Free Six Days by Jeremy Bowen

International airport, the official welcoming party was swamped by a big crowd that rushed on to the tarmac, chanting slogans welcoming U Thant and glorifying Nasser. The press corps broke out of their pen to join them. The fastidious General Rikhye saw Mahmoud Riad, the Egyptian foreign minister, fighting his way over to them ‘through sweaty, heaving, arm-flinging bodies’.
    On the evening of 24 May U Thant and General Rikhye had dinner with Nasser at his villa in the Cairo military cantonment. Nasser had lived there since the early 1950s, when he was a lieutenant-colonel plotting to seize power. It was still the same relatively modest house, with an extension added to one side to give him an office and formal reception rooms. The UN delegation was received in a room furnished with golden chairs and sofas in the style of Louis XIV that was very popular among Cairo’s middle classes. Nasser deployed all of his considerable charm. Disarmingly, he explained he had to close the straits before the secretary general reached Cairo because he knew U Thant was coming to ask him to keep them open. Personally, he did not want war. Egypt just wanted to get back what it lost in 1956, when it was the victim of British, French and Israeli aggression. He did not believe American assurances that Israel would not attack Syria. The CIA were out to kill him, and anyway they were saying something very similar just before Israel attacked Egypt in 1956.
    Nasser led them past walls full of family photographs to the dining room. While they were eating he conceded that there was ‘some foolhardy bravado’ in the lower ranks of the army. At the senior level they were realistic. Egypt had been defeated in 1956. It was not a long time ago. But the army, if necessary, would do its job. He offered U Thant the same promise he had made to the Soviets and the Americans. Egypt would not fire the first shot. But if they were attacked, they would defend themselves. Back at his suite at the Nile Hilton, overlooking Egypt’s great, broad river and the lights of the capital, U Thant sat down with his advisers. Unless there was a way round the blockade, war was inevitable.
    General Yariv, head of Israeli military intelligence, telephoned Rabin in the small hours on the morning of 23 May to tell him that Nasser had reimposed the blockade of Eilat. Rabin felt sick with worry. The morning papers had the story. Any idea that Nasser’s actions were a charade had disappeared. The popular newspaper Maariv compared Nasser to Hitler and said he had declared war. For Yediot Aharonot, the other mass-circulation daily, the ‘decisive day’ had come, and just as they had done at Munich in 1938 when Hitler threatened Czechoslovakia, ‘the great powers are abandoning those who are considered weak and are encouraging those who are considered strong’.
    Rabin and responsibility
    The day after Nasser closed the straits, Eshkol and the cabinet ordered a full mobilisation of Israeli forces. Israel was on a direct line to war. Mobilisation was a well-rehearsed procedure. In 48 hours 250,000 men could be put into the field. When an Israeli soldier completes his compulsory military service, he is allocated to a reserve unit. They exist only on paper, until they are called up for their annual training or for war. Mobilisation started with phone calls to the commanders of the most important units. One of them, a lawyer in civilian life, reported for duty with his private secretary and driver and ‘within ninety minutes was busy getting his brigade out of the card index and into the field’. The message passed down the line to officers who called NCOs, who called the soldiers. Cars or lorries went from door to door to pick them up. Other units were called up by code words that were broadcast on the radio. The Israeli writer Abba Kovner, who led the revolt of the Jews in the Vilna ghetto in Poland in the Second World War, watched it