Half Past Ten in the Afternoon by Budd James

Author:Budd, James
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Casemate Publishers & Book Distributors, LLC
Published: 2014-06-22T16:00:00+00:00

The following month an Israeli patrol boat ran aground on the demilitarized eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee. The boat was clearly in violation of the 1949 ceasefire agreement, the Syrian air force attacked it and two Syrian planes were shot down in the ensuing battle.

Although relations between Egypt and Syria had been poor since Syria pulled out of the union with Egypt in 1961, in 1966 the two countries signed a defence pact in response to the rising tension. The main purpose of this was to protect Syria from a large-scale Israeli military attack while at the same time – from Egypt’s point of view – restraining Syria from overreacting to any future Israeli provocation.

On the Jordanian front, three Israeli policemen were killed in the autumn of 1966 when their border patrol vehicle drove over a land mine planted by Palestinian guerrillas. Fearing Israeli retaliation, King Hussein sent a letter of condolence to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol via the American embassy in Amman, but to no avail. Supported by air cover, two Israeli raiding parties comprising eleven tanks, sixty armoured half-tracks and several hundred soldiers crossed into the West Bank, destroyed a Jordanian police station and moved on to the village of Samu where they began dynamiting the houses. While they were doing this, a Jordanian force approached and was ambushed by the Israelis. In the ensuing battle fifteen Jordanians were killed, over fifty were wounded and a Jordanian fighter plane was shot down. Three local civilians were also killed and nearly a hundred were wounded. Israel lost one dead (the leader of the ambush) and ten of its men were wounded.

The incident had a seriously destabilizing effect on Jordan. Tension between the Jordanian government and the country’s Palestinian population was already high following Jordan’s suspension of relations with the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) in July 1966 in reaction to the PLO’s support for West-Bank-based cross-border guerrilla operations against Israel. The PLO had been set up under the Arab League’s auspices in 1964 and its leader, Ahmed Shuqeiri, enjoyed close relations with Syria and Egypt, and after Israel’s Samu incursion there were riots in the West Bank and demands for King Hussein’s overthrow because of what was seen as his failure to protect his own people. The radio stations in Egypt and Syria attacked the king, accusing him of collaborating with the CIA to overthrow the Syrian government.

While Jordan’s relations with Egypt and Syria continued to deteriorate through the winter of 1966–67, clashes also continued sporadically along the Israeli–Syrian border. Then in April 1967, when Syria reacted to a more than usually blatant Israeli encroachment on the demilitarized zone, the Israelis launched a massive attack, shooting down six Syrian MIGs, hitting thirty fortified positions and killing around a hundred people. Their attack was followed up with harsh words, and in early May General Yitzak Rabin threatened to march on Damascus and overthrow the government. On 8 May two Syrian officials arrived in Cairo and told the Egyptians that

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