The military mobilization in Egypt provoked a deep crisis in Israel. The Israeli public, increasingly fearful of encirclement by Arab enemies, looked to their government for reassurance—and grew yet more anxious. Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol wanted to exhaust all diplomatic means before risking all-out war. His generals, headed by chief of staff Yitzhak Rabin, disagreed. They were confident they could prevail over each of the Arab armies if they acted quickly, before their adversaries could establish secure positions and coordinate a plan of attack. Cabinet meetings grew increasingly divided. Eshkol feared entering a three-front war with Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Even the hawkish former premier, David Ben-Gurion, now retired, expressed reservations to Rabin over his mobilization for war. “You have led the state into a grave situation,” he admonished Rabin. “We must not go to war. We are isolated. You bear the responsibility.”²² The two weeks between the closure of the Strait of Tiran and the outbreak of war were a period of great tension, known as the “waiting period” in Israel. The Israeli public feared for the very existence of their state and had no confidence in their prime minister, whom they saw as indecisive. The turning point came at the end of May. Isolated within his own coalition government, Eshkol was forced to bring the belligerent retired general Moshe Dayan into his cabinet as defense minister. Dayan’s entry into the government tipped the scales in favor of the war party. With reassurances from the United States that it would stand by Israel in the event of war, the Israeli cabinet met on June 4 and made the decision to go to war. The generals swung into immediate action. At 8:00 A.M. on June 5, 1967, an early-warning radar station in ’Ajlun, Jordan, detected waves of aircraft setting off from Israeli air bases and heading to the south-west. The Jordanian operator immediately broadcast a warning to the Egyptian air defense operations center in Cairo and to the Egyptian Ministry of War. His warning fell on deaf ears. The corporal on duty in the main receiving station had set his radio to the wrong station, and the duty officer in the ministry failed to inform the minister. Israel went to war with the advantage of total surprise. While waves of Israeli bombers were heading toward Egyptian airspace, the commander in chief of Egyptian forces, Field Marshal Amer, was in a transport plane with several senior officers, flying to the Sinai to review air force and infantry positions. The head of the advanced command center in Sinai, General Abd al-Muhsin Murtagi, was waiting on the ground at Tamada Air Base to receive the Egyptian military’s top brass. “At forty-five minutes past eight,” he recalled, “Israeli planes attacked the airport, destroying all aircraft and bombing runways to render them inoperational.” Incapable of landing, Amer’s plane was forced to return to Cairo, as all of the Sinai air bases were under simultaneous attack.²³ At exactly the same time, Vice President Husayn al-Shaf ‘i of Egypt was taking the Iraqi prime minister, Tahir Yahya, on a tour of the Suez Canal Zone. They touched down in the Fayed airport at 8:45, just as the first wave of Israeli planes attacked. “Our plane was able to land,” Shaf ’i wrote,and two bombs exploded nearby. We came down, scattered, taking shelter on the ground, and watched events unfold minute by minute. Enemy planes came at ten- to fifteen-minute intervals in groups of three to four planes, targeting specifically the planes which stood motionless on the ground, their wings touching each other as though carefully arranged to be destroyed in the shortest time possible, with no effort or trouble. Every sortie ended with one or two planes going up in flames.²⁴

As the delegation made its way back to Cairo by car, columns of smoke were seen rising above each of the air bases it passed. In less than three hours the Israeli air force had achieved air supremacy over Egypt, eliminating all of its bombers and 85 percent of its fighter aircraft, and inflicting such damage on radar systems and runways as to prevent other aircraft from using Egyptian airspace. Indeed, Nasser requested that the Algerian government lend its MiGs to his air force before he realized that the extent of the damage to Egypt’s air bases prevented their deployment. With the Egyptian air force out of commission, the Israelis went to work next on Jordan and Syria. King Hussein had put his armed forces under Egyptian command in keeping with the defense agreement he had concluded with Nasser six days earlier. The Egyptian commander now ordered Jordanian artillery and the Jordanian air force to attack Israeli air bases. The small Jordanian air force had made its first sorties and returned to base to refuel when it was struck by Israeli jets shortly after noon. In two waves, the Israelis eliminated the entire Jordanian air force—planes, runways, and bases. They turned next to attack the Syrians, eliminating two-thirds of Syria’s air force in the course of the afternoon. Once they had achieved control of the skies, the Israelis dispatched their ground forces in a bid to eliminate their Arab adversaries—Egypt, Jordan, and Syria—in quick succession so as to avoid fighting on more than one front at a time. They began in the Sinai, deploying some 70,000 infantry and 700 tanks against a total Egyptian force of 100,000 in the Sinai. After intensive fighting on June 5, the Israelis had captured large parts of the Gaza Strip, broken through Egyptian lines on the Mediterranean coast, and seized the strategic crossroads of Abu ’Uwigla in eastern Sinai by nightfall. The Egyptians fought back. The next morning the Egyptian commanders ordered one of their armored divisions to retake Abu ’Uwigla. General El-Gamasy was a witness. “I saw one of our armoured brigades under attack. It was heartbreaking. The Israeli planes had complete freedom of the skies. The tanks were moving across open desert in daylight, which made them easy targets with no effective means of defense.” ²⁵ By afternoon, the Egyptian assault was abandoned. Field Marshal Amer, without consulting his officers on the ground, gave orders for a general retreat from the Sinai to regroup his forces on the west bank of the Suez Canal. Disorganized and uncoordinated, this retreat turned Egypt’s defeat into a rout. El-Gamasy recalled watching the troops “withdraw in the most pathetic way . . . under continuous enemy air attacks, which had turned the Mitla Pass into an enormous graveyard of scattered corpses, burning equipment, and exploding ammunition.”²⁶ Now that Egypt’s military had been neutralized, the Israelis turned to the Jordanian front. After the successful air strikes of June 5, the Israelis used their air supremacy to good effect, bombing the Jordanian armored units that had mounted a serious defense of the West Bank. Concerted Israeli attacks on Jordanian positions in Jerusalem and Jenin continued through the night before the air force could resume its strikes at dawn. By June 6 the Jordanian ground forces were besieged in the Old City of Jerusalem and on the retreat from Jenin. King Hussein went to the front to assess the situation for himself. “I will never forget the hallucinating sight of that defeat. Roads clogged with trucks, jeeps, and all kinds of vehicles twisted, disembowelled, dented, still smoking,” he recalled. “In the midst of this charnel house were men. In groups of thirty or two, wounded, exhausted, they were trying to clear a path under the monstrous coup de grace being dealt them by a horde of Israeli Mirages screaming in a cloudless blue sky seared with sun.?²⁷ Hussein continued to hold out, both to avoid incrimination from his fellow Arabs for breaking ranks and in hopes of a UN cease-fire, which might save his position in Jerusalem and the West Bank. But the cease-fire came too late for Jordan. The Old City of Jerusalem fell on the morning of June 7, and Jordanian positions in the rest of the West Bank crumbled before the Israelis agreed to a cease-fire with the Jordanians. Syria and Egypt agreed to a cease-fire with Israel on June 8, but the Israelis pressed their advantage and attacked Syria, occupying the Golan Heights, before bringing the Six Day War to an end on June 10, 1967.