Some Israeli leaders do sometimes tell the truth
On Friday 2 June, Dayan’s second day as defence minister, the beach and streets of Tel Aviv (where many foreign correspondents were based in two hotels) were suddenly alive with soldiers returned from the frontlines. They were swimming, playing on the beach, strolling and drinking in the pavement cafes of Dizzengorf Street. This was evidence – even proof – that Israel was not, after all, going to war. Contrary to expectations, Dayan was standing down the IDF. Now that he had the prime responsibility for Israel’s security, he wanted to be seen to be giving diplomacy a chance. The two weeks of waiting since Nasser had closed the Straits of Tiran were ending with an anticlimax. Message: no war. Somehow the dovish Eshkol had finally got his way. Or so it seemed.
Most foreign correspondents were fooled. Some called for their bills and, after filing their “No war” stories, booked the first available flights out of Israel. Other battlefields were calling.
There were two reasons why I believed that the recall of many Israeli soldiers from their frontline positions was a brilliant Dayan deception strategy.
The first was the comment Dayan himself made to me. Because I had a source with highest level access to Israel’s military and other security services I was aware two days before it happened that Dayan was going to be imposed on Eshkol. The day before his appointment I door-stepped him with my ITN camera crew. If I had asked him if war was coming, he would have ignored me and walked on without saying a word. So I settled for “What do you think the future holds?”
He stopped, gave me a big smile and made a gesture with the index finger of his right hand which supported his words. His reply was, “The desert is beckoning.”
I said to myself and then my ITN crew, “That means war is very close.”
That judgement was confirmed in my own mind by what I witnessed when just before midnight on Saturday 3 June I took a stroll through one of central Tel Aviv’s main residential areas. The following is what I saw.
Away from the lights of the empty, quiet streets, blacked out, single-decker buses were strategically parked. The only sign of life in one was the glow of a driver’s cigarette. Then, as though on cue, and actually following the script Dayan had written, apartment doors opened. The last hugs and kisses had obviously taken place inside. There were no goodbyes in the doorways. Just a quick burst of interior light as each door was opened and quickly shut again. Silently, in ones and twos, like ghosts, the soldiers who had come home on Thursday were returning to their frontline positions. As they neared their assigned buses, the ones and twos became groups. And they spoke not a word to each other. My “Shaloms” drew no response.
The following afternoon, Sunday 4 June, I sat at my typewriter in our suite on top of the Dan Hotel and composed a 40-second voice piece for ITN’s main evening bulletin. I had to keep my story short because it was only a reporter’s think-piece, speculation, and the Sunday evening bulletin was less than eight minutes including opening and closing titles and music. Forty seconds meant that I had only 120 words – three per second – to tell the story. My intro was: “For some reasons I can report, for others I cannot, I think the war is going to start tomorrow morning.” And I signed off: “Alan Hart, ITN, Tel Aviv, on the eve of war.”
I didn’t think the military censor would let me say “Israel is going to war tomorrow morning”, but since I was in Israel, that was my meaning, obviously.
The censor’s office was in a building close to the Ministry of Defence. In the late afternoons for the past two weeks it had been a madhouse as scores of foreign correspondents scrambled to get their copy cleared to beat deadlines around the world. There was never any point in losing one’s cool with Israeli military censors. Even if you thought their decisions were bizarre or stupid. But that didn’t stop many reporters from shouting and screaming at them. On this particular afternoon there were no other reporters around – no war, no reporters – and there was only one censor instead of the usual three or four on duty.
He was a full colonel. He was sitting behind a post-office-like counter checking the Hebrew copy for Monday’s Israeli newspapers. He didn’t acknowledge my arrival or my greeting. He didn’t look up. He merely raised his hand to take my copy. He read it, stamped it, signed it and handed it back to me. Approved. No deletions. I was amazed. I said, “You’re sure I can broadcast this without getting in trouble with your superiors?”
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