The Dark Halls of Power
Extract from ‘Miracle: The History of Israel’ by Joel Hagee
From the trendy Ashkenazi in Tel Aviv to the pious Mizraim in Jerusalem, from the Nazi Holocaust survivors in Haifa to the Soviet Holocaust survivors in Amman, the whole of Israel was united to battle the UAR. There was no doubt amongst any of the population that to lose the war would result in national extinction. At the same time, the Israelis had been shocked by the suddenness and scale of the UAR’s attack. After the relatively easy win of the First Arabian War, many Israelis had expected any attack to be easily counteracted. What many failed to realize was that the Arabs of 1948 were not the Arabs of 1956. Not only were their weapons more up to scratch, but they had a unified command structure, standardized equipment and no fear of offending the West. Perhaps most noticeable of all was the difference in the fighters themselves. The Arabs of 48 were the subject of much mockery in Israel for being incompetent and cowardly who broke and scattered at the first sign of trouble. However, the Arabs of 56 consisted primarily of refugees from the Trans-Jordan mandate. Thus, they were vastly more desperate and tenacious than the Arabs of 48, not to mention having been given a more structured command system which helped troops have more autonomy on the field. Not to mention, while Anti-Semitism had always had a hold in the Arab world (like it had in Europe), the Ba’athists had created a pervading, exterminationist culture against Jews throughout their empire. While Kristallnacht was too much for the sensibilities of the Nazi German public, the poorer UAR, whose population had a far more visible and tangible conflict against Jews than the conspiratorial fantasies of the Dolchstoss, was more than willing to entertain public declarations that, “We will drive the Jews to the sea,” and “When this War is over, the only place where you will hear Hebrew is in Hell”. While this fanaticism was less common among Egyptian troops, the troops from the Syria-Iraq area were notorious for never surrendering, suicide attacks with grenades inspired by Japanese Banzai charges in WW2 and their willingness to march in the worst of conditions, all for the sacred purpose of Israel’s annihilation. This would make Arab troops vastly more terrifying to the Israelis than they were in the last war, which would greatly influence the final peace settlement. Many of Israel’s planes were caught on the ground in the first salvo and the modern Soviet jets were certainly no easy targets.
The first action the Israelis took was to pull troops and civilians out of the narrow stretch at the east of her borders where the Saudi and UAR border were only a few dozen miles apart (from Al Qurayat in Saudi Araba to Milh in Syria). This was due to it being at risk of getting encircled easily with Saudi attacks in the south and UAR movements in the north (as the risk was obvious, there were few people there to begin with). Across the country, children were evacuated in the style of British children in WW2, taken to Kibbutzim in the safer centres of the country, such as Jerusalem and Tel Aviv (which is often seen as the catalyst of the resurrection of the Israeli Left in the late 70s). A new defensive line was set up at Azraq Ash Shishan to give the Israelis time to set up a strong defensive front. At the same time, the Egyptians proved much weaker than expected and were easily held in the outskirts of Gaza, allowing more resources to be used elsewhere. The Saudis, after an easy series of conquests in the Gulf, turned their full force against Israel roughly a month into the war, trying to seize Aqaba. However, the Saudis lacked the fanaticism and ferocity needed to quickly win the battle, giving time for the population to cross the Red Sea to Elat. On May 25th, Aqaba was captured and the Saudis moved to try and seize Elat. This time, however, they faced an army that was more than ready for them. Saudi forces were battered as they attempted a land invasion, and were utterly slaughtered when they attempted to invade by the sea a week later. Of course, this was one of the main handicaps of the Israeli states. They were forced to take their whole populations with them as the Arabs advanced, as they knew that their future under either King Saud or Aflaq was non-existent. This severely hampered their ability to quickly respond to the strategic situation and forced the war to extend to its final, destructive conclusion.
Finally, there was the main theatre, which was centered in the northwest, from the Mediterranean to the Golan Heights. This was where the bulk of both the Israeli and UAR forces would meet. From Lebanon, the UAR tried to march around the Sea of Galilee, with another strike to Irbid to flank the Israelis. The Golan Heights were considered too challenging to the UAR, so they endeavored to get around them from both sides. Irbid would prove a particularly savage battleground, with many of the city’s former Arab residents returning under the UAR flag to take what they considered righteous revenge. Despite lopsided casualties, the numbers and fanaticism of the UAR proved decisive, thus leading to the city being seized on June 13th. Ba’athist forces continued to bitterly fight for every village, ultimately reaching the old border between the Jordanian and Palestinian mandate on July 1st, where intense resistance finally brought their forces to a halt. The Lebanese wing had likewise made great advances, putting great fear into the Israelis that their pincer movement would prove successful. However, the UAR was brought to a halt at Tzfat on July 4th, thus keeping the lifeline to the Golan Heights open.
Though they had survived Aflaq’s initial attack, the losses were considered devastating to the Israeli government. Shamir demanded that the government request the Italians to launch chemical weapon attacks on the Arabs, assuming the UAR didn’t have such a program. Ben-Gurion indignantly refused, while Begin secured a compromise that the Israelis would ask the West to increase its bombing campaign over Arabia. To this, the West accepted, likewise alarmed at the extent of the UAR’s conquests in Israel. From Cyprus, the RAF would batter Damascus, Beirut, Homs, Aleppo, Baghdad and Mosul (attacks from South Iran were considered too incendiary to the Cold War). The oilfields would likewise prove a tempting target, but this was naturally where the bulk of Arab air defenses lay. Italy unleashed a devastating campaign across Egypt, bombing Cairo almost nightly. It grew so fierce that Nasser ordered the contents of the national museum to be taken and hidden in a secure space in the desert. Every night, from the quiet of the Pyramids, one could see the fires leap and hear the sirens wail across the capital of Egypt. Far from being scared, however, Nasser was jubilant, expecting that the bombing would help with creating an impenetrable guerilla haven where the Italians could be bled out. He confidently boasted that ‘Cairo shall be our Stalingrad’, which would likely still be a better fate than which she ultimately received.
Extract from ‘The Arab Tragedy: 1944–1956’ by Abdul Nazim
Aflaq’s lightning strike across Latakia and Tartus caught the Turks totally off-guard. Much like the Israelis, they underestimated the cohesion and discipline of the Arabs, paying for it in spades. However, the Turkish population itself had been roused by this humiliation and was eager to ‘put the savages back in their cages’ as one regime newspaper so chillingly put it. The Turks would soon find themselves bolstered by fellow Roman Alliance members and even a German contingent. The Turks tolerated them and didn’t feel like using them extensively. Instead, the expeditionary groups were mainly used to police the border, especially in the more Kurdish-oriented areas to keep the local Kurdish groups quiet. The main fighting was primarily closer to the coast. A successful attack on Ezrin pushed the Turks almost entirely out of the Levant, leading to the evacuation of Antakya, much to the regime’s embarrassment.
At the start of June, the Turkish front soon began to resemble something closer to trench warfare. The UAR’s leadership had no interest in taking Turkish territory outside of retaking Syria’s old borders and wanted to focus their attention on the Israeli front. To that end, it was decided that the best policy was to make the war undesirable for the Turks to continue. This led to the defensive strategy the UAR deployed in the north, forcing the Turks to pay for every bloody mile as they advanced back down their old territory. The front quickly ground to a halt, with attacks in the eastern portion of Turkey held up by the brutal terrain, which slowed the Allies long enough for the UAR to launch counterattacks. It was in this environment that, over the heads of the Turks, secret negotiations began with Kurdish leaders on both sides of the Turkish border. The Ba’athists, after spending years persecuting Kurds, considered announcing their support of a Kurdish state composed of the Kurdish majority sections of southeastern Turkey. Of course, the Kurds knew they would be left out to dry if the war ended in a stalemate, and left to rot if the Allies outright won. That meant the negotiations with the West were more important. Thankfully for Western planners, they had the advantage of having negotiations with the Kurds that had been going on for a while … not that Turkey was aware of them.
Extract from ‘The War that Ended a World’, by Francis Gautman
The first official contact between Kurdish and Israeli intelligence groups was in 1952. To say the least, it was a tough meeting to arrange, given the Totalitarian nature of the Ba’athist state and the fact Turkey would be outraged over any such meeting. Little was agreed except to acknowledge that both sides had a common enemy in the Ba’athists. Aflaq’s Arabisation programs had bulldozed Kurdish culture and left much bitterness among the population. Begin would cautiously let Mussolini know of the move. The Italian was fine with it, given that he was eager for friends to fight the Arabs, his opinion of the British having fallen substantially under the Gaitskell administration. Bizarrely, the Kurds had another partner interested in taking out Aflaq … North Iran. Reza Radmanesh, the head of the Tudeh Party and dictator of North Iran, was mortified of Aflaq and was disgusted at Khrushchev’s reforms away from Stalinism and support of the UAR. He knew that the Kurdish movement in the UAR was primarily Socialistic and used that to his advantage. He gave sanctuary to Kurdish Communists and Socialists, supposedly to stop any ‘embarrassment’ of a Soviet-aligned power arresting Communists (the UAR, after all, being a one-party state). In reality, he was recruiting them for a grand design – to bring down Aflaq. The Mujahedeen of North Iran had been mostly routed by Stalin’s death by a combination of ruthless suppression and divisions in the Jihadi movement following the Israeli seizure of Jerusalem. This allowed North Iran to focus on the new, Arab menace, hopefully creating a Kurdish buffer to stand in the way against Arab incursion, even better a Communist one under partial Iranian influence. Thus, the Kurds were in the unique position of getting aid from both the Democratic/Fascist blocs and a rogue Communist government in North Iran. Khrushchev, distracted by his reforms and picking up the pieces in China, knew nothing of this and was simply happy that the fighting in North Iran had mostly stopped. Soviet money sent off to aid the reconstruction of North Iran was redirected to Kurdish officials hunkering in the Communist satellite, who subsequently used it to plan their return.
The Kurds also made friends with the ‘Cedar Movement’ in Lebanon. Despite their claims to represent all of Lebanon, it was always little more than a front for the Maronite Phalanges Party. The leadership lived in exile in Italy, under the control of Pierre Gemayel, and managed to keep the organization alive through smuggling supplies into Beirut that had been negotiated for with the Roman Alliance. The Cedarists could rely on a significant diaspora of Middle-Class Lebanese who fled when the Ba’athists took power sending in donations, not to mention the strings-firmly-attached charity of the Fascists. For instance, Gemayel had to agree that any Lebanon run by his party would join the Roman Alliance and recognize Israel. He would, of course, ‘govern internal matters with a free hand’, which was the Roman Alliance’s euphemism for state repression and discrimination, their tempting clause that ran in the face of Soviet domination of the Stalingrad Pact and the strict, democratic standards of ITO. As Aflaq was Christian, a sectarian campaign against the Maronites was deemed impossible and the Maronite community itself was preserved from widespread persecution. Of course, in the Post-War environment, Maronite leaders would claim they were the victim of vast political repression to give the new Lebanese state the off-ramp that could disconnect them from the fate many of their neighboring Arab states fell to.
These complicated webs of alliances in the Middle East bisected the major dividing lines of the Cold War and brought an element of greyness to the decision-making process amongst ITO, the Roman Alliance and the Stalingrad Pact. The repercussions of the Second Arabian War, beyond the obvious ones to the map of the Middle East, would be the end of the story taught across the West from at least 1948 onwards: the story of the alliance between Democracy and Fascism to defeat Communism. As the guns rumbled across the Middle East, the foundations of a New World Order were being laid in the dark halls of power from Madrid to Tehran.
