The Six Day War

The Breaking of the Middle East

Guy Laron

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780300226324
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

The author of Origins of the Suez Crisis "mak[es] us look afresh at the events that led to conflict between Israel and its neighbors" ( Financial Times ). One fateful week in June 1967 redrew the map of the Middle East. Many scholars have documented how the Six-Day War unfolded, but little has been done to explain why the conflict happened at all. Now, historian Guy Laron refutes the widely accepted belief that the war was merely the result of regional friction, revealing the crucial roles played by American and Soviet policies in the face of an encroaching global economic crisis, and restoring Syria's often overlooked centrality to events leading up to the hostilities. The Six-Day War effectively sowed the seeds for the downfall of Arab nationalism, the growth of Islamic extremism, and the animosity between Jews and Palestinians. In this important new work, Laron's fresh interdisciplinary perspective and extensive archival research offer a significant reassessment of a conflict—and the trigger-happy generals behind it—that continues to shape the modern world. "Challenging... well worth reading."— Moment "A penetrating study of a conflict that, although brief, helped establish a Middle Eastern template that is operational today... The author looks beyond Cold War maneuvering to examine the conflict in other lights... Readers with an interest in Middle Eastern geopolitics will find much of value."— Kirkus Reviews

1

THE ARTICLE

THE DEMONSTRATIONS IN Damascus started on Friday, May 5, 1967. The cause of the ensuing mayhem was an article that was published on April 25 in the official journal of the Syrian army, Jaysh al-Shaab (The People’s Army). The author, Ibrahim Khlas, a junior Alawite officer and a member of the ruling Baath Party, wrote:

all [religious] values made the Arab man a miserable one, resigned, fatalistic and dependent. We don’t need a man who prays and kneels . . . the only way to establish the culture of the Arabs and build an Arab society is to create the new Socialist Arab man who believes that God, the religions . . . are nothing but mummies embalmed in the museums of history.¹

At the time, Syria was a military dictatorship led by officers who were members of the Baath Party. The article was the quintessential expression of its ideology, but in view of the growing tensions between the government and the Muslim Brotherhood, its publication was less than circumspect.

On Thursday, May 4, religious leaders (ulema) met in Damascus to discuss the ways in which they would vent their outrage. The government knew that the Muslim Brotherhood would use Friday prayers to bring the masses out into the streets and they took no chances. On May 5, in front of a mosque in the lower-class Muhajarin quarter, which was unusually crowded that Friday, five armed police cars were parked at the main entrance. Another car with more police officers and yet another with plainclothes were not far behind. Police jeeps and riot wagons patrolled the road in front of the mosque. Similar scenes played out in mosques all over Damascus. Public radio suddenly began to include in its broadcasts the phrase “Greetings citizens, peace upon you and the blessing of God.” The police confiscated copies of the journal containing the article.²

Defying the government’s heavy-handed measures, Shaykh Hasan Habanaka, aged 59, the unofficial leader of Damascene ulema, gave a fiery sermon attacking the regime in the Manjak Mosque. The Lebanese daily, al-Hayat, which was known to have excellent sources inside this secretive police state, reported that on that day a crowd of 20,000 people filled the streets chanting “No to Communism and no to Baathism – Quranic Islam!” The demonstrations soon spread to the northern cities of Aleppo, Homs, and Hama where Christians and Muslims were protesting side by side. Initially the government’s response was mild: security forces were ordered to disperse the demonstrators without using force. But at night, the arrests of at least forty senior religious figures were made. Among them was Habanaka, who was also the mufti of the drab al-Maydan neighborhood in Damascus.³

By the next day the situation had grown worse. Butchers, bakers, and shop owners announced a strike to protest the arrest of the well-liked Habanka who was a shopkeeper himself. The market in Damascus closed down and in the following days customers were hard-pressed to find meat, bread, and basic staples.⁴ Demonstrations turned into riots as protesters clashed with security forces. Gunshots were heard in the streets. Some demonstrators were killed, others injured. Denizens of Damascus heard sounds of explosions near Baath Party headquarters, in the main streets, and in the squares. The government lost control over what was happening in the cities of Homs, Hama, and Aleppo where, during Sunday and Monday, unrest continued to simmer. The military commander of the Homs region, Mustafa Tlass, ignored commands from Damascus to bring law and order into the streets. In response, forces loyal to the regime laid siege to Homs; one could not leave or enter by car. Political commentators believed that this was the most serious political crisis in Syria since the bloody 1963 coup that brought the Baath Party to power.⁵

The government, now clearly alarmed, decided to take tougher measures. Shop owners who closed down their businesses were arrested. Truckloads of steel-helmeted riot police patrolled the main streets of Damascus to deter people from congregating. Army units replete with tanks took positions near politically sensitive sites such as radio and television stations, military headquarters, and the Ministry of Defense.⁶ Cars with loudspeakers roamed the streets of Damascus on Sunday and Monday calling on shop owners to end the strike. State media outlets did the same. Units from the National Guard and groups of regime-sanctioned thugs known as the proletarian brigades poured into the streets armed with machine pistols, automatics, sledgehammers, and crowbars. Their aim was to intimidate shop owners and force them to open their businesses. They smashed shop windows in Damascus and Aleppo and distributed the merchandise free of charge to passers-by. At the same time the government attempted damage control. The minister of the interior published a response in Jaysh al-Shaab denigrating the apostate article. The prime minister claimed that the article was arranged by the CIA and was part of an “American, Zionist [and] reactionary plot” to undermine the Baath regime.⁷

These measures failed to fix the problem. Tension between the government and opposition escalated during the following three days and the riots showed no sign of abating.

The Party and the Army

What seemed to be yet another chapter in a typical Middle Eastern tale of religious tensions fueling instability actually turned out to be a twist in a sordid plot that had been unfolding since Syria received its independence from France in 1944. The lines of division were well known to the ulema, their supporters, and the regime, each taking up its intended role in a well-rehearsed choreography of violence. The scenes on the Damascus streets were another battle in a slowly evolving and decades-old civil war between the haves and have-nots.

In Syria, religious and class identities overlapped in a way that created a deeply polarized society. Traditionally, the Sunni majority (about 57 percent of the population) resided in the cities where Sunnis were merchants, small-business owners, artisans, ulema, landowners, and industrialists. Around the cities lived religious minorities – the Alawites in the Latakia hills (11.5 percent of the population), the Druze in the southwestern mountainous area of Jabel al-Druze (3 percent), the Ismailis in the environs of Hama (1.5 percent) – in villages built mostly with mud and lacking piped water, sewerage, electricity, tarred roads, and modern medicine. Overcrowded and suffering from poor sanitation, the villages were ravaged by disease: malaria, tuberculosis, and diarrhea. In 1951–53, 36 percent of registered deaths occurred among children under five. The urban landowner was sole ruler of the people who inhabited his land and he demanded the utmost respect from them. He lived off the labor of the peasants and represented them to the authorities. No girl could marry without his approval. If the landlord desired a girl and her family resisted, they risked being turned off the land.⁸

These unequal relations could exist as long as farmers lived in isolated communities without knowledge of how to organize themselves to make demands. But from the end of World War II, Syria became more integrated into the world economy – especially through the export of cotton. Modernity brought with it better transportation and communication networks and wider access to education. The small world of the rural community was shattered, the authority of village and tribal elders undermined. The more educated were the villages’ younger generations, the more politically aware they became. Ease of travel from the village to the city and between urban centers served to show the have-nots that many shared their plight. If the religious minorities could only come together, they would be formidable.⁹

The Baath Party was to play a key role in that process. Founded in 1947 by two Damascene intellectuals, Michel Aflaq (Christian) and Salah al-Bitar (Sunni), its ideology sought to transcend the various class loyalties and ethnic identities that threatened to tear independent Syria apart. The two loadstars of Baathism were Arabism and socialism (in that order of importance). Following romantic notions of nationalism, Aflaq envisaged Arabism as a living entity that would be able to grow naturally only within a united Pan-Arab state encompassing the entire Middle East. Thus, Syria’s warring communities would be submerged in a larger political unit.

Baathism treated Islam as part of the rich heritage of Arabism but not necessarily its defining feature. According to that tenet, all Arabs, no matter what their religious affiliation was, were welcome to join the Baath and its mission to unite the Arab world. Moreover, the political order that the Baath would strive to establish would be secular, thus abolishing sectarian tensions. Socialism was to cure the deep chasm between rich and poor and between city dwellers and farmers. Baath ideology envisaged a major role for the state in promoting industrialization, building infrastructure, and enacting land reform. At the same time, Aflaq was careful to stress that his was an “Arab socialism” and not foreign-made Communism. Moreover, Aflaq explained that “[Arab] unity is higher in the hierarchy of values than socialism.”¹⁰

The same could not be said about Aflaq’s and Bitar’s disciples, the country boys that came to the big city to acquire education and found themselves drawn into circles of discussion that Bitar and Aflaq conducted in Damascene cafés. When these students returned to their villages as schoolteachers they passed on the lore of Baathism to their eager pupils. Because it appealed foremost to educated Druse, Ismaili, and Alawite youth, the Baath was far more successful in rural areas than in the cities. This pattern was underlined when in 1953 Aflaq and Bitar struck an alliance with Akram Hourani, a firebrand Sunni lawyer, who organized the farmers around Hama into a populist party.¹¹

Nevertheless, the Baath was unable to win a majority in parliament in the elections that took place during the 1940s and 1950s. Despite the popularity of its message, it suffered from organizational weakness. Aflaq was a brooding intellectual, more accustomed to ideological debates in small forums. He shied away from taking formal posts and never served as a minister. Hourani was an energetic schemer and operator but proved too much of an opportunist to become a national leader. He zigged and zagged constantly to secure ultimate power for himself. Bitar served as a go-between for Aflaq and Hourani, but this awkward arrangement did not augur well for the Baath.¹² Yet the party that was unable to pave its way to power through the ballot box was finally able to establish itself there using bayonets.

When the French won a mandate from the League of Nations in 1920, they created a militia known as the Troupes spéciales du Levant (Special Troops of the Levant). The French preferred to recruit soldiers from religious or ethnic minorities who resided farther away from the capital, believing such recruits to be less amenable to nationalism. (This was a deliberate divide-and-rule policy employed by the French in other colonies.) The numerical strength of Alawites, Druze, and Ismailis among the troops thus outweighed their demographic footprint. Post-independence, the military academy at Homs opened its gates to all who were willing to register, without discrimination. Again, the minorities, seeing the army as their avenue to social mobility, seized the opportunity. Hourani, for his part, encouraged rural youths to join the military so that the Baath could build a base within the ranks.¹³

The sons of urban and affluent Sunni families refused to enlist. Under the French mandate they had led the nationalist struggle to independence and therefore would not agree to serve in an occupying army. But even after independence, landowning and commercial Sunni families considered serving in the army to be demeaning. They thus left one of the most important arenas in Syrian politics open to other groups. This did not mean that the army instantly became dominated by the impoverished religious minorities. Some Sunnis from well-to-do families did join the ranks. Encouraged by the military dictators who served between 1949 and 1954, many Sunnis from middle- or lower-class backgrounds also entered the military academies at Homs and Hama. Nevertheless, overall, the class composition of the army was different from that of the Syrian political and economic elite. This was a recipe for trouble. The army saw itself as representing the people’s will against those of a corrupted ruling class, and used its power to intervene in politics.¹⁴ It was also opposed to any attempt to make it answerable to civilian authority. Yet the Syrian army was not, so to speak, uniform. Various ideological currents were represented within the ranks – Communists, Baathists, Nasserites, Muslim Brothers, and independents. Struggles over authority and power therefore took place both within the military and between the military and the civilian politicians. Each time one military faction won, it took care to purge its opponents. Thus, unwittingly, Sunni officers purged each other to the point at which minority officers were able to prevail.

The Unruly Military, 1944–58

No sooner had Syria gained independence in 1944 than it found itself under military rule between 1949 and 1954. Syria participated in the 1948 war for Palestine in which Arab armies tried to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state. The Syrian army failed to conquer northern Palestine, although it was able to occupy a strip of land adjacent to the border. Following the war’s conclusion, officers and civilians hurled the blame for the army’s disappointing performance at each other. In March 1949, after several officers had been arrested for war-related corruption and the government added injury to insult by unilaterally cutting officers’ salaries, the army launched a coup. The civilian government was reinstated, but it was toppled again in November 1951 via another military coup because it wanted to appoint a civilian rather than a general as minister of defense. A counter-coup in 1954 established democracy once more.¹⁵

The next four tumultuous years were typified by a return to parliamentary life and the ascendancy of parties representing the middle class, including the Baath. The power of the traditional elite declined. Those were also stormy years for the Middle East at large. In July 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Abd al-Nasser defied the West by nationalizing the Suez Canal Company, which was owned by British and French investors. A tripartite coalition, which included Israel, Britain, and France, launched a military operation in October to undo the nationalization and topple Nasser. Yet he emerged victorious from the 1956 Suez Crisis and became the hero of the Arab street. This affected Syrian politics as well. The Asali government that served between 1956 and 1958 and included Baathist Salah al-Bitar as foreign minister, adopted a Pan-Arab, pro-Egyptian, and Moscow-friendly foreign policy. In 1957 it had to withstand a regional crisis during which Iraq, Jordan, and Turkey, all of them US allies, concentrated their troops along Syria’s borders and threatened to invade. That was their, and Washington’s, response to the growing reliance of Syria on Soviet civil and military aid. Eventually the eagerness of Syria’s neighbors to intervene cooled off, but growing Soviet influence in Syria was a source of concern to the Baathist officers and conservative parties. The Syrian Communist Party was enjoying mass support and could conceivably take over through free and fair elections.¹⁶

Unity and After, 1958–63

The feeling that Syria was under threat by both external and internal forces brought public calls for a merger with Egypt to fever pitch. That was true for the Syrian military as well. For many officers, Nasser seemed the perfect antidote to Syria’s ills – a strongman who would put the Communists under the boot, scare “the imperialists” away, instill unity within the ranks of the Syrian army, and enforce land reform and government intervention from above as he did in Egypt. Deciding to ride the popular wave, on January 12, 1958, without consulting the government, a delegation of Syrian officers took a plane to Cairo to offer Gamal Abd al-Nasser a merger between the two countries...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Map of the Six-Day War
• Preface
• Plate Section
• Introduction: From the Local to the Global
• 1 The Article
• 2 The Baath in Power, 1963–66
• 3 Playing the Israel Card
• 4 The Spy Who Came Back from the Cold
• 5 The Corruption of the Revolution
• 6 Sliding into War
• 7 The Phone Call
• 8 Defying Israel’s Founding Father
• 9 Expanding Israel’s Borders
• 10 Confronting Syria
• 11 The Self-Inflicted Recession
• 12 Rabin’s Schlieffen Plan
• 13 From Yemen to Texas
• 14 A Short Tether
• 15 Arming the Middle East
• 16 Secret Liaisons
• 17 Abba Eban’s Tin Ear
• 18 One Soviet Foreign Policy or Two?
• 19 Restraining Damascus, Disciplining Cairo
• 20 A Soviet Hall of Mirrors
• 21 A Very Israeli Putsch?
• 22 Last Days
• Conclusion: Six Days and After
• Endnotes
• Select Bibliography
• Illustration Credits
• Index