“Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine” By Shmuel Katz .1. The War Before The Six Day War On May 14, 1967, the territorial limits of the State of Israel were the lines agreed upon in her Armistice Agreements of 1949 with Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt. Israel held none of the territories she was to gain as a result of the still undreamed-of war three weeks away. No more vulnerable boundaries could be imagined. Along its middle strip, on the Mediterranean coast, the country was no where more than ten miles wide. Within this narrow waist were crowded the main centers of the Israeli population: Tel Aviv, with its smaller sister towns Ramat Gan and Petah Tiqva to the east, Bat Yam and Holon to the south, Herzliya and Natanya to the north. These formed its main commercial concentrations and most of its industry. Overlooking the strip from the east was the central range of Palestine’s mountains–the mountains of Ephraim–and holding these mountains were the Arabs of the Kingdom of Jordan. This central area of the State of Israel could be raked with shellfire, clear through from border to border, without a single gun having to be moved across the frontier. In the early morning of June 6, 1967, a shell fired from the Arab village of KalkiReh, beyond the northeastern corner of the coastal strip, sailed southwestward through half its length and all its width and exploded half a mile from the Mediterranean beach in an apartment near Masaryk Square in Tel Aviv. In the northeastern section of the state, the Huleh plain, reclaimed from the swamp, dotted with Israel’s green villages, lay flat as a billiard table under the stark overhang of the Golan Heights – and the heights were held by the Arabs of Syria. In the southwestern sector, the Sinai Desert, though almost empty of population, was nevertheless well provided with Egyptian military airfields, within three to ten minutes’ flying time from Israel’s densely populated coastal strip. It was from these frontiers that on June 5, 1967, Israel launched her air force and her army against the Egyptian armed forces, subsequently resisted the invading forces from Jordan and Syria, defeated them all, and gained control of the remainder of western Palestine clear to the Jordan River, of the Golan Heights, and of the Sinai Peninsula – down to the Suez Canal and the Red Sea. It is to those frontiers of June 5, 1967–to be precise, the Armistice lines of 1949–"with minor insubstantial modifications," that Israel has since then been called on to return, even by some of her friends. The pressures suggest that such a withdrawal from Sinai and the Gaza district to the gates of Ashkelon, from Samaria and Judea back to the ten-nine- wide coastal strip – and the restoration to Syria of the Golan Heights above the Huleh Valley will bring peace between Israel and the Arab states. The way to peace, it is implied, lies in restoring the conditions that existed before June 5, 1967. The central fact in the life of Israel in the period before June 5 was that in those restricted and confined and frighteningly fragile frontiers the Arab states threatened, planned, and tried to destroy her. It was against Israel in those borders that on May 14, 1967, the neighboring Arab states – Egypt, and after her Syria and Jordan, with some support from Iraq – began massing their forces and their resources to prepare for an imminent onslaught on Israel from three sides. In simultaneous action, they set in motion all the available means of communication with the world at large to make known Israel’s forthcoming annihilation. Israel saved herself from that threat and that purpose by the only strategy feasible in her topographical circumstances: a preventive attack on the forces of Egypt, the main enemy. Ile battles that followed on three fronts, for all their startling, spectacular, even historic success, cost Israel in six days twice as many dead in proportion to her total population as the United States lost in eight years of fighting in Vietnam. The offensive that took shape in Arab minds and began to emerge in May 1967 was the climax – indeed, the grand finale – of eighteen years of hostilities against Israel on every front except the direct confrontation of the military battlefield. During those eighteen years, the various hostile acts of the Arab states broke every relevant paragraph in the Armistice Agreements of 1949, which all the states had negotiated and signed and which theoretically governed their relations with Israel. Who today remembers a ship called Rimfrost? Or Franca Maria, or Capetan Manolis? Who remembers Inge Toft and Astypatea? The sailors who manned them, no doubt, and the merchants whose cargoes they carried. In the 1950s they, and many others like them, were actors in the drama of the continuing and all-embracing Arab attack on Israel. The Inge Toft, a Danish ship carrying an Israeli cargo of phosphates and cement, was arrested in the Suez Canal in May 1959. She was detained for 262 days, until her owners, despairing of their legal rights, ordered the captain to submit to the demands of the Egyptian authorities. The captain released the cargo, and the Egyptians confiscated it. The Inge Toft sailed back to Haifa with emptied holds. In those 262 days, many protests were made in direct communications to Cairo and in debates in the United Nations Assembly against Egypt’s flagrant violation of international rights and decisions. None had any effect. By sending a Danish ship through the Suez Canal, the Israeli government was in fact retreating from a defense of Israel’s absolute right to send her own ships freelv through the Canal. For eight years, Egypt had forcibly prevented Israeli ships from doing so. International advice – in fact the urgings of the Secretary General of the UN – had prompted Israel’s government to try the compromise of sending an Israeli cargo on a non- Israeli ship. While the imprisoned Inge Toff continued to demonstrate daily that the Egyptian government would not allow an Israeli cargo through even when carried on a non-Israeli vessel, new advice was forthcoming. The Secretary General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskold, informed the Israeli government that he had reason to believe that if, now, on a non-Israeli ship they were to send a non-Israeli cargo that is, an FOB cargo already the property of the non-Israeli buyer – Egyptian President Nasser would show what was described as moderation and allow the ships through the Canal. This proposal was accepted by the Israeli government, which even agreed to keeping the transaction secret. The Inge Toft was thus still in detention when, on December 17, 1959, the Greek vessel Astypalea, carrying an FOB cargo, sailed into the Suez Canal. She was promptly arrested and detained. After four months of international protests, her owners also submitted to the Egyptians’ demands and allowed the cargo to be confiscated. In the tense months of diplomatic and undiplomatic struggle over these ships, most of the world’s maritime powers protested volubly and often. Their own ships, however, continued to sail freely through the Canal. Egypt was thus given daily, even hourly, assurance that, except for name calling, she need fear no reprisals, no punitive or even admonitory action for violating the famous, hitherto sacrosanct and unequivocal Constantinople Convention of 1888. That international compact laid down that: The Suez Maritime Canal shall always be free and open, in time of war as in time of peace, to every vessel of commerce or war, without distinction of flags…. The Canal shall never be subjected to the exercise of the right of blockade. The daily unblushing procession past the imprisoned Inge Toft by ships of members of the United Nations made it plain, moreover, that the resolutions they had themselves passed in the Security Council against such a breach of international law need not be taken too seriously. The Council had passed such a resolution in 1951, when the Egyptians first blockaded the Canal against Israel. It had reaffirmed it in 1954. The resolution called on Egypt "to terminate the restrictions on the passage ‘of international commercial shipping and goods through the Suez Canal wherever found, and to cease all interference with such shipping. The closing of the Suez Canal to Israel was one detail of the economic war which the Arab states pursued with unrelenting ferocity ever since the State of Israel was established. After signing the 1949 Armistice Agreements, in which they forswore "any warlike or hostile acts," they progressively broadened the scope and deepened the intensity of an all-embracing range of economic hostilities. The Arab states tried to starve Israel of water. First they refused to cooperate in an American-sponsored scheme for regional exploitation of the sources of the Jordan. Next they tried by force-employing artillery to interfere with Israel’s own efforts to realize her meager water resources (by diverting that part of the Jordan River that ran within her territory). Indeed, because the water shortage was a built-in weakness of Israel’s economic structure, throughout those years the Arabs saw Israel’s water supply as a prime target for their offensive. The Arab boycott of Israeli goods and services had been launched against the Palestine Jewish community even before the State of Israel was created, and it developed from year to year. In the Arab countries themselves, all commercial relationships with Israel were forbidden on pain of heavy penalties. In fact, any contact whatever with Israel was prohibited.