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By Root 917 0

no conception of precision, thoroughness of preparation, the obligations of leadership, or of the Israelis’ favorite tenet, “execution of mission.” When over a thousand years ago Arab conquerors swept triumphantly across North Africa, they were fighting with their own weapons in their own tradition. Today, lacking the Israelis’ capacity to create their own armed forces, they are trying to operate in others’ terms. An Egyptian manual picked up in the desert still illustrates drill with drawings of flat-faced smiling Occidentals obviously taken from some British manual circa 1930. Jordan’s army is a British creation. Syrian Artillery listened to instructions in Russian. Egyptians were more dazed than aided by their Russian equipment. They fired not one—or possibly only one—missile from the twenty-odd SAM sites provided for them by the Russians. Their fighter pilots flew Migs, but could not successfully fight in them. Their rocket crews lacked the accuracy to fire surface-to-surface missiles lest, aiming at Tel Aviv, they might leave Beirut in ruins. On the whole, as Nasser suspected, they are not yet fully capable of modern warfare. Nevertheless their numbers, combined with Russian alliance, remain overwhelming and dangerous, and the Israeli command knows it can never succumb to the mood that says, “The Arabs have surrounded us again, the poor bastards.”

Where the Israelis depend on mobility and penetration, the Arabs fight best from fortified positions. Scores of their Soviet heavy tanks were dug in for use as stationary artillery. They were captives of their wealth in manpower and armament. The Soviet-designed system, based on bands of entrenched positions and deep bunkers backed up to a depth of several kilometers, required enormous manpower to construct. “That’s for the rich,” say the Israelis. For all the Arabs’ deep resentment of the intruders in their world, and for all their prewar threats and engineered orgies of hate, their cause against Israel is not for them a matter of life or death, and once they lost air cover they could neither advance nor hold their ground.

The Russians misjudged Arab capabilities—and Israel’s as well—perhaps because they are materialists, disinclined to give weight to imponderables. They ask scornfully, but doubtless in honest bewilderment, “How many divisions has the Pope?” The iron mass of armament they bestowed upon their clients, Migs, tanks, missile sites, rockets, anti-aircraft guns, half-tracks, tons and tons of other arms and ammunition, must have seemed to them certain to be decisive. They may have been misled too by customarily thinking of the Jews with contempt as victimized second-class citizens. They failed to recognize that the Israelis indeed possessed a secret weapon—a homeland.

A final component of the IDF’s capacity was the civil population—its other self. The outpouring of help, solicitude, and love in the form of letter-writing, home-baked cakes, sunburn cream, and other ministrations was phenomenal. The Israeli Air Force may have at this moment the finest combat fliers in the world, and the Israeli soldier may be the toughest fighter, but the campaign had its Jewish-mother aspect nevertheless. In Jerusalem a volunteer women’s organization came into being during the “tension,” starting from one soldier’s call home for mosquito repellent for his company. A campaign of collections from pharmacies, drug companies, and private homes, assembled and distributed by volunteers in their own cars, jumping Army bureaucracy, succeeded in getting eight thousand units to the soldiers within five hours.

From that moment there was no stopping them. Gripped by the national danger and a sense of the country facing its ultimate test of existence, everyone wanted to give something. Within three days the Jerusalem women’s group had 450 volunteers registered and card-indexed according to the kind of contribution each was prepared to make. Some served as baby-sitters where a wife was filling an absent husband’s job, some as messengers to take news of casualties to families. Some drove out