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Making David into Goliath. Joshua Muravchik
Читать онлайн.Название Making David into Goliath
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781594038464
Автор произведения Joshua Muravchik
Издательство Ingram
On May 23, while Egyptian forces continued to pour into the Sinai, Nasser declared the Straits of Tiran closed to Israeli shipping. The Straits of Tiran are at the neck of the Gulf of Aqaba—a three-mile-wide waterway between Egypt and Saudi Arabia that leads to the port of Eilat, Israel’s sole outlet to its south and east. Free passage through this channel had been internationally guaranteed, albeit without Egyptian concurrence, under the terms of Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai after the 1956 war. There was little question that the renewed blockade constituted an act of war. Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, editor of the leading Egyptian government newspaper, Al-Ahram, and a confidant of Nasser’s, told his readers at the time, “an armed clash between [Egypt] and the Israeli enemy is inevitable.”27
For his part, Nasser breathed fire. Addressing a trade union meeting on May 26, he declared:
[I]f Israel embarks on aggression against Syria or Egypt the battle against Israel will be a general one . . . And our basic objective will be to destroy Israel. . . . I say such things because I am confident. I know what we have here in Egypt and what Syria has. I also know that other [Arab] states . . . will send . . . armored and infantry units. This is Arab power. This is the true resurrection of the Arab nation.28
Israeli leaders mostly tried to calm the situation. Levi Eshkol, Israel’s prime minister, was known as an organization man, not an orator. When he addressed the Knesset on May 28, his words were so mild and delivered so fumblingly, that they “were conciliatory to the point of timidity,” says historian Howard M. Sachar.29 “We do not contemplate any military action,” Eshkol insisted in words explicitly addressed to Egypt and Syria, appealing for “reciprocity” from them.30 Cruise O’Brien speculates that these earnest assurances of peaceful intentions may have backfired in that they “seem to have suggested to Nasser that Israel was so anxious to avoid war that further risks could be taken.”31**
Not all Israeli utterances were pacific. Two weeks earlier, military chief of staff Yitzhak Rabin had reacted to some guerrilla actions emanating from Syria by threatening, “We may well have to act against centers of aggression and those who encourage it.” For this bellicose outburst he was dressed down so severely by David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s iconic first prime minister who was still active although he had been succeeded in office by Eshkol, that Rabin apparently had a brief nervous breakdown.
While urging Israeli patience, Washington and London decried Egypt’s action against freedom of navigation. Hoping to forestall a military response by Israel, they floated plans to organize an international flotilla to break the blockade. Although other governments agreed that freedom of the seas should be affirmed, few if any were willing to send ships into a potentially violent showdown. U.S. President Lyndon Johnson was strongly sympathetic to Israel, but he felt constrained by the mounting domestic and international protests against his escalation of the war in Vietnam.
On May 30, King Hussein of Jordan flew to Cairo. Israel’s border with Jordan was by far its most vulnerable, directly abutting Israel’s narrow midsection where most of its people lived. Before, Hussein had always distinguished himself as the most moderate of Arab rulers, the polar opposite of the inflammatory Nasser. In the heat of the moment, however, Hussein calculated that he could not resist the fervor of the “Arab street,” so he opted to go all in. In Cairo he offered obeisance to Nasser and pledged unity against the Zionist enemy, going so far as to place his army under Egyptian command.
The tightening military encirclement of Israel was accompanied by a crescendo of blood-curdling threats. One Arab leader after another promised to “explode Zionist existence,” or to “get rid of the Zionist cancer.”32 Ahmed Shuqairy, head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, vowed: “We will wipe Israel off the face of the map,” adding the memorable fillip, “no Jew will remain alive.”33
With Arab armies mobilized around them, Israeli leaders wanted to strike the first blow, believing that the advantage of surprise could compensate for their disadvantages of size and space. They waited as long as they felt they could for the American/British flotilla to materialize. But, with no sign of progress on that front, they launched their attack the morning of June 5, while claiming disingenuously that the Arabs had fired first. Within hours the Egyptian air force was destroyed, mostly on the ground, and the war’s outcome had been determined.
During the three weeks of the prelude to war, the six days of fighting, and then the period of diplomatic jockeying that followed, Israel enjoyed broad if not unanimous support from the West. Washington and other Western governments were cautious, hoping to forestall the conflict, to bring it to a fast halt if and when the fighting started, and above all to avoid getting drawn directly into it. Still there was little doubt that most of them sympathized with Israel, a position fostered not only by sentiment but by the shrill anti-Western rhetoric of the Arabs and their close identity with the Soviet camp. That link seemed to tighten as the crisis intensified.
Public and elite opinion in the West showed little of the ambivalence or restraint evident in governmental reactions. Memories of the Holocaust, admiration for Israel’s achievements, and its image as a diminutive David menaced by the Arab Goliath combined to create widespread support for the Jewish state.
In America, the Jewish community roused itself as never before. Donations poured in for Israel. Sampling the spirit of the giving, The New York Times offered this snapshot:
“You have got it all now,” said a brief letter containing a check for $25,000. The message was from a professor at the Jewish theological seminary who said he had gladly stripped himself of his worldly goods and sent the proceeds to the . . . Israel emergency fund. The owner of two gas stations . . . turned over the deeds . . . Other Jews walked in with the cash-surrender values of their life insurance policies. Still others, deeply moved by the Arab-Israeli war, sold real estate and securities and sent the money.34
Some donated themselves. During the run up to the war, many American Jewish students departed for Israel, hoping to replace Israeli workers in farms and factories who were mobilized to the front.35 Others joined demonstrations. A rally in New York drew a crowd estimated variously at 45,000 to 125,000; one in Washington, from 7,000 to 35,000.36
A Louis Harris poll showed unsurprisingly that 99 percent of Jews sympathized with Israel. Among Christians, support was strong, too. About half of them said they had no strong feelings or were not sure. But those that did hold clear views were all but unanimously in favor of Israel. Among Protestants the ratio was 41 percent for Israel to 1 percent for the Arabs. Among Catholics it was 39 percent to zero. For Americans altogether, 41 percent sympathized with Israel but only 1 percent with the Arabs.37 A Gallup poll yielded similar results: 55 percent said their sympathies lay with Israel against 4 percent supporting the Arab states. (The rest either answered “neither” or had no opinion.)38
As the crisis deepened a luminous group of intellectuals including Hannah Arendt, Ralph Ellison, Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson, Lionel Trilling, and Robert Penn Warren signed a display ad in The Washington Post. “The issue can be stated with stark simplicity,” it said. “Whether to let Israel perish, or to act to ensure its survival and to secure legality, morality, and peace in the area.”39 A similar declaration, calling on the US government to break the blockade of Aqaba, was placed in The New York Times in the name of more than 3,700 academics.40
Another statement in this vein was issued by a group of prominent Christian religious leaders, including the famous theologian Reinhold Neibuhr and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.41 King was not the only civil rights leader to make himself heard. A Washington pro-Israel rally was addressed by Whitney M. Young, Jr., president of the National Urban League, and Bayard Rustin, the man who had conceived of and organized