Stalemate

The War Of Attrition And Great Power Diplomacy In The Middle East, 1967-1970

David A. Korn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000312911
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Diplomatie & Abkommen

For three years following Israel's victory in the Six-Day War, Egypt, with a massive infusion of weaponry from the Soviet Union, continued to do battle with Israel in what became known as the War of Attrition. The history of these years holds the key to understanding the Arab-Israeli conflict today. In this book, David A. Korn offers a detailed insider's account of the first—and, until recently, the only—U.S.-Soviet cooperative effort to bring peace to the Middle East and an explanation of the origin of the "land for peace" formula. He relates a fascinating story of political intrigue in Washington and Jerusalem that stymied the efforts of peacemakers; of Egypt's massing a huge army along the west bank of the Suez Canal; and of Israel's desperate search for a strategy to hold the east bank with a token force and minimal losses. He also describes the incredible miscalculation that nearly plunged Israel into war with the Soviet Union and the great heroism on both sides of the Suez line. This book fills a large gap in the history of the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors and is the first to analyze war and diplomacy in the Middle East during the critical years of 1967–1970 from the Egyptian as well as the Israeli point of view. To both, Korn brings penetrating insights based on a wealth of materials never before published. It is a gripping story by a writer who had a grandstand seat on the line.

1
By Other Means

[War] is a mere continuation of policy by other means.

—Karl von Clausewitz, On War

It was as though Clausewitz’s famous axiom had been turned on its head.

Even before the guns fell silent, the scene of battle shifted to the glass and steel structures on New York’s east side that house the United Nations. For Israel and for its Arab opponents, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, and for each side’s particular supporters, diplomacy was to become the continuation of war by other means.

The fighting that ended on June 11, 1967, with the entry into effect of the last United Nations cease-fire resolution left Israel in possession of the whole of the Sinai peninsula right up to the Suez Canal waterline, of Gaza and its teeming Palestinian refugee population, of the ancient city of East Jerusalem with its wealth of Christian, Jewish, and Moslem shrines, all of the West Bank down to the Jordan River, and, in the north, the Golan Heights, a thick bulge of Syrian territory pointing toward Damascus. The Egyptian army—Israel’s largest and most potent adversary— was shattered, and Jordan’s was badly mauled; only Syria escaped without crippling losses.

In six days of war, the territory under Israel’s control tripled in size. For the Jewish state, it was a victory of unprecedented proportions, but it was not without historical parallel. Less than eleven years earlier, Israel’s army had swept across the Sinai Peninsula. But in the diplomatic struggle that followed, Israel was obliged to give up every inch it had won. For its pullback, it did extract two important concessions. A United Nations force was put in place along the Egyptian side of the border and in Gaza and at Sharm el-Sheikh near the tip of the Sinai Peninsula; it was to be a barrier to Palestinian guerrilla raids into Israel and a buffer between Israeli and Egyptian armies. And the Straits of Tiran, the narrow waterway connecting the Gulf of Aqaba to the Red Sea, were declared open for the passage of ships to and from Israel’s southern port city of Eilat. With this one stroke, Israel broke out of the blockade Egypt had thrown around its southern exit and gained access to the markets and to the resources of the world that lay east of Suez. No longer did it need rely exclusively on Latin America for its supply of oil or on Western Europe and the Americas for trade. It could now satisfy its petroleum needs from nearby Iran. It could also develop trade and political relations with the states of South Asia and the Far East. In the years that followed the 1956 war, Israelis energetically set about doing just that.

In 1967, with one no less sudden stroke, these gains were wiped out. On May 16, the Egyptian army chief of staff, General Mohammed Fawzi, sent a letter to the commander of the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF), General Rikhye, asking that the UN contingent be removed from “the observation points on our frontier.”¹ Fawzi was not telling the UN to get out; he quite deliberately did not ask it to evacuate its two most sensitive positions, those at Sharm el־Sheikh guarding the entrance to the Straits of Tiran and those in Gaza. But his letter set off a chain reaction that quickly raced out of control. General Rikhye had no authority to act on the Egyptian chief of staff’s request, so he passed it along to his boss, U Thant, the UN secretary general. Thant could have fallen back on the argument that a change in the disposition of UN forces would require approval by the Security Council; or he could have stalled for time to head off the crisis that he surely understood the Egyptian move would ignite. He did neither. Instead, he made the colossal blunder of putting the ball back into the Egyptian court. The UN secretary general told Egypt’s foreign minister, Mahmoud Riad, that Egypt was entitled to ask for the complete removal of the UN force but not to decide how it should be deployed.

No doubt Thant thought this would deter the Egyptians. He was wrong. By this time, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser had whipped up emotions throughout the Arab world. For years his rivals and enemies in the Arab world had taunted and ridiculed him for hiding from Israel “behind the skirts” of the United Nations. His prestige was on the line now, and he could not back down. On May 18, Riad sent Thant a letter asking him to “terminate the existence of UNEF on the soil of the United Arab Republic and in the Gaza Strip.”² Thant still could have stalled, but he took the narrow, legalistic view that once Egypt asked UNEF to leave he had no choice but to comply. Whatever Nasser’s original intent may have been, the withdrawal of the UN force propelled him ineluctably toward confrontation with Israel. A few days later, he declared the Straits of Tiran closed to Israeli shipping and to “strategic cargoes” consigned for shipment to Israel on vessels under other flags. Among other things, this meant Israel would no longer be able to get oil from Iran, which since 1957 had become its major supplier.

It was a step Nasser and those around him knew meant war, for ever since 1957 the Israelis had been proclaiming that interference with navigation would be considered a casus belli.³ The Egyptian army had 30,000 soldiers in Yemen, but Marshal Abdul Hakim Amer, the commander of the armed forces, assured Nasser that his forces were ready for war with Israel. The president of Egypt sent 80,000 troops and 600 tanks into Sinai. He then proceeded to sign a pact with King Hussein that put Jordan’s army, at least theoretically, under Egypt’s orders. A frenzy of war hysteria swept the Arab world, and for a brief moment Nasser basked in the adulation of Arabs everywhere. Egypt’s propaganda machine told the public and the world that victory was certain.

Analysts in Western defense ministries were sure that the Israeli army was more than a match for its Arab opponents. Israeli generals shared this view, but they feared that victory might come at the pyrrhic price of casualties on the order of 10,000 to 15,000. And as they listened to the blood cries that came across the Arab airwaves, many Israelis became badly frightened. In the last days of May 1967, the government fell into disarray and public confidence began to crumble. Prime Minister Levi Eshkol gave a hesitant, stumbling speech, and Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin was momentarily stricken with what the public was told was nicotine poisoning but sounded very much like a nervous breakdown. Israel’s existence and the very lives of its citizens seemed to hang in the balance.

Then suddenly came victory—a victory that was quicker, easier, and more overwhelming than anyone could have imagined. In a matter of days, Israelis were propelled from a terrifying vision of an approaching apocalypse to a state of euphoric exhaltation. The impact was traumatic.

No one was more acutely aware than Foreign Minister Abba Eban of the parallel between Israel’s situation after the 1956 war and the one it faced eleven years later. Eban was ambassador in Washington in 1956 and early 1957 when the terms of Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai were being negotiated. Now, in 1967, he was determined that Israel would give up its military gains only for peace. It was not to be said that Israeli diplomacy had lost what Israeli arms had won—at least not this time around—on Eban’s watch. His role, he was persuaded, was every bit as important as that of the generals who had become instant heroes. After all, Israel’s army had won many victories, but never before had Israeli diplomacy been able to translate them into lasting political achievements.

There were, no doubt, profound considerations of principle behind the foreign minister’s determination, but there was also a consideration of a personal and professional order. For in the early days of June 1967, Eban was fighting for his political life. Born Aubrey Solomon in South Africa and educated at Cambridge, Eban was perhaps the most eloquent orator the English language had known since Winston Churchill. He was also a gifted linguist. He spoke Hebrew fluently—and Arabic too—but in the richness of that earthy tongue he came through as stilted, academic, and pompous; for many Israelis Eban’s Hebrew, with its baroque style and its artful circumlocutions, was at one and the same time admirable and just a little ridiculous. The reserve that his British education inculcated was alien to the free and easy manner of Israeli society. Though it may have been only shyness, it made him seem arrogant. The impression was one Eban did nothing to dispel.

All this would have been a sufficient handicap for anyone in politics in Israel, but there was more. The foreign minister was the only senior political figure in Israel who had not actually lived through the greater part of the British mandate of Palestine and the struggle for independence. He had worked hard to bring the state into being—but from abroad. He first settled in Israel only in 1948; and no sooner had he taken up residence in Jerusalem than he went off to New York to represent Israel at the United Nations. He did not return to live in Israel until 1959. To a great part of the Israeli public, and to many of his fellow cabinet officers, the tall, chubby foreign minister, with his awkward gait, his ample double chin and his Oxbridge accent, was a “foreign import.”

These things could be forgiven in a nation of immigrants, particularly to someone so brilliant and successful as Eban. In May of 1967, however, success had eluded the foreign minister. He had failed to win France’s support. He came away from a distinctly chilly meeting with de Gaulle on May 23 with little more than the admonition that Israel should leave it to the four “great powers”—the United States, the Soviet Union, France, and Britain—to settle the crisis set off by Nasser’s moves in Sinai. To this the French president added a stern warning not to go to war to break Egypt’s blockade of Eilat.⁴

Washington was a good deal more sympathetic, but President Lyndon Baines Johnson made it plain that he would not commit the United States to act alone to break the Arab blockade of Israel; whatever America did would have to be in concert with other nations. Johnson pressed Eban for time to try to resolve the conflict through diplomacy. The foreign minister understood that hasty action would undermine the president’s and the American public’s support for his country, and, in his reports to Jerusalem, he advocated giving Johnson the time he wanted. In Israel, others understood this too; however, as tension rose to almost unbearable levels, Eban’s popularity plummeted. He was accused of mishandling his meetings with Johnson and Johnson’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk, and of exaggerating, in his cables back home, their pledges of support for Israel.⁵ Even in the thrall of victory, many Israelis held Eban responsible for the agony through which they had just passed. There were widespread calls for his resignation. As Eban made ready to return to New York in mid-June to lead the Israeli delegation to the special session of the General Assembly that the Arabs and the Soviets had succeeded in convoking, there was talk of sending Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and Minister without Portfolio Menachem Begin along to serve as “watch-dogs.” Eban was outraged. He was determined not to go to New York under the supervision of other ministers or even accompanied by them. He asked for a private meeting with Prime Minister Eshkol and there laid out his case: The coming diplomatic battle would be as fateful as any in recent years; naming three ministers to head Israel’s UN delegation would be as ridiculous as putting three generals in command of an armored brigade.⁶

Getting Dayan and Begin out of the country was an idea that had its appeal for Eshkol; both had been forced on him in the crisis that preceded the war, and now Dayan—or so the prime minister and his aides felt— was in the process of stealing the glory of victory from him. Eshkol, however, respected Eban’s abilities and understood his predicament. He promised the foreign minister his support. Eban left for the United States unaccompanied but in such a foul mood that a few days later he was momentarily tempted to cancel the address he was about to make to the General Assembly.⁷

On June 8, 1967, apparently with the approval of Prime Minister Levy Eshkol, Eban had told Arthur Goldberg, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, that Israel was not seeking territorial aggrandizement. It would give back all the conquered territories in return for peace.⁸ But this was a matter which only the full Cabinet could decide, and by the end of June it was clear that Eban’s assurance was not to be the last word. Eban himself quickly subtracted East Jerusalem from the list of returnable territories. Dayan and others were talking about keeping Gaza as well, and Israeli highway engineers were surveying for a road through the Latrun salient, the finger of land between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem that the Israelis had failed to wrest from the Jordanian army in 1948.

The Cabinet met all day on June 18 and 19 to discuss territorial issues and peace proposals. After lengthy debate, it approved, by unanimous vote, a proposal under which Israel would withdraw from all of Sinai and all of Golan—back to the international borders between Israel and Egypt and Syria—in return for peace treaties with these two countries, demilitarization of Sinai and Golan, guarantees (from Egypt) for freedom of navigation through the Straits of Tiran and the Suez Canal, and (from Syria) for the unimpeded flow of water into Israel from the sources of the Jordan River. The proposal called for Israeli forces to remain on the cease-fire lines until peace treaties were signed. The peace proposal said nothing about East Jerusalem and Gaza; the Cabinet consensus was that they should remain in Israeli hands. They were ruled out from negotiation altogether, and ten days later Israel redrew and expanded East Jerusalem’s municipal borders and annexed it.⁹

The Israeli Cabinet’s peace proposal left the future of the West Bank for separate discussion. In mid-June of 1967, Israel’s government was ready to agree to withdraw from all of Sinai and Golan—these territories were considered security issues only—if Egypt and Syria would agree to peace. The West Bank was a different matter, and already at that early date the Cabinet was deeply divided over its future. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan felt that the West Bank—“Judea and Samaria”—was, in his words, “part of our land and we should settle there and not give it up.”¹⁰ Minister without Portfolio Menachem Begin, leader of the right-wing Herut party, felt even more strongly about keeping these territories. Others, however, feared that holding on to these heavily populated Arab lands would have grave consequences for the Jewish character of the State of Israel and would be an unending source of conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors. So setting the West Bank aside for later discussion was not just a negotiating tactic; it reflected a deep split within the government of Israel.

Even the consensus on the proposal for full withdrawal from Sinai and Golan was reached only with some difficulty. The Cabinet, surprised at its own audacity, decided to keep its decision secret. The June 19 proposal was to be given to the Americans for transmission to the governments of Egypt and Syria, but it was not to be announced publicly. It turned out to be one of the Israeli Cabinet’s best-kept secrets ever. Yitzhak Rabin was to be sent off to Washington as Israel’s ambassador early in 1968 without having been informed of it. He learned of it from the Americans after he got there.¹¹

On June 22, 1967, Eban called on U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, in Rusk’s suite in New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, in order to hand over the Israeli proposal. The Americans greeted it with a silence that Eban was persuaded reflected dumbfounded admiration for Israel’s generosity.¹² In fact, Rusk and the others were worried that, in demanding peace treaties, Israel was asking more than could be had. They felt that if the Israelis left out Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank it would make agreement difficult if not impossible. The secretary of state asked why Jordan had not been offered a peace treaty; what would happen to the West Bank and to Gaza? Eban tried to skirt the question. Israel’s thinking on the issue had not yet crystallized, he replied. Moreover, the wishes of the inhabitants were not yet known. In that case, Rusk asked, why not hold a referendum to find out? The matter was left there.¹³

A few days later, the Americans informed Eban that Egypt and Syria had rejected the Israeli proposal outright.

Even in these very early days after the war, Israel’s leaders had begun to see peace treaties as the only valid and acceptable solution to their problems with the Arabs, and they wanted to negotiate these treaties face-to-face with their neighbors. What they feared most was the idea that seemed to lie behind de Gaulle’s four-power conference proposal— an imposed settlement, something very much like the one Nasser had brought tumbling down in mid-May. A settlement, however, could be imposed only with the con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 By Other Means
• 2 The United Nations at Center Stage
• 3 Between Cairo and Washington and Cairo and Moscow
• 4 General Rabin Goes to Washington
• 5 Nasser Goes to War Again
• 6 To Hold the Canal Line
• 7 Political Wars
• 8 The Powers
• 9 Escalation
• 10 Soviet Intervention
• 11 Behind the Lines
• 12 An Electronic Summer
• 13 To Stop Shooting and to Start Talking
• 14 Cease-fire and Breakdown
• Epilogue
• Appendix A: United Nations Security Council Resolution 242
• Appendix B: Resolutions of the Arab Summit in Khartoum
• Appendix C: Letter from U.S. Secretary of State William P. Rogers to Egyptian Foreign Minister Mahmoud Riad
• Appendix D: Letter from Ambassador Yitzhak Rabin to Secretary of State William P. Rogers
• Appendix E: Cease-fire Agreement
• Notes
• Note on Sources
• Bibliography
• About the Book and Author
• Index