Six Days of War Quotes

“Employ hindsight but humbly, remembering that life and death decisions are made by leaders in real-time, and not by historians in retrospect.”
― Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“The USSR indeed had nothing more to gain from Zionism—the British empire was dying—and everything to gain in terms of placating the new, post-colonial governments, securing its vulnerable southern border, and threatening the West’s oil supplies.”
― Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“It is rather like arguing with an Irishman,” wrote Michael Hadow of his many conversations with Dayan. “He enjoys knocking down ideas just for the sake of argument and one will find him arguing in completely opposite directions on consecutive days.” Indeed, Dayan was a classic man of contradictions: famed as a warrior, he professed deep respect for the Arabs, including those who attacked his village, Nahalal, in the early 1930s, and who once beat him and left him for dead. A poet, a writer of children’s stories, he admitted publicly that he regretted having children, and was a renowned philanderer as well. A lover of the land who made a hobby of plundering it, he had amassed a huge personal collection of antiquities. A stickler for military discipline, he was prone to show contempt for the law. As one former classmate remembered, “He was a liar, a braggart, a schemer, and a prima donna—and in spite of that, the object of deep admiration.” Equally contrasting were the opinions about him. Devotees such as Meir Amit found him “original, daring, substantive, focused,” a commander who “radiated authority and leadership [with] … outstanding instincts that always hit the mark.” But many others, among them Gideon Rafael, saw another side of him: “Rocking the boat is his favorite tactic, not to overturn it, but to sway it sufficiently for the helmsman to lose his grip or for some of its unwanted passengers to fall overboard.” In private, Eshkol referred to Dayan as Abu Jildi, a scurrilous one-eyed Arab bandit.”
― Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“welcoming”
― Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“The Arabs always seem to accept yesterday’s formulations too late,”
― Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“The second Arab-Israeli war, known in Israel as the Sinai Campaign, and among the Arabs as the Tripartite Aggression, began in the afternoon of October 29th. Israeli paratroopers landed in the Mitla Pass, twenty-four miles east of the Canal. With the pretext established, the Powers issued their ultimatum which the Egyptians, as expected, rebuffed. Dayan’s armored columns, meanwhile, broke through the Egyptian lines in central and southern Sinai and rolled through Egyptian-occupied Gaza. General Muhammad ‘Abd al-Hakim ‘Amer, the Egyptian commander-in-chief, panicked and ordered his troops to retreat. Israel’s victory was swift—too swift, in fact, for Britain and France. The Anglo-French armada dallied at sea, while French and British leaders wavered under international pressure. Not until November 4 did the invasion commence, by which time the Egyptians could claim they had never been driven from Sinai but had rather retreated tactically in order to defend their homes.”
― Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“Not present at Supreme Headquarters when the news of the Israeli air strikes arrived, Nasser also welcomed the opening of hostilities and believed the tide would soon turn. Nevertheless, by 10:00—the height of the second wave—when the air force claimed to have downed 161 Israeli bombers, Nasser became suspicious. He tried contacting ‘Amer, but received no reply; Sidqi Mahmud was also unreachable. One of the few men who would have told him the truth, Anwar Sadat, had secluded himself at home. Entering headquarters at 11:00, Sadat heard from Soviet ambassador Pojidaev and from other senior officers of the full extent of Egypt’s disaster. “I just went home and stayed in for days,” he wrote, unable to watch the “crowds…chanting, dancing, and applauding the faked-up victory reports which our mass media put out hourly.”
― Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“He promptly commanded Sidqi Mahmud to provide air cover for the conquest of Israel’s coast (Operation Leopard) and to deploy Egypt’s newest Sukhoi jets, if necessary with their Russian instructors. ‘Amer then called Damascus and Baghdad and requested that they execute Operation Rashid—the bombing of Israeli airfields—at once. The Iraqis consented, but then complained of “technical delays.” The Syrians claimed that their planes were presently engaged in a training exercise. Such disappointments did little to dampen the mood in Egypt’s Supreme Headquarters which seemed to the Soviet attaché S. Tarasenko, “tranquil, almost indifferent, the officers merely listening to the radio and drinking coffee.” Throughout the capital, however, the citizenry was celebrating. “The streets were overflowing with demonstrators,” remembered Eric Rouleau, Middle East correspondent for Le Monde. “Anti-aircraft guns were firing. Hundreds of thousands of people were chanting, ‘Down with Israel! We will win the war!’” But Rouleau, together with other foreign journalists, was not allowed near the front. All international phone lines were cut. The sole source of information was the government’s communiqué: “With an aerial strike against Cairo and across the UAR, Israel began its attack today at 9:00. Our planes scrambled and held off the attack.”
― Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“Surrounded by what Sidqi Mahmud called “a forest of Israelis jets,” ‘Amer’s plane could not land at all. It circled from base to burning base for nearly ninety minutes before touching down at Cairo’s International Airport. There, Col. Muhammad Ayyub, ‘Amer’s air force liaison officer, was waiting with a drawn pistol, convinced that a coup had been staged against his boss. “You want to murder him, you dogs!” Ayyub shouted as the other officers present also pulled out their guns. Sidqi Mahmud stepped between them, though, averting a firefight. “Fools,” he scolded them, “put your guns away! Israel is attacking us!”
― Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“The Egyptian air force has ceased to exist.”6 As the picture of the battlefield became clear in Israel, in Egypt and the rest of the Arab world it grew deeply obfuscated. Officers at the ravaged air bases were aware that a terrible tragedy had transpired. The pilot Hashem Mustafa Husayn, stationed at Bir al-Thamada, described the feeling: Some 30 seconds from the end of the [first] attack, a second wave of planes arrived…We ran about the desert, looking for cover, but the planes didn’t shoot. They merely circled, their pilots surprised that the base was completely destroyed and that no targets remained. We were the only targets…weak humans scurrying in the desert with handguns as our only means of self-defense. It was a sad comedy…pilots of the newest and best-equipped jets fighting with handguns. Five minutes after the beginning of the attack the [Israeli] planes disappeared and a silence prevailed that encompassed the desert and the noise of the fire that destroyed our planes and the airbase and the squadron. They completed their assignment in the best way possible, with a ratio of losses-100 percent for us, 0 percent for them.”
― Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“his strongest desire was to return to farming, but Weizman had insisted that Hod replace him as air force chief early in 1966. Since then, he had concentrated on refining Focus, reducing the turnaround time for refueling and rearming jets to less than eight minutes. The Egyptian turnaround rate, by comparison, was eight hours. “He may not be able to quote [the Hebrew poet] Bialik or Shakespeare,” Weizman said of Hod, “but he will screw the Arabs in plain Hebrew.”
― Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“But even if those messages could have been read, Badran was not present to read them. The defense minister had gone to bed only a few hours before, leaving strict orders not to be disturbed. Similarly absent were Col. Mas’ud al-Junaydi, in charge of decoding, and Air Operations Chief General Gamal ‘Afifi. At his subsequent trial for incompetence, ‘Afifi claimed, “I was out of the army for ten years before that, and less than six months in that job. Thank God I wasn’t there, for the man who was at least knew who to call and what to do. Had I been there, the situation would have been much worse.” Air force intelligence also reported extensively on the Israeli attack, but the officers at Supreme Headquarters, devoted to ‘Amer and distrustful of Nasser loyalists in the air force, ignored them.2”
― Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“Whether the army was capable of carrying out such an operation was a question never asked. The officer corps had been repeatedly purged, those ousted replaced by some 2,000 Ba’thist-indoctrinated ‘educators.’ “I worked as a teacher in the staff college,” remembered Ibrahim Isma’il Khahya who, in 1966, became commander of the 8th Infantry Brigade. “My officers were mostly teachers, too. They weren’t ready for war.” The head of intelligence for the Golan district, Col. Nash’at Habash, had been kicked out and replaced by a mere captain, brother of a high-ranking Ba’th official. Ahmad Suweidani, the former military attaché in Beijing, had been boosted from colonel to lieutenant general and chief of staff. Though Syria’s 250 tanks and 250 artillery pieces were generally of more recent vintage than Israel’s, their maintenance was minimal. Supply, too, could be erratic; deprived of food, front-line troops had been known to desert their posts. The air force was particularly substandard. An internal army report rated only 45 percent of Syria’s pilots as “good,” 32 percent as “average,”‘ and the remainder “below average.” Only thirty-four of the forty-two jets at the Dmair and Saiqal airfields were operational. Yet, within the ranks, morale had never been higher. Capt. Muhammad ‘Ammar, an infantry officer serving in the fortress of Tel Fakhr, recalled: “We thought we were stronger, that we could cling to our land, and that the Golan was impenetrable. We were especially heartened by the unity between Syria, Egypt, and Jordan.” Another captain, Marwan Hamdan al-Khuli, heard that “we were much stronger and would defeat the enemy easily.”
― Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“For the mass of Israelis not involved in these power plays, however, the ordeal was all-consuming. Throughout the country, thousands were hurrying to dig trenches, build shelters, and fill sandbags. In Jerusalem, in particular, schools were refitted as bomb shelters, and air raid drills were practiced daily. Most buses and virtually all taxis were mobilized, and an emergency blood drive launched. An urgent request for surgeons—“in view of the tough conditions they must be physically fit and experienced”—was submitted to the Red Cross, and extra units of plasma ordered from abroad. Special committees were placed in charge of gathering essential foodstuffs, for replacing workers called to the front, and for evacuating children to Europe. Upward of 14,000 hospital beds were readied and antidotes stockpiled for poison gas victims, expected to arrive in waves of 200. Some 10,000 graves were dug.15”
― Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“he would be met not only with the united strength of the Arab countries but also with strong opposition from the Soviet Union and all peace-loving peoples.”
― Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“nothing could remedy the country’s woefully chronic ills: a population of 29.5 million growing at 3.5 percent annually, poor (about $140 per capita per year, 40 percent inflation), unhealthy (average male life expectancy thirty-five years), and to a large extent (45 percent) illiterate. Brutal crackdown of dissidents, the arbitrary nationalization of property, a suffocating bureaucracy: This was Egypt in the mid-1960s, a police state. Even the High Dam at Aswan, Nasserism’s grandest symbol, proved toxic, spreading the dreaded bilharzia disease throughout the countryside.46”
― Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“the Egyptian leader let loose: “The American Ambassador says that our behavior is not acceptable. Well, let us tell them that those who do not accept our behavior can go and drink from the sea…We will cut the tongues of anybody who talks badly about us…We are not going to accept gangsterism by cowboys.”45 So ended U.S. aid to Egypt. By 1965, Washington was working sedulously to undermine Cairo’s efforts to reschedule its international debt and to gain credit in world monetary funds. The shipments of American wheat that accounted for 60 percent of all Egyptian bread were suspended. Nasser was convinced that Johnson was out to assassinate him.”
― Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“None of the Western-oriented armies wanted to standardize their arsenals with Soviet arms, and nobody wanted to take orders from Egyptian generals. Except in Egypt, Shuqayri was universally despised and the PLO in constant arrears, as the Arab states uniformly defaulted on their pledges.42”
― Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“Israel owed some measure of its success to the Arabs, to their hostility that helped galvanize an otherwise factious society.”
― Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East