“Preparations have already been made,” he said. “We are now ready to confront Israel.”
Israel responded by mobilizing its army reserves, adding to the sense of crisis.
At the United Nations in New York, diplomats expressed worries about the poten-
tial for war, but they were unable or unwilling to do anything to stop it. In Israel,
political leaders formed a national unity government on June 1 to ensure broad back-
ing should war break out; the chief change was a handover of the Defense Ministry
to Moshe Dayan, Israel’s military hero of the Suez crisis and a harsh critic of Prime
Minister Levi Eshkol, who had held the defense portfolio in the previous government.
Despite a U.S. appeal to Israel to hold its fire, the Egyptian military maneuvers and
the hawkish rhetoric of Nasser and other Arab leaders provided Israel the incentive to
strike first: On the morning of June 5, Israeli warplanes attacked airfields in Egypt,
destroying in just three hours nearly three-fourths of that country’s air force and putting
its runways out of service. The Egyptians had expected an attack but were caught off
guard by the timing and the unusual pattern the Israel planes took on their bombing
runs. As it had done in 1956, the Israeli army surged into the Sinai Peninsula in four
directions, easily defeating Egyptian defenders and forcing thousands of soldiers to flee.
On June 5, with the initial attack against Egypt under way, Israeli ground forces
moved into the Jordanian-held West Bank, and the Israeli air force quickly destroyed
Jordan’s small air force. Israel said that it had not planned an attack on its eastern
front, but moved against Jordan nonetheless in response to artillery fire from its ter-
ritory. Before the outbreak of hostilities, Israel had bluntly warned Jordan’s King Hus-
sein to stay out of the conflict if war erupted. Jordan’s artillery attack provided Israel
an opportunity, which it seized.
King Hussein had given temporary command of his army to an Egyptian general.
In the face of the Israeli assault, the overmatched Jordanian army quickly withdrew
from East Jerusalem, and Israeli forces moved into that part of the city early on June
7, completing what had been, from Israel’s perspective, the major unfinished business
from the 1948 war. By that evening, Israel also had captured Nablus, the largest city
on the West Bank, and gained effective control of that territory. According to most
estimates, some 200,000 to 300,000 Palestinian Arabs fled the West Bank or were
pushed out by the Israeli army. Most crossed the river into Jordan.
The third front in the war involved Syria, the country that had staged the most
provocative acts against Israel during the previous two years. The Syrian air force had
met the same fate as those of Egypt and Jordan, also in the early hours of the war on
June 5. Syrian artillery fired at Israeli military and civilian positions for the first four days
of the war, but on the afternoon of June 8, Syria accepted a UN demand for a cease-
fire, apparently hoping to avoid an Israeli ground invasion. With actions against Jordan
complete and those against Egypt nearly so, Israel on June 9 moved its army against heav-
ily fortified Syrian positions on the Golan Heights, a strategic plateau with commanding
views of the Hula and Jordan Valleys in northeastern Israel. As Israeli tanks surged up
the Golan’s steep approaches, Syrian forces responded with defensive fire, but within
hours the government ordered the army to withdraw to positions outside Damascus.
On June 10, Israeli units moved across the heights, encircling several small towns
and capturing Quneitra, the area’s administrative capital, and Mount Hermon, a
9,000-foot mountain with a view of downtown Damascus. This offensive, which
appeared to have Damascus as a target, briefly threatened global repercussions, with
the Soviet Union warning that it would come to Syria’s defense if U.S. pressure failed
96 ARABS AND ISRAELIS