Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [102]
The impetus and force that carried the Israelis forward through the six days cannot be understood separately from the period of crisis that preceded. The “tension,” as they call it, was the worst time, everyone agrees. The people at large, not sharing the high command’s exact knowledge of its own capacity, felt the enemy closing in. With Egyptian armor massing, the radios of Cairo, Damascus, and Amman bellowing annihilation, they saw the specter of genocide again. They knew they would have to fight alone if they fought at all. One by one the nations had dropped away from the proposed maritime armada to force the Gulf of Aqaba. The experience was familiar. Britain had closed the doors of Palestine to Jews seeking escape from Hitler. The U.N. after voting partition had left them to Arab attack, embargoing arms. The assurances of 1956 had not been honored. World indifference, they felt, was now repeating itself, leaving them to another “final solution.” The Nazi program to wipe out the Jews is never out of mind in Israel, and they lived with the knowledge that the Arabs who have adapted it to their purposes were now gathering for the attempt.
Alongside the fear and depression of some, a more resolute mood possessed others, a feeling that they had had enough of Arab belligerence, threats, sabotage, terrorists, and diversion of water, that this time they must make a thorough job of it. They had reached, in General Rabin’s words, “an accumulated frustration, because everybody felt that we had tried every way to avoid war but that now it was forced on us.”
For the high command the period of waiting was “agony,” for with each day that it was prolonged their war casualties would be that much greater. As compared with 1956, so they believed, they would be entering war at a greater disadvantage: This time the bulk of Egyptian force was already east of the Canal zone, with an enormous quantity of modern weapons and ten years of Soviet training they had lacked before. Israel would be advancing against them alone with no allies to pin down enemy planes; in addition it would be fighting on two, possibly three fronts instead of only in Sinai. Yet the alternative—acceptance of the blockade—would have been intolerable: “We would have been buried alive,” as one officer said. The decision had to be taken, for the choice, as summed up by the same man, was clear: “Not to be strong was to be smashed like a worm.” Held in restless waiting for three weeks, the IDF shot forward as if released by a spring.
Its spearhead was the Air Force, which established the conditions of victory—Air Chief General Mordecai Hod prefers to say “won the war,” but that seems unfair to the ground forces—in eighty minutes. “We planned and trained eighteen years for those eighty minutes,” he says, sparkling with pride. As commander of a performance of spectacular brilliance and sensational success, he cannot hold in his delight. A smile quivers in his eyes and on his mouth as he talks, and breaks easily into a grin. He is brimming with happiness. Before succeeding to the command, Hod was for five years deputy commander under his no less exuberant predecessor, Ezer Weizmann, and they are much alike in style. Weizmann, nephew of Israel’s first President, was born in Tel Aviv and Hod in Israel’s oldest kibbutz, Degania A in the Galilee. At forty, he still flies every week with one of his squadrons, feeling that he must be able to do himself whatever he demands of them. It gives confidence in their orders to the fighter pilots, who start training at eighteen and whose average age is twenty-two to twenty-three.
The Air Force convinced its colleagues that though Israel might stand off the enemy, it could not win without air superiority. To create the perfect and infallible instrument for this purpose was the goal of Hod and Weizmann. Appointed to command the Air Force at thirty-four in 1958, Weizmann describes the following eight years until shifted