TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century

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<text> <title> (1960s) Israel At War </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1960s Highlights </history> <link 07776> <link 07593> <link 07291> <link 00164><article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> Israel at War </hdr> <body> [The Middle East was a hot spot throughout the decade, with coups and savage political warfare and of course, implacable hostility was raised to the pitch of war by an inexplicable lapse on the part of the U.N. Secretary General, U Thant, who allowed himself to be talked by Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser into removing a U.N. truce team from his Sinai Desert border with Israel. Nasser followed up by closing the Red Sea's Strait of Tiran leading to the Israeli port of Eilat. The Israelis, facing five mobilized armies, poised to attack and out-numbering their own troops three to one, struck first.] (June 16, 1967) Streaking in ahead of the dawn, the first waves of Israeli Mirage-3 fighter-bombers simultaneously destroyed four Egyptian airbases in the Sinai Peninsula, site of Nasser's massive buildup against Israel in the past month. Some 200 of Nasser's front-line fighters, mostly Russian-built MIG-21s, were caught and destroyed on the ground. By Monday night, the end of the first day's fighting, some 400 warplanes of five Arab nations had been obliterated. Egypt alone lost 300, Syria 60, Jordan 35, Iraq 15, Lebanon at least one. The cost to Israel's 400-fighter air force: 19 planes and pilots, mostly downed by ground fire. Inevitably, the fact that so many Arab planes were trapped in their parking area--strung out wingtip to wingtip--suggested that Israel must have struck the first blow. The stunned Arabs, of course, said that it had, and Moscow angrily concurred. But, as Israel first told it, the Jewish jets scrambled only after early-warning radar picked up several waves of Arab planes headed straight for Israel. At the same time, a massive Egyptian armored column was reported to be rolling out of its base at El Arish and steering toward the Israeli border. Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser had apparently not read Dayan, nor had he studied Santayana, who observed that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Thundering down the same roads, blasting and overrunning the same Egyptian positions, the Israelis repeated almost exactly what they had done in 1956--the only difference was that this time the job took only half as long. From Kerem Shalom in the north to El Kuntilla in the south, Israeli Centurion tanks, halftracks and field guns, plus convoys of infantrymen in sand-colored fatigues, pounded across from the Negev into Sinai in the blazing morning sunlight. In some places, the Egyptians had built their fortifications smack against the Israeli border; there, in hand-to-hand fighting, the Israelis drove them out. Within two days, the Israelis had knocked out or captured 200 of Nasser's tanks, and were deep in Sinai. For all the sensational and far more important military victories won in Sinai, nothing so elated the Israelis as the capture of the Biblical city of Jerusalem. Said the tough commando leader who took the Wall: "None of us alive has ever seen or done anything so great as he has done today." And there by the Wall, he broke down and wept. One by one, other Biblical towns fell to the advancing Israelis--Jericho, Hebron, Bethlehem--until they had seized all of Hussein's kingdom west of the Jordan River and the Dead Sea. Unlike their Egyptian brethren in Sinai, King Hussein's legionnaires fought stubbornly and with discipline. But as in Sinai, the Israelis' absolute mastery of the air meant ultimate Arab defeat. As Israeli troops captured the west bank of the Suez Canal, Jordan broke ranks and accepted the U.N. cease-fire that Moscow had been desperately trying to arrange for three days to save the Arabs from total disaster. The Egyptians fought one final tank battle at Suez in a frantic attempt to open a retreat path for what was left of their 80,000-man ground force in Sinai, then they, too, agreed to the cease-fire. Syria joined the chorus only a few hours later. [While the thumping Israeli victory elated Israel's supporters, especially in the U.S., in many ways it only made matters worse. Israel, with new, hostile, Arab-populated territories to administer, resorted to the time-honored tactics of occupying armies, albeit with less inhumanity than many. The humiliated Arab leaders turned to the Communist world for arms to rebuild their forces for another try, which would some six years later. Their defeat resulted in the precipitous growth of Arab terrorist forces, the first of a wave of airliner hijackings, and what was to become the pattern of Israeli tit-for-tat response.] (December 1, 1967) Shortly before dusk the streets and bazaars of the Arab world fell suddenly silent. Just as the evening rush hour began, taxi drivers put up their "occupe" signs and pulled over to the curb, shopkeepers pulled down their shutters, and all of Araby tuned into Radio Cairo. Gamal Abdel Nasser, still revered as El Raylis (The Boss), was scheduled to speak for only the second time since the Arab-Israeli war in June. Nasser did not let his listeners down. He was his old bellicose self. "What was taken away by force cannot be recovered except by force!" he cried. "We are committed to four principles: no recognition of Israel, no peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel, and no interference in the Palestine issue, which is the legitimate case of the Palestine people." Nasser was, in effect, replying to last week's U.N. Security Council resolution, sponsored by Britain, which aimed at leading Israel and her Arab enemies in the general direction of peace. The resolution, passed unanimously after months of diplomatic haggling and name-calling, empowered the U.N. to send a special representative--Swedish Diplomat Gunnar Jarring, 60, now his country's ambassador to Moscow, was selected--to the Middle East to try to bring the Jews and Arabs to the conference table. It also asked Israel to "withdraw" from occupied lands, although in terms so general that even Israeli Premier Levi Eshkol said that "we can live with the resolution." For all its emotional appeal to the Arabs, Nasser's intransigence played directly into the hands of the Israelis, who have been claiming all along that their national security would be threatened if they gave back the occupied Arab lands. There is, in fact, precious little sign that either side wants peace. (August 2, 1968) The hijacking of U.S. airliners for unscheduled trips to Cuba has become so commonplace that a virtually automatic routine has evolved for the prompt release of planes and passengers. The matter was far more serious last week when three wells-dressed Arab passengers seized Israel's El Al Flight 426 an hour out of Rome and forced it to divert its course from Tel Aviv to Algiers. What the Arabs wanted from their skyway robbery was not a free trip but bounty and hostages to use against Israel. When the big Boeing 707 touched down at Algiers' Dar-el-Beida airport, Algerian authorities impounded the plane. Next day they sent all passengers identified as non-Israelis to France on Air Algerie Caravelle jets after treating the detoured travelers well and giving them a sightseeing trip around Algiers. Twelve Israeli passengers and the crew of ten were held along with the plane, possibly as hostages for hundreds of Arab guerrillas currently in Israeli custody, though ten women and children were released at week's end. Israel at once started dealing through diplomatic channels for the return of the plane, its male Israeli passengers and crew. It may take a while. (December 13, 1968) At Fatah's signal, a band of Arabs sets out across the Jordan River on rafts made from tractor tires, carrying their Russian-made Kalashnikov assault rifles in water-proof inner tubes. In the darkness they land, make their way inland, plant a mine, ambush an Israeli patrol or throw a grenade, then scramble as best they can for home. The odds are heavily against their making it back, for many are caught or killed by efficient Israeli security forces. But the rewards are high, as posthumous compensations go. They are martyrs to all Arabs, their photographs and tales of their exploits are displayed in Cairo and Amman. Under the rules of jihad, or holy war, proclaimed against Israel by Moslem leaders from 34 countries last October, those Arabs who fall in battle are accorded the reverence of prophets and go straight to paradise. The Fatah is one of several similar clandestine organizations. While no one can be sure of the exact numbers involved, Fatah is the most prominent and the largest of them. To the Israelis, the raiders are terrorists and thugs, inept and indiscriminate in their missions. To the Arabs, they are freedom fighters in the best guerrilla tradition, skilled in the arts of the commando and the saboteur. The world knows them best as the fedayeen, meaning "men of sacrifice," a disparate group of clandestine plotters often at odds with one another, who plays a large part in keeping the Middle East on the edge of war. The primary sources of fedayeen strength are the Palestine refugees, now 1,500,000 strong, who for 20 years have been pawns in Arab politics, nourished on promises of a return to Palestine and a passionate hatred of Israel. In the aftermath of the Arab defeat, the fedayeen are today the only ones carrying the fight to Israel. The guerrillas provide an outlet for the fierce Arab resentment of Israel and give an awakened sense of pride to a people accustomed to decades of defeat, disillusionment and humiliation. In the process, the Arabs have come to idolize Mohammed ("Yasser") Arafat, a leader of El Fatah fedayeen who has emerged as the most visible spokesman for the commandos. An intense, secretive and determined Palestinian, he is enthusiastically portrayed by the admiring Arab press as a latter-day Saladin, with the Israelis supplanting the Crusaders as the hated--and feared--foe. He speaks softly and turns aside all questions about himself: "Please, no personality cult. I am only a soldier. Our leader is Palestine. Our road is the road of death and sacrifice to win back our homeland. If we cannot do it, our children will, and if they cannot, their children will. (January 3, 1969) In perhaps the single most audacious military exploit in their already spectacular history, Israeli forces swept down in helicopters on Beirut's busy international airport, through which thousands of Arab and Western tourists and businessmen pass each day. In 45 minutes, the attackers wreaked an Israeli-estimated $100 million in damage. A dozen Lebanese civilian planes were destroyed or heavily damaged, hangars and fuel dumps set afire, all apparently without loss of life to either side. The incitement had taken place only two days before, at Athens' international airport. There, a New York-bound Boeing 708 belonging to El Al, the Israeli airline, and carrying 41 passengers and a crew of ten had just moved away from its loading ramp when two men dashed onto the runway. Opening a canvas travel bag, they snatched out an automatic rifle and four grenades and fired a fusillade of bullets at the fuselage. They killed one passenger. In accordance with a policy of holding Arab governments responsible for fedyeen terrorism, Israel quickly blamed Lebanon. The terrorists, said a Tel Aviv statement, had flown to Athens from Beirut's airport, and belonged to a group of Arab saboteurs based in Lebanon. "The mark of Cain is on the heads of the perpetrators," declared Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. [As the decade ended, a war of attrition between Egypt and Israel escalated along the Suez Canal.] (September 19, 1969) For a few suspenseful days last week, the people of Israel wondered whether the next war might not be imminent. Israeli units were engaged in the biggest combine air, land and sea operation since the Six-Day War with the Arabs in 1967. Naval commandos were the first to go into action in the Gulf of Suez, blasting two Egyptian torpedo boats. Next, an Israel armored unit of 150 men ferried across the gulf in landing craft, spent ten hours shooting up troops, bases and radar installations with utter impunity along a dusty strip of Egyptian coastline. Not until two days later did the Egyptians reply by sending swarms of MIG fighters and Sukhoi bombers aloft, but Israel's air force quickly routed them. It is not full-scale ware, but far more serious than the nagging frontier clashes that sometimes go on between hostile nations for years. It involves issues that reason, self-interest and compromise could settle, yet it is wrapped in nationalistic and cultural hatreds that seem beyond resolution in this generation. Each side is backed by one of the world's two big powers and yet, while neither the U.S. nor Russia wants war in the Middle East, neither seems capable of making peace. </body> </article> </text>