Word: nasserism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Lovelier Windows. At 11 a.m. on the first day of battle in response to a plea from Nasser, Jordan opened a second front. Mortar and artillery shells rumbled down from the heights of Arab Jerusalem to splatter the Israeli sector of the divided city. Longer-range guns reached across Israel's narrow waist to hit the outskirts of Tel Aviv, and Syrian guns opened up on northern Israeli towns from the hills overlooking the Sea of Galilee. But it was Jerusalem, the Israeli capital, that took the worst damage the Arabs inflicted on the Jews in the whole war. Most...
Trapping the Remnant. Modern desert warfare is essentially tank warfare, supported by infantry and aided by air. At the start of the war, both Israel and Egypt had some 1,000 tanks each. The Israelis' were largely American and British; Nasser's were Russian, like most of his other equipment. Some 800 on each side squared off to battle for the Sinai Peninsula, a hell's amphitheater of ankle-deep, choking velvet sand broken by the ocher slag heaps of hills and occasional grey-green scrub...
...stubborn pockets of Jordanian resistance. Unaware of the extent of Egypt's air losses, Hussein could not believe that the Israeli air force alone could so blacken the sky on his own Jordanian front. Thus it was partially understandable that for a while, at least, he backed up Nasser's claim that the U.S. and British planes had joined in Israel's attack...
...Nasser almost surely knew better. But he was desperate to find an excuse for the Arab debacle, and he probably hoped that by implicating the U.S. and Britain he might persuade Moscow to come to his rescue. He never had a chance. Russian ships monitoring the U.S. air movements in the Mediterranean knew from their own radar that no U.S. or British planes had been involved. The Russian ambassador in Cairo went to Nasser and bluntly told him so. With nothing more to lose, Nasser continued his big lie, triggering the breaking off of diplomatic relations by seven Arab nations...
...Just how Nasser pressured Hussein into backing his phony air-attack ploy will surely become one of history's more curious footnotes. Israel monitored and tape-recorded a radio conversation between Nasser and Hussein on the second day of the war, and released the dialogue two days later. The voices were unmistakably those of Nasser and the King; neither bothered to deny it. A sampling of their talk...