Orchestrated Panic

LRB

1 November 2007

Yitzhak Laor

1967: Israel, the War and the Year That Transformed the Middle East by Tom Segev, translated by Jessica Cohen

The 1967 war changed the lives of Israelis and made Palestinian lives hell. Shortly after it, Israel’s Labour prime minister, Levi Eshkol, a relative moderate, approved the colonisation of the West Bank. The Labour Party never really opposed the process, though for years it seemed to have its doubts. That way of carrying on – appearing indecisive, sounding hesitant, while acting decisively, even aggressively – is a key component of Israeli politics. Eshkol tended to be scornful about the process he’d set in motion. In his favourite language, Yiddish, he said that Israel was thought of as a ‘nebichdike Shimsen’ (‘pitiful Samson’). For years the Israeli soldier has been depicted this way, as a conscience-stricken man who doesn’t really want to become a hero but has no choice.

Since 1967 Labour men and women in
various parts of the state apparatus, from
the military to the Jewish Agency, have done
everything in their power to deepen Israel’s
hold over the Occupied Territories, even
when it meant creating a Golem in the new
guise of the settler. The ‘project’ was a success
and lies today like a knife at the throat
of all Israelis. It would be easy to characterise
the behaviour of Israeli politicians
and generals as uniquely foolish, informed
by a lust for land that was always greater
than the country’s ability to swallow the
chunks they grabbed. Yet all Israelis – from
the generals and politicians of all parties
down to the ‘man in the street’ – seem driven
by the conviction that the more we have
the better off we are. Any ‘concession’ we
then make, even if it’s a few acres, seems to
be a magnanimous sacrifice, as if it had belonged
to us in the first place. Such is the
settler morality.
In his excellent book, which reads like a
Bildungsroman of a generation that lost its
soul, Tom Segev accurately depicts Israel’s
1967 politicians and generals as irrational,
aggressive and hungry for power. His research
– which took in an immense quantity
of minutes from contemporary meetings
– uncovers surprises. Even he seems disappointed
at what he found. There are numerous
examples of the drive for land appropriation
among the generals. Moshe Dayan,
minister of defence during the war, ruled
out ‘occupation of the Golan Heights, including
the Banias, for fear of a Soviet response.
Political considerations also motivated
him not to approach the Suez Canal.’
But as everyone knows, the IDF did reach
the Suez Canal and it occupied the Golan
Heights. Was it the army’s innate disobedience
that drove generals to take decisions
and change plans while running down the
enemy? The fame of the IDF is based on precisely
such a violent, brainless glorification
of tactics at the expense of strategy. It’s
known in the jargon as a ‘rolling operation’.
It was inconceivable to defend our
country by preventing wars; there was only
ever the thought of rumbling across borders,
as in the fiasco last summer in
Lebanon.
It is also from the example of Gaza that
hunger for territory goes hand in hand with
the attempt to empty it of its inhabitants.
Ever since it captured Gaza, Israel has tried
to diminish it by starvation and suffocation,
driving residents to emigrate. Segev has
some stunning evidence about this. ‘I want
them all to go, even if they go to the moon,’
Eshkol told Ada Sereni, whom he had appointed
head of a committee briefed to rid
Gaza of its Palestinians. Because this failed,
Gaza is today a hunger-stricken ghetto. The
West’s obsession with Hamas’s ascendancy
is a result of Western refusal to see Israel’s
age-old policy for what it is: the aim has always
been to seize the maximum amount of
land while inheriting a minimum number
of Palestinians.
And there were times when the politicians
outdid the generals. In November
1966, the IDF went on a ‘retaliation operation’
in a West Bank village by the name of
Samua, a few kilometres south of Hebron.
They ordered the villagers out, blew up
dozens of houses and killed more civilians
than they at first admitted. There was a
wave of condemnations. The Palestinians
in Jordan demonstrated; inside Israel a
sense of shame vied with enthusiastic
praise for the courage of the army. Among
many postmortems there was a secret discussion
by intelligence officials about Israeli
interests in the West Bank. Taking part
were high-level figures in Mossad, military
intelligence and the Foreign Ministry
(which runs its own intelligence). All
agreed that occupying the West Bank would
be a mistake for Israel. When the time came
for Eshkol to make the decision, in 1967,
these conclusions were common knowledge
in the military. The prime minister
knew of them too, and understood that taking
control of the West Bank would mean
placing a million Palestinians under Israeli
rule. Surely it was preferable, as the top
brass in intelligence had felt in 1966, to allow
King Hussein to continue the erosion
of Palestinian identity by integrating Palestinians
in Jordan. Yet to dissuade his government
from occupation, Segev writes,
Eshkol ‘would have had to know, or at least
presume, that Israeli rule would remain for
a long time.’ This, it is implied, he couldn’t
do.
There was not a single area, during the
1967 war, in which the military behaved in a
way that was consistent with its earlier
analysis. Some might call this evidence of
pragmatism, but a long look at where we
are now and a careful reading of Segev’s
book will be enough to show what the impulsive
Weltanschauung of our military has
done for us. For years, the Israeli army developed
a pattern of behaviour that extorted post-factum consent from its superiors. Junior
commanders have always been encouraged
to act without full or explicit orders
and were often praised for not ‘going
by the book’. While this empowered field
commanders to be creative, it became a prevailing
and harmful pattern in the relationship
between the army and the political
leadership of the state. The example of the
Golan Heights, occupied despite an earlier
decision by Dayan and the government not
to seize them, is typical. How did the army
‘convince’ the political leadership to endorse
its faits accomplis?
Segev writes that when the air force
bombed the Golan Heights on 8 June 1967,
Yitzhak Rabin, then Chief of Staff of the
IDF, ‘claimed it was an “error”. The Syrians
bombed several Israeli communities in response,
and Eshkol authorised the evacuation
of the children from the region. Elazar’
– the general in charge of the Northern
Command – ‘and his men pushed kibbutz
members in the Galilee to exert pressure on
the government to take the Golan.’ A study
conducted by the history department of the
IDF, published as a book in 1999, provides a
detailed chronology of the occupation of
the Golan, including all the subterfuge that
the officers used. The book reveals that the
army had an official expression for its behaviour:
mitzuy ishur, which means ‘eliciting
authorisation’. In an interview late in
his life, Dayan described Israel’s tactics
against Syria as a constant ‘provocation’.
Needless to say, Dayan himself had become
a hero during the 1950s for exactly that kind
of behaviour.
A similar pattern of behaviour obtains in
the relationship between Israel and the US.
Israel has always acted ‘on behalf of American
interests’, conveniently assuming that
it was doing what the Americans would
have endorsed, even when there was no
green light from Washington. In other
words, Israel used the same policy of ‘eliciting
authorisation’ when it came to its dealings
with its superpower patron. I believe
that this is a crucial aspect of Israeli military
history and that the close connection between
the two lethal war machines in the
Middle East should be read in light of that
model. The political drama of May 1967 inside
Israel centred not on the dangers of the
coming war but the questions ‘what do the
Americans want?’ and of course ‘can we go
to war despite the Americans?’ – which also
implied that they would endorse almost
anything after the event, provided it involved
the defeat of Nasser.
In Segev’s view this war was a conflict
that broke out as a result of misjudgments.
Rabin and his generals didn’t think Nasser
would react to the damaging Israeli strikes
against Syria in April, when the air force inflicted
a humiliating defeat on its Syrian
counterpart, already well-equipped by
then. (Some of the engagements took place
over Damascus.) Nasser, for his part, didn’t
think that Israel would go to war or, in the
event, that his army would be so swiftly defeated.
Segev writes about the importance
Israel attached to what it called ‘public
opinion’ and the major role it played in the
war. It is quite clear that Israeli atrocities
benefited from better PR than, say, the
American atrocities in south-east Asia, and
this is not only thanks to American Jews,
though they have played their part in the
daily extinction of the Palestinian people.
One has to understand 1967 as the return of
the ‘colonial’, though it took Western societies
years to arrive at this proper description
of the occupation. On the eve of the
1967 war public opinion in Israel, like public
opinion in the West, was shaped by the
perception that the country was facing annihilation.
That theme of imminent danger
to our very existence – a ‘second Holocaust’,
the generals warned the cabinet –
became the magnetic field in which public
opinion in the West was inexorably drawn
to Israel. (When it began turning against Israel
in the autumn of 2000, the idea of ‘annihilation’
was again emphatically foregrounded
by semi-official state propagandists
– among them Eli Wiesel, A.B.
Yehoshua and Amos Oz – who wrote in the
Western press that Arafat and the Palestinians
threatened Israel with extinction by demanding
the right of return for the
refugees. (At the time, I was mistakenly approached
by a Peace Now activist, a professor
in the Hebrew University, who said:
‘Now we all have to write against the right
of return.’ By ‘we’, he meant the Zionist
left.)
Eleven days before the 1967 war, the Israeli
foreign minister, Abba Eban, visited
Washington, in an attempt to broker a deal
between President Johnson and the Israeli
government and to ascertain what exactly
the Americans wanted. In Washington he
received a telegram from Tel Aviv, most
likely written by Rabin, describing the military
situation as nearing catastrophe. Years
later, Eban wrote in his memoirs: ‘I found it
difficult to comprehend how such a radical
change could have occurred in our military
situation since I heard the reports from our
generals in Tel Aviv.’ (This quotation appeared
only in the Hebrew edition of Eban’s
book.) The point here is surely that Israeli
generals were not panicked so much as determined
to induce panic, and that Rabin
caved in because he was gambling, and the
stakes were too high. Yet, it was not true,
even for a moment, that the Egyptian army
in May 1967 posed a real threat to Israel. It
was not even stationed on the borders of Israel:
it was deep in the Sinai that its massive
forces encountered defeat.
Anyone who knew the details, including
the CIA in Tel Aviv and the General Staff of
Israel, knew that Israel was not facing a
‘second Holocaust’, as the Israeli press,
nourished by the military’s psychological
operations, insinuated. Segev gives a careful
description of this dynamic. The real
dangers the Israeli military faced were
scarcely minor; even so a very small group
of individuals floated an exaggerated, cataclysmic
scenario for the benefit of world
‘public opinion’, a key component in Israel’s
strategy to this day. Who are the public?
Not the people of India or Brazil, but the
nations of the West and Israelis themselves.
Who could tell fact from fiction in the impulse
that led Israelis to destroy the Egyptians?
When General Israel Tal led his armour
into the Sinai desert, he published an
order of the day to thousands of soldiers
and officers:
Today we shall go forth to crush the hand that
reached out to strangle us. This is a battle that
the enemy began. We will strike the enemy
twice as hard as he hit us . . . For the third time
the Egyptian dagger has been brandished at
us. For the third time the enemy has erred in it
mad delusion of seeing Israel brought to its
knees. With blood, fire and iron, we shall
purge this intention from their hearts.
It sounds insane (when was the ‘second’
time the Egyptians threatened us? The reference
is to 1956), but it is still part of the Israeli
credo, which is why it is so important
to know who wrote that text for General Tal.
It was Amos Oz. Our truths lie beyond the
facts; they are always rapidly subsumed in
fiction and mythology.
It was not only Israelis who succumbed
to the orchestrated panic. ‘The Israeli embassy
in Washington,’ Segev writes, ‘had already
begun to implement instructions
from Jerusalem: “Create a public atmosphere
that will constitute pressure on the
administration in the direction of obtaining
our desired goals, without it being explicitly
clear that we are behind this public campaign.”’
The manipulation of opinion in
1967 was so successful that the waves of
sympathy for Israel, even within audiences
that were supposed to be far more critical –
on the left in France, in the Italian Communist
Party – may be one of the reasons that
Israel is reluctant to solve the conflict in the
Middle East to this day. Of course the best
example of the wave of uncritical support
for Israel is the change within American
Jewry, which only became blindly, callously
pro-Israel after the 1967 war. Immanuel
Wallerstein describes this deep change
among American Zionists in an essay for
the Hebrew journal Mita’am. Before 1967,
he explains, ‘the Zionists presented the
state of Israel not only as the historic resurrection
of a Jewish state, but as an anticolonial
achievement and a model of democratic
socialism, embodied in the kibbutzim.’
After 1967, however, ‘the kibbutzim
disappeared from the discourse – both because
they were no longer thriving and because
they were too “socialist”. Two new
themes emerged. One of them was the
Holocaust, a subject little talked about before
1967. Making the Holocaust a central
part of Jewish, and of non-Jewish, memory
became a paramount effort of American
Jews.’
Since he is determined to present the story
of the war as the story of a particular generation,
Segev also tells the personal stories
of several individuals, one ‘famous’, another
an ‘unknown reserve soldier’ who kept a
diary during his 30 days in reserve service.
There is much attention here to the anxieties
of Israelis at the time:
The existential anxiety that gripped Israel
when the crisis erupted was real. Someone no
doubt organised citizens to send care packages
to soldiers, perhaps to unite the people
around their army, but there is no reason to
assume that anyone solicited the letter written
by a woman who sent a package of goods to
soldier Arnon David Grabow. She told him
she had been in Auschwitz, where her husband
and four children were murdered.
In Segev’s liberal world of facts and common
sense, ‘soliciting’ is what happens
when an officer or commissar-figure
knocks on an old lady’s door and entreats
her to write a painful letter to an unknown
soldier because a second Holocaust is imminent
unless people like her remind the nation of its past. But Segev should know
better. After all, he was the one who first
embarked on critical writing about the construction
and abuse of Holocaust memory
in Israel. Incidents such as the note to
Grabow were carefully set up, ‘solicited’, if
you like. Yet, I guess Segev’s findings on the
ability to produce mass faith in the coming
of a second Holocaust were so frightening,
for a true liberal, that he could not refrain
from the search for authentic ‘anxiety’.
Given that there was no Egyptian plan to
attack Israel, what was the real danger the
General Staff of Israel saw in the Sinai
peninsula in May 1967? Quartermaster
General Matityahu Peled, who later became
one of the leaders of the pro-Palestinian left
in Israel, thought Israel had to go on the attack
because, in Segev’s words, ‘there was
no possibility of extending the reserve callup
much longer, which meant that Israel
would soon face the Egyptians with a smaller
army lacking response capabilities.’
Twenty-five yeas later, when I was working
on a novel about the war, I asked Peled for
the numbers of soldiers and tanks on both
sides of the border. He gave me accurate
figures and reaffirmed the position he had
expressed in a dramatic meeting between
the prime minister and General Staff a week
before the war. He still maintained in 1991
that Israel couldn’t call up tens of thousands
of soldiers and keep them in a state of
readiness without courting economic ruin.
The real top secret of Israel’s security is the
limited number of days it can remain on
general alert.
Then, however, the question is why did
Israel have to draw on its reserve forces
when Egypt mobilised its army in the Sinai
peninsula, miles from the border? Segev
notes that a few months before that particular
set of Egyptian manoeuvres Israel had
seen no need to respond to a very similar
situation. Was Nasser’s rhetoric the new element
that precipitated war? Perhaps. Were
Israel’s warnings to Syria, especially Rabin’s
warning, some ten months before the
war, that Israel would bring down Syria’s
new regime, part of a self-fulfilling logic?
Were words, on both sides, the real protagonists?
The Israeli security elite regarded Egyptian
military movements as an ‘existential
danger’ to the state of Israel, in itself a definition
that was not unrelated to the war of
words between January 1966 and June 1967.
This attitude always went hand-in-hand
with the question ‘do they recognise our superiority?’
– which is, of course, a question
about deterrence, from the beginning a
plausible component of Israeli strategy. Rabin
and his generals believed that in May
1967 Israel had lost its deterrence capability.
When the General Staff predicted at the
beginning of the year that there was no
chance of war in the region until 1970, it
had based its assumption both on the incapacity
of the Arab states to wage a war, and
on the strength of Israeli deterrence, which
is to say the extent of Arab fear. Once deterrence
seemed to have failed – Nasser did
what Israel didn’t want him to do – the
whole concept fell apart and a war erupted.
Military analysis should always be informed
by a deep understanding of the other
side, but the quotations from closed
meetings that Segev has unearthed prove
not only that the generals were more obtuse
than we had thought them, but that they
had a profound contempt for the Arabs.
This is the context in which one must understand
Israel’s ‘deterrence theory’.
Thus, for example, after the massive operation
in Samua in November 1966, General
Uzi Narkis of the Central Command
told the prime minister that it was necessary
to strike yet again because ‘we are dealing
with the Arabs, and the Arabs, mentally,
for the most part, what characterises them
is that when they get hit, they retreat.’ When
the secular general had to corroborate his
‘thesis’ with facts, he had a stab at quoting
from the Old Testament: ‘Let’s say, during
the time of the prophets’ – he must have
meant Judges – ‘that the People of Israel
had trouble. They struck a blow against the
enemy, and everything was quiet for forty
years. In modern times, two weeks is like
forty years.’ Less than six months later,
Narkis was charged with the occupation of
the West Bank and East Jerusalem. He said
it again: ‘The Arabs, when they get hit – they
calm down for a while.’ The Israeli military
elite was always racist. Part of the reason for
the colossal failures of our huge army since
1967 is its colonialist inability to see the
burning motivation of the other side. (It’s
interesting that the only general who became
active on the pro-Palestinian left,
General Peled, was also the only general
who turned to Palestinian poetry after his
service and became a professor of Arabic
literature.)
A few weeks before the war began, Israel
suddenly found itself unable to decipher a
Middle East in which it had been playing
with fire – and inflammatory rhetoric – for
several months. No wonder Rabin broke
down in the middle of the crisis. For years
his nervous breakdown and the delirious
voices he heard on a visit to military bases in
the south were just a rumour. The semi-official
version was nicotine poisoning: he
was a heavy smoker, and later it transpired
that he was fond of Scotch, something rare
among his generation in Israel. ‘Rabin
shared the opinion that the IDF’s job was to
deter the Arabs so that there would not be a
war. He knew that he bore a significant part
of the responsibility for the deterrence failures
that, in his view, necessitated immediate
war.’
The Middle East theatre was not under
the full control of regional players who
gathered information about their enemies
and informed their superiors on the risks
and chances for war. The role of the superpowers
in misinforming the protagonists
has been the focus of several studies on the
background leading up to the 1967 war.
Segev tends to agree with many Israeli analysts
that the Soviets misinformed the Egyptians
about Israeli intentions to hit Syria.
However, he also describes very meticulously
the events that preceded that Soviet
assessment, underpinned by growing tension
between Syria’s new Ba’ath regime and
other actors. It is more than surprising to
read what an Israeli diplomat based in London
wrote in December 1966:
I was struck by the way the British ambassador
to Israel [Michael Hadow] practically encouraged
us openly to strike against the Syrians
. . . To my knowledge, Hadow moved
among various circles in Israel offering encouragement
in this direction. Today we are witnessing a confrontation between IPC [the
Iraq Petroleum Company] and Syria. Is it conceivable,
then, that Hadow’s campaign was
connected with British oil interests, whereby
a destructive Israeli blow against Syria would
have brought down the radical regime and
prevented the current crisis? It may sound absurd
but is it, perhaps, not that absurd?
Before 1967, and long afterwards, the Israeli
military was supposed to deter the
Arabs, to ‘improve positions’ (military jargon
for minor territorial changes) within
the balance of the Cold War and try to win
the support of the Americans. In one of his
many books, the former head of both the
Mossad and the Shin Bet during 1950s, Issar
Harel (‘little Issar’) describes in detail
the way Israeli intelligence supplied the CIA
with information about the Soviet Union.
Immigrants from the Communist bloc during
the 1950s were interrogated and every
detail, of any nature, about life in the USSR
was handed to the Americans. The goal was
always the same: to prove to the Americans
that we were a very worthwhile client, much
more so than any of the Arab states. For
years, the deepest connection with the
American defence establishment was
forged within the intelligence communities.
When it all boiled down, by the end of
May 1967, to the question of what the
Americans really wanted Israel to do, or
how they were going to react if Israel attacked,
Israel sent the head of Mossad, Meir
Amit, to Washington; this was after the visit
of Abba Eban, who opposed the war and
failed to bring the ‘right’ answers home.
Segev says that Eban had lied to the cabinet
and to General Staff (it seems that during
those three weeks everyone lied to everyone).
Amit’s trip to Washington signalled that
the military establishment had decided to
take charge of Israeli diplomacy. It was instigated
by the head of military intelligence,
Aharon Yariv, its main purpose being to
find out, through intelligence channels,
what the Americans would actually do if Israel
attacked Egypt. Amit’s achievement is
indisputable: it was thanks to his connections
that Israel got the green light to go to
war. ‘The first person Amit met there was
James Jesus Angelton, head of counterespionage
in the CIA. He was a controversial
figure, obsessed by the belief that the USSR
was the source of all evil in the world.’ Amit
later wrote about that meeting: ‘In his
imagination, everything that happened,
every event, every incident was tinted by his
suspicion and was somehow connected by
his theory.’ Though his colleagues mocked
Angelton, Amit liked him. It is to this moment,
perhaps even earlier, that one may
trace the affection between today’s lunatics
in the Pentagon and those in the Israeli establishment:
‘Angelton was an extraordinary
asset for us. We could not have found
ourselves a better advocate.’
Amit’s visit to Washington appears as a
sort of deus ex machina in the story as Segev
recounts it, probably due to a lack of material
about the earlier relationship between
Israel and the US. In fact the visit came after
years of careful co-operation, while official
US policy was quite restrained, but underneath
the surface Israel was already seen as
a ‘military asset’. Amit went on to meet
Richard Helms, head of the CIA. Not only
did Helms introduce him to CIA seniors,
but he set up a meeting between Amit and
Robert McNamara, then the defense secretary:
McNamara found Amit’s arguments persuasive,
and he conveyed them to Johnson the
same evening. The president understood that
Israel was going to act. He set up a special
task force headed by McGeorge Bundy. Jim
Angelton was enthusiastic: for the first time
in the history of the Middle East, there was the
possibility of solving the region’s problems,
making it less vulnerable to intrigue and extortion,
safer for capital investment and development
. . . Helms had made sure Israel’s
positions were reflected in the CIA’s recom -
mendations to the president.
How convincing is this sort of Hollywood
narrative, turning on personal meetings,
business-like meetings that determine historical
events?
The book mourns the loss of good old Israel,
though Segev knows it was not that
good; he knows also that it was young and
full of flaws. He continues at length, and in
detail, into the second half of 1967, with the
war won and the colonial enterprise expanding.
The second half of that year has
never really come to an end. My memories
are condensed down to the scream of a
three-year-old Palestinian child whose
house we broke into in the middle of the
night. Our officer was shouting like a maniac.
A Shin bet man told him to shut up, bent
down to the toddler and asked him quietly
what he wanted, and the child asked for water.