Six Days (42 page)

Nasser had been the dominating personality in the Arab world for the best part of 15 years. He was a gigantic figure who was loved and hero-worshipped by millions. Nasser had given Arabs their pride back after the humiliations of colonialism and the disaster of 1948. Young people in their twenties had grown up listening to Cairo Radio's accounts of his exploits, from the expulsion of the British, to the rhetoric about the rights of dispossessed Palestinians and what had seemed, until only a few days before, to be a heroic stand against Israel and its Western allies. Until a few hours before Nasser's resignation, Cairo Radio had still been reporting the triumphs of the Arab armies. Now that familiar voice, coming from the same place on the dials of their radios (and on the television too), was shattering everything that had seemed certain in their lives. Nasser, the good son, the big brother, the father of the Arab nation, was going. No wonder they came out on the streets. Observers at the time reckoned there were hundreds of thousands of people on the streets of Cairo. In Egypt's second city Alexandria there were also mass demonstrations. In Port Said, on the Suez canal, the governor had to intervene to stop the population decamping for Cairo to add their voices to the crowd in the capital.

Whether Nasser's plan to resign was sincere or not is still widely debated in Egypt. Many people believe the speech was a piece of political theatre. The truth is probably that he felt he had no other choice. The scale of the Egyptian defeat was so vast that his best guess on Wednesday and Thursday was that a popular rebellion would kick him out of office. Before the broadcast, Mohamed Fayek, the information minister, claims Nasser told him: ‘They'll put me on trial and hang me in the middle of Cairo.' Perhaps resignation was not only more dignified, but it offered the chance to return at some time in the future. What he could never have guessed at was the reaction of the people. A huge crowd gathered outside his villa, where he had returned after the broadcast. The wife of Amin Howedi, who was about to be appointed minister of defence, was so stricken with grief that she left her house in her dressing gown to join the crowd. Fayek arrived at Nasser's villa in his official car. When the crowd was too thick to drive through, he got out to move forward on foot. Suddenly people started shouting that he was Zakkaria Mohieddin, the vice-president that Nasser had nominated as his successor. They turned on him, jostling him and ripping his clothes for having the temerity to take their hero's job. Fayek was rescued by the presidential guard and entered Nasser's residence badly shaken and dishevelled. Inside, he was received by Nasser, who was sitting alone. Fayek told him that a woman had killed herself with grief.

Some of the demonstrations were organised. The ruling party, the Arab Socialist Union, told 20,000 hard-core activists in Cairo to expect instructions once the speech was over. According to the official Yugoslav news agency, they directed the demonstrators once they were on the streets. But there was a massive element of spontaneity. If party activists were organising elements of the demonstrations they did not do the job across the country. Some hapless officials of the ASU refused to provide vehicles to take the faithful to Cairo, saying they were waiting for an order. The faithful responded by burning down the party offices. Gamal Haddad, the governor of a province in the Nile Delta, was asked by the ASU to provide transport on the morning of the 10th to take demonstrators to Cairo. He was convinced their grief was spontaneous, because in his province the ASU was not capable of organising anything remotely so big. The same evening, after Cairo Radio broadcast that Nasser would be appearing the next day at the National Assembly, the Cairo office of the Socialist Youth Organisation of the ASU sent out a circular to its members telling them to seal off the National Assembly building ‘and not let Nasser go out unless he has gone back on his resignation'.

Damascus

Nasser's announcement was as big a bombshell to the Syrians as it was elsewhere in the Arab world. In Damascus the government panicked. Jordan was defeated, Nasser's resignation meant Egypt must be too – which left only one Arab country for the Israelis to knock over. They were already attacking. If a leader like Nasser could not resist them, who could? Self-preservation became the government's priority. Orders were issued for the army to disengage and fall back to Damascus, only forty miles or so from the border. Key members of the government left the capital. The army command was infuriated by the order to pull back, which at first it refused to obey. But during the night General Suwaydani, the Syrian chief of staff, was told by Ahmad al-Mir, the commander of the front, that Israel was close to trapping the Syrian army by outflanking its defences. Suwaydani ordered them to fall back to Kuneitra, the main town of the Golan, which controls the road to Damascus.

DAY 6

10 June 1967

Syria–Israel border, 0826

Israel had used the night to regroup and resupply its forces – and to brace themselves for a counter-attack which never came. Instead the Syrian army was pulling back. Its soldiers were being shelled and bombed from the air. But in the end they broke because of a piece of Syrian propaganda. A defence ministry communiqué was read out on Damascus Radio, saying that Kuneitra, the provincial capital, had fallen. It was untrue. Perhaps they hoped a false report would put more pressure on the UN Security Council or the USSR to stop the Israelis. Or perhaps it was a mistake, a sign of panic and confusion. Two hours later General Hafez al-Asad, the Syrian minister of defence, ordered a correction to be broadcast. But by then the damage had been done. Syrian troops facing the Israelis ran for their lives. Ahmad al-Mir, the commander of the front, escaped on horseback. Some reserve officers changed into civilian clothes and headed for the Syrian capital. Damascus Radio tried to make up for its mistake by, once again, claiming that America and Britain were helping Israel. ‘The enemy's air force,' it reported, ‘covered the sky in numbers which can only be possessed by a major power.' Later, Ba'th party officials claimed the premature announcement about Kuneitra was a clever tactic which saved the lives of thousands of soldiers.

The Israelis pushed on, not always fast enough to catch up with the retreating Syrians. A senior Israeli officer grumbled, ‘It was very difficult to make contact with the retreating enemy. Whenever we arrived, they had withdrawn their forces and we could not make contact. We fired on a number of tanks only to discover that they had been deserted. Their crews had abandoned them.'

Cairo

Nasser withdrew his resignation. Senior Egyptian officers wanted Nasser back as much as the weeping crowds in the streets, but not for emotional reasons. They wanted Nasser to get them out of the mess he had got them into. They wanted Amer back too, not because they rated his military skills, but because if he was purged anyone could be. And, remarkably, he still inspired loyalty, even though his incompetence had been proved beyond doubt. General Fawzi, the chief of staff, announced that Amer would be appearing at GHQ to say farewell to his officers. Five hundred of them gathered in a hall inside the building to honour their chief. When Amer did not appear, the officers started to chant his name. The atmosphere was getting tense and ugly. General Hadidi, the commander of the Cairo military district, left the hall and went down into the basement complex of bunkers to find Fawzi. He told him he had to face the men upstairs, or ‘there would be a revolution'. When Fawzi reappeared, saying that Amer had telephoned to say he was not coming, there was uproar. Officers started to insult Fawzi, yelling at him to get out of their sight. He left. The demonstration, with some leadership, could have turned into a threat to the regime. But no leaders emerged. After another hour or so of shouting, the disheartened officers started to drift away.

On the radio news at 2:30 p.m. Nasser started to reassert himself, striking out at the potentially disloyal. The announcer read out a communiqué announcing the retirement of a dozen officers. More names, with more sackings, came in bulletins later in the afternoon. If there was going to be a coup against Nasser, this was the moment. He was very vulnerable. But it was a step that nobody was prepared to take. General Hadidi had no more troops left in Cairo to protect him. Every spare man had been sent to the Sinai. Nasser had the Presidential Guard, which would have been an obstacle.

But his best defence, which was formidable, was his aura. Nasser was still Nasser, the only leader the Arabs had. He was also protected by the convenient fact that the people who had wept for him in the streets still did not know the full extent of the disaster. As the survivors of the beaten divisions in the Sinai trailed back, the truth was spreading, but it would take weeks to filter through the barrage of propaganda that was coming from the official media. Newspapers, radio and television redoubled their accusations of collusion between Israel, the United States and Britain. They continued to hide the truth about the defeat. ‘Setback', the word used by Nasser in his resignation speech, was the only way it was described. A week later, Michael Wall of the
Guardian
could still report that ‘the Egyptian people have no conception of the disaster that has overtaken their country'. But the news was leaking out. Soldiers back from the front were telling ‘appalling stories of casualties, of wounded being left where they fell, of the hundred mile struggle back in the burning sun, of Israeli planes trying to mow down each individual staggering towards the canal'.

In his office opposite Nasser's residence, Sami Sharaf was sitting with Amin Howedi, the new minister of defence and head of general intelligence. Two officers came in to report to Sharaf that Egypt had 100 tanks left. Sharaf got up, threw his arms around Howedi and said they should give thanks that something had been saved. Howedi shook his head and pulled away. He told Sharaf that he seemed to have forgotten that a week earlier Egypt had more than one thousand tanks. ‘Amer's got to go,' he said, ‘or we'll never sort this out.' If there was going to be a fall guy, it was going to be Field Marshal Amer, not Nasser.

Nasser was back in power, but he was never the same man again. On the eve of the war he still hoped he had scored his greatest political victory, a bloodless defeat of Israel. After his armed forces were smashed he kept his job because there was no other convincing candidate. No one else had any chance of inspiring public confidence. In Cairo the CIA was told that if Nasser had simply disappeared there would have been ‘chaos and the collapse of the Cairo government'. Egypt, though, was now like a sinking ship. ‘The morale of the ship's crew may be maintained by giving the appearance that the captain remains in command; however, the ship sinks and the captain sinks with it.'

Gaza

Major Ibrahim El Dakhakny had been in hiding since 6 June, in a hut near a dried up river valley called Wadi Gaza. Local Palestinians kept him fed and watered and tipped him off when the Israelis were about. On a small transistor radio they had given him, he heard that Nasser had resigned. Dakhakny was as angry as his brother officers in Cairo. Nasser, he thought, could not go because he had to face his responsibilities. He might have been responsible for the defeat, but there was no one else to replace him.

The Palestinians had put Dakhakny in touch with three of his soldiers, who were also on the run from the Israelis. As the resident chief of Egyptian military intelligence in Gaza he assumed the Israelis knew his name and were looking for him, along with their pilot who was downed by anti-aircraft fire on the first day of the fighting. The Israeli pilot had been sent to Cairo in one of the last cars to make it through Al-Arish before the Israeli takeover. Dakhakny was stuck. He was hearing stories from the Palestinians that the Israelis were shooting prisoners and civilians. Some of them claimed that the victims had been forced to dig their own graves before they were killed. He was determined not to be captured.

Dakhakny bought a camel from a Palestinian farmer. With his three soldiers, and the camel's help, he was going to cross the Sinai and get home. They loaded the beast with water, flour, sugar and tea, enough they hoped to keep them going until they reached Egypt. They left after dark, moving down the Gaza Strip and into Sinai, avoiding Israeli patrols by staying off the roads and walking through fields and groves of oranges, bananas and olives. Dakhakny always liked to keep a low profile by dressing in civilian clothes, so he had not been wearing a uniform when the war started. His three soldiers had dumped their uniforms and been given new outfits by friendly Palestinians. They had all kept their Kalashnikov assault rifles.

Their plan, once they had slipped into the vastness of the Sinai desert, was to find a Bedouin guide. Luckily they had just been paid when the Israelis invaded, but most of their cash had gone on the camel. But they found a man who would take what was left. He even brought another camel. They stayed at least ten kilometres away from roads, moving at night because of the heat. ‘It was very, very hard. The sand was very hot. So was the air. We had no tents or shelter when we stopped during the day. We just covered our heads and sat and tried to rest.' They walked for nearly three weeks, following their camels and their guide along a meandering route. Sometimes they had to turn back and take a looping detour when they met Bedouin who told them that the Israelis were ahead. As time went by, and more and more Israelis were demobilised and sent home, the desert seemed emptier.

With their supplies almost gone, they reached the territory of the Bayardia tribe of Bedouin, around forty kilometres from Suez. The tribe had made a camp from palm branches, a custom that went back to biblical times. (During the Jewish religious holiday of Sukkot, the faithful build small shelters of palm branches to commemorate the wanderings of Jews in the Sinai in the time of Moses.) Dakhakny and his party had passed other Egyptians as they moved through Sinai, all trying to evade the Israelis and get back home. Quite a few of them had been swept up by the Bedouin and brought to the camp made of palms. The Bedouin were in contact with the Egyptian military. They took small groups of fugitives to the beach at night, where they were picked up by boats that Egypt had sent from Port Said. The boats came full of flour and other staples the Bedouin needed, were unloaded and filled again with the thin, sunburnt and exhausted Egyptians. Dakhakny gave his camel to the guide who had saved him. ‘I felt I was already in the grave. Sinai was a grave, and I was reborn when I left it.'