and pledged unity against the Zionist enemy, going so far as to place his army under Egyptian command.
The tightening military encirclement of Israel was accompanied by a crescendo of blood-curdling threats. One Arab leader after another promised to “explode Zionist existence,” or to “get rid of the Zionist cancer.”32 Ahmed Shuqairy, head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, vowed: “We will wipe Israel off the face of the map,” adding the memorable fillip, “no Jew will remain alive.”33
With Arab armies mobilized around them, Israeli leaders wanted to strike the first blow, believing that the advantage of surprise could compensate for their disadvantages of size and space. They waited as long as they felt they could for the American/British flotilla to materialize. But, with no sign of progress on that front, they launched their attack the morning of June 5, while claiming disingenuously that the Arabs had fired first. Within hours the Egyptian air force was destroyed, mostly on the ground, and the war’s outcome had been determined.
During the three weeks of the prelude to war, the six days of fighting, and then the period of diplomatic jockeying that followed, Israel enjoyed broad if not unanimous support from the West. Washington and other Western governments were cautious, hoping to forestall the conflict, to bring it to a fast halt if and when the fighting started, and above all to avoid getting drawn directly into it. Still there was little doubt that most of them sympathized with Israel, a position fostered not only by sentiment but by the shrill anti-Western rhetoric of the Arabs and their close identity with the Soviet camp. That link seemed to tighten as the crisis intensified.
Public and elite opinion in the West showed little of the ambivalence or restraint evident in governmental reactions. Memories of the Holocaust, admiration for Israel’s achievements, and its image as a diminutive David menaced by the Arab Goliath combined to create widespread support for the Jewish state.
In America, the Jewish community roused itself as never before. Donations poured in for Israel. Sampling the spirit of the giving, The New York Times offered this snapshot:
“You have got it all now,” said a brief letter containing a check for $25,000. The message was from a professor at the Jewish theological seminary who said he had gladly stripped himself of his worldly goods and sent the proceeds to the . . . Israel emergency fund. The owner of two gas stations . . . turned over the deeds . . . Other Jews walked in with the cash-surrender values of their life insurance policies. Still others, deeply moved by the Arab-Israeli war, sold real estate and securities and sent the money.34
Some donated themselves. During the run up to the war, many American Jewish students departed for Israel, hoping to replace Israeli workers in farms and factories who were mobilized to the front.35 Others joined demonstrations. A rally in New York drew a crowd estimated variously at 45,000 to 125,000; one in Washington, from 7,000 to 35,000.36
A Louis Harris poll showed unsurprisingly that 99 percent of Jews sympathized with Israel. Among Christians, support was strong, too. About half of them said they had no strong feelings or were not sure. But those that did hold clear views were all but unanimously in favor of Israel. Among Protestants the ratio was 41 percent for Israel to 1 percent for the Arabs. Among Catholics it was 39 percent to zero. For Americans altogether, 41 percent sympathized with Israel but only 1 percent with the Arabs.37 A Gallup poll yielded similar results: 55 percent said their sympathies lay with Israel against 4 percent supporting the Arab states. (The rest either answered “neither” or had no opinion.)38
As the crisis deepened a luminous group of intellectuals including Hannah Arendt, Ralph Ellison, Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson, Lionel Trilling, and Robert Penn Warren signed a display ad in The Washington Post. “The issue can be stated with stark simplicity,” it said. “Whether to let Israel perish, or to act to ensure its survival and to secure legality, morality, and peace in the area.”39 A similar declaration, calling on the US government to break the blockade of Aqaba, was placed in The New York Times in the name of more than 3,700 academics.40
Another statement in this vein was issued by a group of prominent Christian religious leaders, including the famous theologian Reinhold Neibuhr and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.41 King was not the only civil rights leader to make himself heard. A Washington pro-Israel rally was addressed by Whitney M. Young, Jr., president of the National Urban League, and Bayard Rustin, the man who had conceived of and organized the landmark 1963 March on Washington.42
News organizations, too, embraced Israel. The New York Times editorially denounced Nasser as “crudely aggressive,” a sentiment echoed by its star columnist, James Reston, who wrote: “the key issue has to be clearly defined . . . Nasser has committed an aggressive illegality.” Humorist Russell Baker poured ridicule on the Arabs, going so far, in those days before the advent of “political correctness,” as to make fun of “the Arab mind.”43 TIME carried stories with a pro-Israel slant several weeks running. “The real issue,” it said, “is . . . Israel’s . . . basic right to exist. Most of the world has accepted and acknowledged that right, but not the Arabs.”44 Reporting that “there was little doubt as to where the majority of Americans stood,” the magazine offered a potpourri of illustrations such as: “in Chicago’s Loop, Mayors Row restaurant changes the name of one of its dining rooms from ‘Little Egypt’ to the ‘Tel Aviv room.’”45
Although the executive branch was cautious, worried about what actions might have to follow words, members of congress and senators were less so. When the State Department spokesman declared at the outset of fighting that the position of the United States was “neutral in thought, word, and deed,” Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen, the minority leader, waxed indignant: “what’s neutral? I call it ‘snootral’—when you stick up your snoot at both sides.” His colleague, Republican Senator Hugh Scott, condemned the administration’s position as “very much confused.” Democrats joined in the criticism, and The New York Times branded the neutrality declaration “grotesque.”46 Secretary of State Dean Rusk quickly issued a clarification, saying neutrality did not mean “indifference.”47
Although support for Israel was bipartisan, Israel was above all a cause championed by liberals. In addition to civil rights leaders, AFL-CIO President George Meany warned that failure to defend Israel would imperil “the security of our country, of the entire free world.”48 So militant was labor’s attitude that on the day the war broke out, “a labor rally for Israel almost turned into a riot . . . when some persons got the impression that one spectator was opposing a resolution pledging financial support for Israel,” according to a report in The New York Times.49
John Kenneth Galbraith, the president of the leading liberal advocacy organization, Americans for Democratic Action, appeared on Meet the Press and declared that he would “absolutely” favor direct military intervention in defense of Israel. Like Galbraith, many of the strongest advocates of support for Israel were opponents of the Vietnam War. Senator Wayne Morse, who had cast one of only two votes against the Tonkin Gulf resolution that had originally authorized the war, called on the administration to unilaterally break Nasser’s maritime blockade.50 Senator Eugene McCarthy, who would become the champion of the Vietnam peace movement in the 1968 election, declared that the United States had “the legal and moral obligation” to take military action if Israel were attacked.51 And Senator George McGovern, who would capture the Democratic presidential nomination as a peace candidate in 1972, said on the conclusion of the fighting that he hoped Israel “did not give up a foot of ground” until the Arabs made peace.52
The response in Europe to the Middle East crisis was very much like that in the United States. The British government under Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson worked closely with the Johnson administration to end the Egyptian blockade but got nowhere. London’s
