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The Golan capture
By Michael Arnold
But for an unexplained change of heart by Moshe Dayan, the Six Day War might have ended with the Golan Heights in Syrian hands, Michael S. Arnold reviews the chain of events
Anyone familiar with Syria's shelling of Israeli civilians below the Golan Heights in the years before the Six Day War might assume that conquering the commanding plateau was a prime Israeli objective when war broke out in June 1967.
In fact, but for a startling change of heart toward the end of the war by defense minister Moshe Dayan - who feared Soviet involvement if he attacked but may have feared even more the judgment of history if he didn't - Israel would have ended the war with Syria still in control of the strategic plateau, leaving the Golan over Israelis' heads as a 'curse for generations to come.'
One of the factors influencing the Israel government decision to take the heights was an unprecedented appeal by a delegation of Upper Galilee residents directly to prime minister Levi Eshkol's war cabinet. The leader of the delegation Upper Galilee Council head Ya'acov Eshkoli recently revealed details of the meeting.
'I'm going to tell horrible things, that we'll all leave Upper Galilee and that Jewish settlement would end at Afula,' Eshkoli says he told the war cabinet. Eshkol responded that the delegation's appeal would weigh heavily in the government's decision to take on the Syrians.
DESPITE Syria standing aside initially in the Six Day War and Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shara's revisionism notwithstanding, many historians agree that Syria more than any other actor was responsible for the chain of events that dragged the region into the Six Day War.
Indeed, shortly after the secular, ostensibly socialist Ba'ath party took power in March 1963, Damascus began urging the Arab world to make war over Israel's project to divert Jordan River water to the south of the country, correctly realizing that this project would have a major effect on the young Jewish state's viability.
A February 1966 coup engineered by Hafez Assad and others brought to power a new Ba'ath regime in Damascus which adopted 'the most extreme anti-Israel policy since the beginning of the Syrian-Israeli conflict,' writes Hebrew University expert Moshe Maoz, in his book Syria and Israel: From War to Peacemaking.
'This regime had the narrowest socio-political base and the most tenuous public legitimacy in modern Syrian history,' Maoz writes, and warmongering against Israel was one way to mask its domestic instability.
The new regime called for a 'people's war of liberation' to take the form of terror attacks against Israel; 'when in response to the people's war of liberation, Israel will be forced to begin a conventional war.' According to the Syrian leadership's strategy quoted by Maoz, the Arab armies would join the 'defensive' struggle for Israel's liquidation.
As June 1967 approached, things seemed to be going according to plan. Between February 1966 and May 1967, the Syrian regime initiated 177 border skirmishes and 75 Palestinian terror attacks within Israel, actions painstakingly detailed in recently declassified documents of the British and American governments.
The main theater of impending war, however, had by April 1967 shifted to the Egyptian front. When Israel downed six Syrian MiGs, Egyptian president Gamel Abdel Nasser refused to abide by a 1966 mutual defense treaty to send military support to Damascus. His position changed a month later in response to baseless Syrian and Russian reports that Israel was massing troops on the Syrian border for an apparently offensive attack.
His anti-Israel credentials under fire in the Arab world, on May 14, Nasser began moving troops into the Sinai desert. Days later he demanded the removal of United Nations peacekeeping troops and closed the Straits of Tiran to Israel-bound shipping, effectively blockading the port of Eilat. Jordan and Iraq joined the mutual defense pacts. An Arab-Israeli war had now become inevitable.
GIVEN SYRIA'S role in instigating the war, it might have seemed logical for Israel to take the Golan Heights, removing its settlements from the threat of Syrian guns and putting Israeli tanks within reach of Damascus.
Instead, with Syria's military considered 'a coup army - not very good, even by Third World standards,' according to Eric Hammler's Six Days in June, Israel focused on the far more serious Egyptian threat.
On June 4, the morning before the start of the war, Dayan met with Northern Command head David (Dado) Elazar, who was eager to remove the sword hanging over the northern settlements.
'Get used to the idea that this war is against Egypt,' Dayan said, according to a biography of Elazar written by Hanoch Bartov.
'If there's a war against Egypt, there will be a war here, too,' Elazar pleaded.
'Maybe so, but first this is a war against Egypt and what you people have to do here is sit tight and hold out,' Dayan responded.
Indeed, when war began on June 5, the heavy initial fighting was in the Sinai and, when Jordan ignored Israeli pleas to stay out of the conflict, on the eastern front. The Syrian front was relatively quiet.
Syrian planes attempted to bomb the Haifa Oil Refineries and targets in Galilee; massive Israeli retaliation destroyed the bulk of the Syrian air force on the ground.
Damascus Radio, nonetheless, announced stunning military successes, such as the downing of 54 Israeli planes and the conquest of several Israeli settlements. Meanwhile, by the end of the first day of fighting, Ba'ath leaders were receiving reports of the devastating blows being suffered by Egyptian and Jordanian forces.
The Syrians began the morning of June 6 with an intense barrage on Israeli settlements at the foot of the Golan, and before 8 a.m. had invaded and attacked both She'ar Yashuv and Tel Dan.
In both cases they were repulsed by local paramilitary forces, but Elazar believed that the Syrians, aware of Israel's purely defensive posture in the north, were sending out probes before a much larger attack. Instead, Syrian gunners kept up a heavy artillery barrage on the settlements that continued almost unabated through June 8.
With the IDF pursuing the war with great efficiency on its other fronts, pressure began building on the Israeli leadership to storm the Golan Heights.
'The Syrian Army had the best of both worlds,' writes Shabtai Teveth in his biography of Moshe Dayan.
'It could display solidarity with the Arab war effort by firing down on Israeli settlements below the Golan Heights while not suffering any of the consequences of a full-scale war on her territory. Dayan's order concerning the Syrian front was quite explicit: do not get involved in a war with the Syrian Army. Thus Syria, clearly Israel's most bothersome enemy since 1956 and actively instrumental in precipitating the Six Day War, came close to emerging from the war unscathed.'
While the rest of the country could begin celebrating after the first day or two of the war, residents of the northern settlements remained in their bunkers under the constant artillery barrage.
A lobbying campaign by settlement residents, humorously dubbed the 'Galilee Rebellion,' now began in an attempt to sway Dayan, Eshkol and chief of General Staff Yitzhak Rabin to counterattack.
Goading the settlers, too, was labor and social affairs minister Yigal Allon, a member of the Premier's Ministerial Committee for Defense Affairs and a resident of Kibbutz Ginossar, who even advocated taking the Golan and turning it into an independent Druse state.
Much of the cabinet supported an attack to drive the Syrians back from the Golan, especially the left-wing Mapam party (a forerunner of today's Meretz), which had strong ties to kibbutzim in the region. Pockets of resistance remained, including National Religious Party ministers who feared world reaction. Leading the opposition was Dayan himself.
Curiously, the outbreak of war had seen a strange role reversal between the normally hesitant Eshkol and the brash Dayan; now Eshkol, former head of the Mekorot water company, was said to covet the Banyas springs and the sources of the Jordan - though he too feared international reaction - while Dayan was the main voice for restraint. A cabinet meeting of June 7 ended with orders for no attack on the Golan, but gave Dayan and Eshkol the power to change course if circumstances warranted.
BY THE morning of June 8 it was clear that the Jordanian and Egyptian armies had been routed. Israeli tanks began to rumble north from Samaria toward the Golan. Foreign minister Abba Eban noted a conversation with president Lyndon Johnson's national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, in the course of which Bundy remarked how odd it was the country that had precipitated the war was getting off the lightest, and could engage in similar aggressions in the future, Eban said in an interview.
'I deduced from these remarks that official Washington would not be too grieved if Syria suffered some penalties from the war which it had started, so that Jordan's moderate posture up to June 1967 should not seem to be penalized,' Eban wrote in his autobiography. He conveyed his impressions to the government.
Eshkol reportedly was greatly affected by a telephone call on June 8 from the leadership of northern settlements, during which he clearly heard exploding shells in the background.
A three-person delegation under the leadership of Ya'acov Eshkoli set out for Tel Aviv. The prickly Dayan was offended that Eshkol invited Rabin and Elazar to meet with the residents, but snubbed his defense minister.
Clearly sensing that Eshkol supported the residents' call for an offensive, Eshkoli requested permission to address the Ministerial Committee for Defense Affairs, Eshkol's inner war cabinet. Eshkol agreed to the highly unusual move.
Eshkoli, today an 87-year-old resident of Kibbutz Kfar Giladi, recalls that when he finished his presentation several of the ministers present were wiping tears from their eyes. Dayan, in contrast, reacted 'as if he didn't see me, he went to sit in the back of the room, put his feet up and went to sleep.'
In his autobiography, indeed, Dayan appears incensed that Eshkol allowed the civilians not just to sit in on the meeting, but even to participate in the discussion - clearly an attempt to sway Dayan, who by this point was the only holdout against military action on the Golan.
'Your words will have a great weight on our discussions tonight and our decision,' Eshkol is said to have told Eshkoli on parting.
Dayan was less moved. If the settlements really could not persevere in the face of Syrian shelling, he told the cabinet, it's better that they be moved away from the border than that Israel attack Syria. His main fear, Dayan said, was that the Soviet Union would intervene on behalf of its Syrian client in the case of an Israeli attack.
Dayan's warnings of possible Soviet intervention 'managed to sow a sense of grave disquiet among the ministers,' Rabin notes in his memoirs.
'It was obvious that the arguments presented by [Elazar] and the settlers convinced Eshkol that we must act, but under the circumstances the decision was up to Dayan.'
In his autobiography, Dayan sets out two factors beside the fear of Soviet intervention.
One was a June 7 statement from Nasser that Egypt would continue fighting until the last Israeli soldier left Sinai, leading Dayan to believe that the war could drag on interminably; in that case, Israel didn't need a Syrian front as well.
In addition, Dayan noted presciently, 'the Syrians wouldn't accept our permanent presence on the Golan Heights, and we'd be in a state of war with three Arab countries.'
The meeting ended with a decision similar to that of the previous evening: no attack, but Dayan and Eshkol were empowered to act as they saw fit. Still, Dayan noted, the tenor of the meeting had been different: because of the settlers' visit and Israeli successes in Sinai, 'now I saw, not like previous times, that most of the government ministers supported the conquest of the Golan Heights.'
NO ONE knows precisely what happened between 2 a.m. and 7 a.m. the following day to make Dayan change his mind and order Northern Command to take the Golan Heights.
Dayan himself gives several factors. At about 3 a.m., Nasser suddenly expressed his willingness to accept a cease-fire, and urged the Syrians to do the same. Shortly after that, military intelligence reported that Kuneitra, the major Syrian city on the Golan, had been abandoned. At 4:45 a.m., the commander of the southern front cabled Dayan with the information that IDF forces were deployed on the Suez Canal and Red Sea.
Not only was there no need for the IDF to fight simultaneously on northern and southern fronts, Dayan realized, but the window of opportunity to confront Syria was closing fast.
'In my opinion, this cable compels us to take the maximum lines,' Dayan wrote in the margins of a letter to Eshkol, according to his former military secretary Arieh Baron in Moshe Dayan and the Six Days War. 'Last night I had no idea that the leadership of
Egypt and Syria would collapse like this and give up the battle. In any event, we must exploit this opportunity to the utmost. A great day.'
Rabin wrote that he 'never grasped' Dayan's reasons for changing his mind. Teveth wrote that Dayan's prior opposition had shown the world that the Israelis did not have aggressive aims and had no intentions of taking Damascus, a show of moderation that may have allowed Israel to carry out its conquest of the Golan without Russian intervention.
Whether this was a calculated move on Dayan's part, however, is an open question.
Elazar speculated that when Dayan realized that his was the lone voice in the government against an attack, the issue became 'a question of responsibility and no one to share it with,' says Bartov.
Historian Michael Oren, a senior fellow at the Shalem Center who is producing a study of the Six Day War from newly released archival material, says Dayan was a supremely enigmatic man who often said one thing and did precisely the opposite for reasons that were never entirely clear to outsiders.
In any case, just before 7 a.m. on June 9, Dayan called Elazar at Northern Command headquarters. Bartov quotes the following conversation:
'Can you attack?' Dayan asks Elazar.
'I can - and right now,' Elazar responds.
'Then attack,' Dayan orders.
'Fine. Thank you very much,' Elazar says.
Yet Elazar was surprised at the breach of decorum; chief of General Staff Rabin should have been the one to issue such an order. Dayan claimed he couldn't find Rabin, although Dayan knew Rabin was at home that night, according to his biographer Teveth. Only afterward did Dayan call prime minister Eshkol to seek his approval, which was readily granted. Deputy chief of General Staff and head of the Military Operations Branch Ezer Weizman was the one to wake Rabin with the news. Elazar, too, called Rabin to double-check the order with him.
'It is up to the chief of General Staff to give operational orders,' Rabin writes, 'but I had no desire to quibble when the Syrians were about to get their just deserts for malicious aggressiveness and arrogance.'
By 11:30 a.m., after Israeli planes had softened up Syrian defenses and Israeli engineers had cleared a path through the mine fields, IDF tanks were making their way up the steep escarpment.
The battle then became a race against time, as the Syrian defenses folded quickly and the UN Security Council sought to impose a cease-fire deadline. The Israelis - whose lack of forethought about conquering the heights is illustrated by the fact that much of their battle plan was improvised on the fly - meanwhile sought a line on top of the heights that would be defensible.
With the Soviet Union issuing grave threats through the Americans, Dayan ordered land operations to cease by 8 a.m. on June 10. That morning, however, Radio Damascus issued the false report that Kuneitra had fallen to Israeli forces, perhaps a desperate bid to force an intervention by the Soviets, who might have feared for the safety of Damascus.
In any case, the report prompted Syrian forces to flee in panic back toward Damascus, leaving Kuneitra indeed open for the Israelis. Dayan ordered the army to push on and take Kuneitra, with the final cease-fire taking effect at 6:30 p.m.
DAYAN, it seems, was never entirely comfortable with the decision to take the Golan. In a summary chapter of the Six Day War in his autobiography, he writes, 'You can't say that we were forced to conquer the Golan. It was possible to finish the war where we stood, on the Syrian front, at the previous borders. We weren't forced to enter the war with Syria because of the actions they initiated. Our reasons were: to save the settlements from shelling, and to teach the Syrians a lesson.'
Two-and-a-half years ago, a startling story appeared in Yediot Aharonot based on an interview Dayan held in 1976 with Israeli journalist Rami Tal. The journalist promised not to publish the material without Dayan's approval, and kept the material hidden for 15 years after Dayan's death in 1981.
According to the story, Dayan said Israel conquered the Golan because farmers in the northern settlements simply coveted the fertile land.
'The Syrians opposite them were soldiers who shot at them, and they certainly didn't like that. But I can say with absolute certainty that the delegation that came to convince Eshkol to ascend the Golan did not think about these things. They thought about the land of the Golan,' Dayan is quoted as saying.
'I know what went on. I saw them and I spoke with them. They didn't even try to hide their lust for that soil. That's what guided them.'
Eshkoli vehemently denies the characterization, charging that Dayan was so incensed that the pleas of a few provincial officials carried more weight than his own advice that he set out to smear their names.
'It's nonsense,' Eshkoli says.
Later in the Yediot story, Dayan is quoted as saying that Israel repeatedly sought to provoke the Syrians in the years before the Six Day War in order to take more territory in any ensuing fracas.
'Eighty percent of the incidents worked like this: We would send tractors to plow in an area of little use, in a demilitarized zone, knowing ahead of time that the Syrians would shoot. If they didn't start shooting, we would tell the tractors to advance until the Syrians would get aggravated and start shooting. We used artillery and later the air force became involved,' Dayan is quoted as saying.
The Hebrew University's Maoz says that Israel was sometimes guilty of provoking the Syrians, wishing not to take the Golan but to teach the Syrians that their continuing belligerency and support for terror carried a painful price.
'There are no saints in the Middle East; even Israel is not a saint,' Maoz says. 'Israel did some things to provoke the Syrians but the Syrians were also very much culprits, shooting without provocation, doing a lot of shooting and strafing.'
Oren says nothing in the archival record supports Dayan's claim that Israel sought to provoke the Syrians or coveted the Golan lands.
'What do you mean by provocation?' Oren asks.
'We would send a tractor in and the Syrians would shell the settlements. I think there's a certain imbalance there between cultivating a field and shelling a civilian settlement.'
Indeed, he says, the Syrians might find Israeli farmers in the demilitarized zone provocative because they refused to recognize Israeli sovereignty in the area, hoping the land they had taken by aggression in 1948 would supersede the international boundary. Of course, Oren notes, the Syrians hardly could recognize Israeli sovereignty in the area when they continued to deny Israel's existence.
'The Arabs regarded any assertion of Israel's existence as a provocation,' he says.
Also, he notes, the 1976 interview occurred just as Dayan was making the transition from warrior to peacemaker, shortly before becoming one of the major forces for peace in the Camp David negotiations. Could he have been attempting to project an image as moderate and self-critical? Or was he, as even Dayan's friends admitted was his custom, playing a bit loosely with the truth?
The answer to that question, as to the question of just why Dayan changed his mind so fatefully in the early morning hours of June 9, 1967, probably accompanied him to the grave.
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