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The makings of history / A light in the dark By Tom Segev Tags: Israel News, King Hussein The new biography of King Hussein of Jordan by Nigel Ashton contains numerous revelations that Amir Oren reported in Haaretz last week - among them, the fact that the secret of the Israeli decision to launch a war against Egypt on June 5, 1967 was leaked to Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser via Hussein. According to Oren, the source of the leak was, astonishingly, none other than chief of the Mossad espionage agency, Meir Amit. This wasn't a matter of malicious intent, heaven forbid, but merely the result of the rather convoluted way in which secrets are passed from intelligence agency to intelligence agency, and from country to country. Amit was in Washington, D.C. on June 1, 1967; he met with top officials from the Central Intelligence Agency and with the U.S. secretary of defense, Robert McNamara. But he could not have divulged when the war would break out, because he did not know: The date was set only after he returned from Washington, at a meeting held at the home of the prime minister Levi Eshkol, in which the participants discussed various dates. Amit himself suggested postponing the start of the war by a week. Advertisement Amit had traveled to Washington to clarify to the Americans what Abba Eban, the foreign minister, had not made clear to them: Israel was about to take action against the Egyptians unless the United States worked to open the Straits of Tiran. Israel was prepared to wait several more days at most. Amit hoped to get a "green light" in Washington; upon his return, he relayed his impression that the U.S. wouldn't "sit shivah" if Israel acted on its own. That assessment convinced the government ministers to go to war. A hysterical outburst by defense minister Moshe Dayan ("We are losing the Land of Israel") persuaded the political leadership to act immediately. Amit's talks in Washington are well documented: There are notes on the report he gave at Eshkol's home; a detailed account which Amit himself authored; a document that was written with Amit's permission that summarized his conversations with McNamara; as well as a (recently declassified) summary of his conversation with CIA chief Richard Helms. Amit left no room for doubt: Israel would make a move within days. On June 2, high-level American and British officials met to coordinate their positions, and at that meeting McNamara stated that Israel believed it would win the war if it launched it "now or in another week." On June 4, president Lyndon Johnson still received the assessment that the Israelis would wait "only about a week." Thus, even after a date had been set for going to war - the night between June 3 and June 4 - the White House was not apprised of it. In theory, the CIA could have known about the decision reached at Eshkol's home and passed on the information to King Hussein, who could have passed it on to Nasser. In theory, Amit could also have been the source. There is no documented confirmation for this. According to an earlier biography of Hussein by Avi Shlaim, the king warned Nasser three times, but it is not known exactly when. Either way, this story shines a spotlight on two of the questions that still arouse debate: Did the U.S. give Israel permission to go to war? Amit reported on his return from Washington that the Americans welcomed an operation that would "blow up Nasser." The more important question, however, is what Nasser wanted. There are not enough documents to answer this with certainty. There is a basis for stating that he did not want a war and did not believe one would break out. Israel did not know what Nasser wanted. It went to war out of panic - not on the basis of verified intelligence. The Green Line is 60 The Six-Day War eliminated the so-called Green Line, drawn on the map of the armistice agreement between Israel and Egypt. Last week marked the 60th anniversary of the demarcation of that line.The original event took place at the Hotel des Roses on the Greek island of Rhodes, where Egyptian and Israeli representatives met at the end of the War of Independence. "Thousands of butterflies in an array of colors and shades flitted among the shrubbery and gave to the place a fairytale appearance," Moshe Dayan would later write. A lieutenant colonel by the name of Yitzhak Rabin was also present. The talks were held under the auspices of the United Nations; the efforts of the mediator, Ralph Bunche, subsequently earned him a Nobel Peace Prize.The negotiations lasted about six weeks. At that time Israel believed it had an interest in holding on to the Gaza Strip, but the Egyptians refused to give it up. They also demanded Be'er Sheva. Both sides rejected their opponent's demands with nerve-racking stubbornness. The Israelis wasted a lot of time on all sorts of details that might not have been truly important even then, but the negotiators fought over them as though the country's fate were in the balance. Bunche bent over backwards to get the sides to reach an agreement. One day he summoned the Israeli and Egyptian delegations to his room and showed them ceramic plates he had commissioned from a local workshop, with the inscription: "Armistice Talks, Rhodes 1949. "If you come to an agreement, you will each receive such a plate as a souvenir," he informed them, "otherwise I will personally smash them over your heads."The two sides signed on February 24, 1949. We got Be'er Sheva; they got Gaza. David Ben-Gurion wrote: "After the establishment of the state and its victories on the battlefield, this is the greatest event in a year of extraordinary greatness." The assumption was that signing the agreement with the largest Arab state would lead to peace agreements with all of them. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Demjanjuk sentence Former Nazi camp guard Demjanjuk charged 29,000 times. The infamous scam Why does Bernard Madoff evoke record-breaking resentment?

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