More On Jews And Arabs (6)

By 1962, Britain had given up all pretense of keeping order in any part of the Arab world. She withdrew her last forces from the area around Aden and along the Trucial Coast. I remember seeing a picture of British Tommies withdrawing from positions overlooking the Persian Gulf and thinking, “Oh, oh, we’ll have to take their place.” And we have.
The French continued to supply Israel with top drawer war planes and ships. Almost as a way of saying “Merci” for 1956. UNEF went on keeping Egypt and Israel away from each other on the Sinai. The Soviets kept supplying Syria and Egypt with advanced weaponry, futilely trying to turn Arabs into European soldiery.
The Soviets were unsuccessful for a reason I spotted one afternoon while having coffee in Beirut. I watched as two Bedouin tried to operate a jack hammer in the street. They weren’t stupid, but their hands just were not used to holding a machine—just as Charlemagne could never learn to write. He had held a sword too long, a pen too late. Arabs, on their part, had simply not gotten used to machinery.
A Soviet advisor in Cairo told the following story. He was teaching a class of Egyptians how to run a tank in desert warfare. When he got to the part where you tell them what to do if the tank breaks down in battle (“You get out of the tank … .”) they burst into laughter.
The Egyptians weren’t cowards, but it was inconceivable to them that any one in his right mind would get out of an all metal tank in the midst of a battlefield. The problem with Arab soldiers was very similar to the problem Germany had with her drivers in World War II.
If a German truck broke down, the driver knew nothing better to do but sit until a mechanic came up from the rear. If an American truck broke down, somebody in the column had spent his summers tearing down an old Model T and making it run. He just instinctively starting applying tape and chewing gum until the truck started. The German, raised with horses, didn’t know how to do that. Ditto the Arab.
Then, suddenly, what an Egyptian tanker might or might not know maneuvering a tank in battle became vital. It was Spring, 1967, and rumors were flying. Some blame the Russians, others blame the Americans. Nasser became convinced that Israel was about to attack Syria.
He demanded that the United Nations remove its peace force on the Sinai so that he could get at Israel. Some say the Russians spread false intelligence for whatever reason. I have personally been told while in Washington that Lyndon Johnson engineered the blowup in hope of shortening the Vietnam War.
That story was that LBJ became convinced that the Viet Cong could not fight on without Russian supplies and munitions. These were flowing through the Suez Canal. If, the reasoning went, an Arab Israeli war shut down the canal, the North Vietnamese would be left without supplies for up to four months while the Russian ships had to sail around the Cape of Good Hope. In this time, we could defeat them.
Whatever. U Thant of the UN ordered his remaining 3500 troops out of Sinai, and everybody braced for action. Nasser was doing his usual boasting and bragging about how he would utterly destroy Israel’s armed forces with his large army and new Russian toys.
Suddenly word came that war had begun. Nasser crowed loudly that he had wiped out the Israeli air force. I stood in my office and watched the AP ticker repeat the story. Israel was crippled. Syria and Jordan believed Nasser and attacked Israel. It was time for the kill.
As I and my friends watched the ticker in concern, my phone rang. It was a good friend of mine who was very well connected (whenever I needed to contact any Jewish agencies, he called first and told them to talk to me) was on the line. “Don’t worry,” he said, “we creamed them.”
Three hours later the AP caught on to the real story. The French-made Israeli Mirage fighter planes had flown west across the Mediterranean at wave height, below the radar. They had turned around and attacked Egypt from the rear, wiping out nearly the entire Egyptian air force on the ground. They then took out the Jordanian and Syrian airforces.
Now the ill-trained armies of Syria, Jordan and Egypt were left to face a very peevish Israeli Defense Force which still had its full air support. What happened in the nest six days is best summed up in a joke current in Jewish circles at the time.
An Egyptian division was moving through the Sinai. Suddenly a lone Jewish soldier appeared on top of a hill, shouting, “Go back, go back!” Annoyed, the Egyptian commander sent a company to get him. When no one returned, he sent a battalion. When still no one came back, he sent a regiment.
This time one Egyptian soldier crawled back over the hill, the badly wounded sole survivor. “Go back,” he gasped to his comrades, “it’s a trap. There are two of them.”
This was to be a humiliation that still grates at the Arab soul. We’ll talk about a few specifics later. Incidentally, if closing the Suez was to win America’s war in Vietnam, it didn’t work.