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A
If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat, community discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com.
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B
Hello and welcome to Empire with me,
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A
Anita Anand and me, William Dalrymple. Now, last time, our number one friend of the show, Eugene Rogan. The great Oxford historian and author of the Arabs. My favorite book on the modern Middle east took us through the world in the lead up to the June 1967 war that changed the Middle east forever. Nasser's impossible position after Suez, the Palestinian refugees, the Arab Cold War, the United Arab Republic and its failure, the the dysfunction within the heart of the Egyptian military and political establishment, the Yemen quagmire and the spiraling crisis of May 1967, driven by the Syrian Ba', Athis, a bizarre piece of false Soviet intelligence, and finally the closure of the Straits of Tehran. So today we're actually gonna take it into the war itself.
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B
Yeah, and there's no one better to lead us through this very difficult terrain than Eugene, because you're gonna be taking us, Eugene, through six days of war. And I would love you in this episode to talk us looks like from from Cairo, from Amman, from Damascus, from the Palestinian villages when the Israeli army arrives at the doors there. So where shall we even begin? First of all, thank you and welcome back. Take us to the morning of June 5, 1967. Because from the Arab perspective, what exactly is happening, particularly you know, the Egyptian air bases first thing in the morning, because that's really interesting.
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C
Well, first off, Anita will thank you so much for your invitation. As you know, I can't coming onto this podcast and we get the best conversation in the world of history right here. Right. So what is happening in the Arab World on 5 June? It's a strange moment of normalcy before normal becomes absolutely lost. The Egyptian Air force has gone on its usual rounds and is coming in to land at about 7:30am as it always does, having reassured the skies over Egypt from any outside threat and in time for the pilot pirates to go and get their breakfast. But of course, their neighbors in Israel have been following the maneuvers of the Egyptians long enough to know of this pattern of behavior and they've made their war plan accordingly. So no sooner do our Egyptian pilots land their aircraft and make their way to the canteen than I think the world blows up beneath their feet.
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A
Literally.
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B
When you say blows up beneath their feet, I mean you're talking about basically Israeli aircraft arriving over these Egyptian air bases and opening their payload doors.
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C
And the thing is, there were early warning systems in place. We have from Jordanian accounts the fact that their radar had picked up the movement of large numbers of Israeli jets first thing in the morning flying along the Mediterranean coastline towards Egypt. They put the call through immediately to the hotline in Cairo to alert their Egyptian allies of what they were seeing. And no one answers the phone.
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A
Literally no one picks up the phone.
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C
According to Jordanian sources, no one picked up the phone. Cracking. So there was a sense of an emergency, and yet no one seemed to be on alert. So the Egyptians are caught completely by surprise as Israeli airplanes begin to sweep low over their airfields and bomb all their aircraft sitting on the tarmac.
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A
How come the Egyptians don't have their own early warning system?
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B
Yeah, I mean, you would have thought this is the 1960s states, after all.
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C
It's true. But the Israelis had planned for that as well. And so I think one reason why the Israelis were able to elude detection by the Egyptians was that after takeoff, reaching high enough in the air that the Jordanian radar picked up on flight movements, they immediately came right down and hugged the deck. They flew literally feet above the water in a very sort of bold formation to evade Egyptian radar and enjoy the total surprise. And it was successful. They literally swoop down on Egyptian airfields and are able to strike Egyptian aircraft on the ground before the Egyptians are in any position to scramble.
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B
Well, we're doing 300 Egyptian aircraft as well. I mean, I mean, this is not, this isn't. I mean, this is pretty much the entire air force, isn't it, of Egypt. It's an astonishing number.
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C
A vast part of the Egyptian Air Force was now based in and around the Sinai. In Cairo, there were still units in upper Egypt, and of course, there were units in Yemen supporting the losing conflict that the Egyptians were waging at that moment in Yemen. But no, you're right. I mean, I would say it's probably 90% of the Egyptian Air force is based within striking distance of that first wave of Israeli planes.
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A
I have a small personal connection to this story. In 1994, I was sent by Andrew Neill, Anita's old colleague, to interview Hosni Mubarak, then president of Egypt, for the Sunday Times Magazine. And he told me his firsthand account of that morning. And he was the only Egyptian pilot to get off the ground on the airport and to get his fighter jet out, which is how he started his political career. He became a national hero as the only, literally the only pilot on that airfield to save his plane.
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C
So what did he see, Willy? I mean, he gets up into the air. What does he see?
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A
So he's having his breakfast, and the bombs start going off, and he runs out and he gets into his plane and things are blowing up all around. It's one of the most dramatic moments of modern war warfare. And there are explosions happening, and they're trying to break the Runway. And he manages. He alone manages to get his plane to take off and elude the jets and escape, and he parks it in an airfield in Upper Egypt, but no one else does. None of his colleagues succeed in doing that.
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B
Can we just for a moment pause and just think what an extraordinary piece of intelligence gathering this is for Israel. I mean, they know when those pilots are going to be there, they know how many jets are going to be on the ground. It is pretty bonkers how much they know.
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C
I think the Israelis were serious that they could never afford to lose a war. You know, the. The Arab side had lost wars. They realized that it didn't ultimately overturn their worlds. I mean, obviously there was turmoil after each of the major wars in the region, certainly after 1948, and it overturned
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A
the lives of the Palestinians in 1948. I mean, 85% are expelled, obviously.
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C
Obviously. But the point is, for Nasser, for the leadership in Jordan, in Syria, in Lebanon, defeated an Arab. Israeli war had not been as consequential for them. And so they didn't have the seriousness of purpose that the Israelis had because they knew if they lost one war, then all survivors could be expected to be rounded up, put on boats and sent away. They would lose their country. And so they did not leave anything to chance. They planned meticulously, and in so doing, they were able to execute a strategy that gave them supremacy of the air. From the opening moments of the war, they were able to take the Egyptian Air Force out of the formula in the opening hours of the very first day of the war, from which point onwards, there wouldn't be a force that could really stop the Israelis.
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B
Yeah, I mean, first of all, that image of Hosi Mubarak up in the air just watching everything exploding around him is. Yeah, hard to understand what that might have felt like. What did it feel like to the Egyptian command structure? Because they too, are sort of watching their prospects, their defense, explode around them.
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C
You know, we have a number of accounts from memoirs of the political figures who lived through this time. Anwar Sadat, you know, Haeckel himself. And they capture a sense of surrealism, that in a sense, the Egyptians go into shock. They might have anticipated hostilities, but they didn't imagine such sweeping strikes in the opening moments of the war that would prove so devastating to them on the ground. And stunned, they seemed almost to have lost their grip on reality, because what they do for the next few days shows no signs of a strategic assessment of the realities on the ground, in the way they prosecute the war and in the way they conduct the communications war. The messaging they put out about their war effort just suggests the leadership out of touch with reality and really lying to each other as well as to their fellow citizens.
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B
So Field Marshal Amr, who we spoke about at the end of the last episode, who, you know, is just to remind people the bromance that is between Nasser and Amer. He's actually in an aircraft when this Israeli attack begins.
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C
He was actually flying a group of people over the Sinai to give them an aerial view of the situation and realized the panorama they were getting was critical and one he needed to address. Immediately they landed, and immediately he found himself caught up in a war that was out of his control. And Amr actually goes quite quiet from this point on. His voice is lost in that of the Egyptian state as a whole. And the Egyptian state is in damage control mode, trying to preserve morale among the Egyptian soldiers and populace at large by essentially feeding a distorted narrative of Egyptian victories in the air and on the ground, when the Egyptians were already on retreat on all fronts.
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A
And he issues an order of general withdrawal on hearing of the loss of the aircraft. So you have these soldiers who are up in forward positions in the Sinai, miles from the main centers of Egyptian population and with the whole desert around them that begin sort of packing up and sort of straggling home.
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C
Well, in a sense. Well, there's very little that the Egyptian government could do to protect them in their advanced positions. The moment you lose air control, then infantry units are sitting ducks. And tanks, columns of soldiers were targets for an Israeli air force that had no constraints. They did not have the surface to air missiles that might have given them the protection that they would enjoy. Let's say 1973.
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A
I've always thought about that. I didn't realize that. Presumably they had cat guns and stuff like that, didn't they? Or.
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C
I know, but you try using that against supersonic jets and it's just not an effective deterrent.
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B
Right? Yeah. Stuff that's strafing you from the sky. The sky always wins, doesn't it? I mean, that's why the RAF was so effective during. During the war. So I mean, do you have then a situation, Eugene, where in Egypt people are looking at images of their soldiers abandoned pretty much in the desert? No, they have no protection. They have no, you know, supply lines, I guess, are obliterated as well because you can wipe those out from the skies. And in the desert, those things are really. They're important. They're not just important, they're vital. You die without them.
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C
So that's the reality on the ground. And of course you have the phenomenon of Egyptian troops trying to retreat back to a point of safety without any of their material needs, right down to the fact they don't have enough water. And there are images taken of soldiers who abandoned their boots because their swollen feet were so uncomfortable in their shoes. You know, it was a rout. And with that, the Egyptians don't have an army on the ground capable of confronting the Israelis. They don't have an air force to protect them. The strongest military in the Arab world is beaten, I would say, in the first 48 hours of this war. All the while their government broadcasting to Al Sundry that victorious columns of Egyptian soldiers are marching on Tel Aviv and that hundreds of Israeli airplanes are being shot down when it's exactly the opposite that's taking place.
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A
So take us now, Eugene, to Jordan. King Hussein is 32 years old. He got to the throne when he was 18. He went to Sandhurst, come back under pressure from nationalists and from revolutionaries. He's joined this pact with Nasser, and so he's now committed to war.
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C
Yes, Hussein felt himself very vulnerable in the lead up to war, decided that his greater security and the security of his throne was to be aligned with Egypt, even if that meant taking his country into a war that could cost him territory. And he faces the same fate as the Egyptians do. As soon as the Israelis have eliminated the Egyptian air force, they turn next to the Jordanians. So on the afternoon of the first day of the war, the Israelis then turn to Jordanian airspace. The Jordanians are aware of the strikes on Egyptian air bases. They do have enough knowledge to scramble some planes. They do engage the Israelis. But as soon as the Jordanians are forced to put down to refuel, their airplanes were vulnerable to attack and they were eliminated as well. Indeed, the Israelis will go from wiping out the smaller Jordanian air force to to taking on the Syrian air force by the late afternoon and evening of the first day, just to confirm Israel's air superiority on all fronts. For the Jordanians, they found themselves then trying to defend East Jerusalem territory that they knew Israel had been absolutely determined to win already in 1948 and would be the first target of an Israeli infantry thrust. And then the territory on the west bank, one of the last bits of mandate Palestine still in Palestinian hands and under Arab rule, under Jordanian rule. So they begin to think of how best to withdraw their troops from lines they can no longer defend from the air and will be vulnerable to a predictable Israeli invasion.
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B
I just wanted to think about King Hussein of Jordan just for a moment longer because ex Sandhurst, he knows the military strength and weakness of his position. He knows without any kind of air cover his troops are done for. But I guess he's also facing a situation that if he decides to hightail it out of there, if he decides not to stand with Nasser, you know, to defy the defence pact, he's going to be the king who abandoned his brothers. That's the truth, isn't it? So almost it's like a slow motion car crash that he has to go through with.
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C
Yeah, Anita, I think that that's all part of the very difficult calculus that the King has to make. But he knows one thing, which is that what has saved him from revolution so far is the support of his military. Were he to lose his army then he would be extremely vulnerable to an overthrow from within Jordanian society. So just as he took the risk of siding with Egypt to protect himself from attack for not having supported the common Arab cause at war, he's going to protect his army for all he's worth. He's lost his air force, but he can keep his army. And so getting a measured retreat and allowing his soldiers to come back across to the east bank of the Jordan to defensible lines is going to be his only strategy to uphold the monarchy. And he'll take that risk even if he knows it means surrendering the last of Palestinian territory to Israel.
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A
I don't understand why these Arab armies or particularly the Arab air forces are collapsing so quickly. We're used today to a world where Israel got an almost blank check from America and has also got its own military technology which is, is very, very up to the minute. And you know, in drone and in electronic warfare, some of the very best in the world. But that's not the situation. 1967. 67. America is not fully militarily committed to Israel in the way it is now. I believe most of the Israeli air force comes from France, doesn't it? It's mirages from France which are not, you know, necessarily any better than what the Jordanians have. There's no massive sluice of money coming from, from America at this period. How can we explain this extraordinary winning of the war effectively in the first day?
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C
Well, you raise good points, Will. And I think the first one I would want to emphasize is that Israel's ally at this moment really is France. The United States has been warming to Israel under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, but there's nowhere near that special relationship that we associate with Israel in the United States today. And you're right, I mean the Mirages that Israel is flying came up against Hawker Hunters that the British had given to the Jordanians which were planes that were well matched.
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A
Comparable. Huh.
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C
They were up for the fight. But you know, I think that it was the element of surprise in taking out the Egyptians.
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A
But that's not the case with Jordan. With Jordan it's an equal match, isn't it?
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C
You know, I was acquainted with one of the Jordanian pilots. Since you raised your Mubarak story, I'm
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A
not going to try and take you on for contacts there a world Eugene, proud of my Mubarak story.
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C
Listen, I never got to President Mubarak, so all credit to you, Will. No, I mean, but Sam Sherdam was one of the officers who actually managed to scramble against the Israelis. And I believe he is actually counted as the only Arab ace, the only Arab pilot to shoot down five Israeli aircraft in the course of his career. But he did fly in June 67. But his is the story of someone who, having engaged with the Israeli air force and having, you know, fired on their plane successfully, was forced to land when he ran low on fuel. And it was while his plane was on the ground that it was destroyed by the Israelis. And they just didn't have the numbers of aircraft to match the Israeli air force. And so it was not that they were surprised, but they had never really anticipated taking on Israel single handed without the support of other Arab air forces.
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A
And the Egyptians did have the numbers of aircraft, but they're knocked out at the beginning. I mean, there could have been a very different ending to this story if that initial strike had not succeeded.
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C
Absolutely.
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B
Just on that, I mean, is it true that actually Nasser does a bit of a barefaced lie to Jordan saying, you know what, we're actually winning, we're fine, we're taking them out over the desert and the infrastructure and the communications, the comms are so bad that there is no way that the Jordanians know that in that breakfast window, the creamy thing, the Egyptian air force has been wiped out?
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C
Well, I think Nasser had to eventually come clean with King Hussein, the two of them, actually, after many years of adversity, come quite close in the moment of defeat in June 67 and afterwards. So you're going to see a kind of rapprochement between Nasser and King Hussein. And beginning, you know, the first communications, they definitely lie about the extent of Egyptian losses.
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B
Right.
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C
So the Jordanians are aware that the Arab world is under attack and that's why they're primed and ready to respond and scramble their air force when the Israelis come for them.
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B
Okay.
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C
But ultimately Nasser will confide in Hussein that things have gone very badly.
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B
Eventually, eventually.
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C
And we'll get Hussein's collusion to maintain the fiction that the Arab side is winning.
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B
Okay, that's interesting.
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C
It's quite a complex exchange of phone calls between Amman and Cairo about how they manage the communications of a war that's going desperately badly for the Arab side.
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B
So, Ayman, I just. I just. We're going to take a break. 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?
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C
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.
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A
Quick break. This surprised me. The most useful advice I get now doesn't come from experts. It comes from regular people on TikTok. What works, what doesn't. No filters. Download TikTok and see for yourself.
- [20:49]
B
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?
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C
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 Israelis to strike a
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A
modus vivendi that being the title of his famous book, Collusion across the Jordan.
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C
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. And 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.
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A
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?
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C
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. Could handle. And 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
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A
Old City of Jerusalem at the Western Wall.
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C
At the Western Wall, One of the
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A
most famous photographs of the 1960s.
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C
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.
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B
And what about the Palestinian experience? Because, you know, we're talking about people who have now, you know, been driven from one home, who have thought this will be their next home, and now this happens.
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C
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. And 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 more
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A
obvious is that this is rubbish. Yeah.
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C
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 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 bank and East Jerusalem, they've lost all the Gaza 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.
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A
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?
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C
Well, already in mandate times, Palestine was a city divided by 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 and 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 corners. So, you know, 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. So 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 June war. Bigger than Golan and Sinai, as important as they were strategically for Israel, 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.
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A
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 police kept a very close eye on what was going on in Gaza. But what happens to these people now?
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C
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. Gaza as a strip is a product of the 1948 war. It didn't exist before then. You had a Gaza province and an
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A
ancient Gaza town and an ancient city
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C
of Gaza and other old towns. But you know 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. And there they have been enclosed with very little communication with Egypt as a kind of self governing refugee camp.
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A
And also no communication with their old homes in what has now become Israel. Totally cut off from that too, or
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C
with the West Bank. I mean really an area quite cut off from the rest of the Palestinian diaspora.
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A
So many families who fled in one direction had cousins who'd flee in another and. And they haven't seen them now for
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C
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. And now they find themselves after, what are we talking, 19 years since the establishment of this refugee community, flooding into the established towns of places like Rafah Khan Younis. Gaza City itself now coming under Israeli occupation.
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A
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 been people put up against the wall, machine gunned. And so people are extremely anxious now in Gaza.
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C
With good reason. As you say, the experience of occupation in the 1956 war have been deeply traumatic. I believe Israel's actions were explained in terms of securing the rear before moving on to the Sinai. So the concern 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. But yes, I mean, I think that for the people of Gaza, the, 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
- [31:13]
A
in Israeli hands 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.
- [31:38]
C
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. Instead, 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 as Judea and
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A
Samaria, where the whole Israelite identity developed at the end of the Bronze Age.
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C
Absolutely. The Kingdom of Israel, you know, if you read the Book of Kings or 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. The people.
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A
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.
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C
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. And 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 Baca camp, you know, on the road north of Amman, whole quarters of Amman, Jebel Hussein, you know, the areas around Hashemiya, 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 Ramla and Lydda when they were taken over by Israel in 1948 to take refuge in the west bank. And now for a second time, being displaced. So 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.
- [34:00]
A
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 force is 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?
- [34:32]
C
In a sense, the Israelis were preoccupied first and foremost with taking down the biggest threats that they faced. And 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.
- [34:50]
A
This is Ariel Sharon and his tank regiments, isn't it? Am I right about that?
- [34:54]
C
You are. And in that sense, they're able to eliminate a threat from their Egypt, from their southern flank.
- [34:59]
A
But what I'm asking is why the Syrians don't preemptively.
- [35:04]
C
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, the
- [35:24]
A
Arab Legion, which in many ways was one of the winners in 1948, its defense of the Old City. It beats back Rabin, doesn't it? In the early days of 1948?
- [35:34]
C
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 frontierland of Israel, as it borders Syria, goes up into the highlands of the Golan. And 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 on the heights to take potshots on Israeli positions in 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.
- [36:43]
A
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?
- [37:13]
C
I think there is a sense of panic there that sweeps through Damascus and that the Damascenes prematurely announce defeat. So there is a broadcast announcing that the Israelis have actually managed to secure the Golan city of Quneitra and that Quneitra has fallen while it was actually still in Syrian hands.
- [37:32]
A
Quneitra is still there, kept as a sort of museum of war, isn't it?
- [37:38]
C
Totally abandoned Circassian settlement for the 19 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 Quneitra had fallen and they begin to retreat. And so I think where the Israelis, 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.
- [38:31]
A
But there is some very bitter fighting up there nonetheless, isn't there? I mean, I remember as a child seeing pictures, pictures of Syrian troops in the aftermath of napalm attack, for example. There's a lot of napalm being used up on the Golan Heights at this point.
- [38:44]
C
It was a total war for Syrians who were confronting the Israelis. Of course, they would have fought with all of their disposal, which would then drive Israeli uses of weapons like napalm to get out the well entrenched defenders. 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. And the Syrians were the last to fall victim to the failings of their government. But it cost them the Golden Heights at the the end of, of the war.
- [39:29]
A
Give us a brief picture of the two Israeli heroes of 1967, Moshe Dayan and Ariel Sharon.
- [39:36]
C
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,
- [40:00]
A
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.
- [40:16]
C
Yeah, 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 Zeif Jabotinsky and his acolytes.
- [40:38]
A
The idea of the Iron Wall, the
- [40:40]
C
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. And then strike peace with your Arab neighbors only when you have secured your iron walls. And the Palestinians were in many ways the biggest impediment to that, because how do you square getting Palestinian buy into 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.
- [41:46]
A
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.
- [41:57]
C
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. I think it does something to Arabs confidence in their leaders that they will never recover from.
- [42:39]
A
Even now. Absolutely, even now.
- [42:41]
C
It'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.
- [42:49]
A
And their confidence that they're being told the truth by their leaders takes an incredible blow.
- [42:55]
C
It 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.
- [43:00]
A
And plots constantly plots and conspiracies and plots and conspiracies.
- [43:05]
C
And it's encouraged because, you know, the leaders, instead of saying, we messed up, we'll blame defeat on conspiracies with the Europeans or conspiracies with the Americans. And 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.
- [43:44]
A
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.
- [44:02]
C
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, and he needed to use the credibility that he had left to try and clean up the message. 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.
- [44:43]
A
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 is 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.
- [45:17]
C
It 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 Darwish says, but maybe also the opportunity for the Palestinian liberation movement to emerge like the phoenix from the ashes of Arab defeat in 67.
- [45:46]
A
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?
- [45:54]
C
No. The PLO were actually kept out of this war. And in that sense, we're not discredited by it.
- [45:58]
A
Right.
- [45:59]
C
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.
- [46:10]
A
Got it.
- [46:11]
C
And finally lead to the Palestinians liberating their own territory.
- [46:15]
A
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.
- [46:32]
C
All 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.
- [46:44]
A
But this is the moment, isn't it, when Said Qutb and the Muslim Brotherhood and the 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?
- [47:02]
C
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, in the 1980s. And they'll find Sayyid Kut and his ideologies a roadmap for their revolution.
- [47:25]
B
Eugene, once again, thank you so very much. Absolutely fascinating. You're such a master storyteller.
- [47:30]
A
Thank you so, so much for coming back on this show.
- [47:32]
C
Thank you. Will.
- [47:33]
B
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 EmpowerPoduk.com and if you are a member of the club, you get these miniseries all in one go and lots more besides. Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Anand, and goodbye
- [47:53]
A
from me, William Durimple.