“There are two clocks ticking, one in Washington . . . and one in Israel . . . neither of them in sync.”
On the face of it, these words appear as if they were lifted from any report over the past year characterizing the discord over American and Israeli efforts to halt Iran’s nuclear program. But in fact they were spoken forty-five years ago by Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban on the eve of the Six Day War.
Eban had just returned to Jerusalem from Washington, where he was anxiously pressing the Lyndon Johnson administration to provide U.S. guarantees for Israel’s security in the event that Egypt attacked. Previously confident that America would have Israel’s back in the event of renewed warfare, Eban was now despondent at the likelihood that Israel would be forced to face the combined Arab armies alone, again.
For two weeks, Gamal Abdel Nasser had been building up his forces in the Sinai Peninsula to the point where they posed a credible threat to the young Jewish state’s existence. Now, Nasser had dismissed UN peacekeepers from the Egyptian-Israeli border and closed the Straits of Tiran, cutting off Israel’s vital access to the Red Sea, through which it imported a majority of its energy supplies. Nasser had provided Israel with casus belli and then proclaimed that “if war comes it will be total and the objective will be Israel’s destruction.”
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