Jerusalem. The Biography

mufti and by 1948. In a sign of the times, Anwar Nusseibeh’s son Sari joined Fatah.
    The Palestinians were losing patience with Hussein. When Governor Nusseibeh refused a royal order, the king sacked him and appointed a Jordanian in his place. In September 1965, following in his grandfather’s footsteps, Hussein secretly met the Israeli foreign minister, Golda Meir,who suggested that one day ‘we could put aside arms and create a monument in Jerusalem that would signify peace between us’. 27
    When Ben-Gurion retired as prime minister in 1963, his successor was the sixty-eight-year-old Levi Eshkol, born near Kiev, a bespectacled plodder whose chief achievement had been founding the Israeli water utility: he was no Ben-Gurion. In early 1967, Syrian attacks on northern Israel led to a dogfight in which the Syrian air force was decimated over Damascus. Syria backed more Palestinian raids into Israel. *
    The Soviet Union warned Nasser – wrongly as it turned out – that Israel planned to attack Syria. It is still unclear why Moscow pushed this false intelligence and why Nasser chose to believe it when he had weeks to verify or disprove it. For all the strength of Egypt, his own charisma and the popularity of pan-Arabism, Nasser had been humiliated by Israeli reprisal raids and exposed by Syrian brinkmanship. He moved his troops into the peninsula to show that he would not tolerate an attack on Syria.
    On 15 May, an anxious Eshkol and his chief of staff, General Rabin, met at the King David in Jerusalem before the Independence Day parade: how should they react to Nasser’s threats? The next day, Egypt asked the UN to remove its peacekeepers from Sinai. Nasser probably hoped to escalate the crisis while yet avoiding war. If so, his actions were either hopelessly clumsy or reckless. As the Arab leadership and the crowds on the street hailed the coming extermination of the Jewish state, Eshkol dithered nervously. A crisis of foreboding and existential fear swept over Israel, which had lost the initiative to Nasser. Surviving on coffee, chain-smoking seventy cigarettes a day, aware that the survival of Israel rested on his shoulders, General Rabin started to crack up.
    RABIN: THE BREAKDOWN BEFORE BATTLE
     
    Nasser called the odds as he convened his Cabinet and closely questioned his vice-president and military supremo, Field-Marshal Abdel-Hakim al-Amer, a deluded, drug-taking bon vivant, who remained the president’s oldest friend.
    NASSER: ‘Now with our concentrations in Sinai the chances of war are 50–50. If we close the Strait of Tiran, war will be 100 per cent. Are the armed forces ready, Abdel Hakim (Amer)?’
    AMER: ‘On my own head be it, Boss! Everything’s in tiptop shape.’
    On 23 May, Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran, the seaway to Israel’s key port of Eilat. Syria mobilized for war. King Hussein reviewed his forces. Rabin and the generals advised Eshkol to launch a pre-emptive strike against Egypt or face annihilation. But Eshkol refused until he had exhausted all political options: his foreign minister Abba Eban carried out painstaking diplomacy to prevent war – or win support if it came. Yet Rabin was tormented by guilt that he had not done enough to save Israel: ‘I had the feeling, rightly or wrongly, that I had to carry everything on my own. I had sunk into a profound crisis. I had eaten almost nothing for almost nine days, hadn’t slept, was smoking nonstop and was physically exhausted.’
    With its drifting prime minister, its chief of staff under sedation, its generals on the verge of mutiny and the nation itself in panic, there was nothing fake about Israel’s trauma. In Washington, President L. B. Johnson refused to back any Israeli strike; in Moscow, Premier Alexei Kosygin strongly advised Nasser to pull back from war. In Cairo, Field Marshal Amer, boasting that ‘This time we’ll be the ones to start the war,’ prepared to attack the Negev. Just in time, Nasser ordered Amer to hold back.
    In Amman, King Hussein felt he had little choice but to join Nasser: if Egypt attacked, he had to support his Arab brother; otherwise, if Egypt lost, he would be regarded as a traitor. On 30 May, Hussein, wearing a field marshal’s uniform and packing a .357 Magnum, piloted his own plane to Cairo where he was met by Nasser. ‘Since your visit is a secret,’ said Nasser, towering over the diminutive king, ‘what would happen if we arrested you?’ ‘The possibility never crossed my