinians never recovered.

25:36William:And explain for those who don't understand it, the significance of East Jerusalem and the Haram al-Sharif and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. What does this mean for those who see it as the center of their world? Well, already in mandate times, Palestine was a city divided between a sort of modern British and Jewish quarter and the old city and Arab quarters that were in Arab hand. And that line was reinforced in the course of the 1948 June War when the city was left divided between Israeli and Jordanian forces with the holy sites of the old city, the walled city of Jerusalem spanning back the millennia, were left in Arab hands.

26:16And the neighborhoods in the West integrated into the Jewish state. And it was quite a hard division line of armies shooting at each other in a way not dissimilar to, let's say, the division of Berlin between East and West quarters. So overcoming that division and allowing Israelis access to the holiest sites associated with Judaism in Jerusalem. In Jerusalem, the site of the temple, you talk about the Haram al-Sharif for observant Jews. This is the Temple Mount. The Western Wall are the same stones that had been the retainer wall of the Temple enclosure. This is why the Western Wall holds such important spiritual and historic value to Jews, observant and secular alike.

27:02So the symbolism of the Jewish state securing control over all of Jerusalem was massive for Israelis and was arguably the largest single prize of the Jude War, bigger than Golan and Sinai, as important as they were strategically for Israel, and bigger than gaining the West Bank, which filled in what was seen as the narrow waste of Israel, where the bulge of Arab territory narrowed Israel to 10 or 12 miles at points. But Jerusalem, to which Jews had been vowing next year at every Passover Seder for millennia.

27:39William:And talk now about Gaza, because Gaza was where many of the Palestinians who were driven off their land and expelled from Palestine in 1948. Many had taken refuge in the refugee camps of Gaza, on the sand dunes of Gaza. They had been under Egyptian rule, which wasn't wonderful, because they were not allowed political activity. The Egyptian secret pleas kept a very close eye what was going on in Gaza, but what happens to these people now? Well, as you say, Will, it's not as though Gaza had been a particularly prosperous or happy place. Holiday camp. It was basically the world's largest refugee camp.

28:16The Gaza, as a strip, is a product of the 1948 war. It didn't exist before then. You had a Gaza province. And an ancient Gaza town. And the ancient city of Gaza and other old towns. But that geography that we know so well today. It's a product of 1948. It's the territory that Israel didn't occupy. And the reason why the Israelis were not so interested in occupying that territory is because it had become the catchment area of Palestinian refugees, particularly from towns and cities from Jaffa southwards or from Beersheba westwards. And as Israel conquered those territories, townsmen and villagers fled into an area still under Egyptian army control around the city of Gaza that becomes the Gaza Strip.

29:01And there they have been enclosed with very little communication with Egypt as a kind of self-governing refugee camp.

29:09William:And also no communication with their old homes in what has now become Israel. Totally cut off from that too. Or with the West Bank. I mean, really an area quite cut off from the rest of the Palestinian diaspora. So many families who fled in one direction had cousins who'd flee in another, and they haven't seen them now for 20 years. Unless they were able to go through Egypt and then make their way to Jordan for family reunions, which would have been one way to do it. You could cross from Gaza to Cairo with a permit. So family unifications were conceivable. But the isolation of Gaza was pretty intense nonetheless.

29:43And now they find themselves after, you know, what are we talking, 19 years since the establishment of this refugee community flooding into the established towns of places like Rafa, Khan Yunus, Gaza City itself, now coming under Israeli occupation.

30:01William:And there is great fear, isn't there? Because in the Suez War, Israel had also seized Gaza briefly and committed a number of massacres. The secret police had arrived, there'd be people put up against the wall, machine gunned. And so people are extremely anxious now in Gaza. With good reason. As you say, the experience of occupation in the 1956 war had been deeply traumatic. I believe Israel's actions were explained in terms of securing the rear before moving onto the Sinai. So the concerns for the Israelis was not to have hostile forces behind their lines that might in some way interact with Egyptian troops as Israel went down towards the Suez Canal as planned by their collusion with the French and the British.

30:43But yes, I mean, I think that for the people of Gaza, the invasion of 1967 was met with fear and trepidation, and there was no one there to protect them. Basically, they fell, Egypt was in retreat, And their fate was now very much in Israeli hands.

30:59William:And on the West Bank, what is the scale of the second displacement? Because we all talk about 1948 and the 750 ,000 Palestinians who flee what becomes Israel at the Nakba. But tell me what happens in 1967. There's a whole second displacement from Jerusalem, from Nablus, from Ramallah, and so on, over the bridge into Jordan. So you will see a displacement into Jordan. But interestingly, the majority of Palestinians living in the West Bank opt to remain in the West Bank. Their witnessing of what happened to Palestinians who left their homes in 1948 gave them pause. And so Israel was not driving the population out in a way that would have emptied the West Bank of its populations.

31:51Instead, they found themselves coming under the occupation of a very large Palestinian population, which would pose all kinds of problems for Israel's future as it looked to extend its grasp over the West Bank. This was strategic territory. It was all historically land associated with the Kingdom of Israel, Es Judea and Samaria.

32:15William:Where the whole Israelite identity developed at the end of the Bronze Age. Absolutely. the kingdom of Israel. If you read the book of Kings and the books of Samuel, this is the territory we're talking about. But as the Jordanians saw, if you keep the land, you get the people. I believe that in 1967, between 280 ,000 and 325 ,000 Palestinians flee the West Bank over the bridge at this point. It's not quite the scale of the Nakba, but it's kind of half the Nakba. Oh, it's definitely a massive displacement of people and a new wave of misery for Palestinians who already have known practically two decades of exile from their homeland.

32:58And here again, you see hundreds of thousands displaced into Jordan to once again overfill the refugee camps of Jordan, which themselves had not been particularly comfortable places to live. So places like the Baka camp on the road north of Amman, whole quarters of Amman, Jabal Hussein, the areas around Hashemiah and all, become reception areas for people dispossessed, in many cases for the second time, because many of the West Bank were people from places like Ramallah and Lidah when they were taken over by Israel in 1948 to take refuge in the West Bank, and now for a second time being displaced.

33:34So the human misery is intense, but my point is you have far more who choose to stay, And that will become a problem for the Israelis because you keep the land, you keep the people.

33:44William:So Eugene, take us now to the Syrian front because there's a real paradox here, isn't there? Syria has done a great deal to provoke this crisis in the first place. There's a lot of sponsorship of Fatah raids that understandably angers the Israelis and the Israeli casualties from these. There's a lot of radical rhetoric. But when the attack actually happens, when the Egyptian air forces were wiped out, when the paratroopers head into East Jerusalem on that first day, and the second day, and the third day, nothing at all happens on the Syrian front. Why is that? In a sense, the Israelis were preoccupied first and foremost with taking down the biggest threats that they faced.

34:23And so in the opening days of the war, their first priority was to secure their front with Egypt. And they sweep straight through and secure the whole of the Sinai Peninsula right up to the Suez Canal.

34:35William:This is Ariel Sharon and his tank regiments, isn't it? Am I right about that? You are. And in that sense, they're able to eliminate a threat from their Egypt from their southern flank. But what I'm asking is why the Syrians don't preemptively - We're getting there. We're getting there. Because if you think about what are the biggest borders that Israel has with its Arab neighbors, once you've secured the southern flank with Egypt, which is the biggest threat, you turn to Jordan, which is your next longest border, which goes the whole length of the West Bank. And Jordan had a very disciplined army, had a very disciplined air force.

35:08William:The Arab Legion, which in many ways was one of the winners in 1948, its defense of the old city, and it beats back Rabin, doesn't it, in the early days of 1948? Absolutely. So the Israelis did not wish to have an army with the discipline and the experience of the Arab Legion on its eastern flank threatening. So they turn all their effort to the Jordanians as soon as the Egyptians are concerned. I think they were emboldened by the success that they had enjoyed against Egypt and Jordan to then deal with the last of the strategic risks, which is the way in which the frontier land of Israel, as it borders Syria, goes up into the highlands of the Golan.

35:50And here, if they were to secure the Golan Heights and be able to secure their territory with Syria from the high ground, Syria had long used the position of the heights to take potshots on Israeli positions and the Galilee panhandle, that would all end now. And the Israelis saw that their success on the ground and their control of the air meant that they could actually probably secure their territory beyond their wildest dreams on the eve of war in 67 by securing the Golan Heights as well. And so they turned their full force against a Syria that's very ill-prepared to take on the full might of Israel single-handed.

36:27William:And this again is Ariel Sharon, isn't it? The same tank regiments that have now come back from the Sinai are now heading right through Israel, heading for the north to the Golan Heights. But what I want to know, Eugene, is why we're not seeing columns of Syrian tanks pouring down from the Golan on day one and day two? Why are they just sitting in, they want to keep their defensive positions tight, do they? They know that how powerful the Golan Heights is as a fortified position. Is that the reason they don't advance? I think there is a sense of panic that sweeps through Damascus, and that the Damascenes prematurely announce defeat.

37:06So there is a broadcast announcing that the Israelis have actually managed to secure the Golan city of Kinetra, and that Kinetra has fallen while it was actually still in Syrian hands.

37:17William:Kinetra is still there kept as a sort of museum of war, isn't it? Totally abandoned. Circassian settlement from the 19th century that, yes, has never been resettled except by Syrian army units overlooking the frontier zone with Israel as it was to be after 67. But the effect of this broadcast on troop morale meant that Syrian soldiers, one presumes were better informed about the fate of Egyptian units and Jordanian units, felt that they were no longer protected if Karnatra had fallen and they began to retreat. And so I think where the Israelis, you know, fighting what is arguably the most difficult of wars to be trying to go up high terrain against well-entrenched defensive positions, found themselves marching through undefended land and able to claim the Golan Heights almost without resistance.

38:16William:But there is some very bitter fighting up there nonetheless, isn't there? I mean, I remember as a child seeing pictures of Syrian troops in the aftermath of an Nepal attack, for example. There's a lot of Nepal being used up on the Golan Heights at this point. It was a total war for Syrians, you know, who were confronting the Israelis, of course. They would have fought with all of their disposal, which would then drive, you know, Israeli uses of weapons like napalm to get out the well-entrenched defenders. I mean, I think what it points to really was the way in which soldiers across all Arab fronts had been failed by their governments and were left vulnerable to Israeli attack, where Israel had the benefit of air defense and total supremacy of the sky, and where the governments were failing in supporting their troops in the field.

39:07And the Syrians were the last to fall victim to the failings of their government, but it cost them the Golden Heights at the end of the war.

39:14William:Give us a brief picture of the two Israeli heroes of 1967, Moshi Dayan and Ariel Sharon. I mean, both were flamboyant characters who had established their reputations as successful military commanders. Very different outlooks on the neighborhood that Israel finds itself in. Dayan, having always advocated respect for Palestinian neighbors, spoke with Palestinian villagers in Arabic. Acknowledged the fact that so many Arab villages had been destroyed and kibbutz is built on them. And there's this famous quote, isn't there, which he tells the Israeli classrooms, every single settlement we have is built on top of an Arab village, which is much quoted on the internet these days.

40:00Yeah, I think that Dayan really was someone who actually believed in the possibility of cohabitation between Israelis and Palestinians as the best outcome. Sharon, on the other hand, was very much aligned with the kind of right-wing revisionist politics in Israel, those influenced by Zayv Jabotinsky and his acolytes.

40:22William:The idea of the Iron Wall. The whole notion that any rational people will fight against occupiers with all they've got. And so out of respect for Palestinian rational claims to their own country, you had to just fight until they were all gone. They will never willingly surrender their land. So, Jabotinsky ironically comes across as at least respecting Palestinian claims to nationhood, even though his solutions were to use absolute force. And I think that Sharon, in that sense, really represents the military face of revisionist Zionism, where you had to deal such blows against Israel's Arab neighbors that they would retreat, leave the terrain to Israel, and then strike peace with your Arab neighbors only when you have secured your iron walls.

41:12And the Palestinians were in many ways the biggest impediment to that, because how do you square getting Palestinian buy-in to the Israeli project under occupation. And that would be something that would bedevil Sharon's approach to the Palestinian movement, you know, right through his career.

41:31William:So, Dayan and Sharon are being acclaimed as great war heroes. At the same time, Nasser resigns and then reverses the decision. Tell us about that. Well, we talked a little bit about the way in which the Arab world has been deluded, and Nasser leads the lying campaign of promising everyone total victory and then having to come clean to his countrymen and to the Arab world at large that it had been total defeat. And so I think his resignation was him taking responsibility for leading total Arab failure. But for the Arab world, already, the shock of defeat is a trauma that I really wish to stress.

42:17I think it does something to Arabs' confidence in their leaders that they will never recover from.

42:24William:Even now, absolutely. Even now. There's just a notion that there is a kind of Alice in Wonderland world that the political people live in and that real people are victims of. And their confidence that they're being told the truth by their leaders takes an incredible blow. makes you very conspiratorial. You don't believe what people are telling you at face value, and you look for the meaning under the truth. And plots, constantly plots and conspiracies. And plots and conspiracies. And it's encouraged because the leaders, instead of saying, we messed up, will blame the defeat on conspiracies with the Europeans or conspiracies with the Americans.

42:59And so you have all of that. Nasser's resignation, however, was something that I think the Egyptian people and the Arab at large simply wasn't ready for yet. He was still their hero. He was still their champion. And having lost war, they didn't want to lose him. Now, he came out of this war so discredited. He will be openly scorned by his fellow Arab leaders in the years after 67 until his death in September of 1970.

43:29William:A bit like Nehru after losing great chunks of the Himalayas to China in 1962, five years before this. It's a good parallel, but even worse. These great heroes of an earlier generation. When he resigns, however, people pour out in the streets weeping, begging him to reconsider. I mean, there are crowds in Cairo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They weren't ready to lose him. They just begun to integrate the magnitude of their loss in the war. They weren't ready to lose him. And so they reject his resignation. They demand that he stay on. And in a sense, it was responsible for Nasser to stay on. This was a mess of his making.

44:06And he needed to use the credibility that he had left to try and clean up the mess. So, you know, I feel like his resignation was the right thing to do. But in a sense, his acceptance of people's demands that he not resign showed a sense of responsibility, because it was no picnic for Nasser coming back to power after the defeat of 67.

44:27William:The cultural response in the Arab world, the poets respond to this in a particular way, don't they? I interviewed Dawish in Ramallah a few years ago before he died. And he keeps coming back to the defeat of 1967 as the moment that kind of breaks Arab nationalism and Arab hopes, that there's still hopes after the Nakba, after 48, that people can still reclaim their homes, that these keys that they've got hanging around of their old houses in Galilee and so on, you know, can still be put into a lock and turned and somehow all this nightmare will end. But in 1967, that hope really just shatters, a second defeat, a second exodus.

45:01It does, but it actually liberates Palestinians in a new way because in Arab defeat, the PLO will emerge as the most legitimate representative of Palestinian aspirations, and they're no longer shackled to the Arab states they had to rely on previously or were controlled by previously because they were so discredited by their own failure in the war. So, terrible defeat, as Dudwish says, but maybe also the opportunity for the Palestinian liberation movement to emerge like the phoenix from the ashes of Arab defeat in 1967.

45:30William:And what do we see the PLO do in this war? I mean, have they had a good war? Have they fought with any better than the Egyptians or the Syrians? No, the PLO were actually kept out of this war. And in that sense, we're not discredited by it. Right. So, the PLO and all of the factions underneath it, all the militias underneath it, are going to be able to present themselves as the clean pair of hands to pick up the baton dropped by the Arab leaders and finally lead to the Palestinians liberating their own territory. But the other thing that happens, and I think this is crucially important for where we are now, is that this gives a death blow to secular Arab left-leaning nationalism, which has been very much the guiding force in the Arab world since the end of colonialism, since 1947-48.

46:17All I'd say is that big ideas like that take a longer time to die than you might think. So I'm going to give Arab nationalism another 10 or 15 years, even after 67, before it's going to really be overtaken by alternatives.

46:29William:But this is the moment, isn't it, when Saad Qutb and the Muslim Brotherhood and this whole world of Islamist thought, which obviously is such a huge thing in the years to come, in the decades to come, with the rise of the Brotherhood, then Al-Qaeda, then ISIS, this egg is laid at this point, if you like, isn't it, wouldn't you say? Perhaps, but it really won't hatch until you have the example of the Iranian revolution overturning a secular leader like the Shah of Iran to make people aware that Islamist groups and their politics could actually achieve more than Arab nationalist groups could. And that'll come after 1979, really the 1980s, in the fine state, Kut and his ideologies, a roadmap for their revolution.

47:09Anita:Eugene, once again, thank you so very much. Absolutely fascinating. You're such a master storyteller.

47:14William:Thank you so, so much for coming back on this show. Thank you, Will.

47:17Anita:That's it from us. If you can't wait for the next episode, you know you don't have to. You just become a member of our club and it's very easy to do. EmpirePodUK.com. That's EmpirePodUK.com. And if you are a member of the club, you get these mini-series all in one go and lots more besides. Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnand. And goodbye from me, William Derimple.

47:44Thank you.