Now there could be no doubt about what was intended for us. With my very ears I heard President Nasser’s speech on 26 May. He said:
“We intend to open a general assault against Israel. This will be total war. Our basic aim will be to destroy Israel.”
On 2 June, the Egyptian commander in Sinai, General Mortagi, published his Order of the Day, calling on his troops to wage a war of “destruction against Israel.”
Here, then, was a systematic, overt, proclaimed design at politicide, the murder of a state.
The question then widely asked in Israel and across the world was whether we had not already gone beyond the utmost point of danger. Was there any precedent in world history, for example, for a nation passively to suffer the blockade of its only southern port, involving nearly all its vital fuel, when such acts of war, legally and internationally, have always invited resistance?
This was a most unusual patience. It existed because we had acceded to the suggestion of some of the maritime states that we give them scope to concert their efforts in order to find an international solution which would ensure the maintenance of free passage in the Gulf of Aqaba for ships of all nations and of all flags.
As we pursued this avenue of international solution, we wished the world to have no doubt about our readiness to exhaust every prospect, however fragile, of a diplomatic solution – and some of the prospects that were suggested were very fragile indeed.
Even when engaged with Egyptian forces, we still hoped to contain the conflict. Egypt was overtly bent on our destruction, but we still hoped that others would not join the aggression. Prime Minister Eshkol, who for weeks had carried the heavy burden of calculation and decision, published and conveyed a message to other neighboring states proclaiming:
“We shall not attack any country unless it opens war on us. Even now, when the mortars speak, we have not given up our quest for peace. We strive to repel all menace of terrorism and any danger of aggression to ensure our security and our legitimate rights.”
To the appeal of Prime Minister Eshkol to avoid any further extension of the conflict, Syria answered by bombing Megiddo from the air and bombing Degania with artillery fire and kibbutz Ein Hammifrats and Kurdani with long-range guns.
But Jordan embarked on a much more total assault by artillery and aircraft along the entire front, with special emphasis on Jerusalem, to whose dangerous and noble ordeal yesterday I come to bear personal witness.
There has been bombing of houses; there has been a hit on the great new National Museum of Art; there has been a hit on the University and on Shaare Zedek, the first hospital ever to have been established outside the ancient walls. Is this not an act of vandalism that deserves the condemnation of all mankind?
Thus throughout the day and night of 5 June, the Jordan which we had expressly invited to abstain from needless slaughter became, to our surprise, and still remains, the most intense of all the belligerents; and death and injury, as so often in history, stalk Jerusalem’s streets.
* * * * *
We have lived through three dramatic weeks. Those weeks, I think, have brought into clear view the main elements of tension and also the chief promise of relaxed tension in the future.
The first link in the chain was the series of sabotage acts emanating from Syria. In October of 1966, the Security Council was already seized of this problem, and a majority of its member states found it possible and necessary to draw attention to the Syrian government’s responsibility for altering that situation. Scarcely a day passed without a mine, a bomb, a hand-grenade, or a mortar exploding on Israel’s soil, sometimes with lethal or crippling effects, always with an unsettling psychological influence.
