Yeshayahu Gavish, Israeli commander in Six-Day War who occupied Suez and Gaza Strip against orders
My piece published today in the Daily Telegraph.
Defence minister Moshe Dayan had told him: ‘I approve your military plans, but I am imposing two limitations.’ Gavish ignored both
CREDIT: Telegraph Obituaries
17 October 2024
Yeshayahu “Shaike” Gavish, who has died aged 99, was the last surviving senior Israeli commander from the Six-Day War in 1967, in which Israel occupied vast lands incorporating parts of Egypt, Syria and Jordan; he served as OC Southern Command in charge of the Israeli forces facing Egypt.
On May 14 1967, the Egyptian army sent two divisions in Israel’s direction, across the Suez Canal and into the Sinai Peninsula. Two days later the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, demanded the departure of UN forces deployed in the Sinai to keep Egypt and Israel apart.
On May 24 he ordered the Straits of Tiran to be closed to Israeli shipping – and with such an escalation, Israel, expecting a direct attack, decided to strike first, hoping that other Arab armies would stay out of the conflict.
On June 2, Israel’s defence minister, Moshe Dayan, told Gavish: “I approve your military plans, but I am imposing two limitations. First, you must stop short of the Suez Canal. You have to stop 10 kilometres before it. I don’t want to see you on the canal bank.”
Dayan believed that if Israel occupied the Canal and deployed forces on its eastern bank, a mere 200 yards from Egyptian troops, Nasser would not open the Suez Canal after the war and might even resume hostilities against Israel.
As for Dayan’s second limitation, he ordered Gavish: “You must not take the Gaza Strip. Let the Palestinians stay there. I don’t want anything to do with them. We will be outside; they’ll be cut off inside. Let them eat up each other.”
Dayan considered the Strip to be a place that “bristled with problems… a nest of wasps”. Israel should not occupy if it did not want, as Dayan put it, “to be stuck with a quarter of a million Palestinians”.
On June 5 Israel attacked Egypt from the air in “Operation Moked” (“Operation Focus”). Subsequently, Gavish gave the order “Sadin Adom” (“Red Sheet” in Hebrew), a signal to his three divisions to commence their ground operation.
The ensuing operation was vast. In the heat of the battle, Gavish’s forces moved deeper and deeper into the Sinai, chasing the retreating Egyptians. In an interview with the historian Ahron Bregman, Gavish described the scene:
“Thousands of Egyptian tanks and other vehicles were attacked from the air and the ground and destroyed. They were burning. This was a terrible scene. And the Egyptian army never managed to get its equipment out of the Sinai. Most of the soldiers got out on foot. They walked across the dunes and got to the Suez Canal.” Two thousand Egyptian troops died fighting the Israelis, while 10,000 were killed in the retreat.
Then, overlooking Dayan’s clear orders not to get too close to the Suez Canal, Gavish’s forces reached the Canal and occupied it.
Likewise, on June 5, when Egyptian and Palestinian forces began shelling Israeli settlements from inside Gaza, Gavish ordered his forces to enter the Strip and occupy it.
Dayan was furious, and Gavish later described to Bregman Dayan’s arrival at his HQ when the battle was over: “He got out of the helicopter, holding a Tempo [drink] in his hand. He looked at me and said, ‘I’ll throw you into prison for disobeying my instructions not to occupy Gaza’. He then turned around and left.”
Gavish was never sent to prison, but in 2005, the prime minister Ariel Sharon, who had fought under him in 1967, concluded that it would be too challenging to remain in Gaza, surrounded by 1.8 million, mainly hostile, Palestinians. And so, 38 years after Gavish had occupied the Gaza Strip, Sharon pulled Israel out.
Yeshayahu Gavish was born on August 25 1925 in Tel Aviv, then in British Mandatory Palestine, and studied at the local School for Workers’ Children before moving to a high school at Kibbutz Givat HaShlosha.
Aged 18, he joined the Palmach (“Strike Companies”), the elite strike force of the Haganah, the Israeli Defence Force’s pre-state predecessor operating in British-ruled Palestine.
In line with the May 1939 White Paper, the British restricted the number of Jews allowed into Palestine and limited their buying of local land. This was the background to the decision of Haganah and other Jewish underground organisations to fight the British.
On the night of June 16 1946, in what came to be known as “the Night of the Bridges” (“Operation Markolet”), Gavish led a unit of Palmach combatants to blow up the “Train Bridge” in southern Palestine, not far from Gaza. It was part of an operation aimed at destroying 11 bridges connecting British Palestine and neighbouring countries to attack the transportation routes used by the British Army.
They put the explosives at the foundations of the bridge and retreated. “When we were half a kilometre from the bridge, we detonated the explosives, and we could hear the explosion,” Gavish recalled. “It was precisely 23:00, which was the agreed time, when the rest of the bridges connecting Palestine to Jordan, Syria and Lebanon also exploded.
Twelve days later, on June 29 1946, partly in response to the bridge bombings, the British launched “Operation Agatha” (known in Jewish historiography as “Black Saturday”), raiding Jewish settlements, arresting activists and collecting illegal weapons. Gavish was detained and jailed for two months in the Latrun prison for his role in the June 16 attack.
The British left Palestine on Friday, May 14 1948 as Israel declared independence. On the next day, five Arab armies invaded, setting off the first Arab-Israeli war, which the Israelis call “the War of Liberation” and the Palestinians call “The Nakba” (“Catastrophe”). Gavish, by then a battalion commander, led forces in battles all over the new state.
After the war, Gavish planned to study engineering at the Haifa Technion, but Yitzhak Sadeh, the celebrated commander of the Palmach, insisted that he stay in the military. Gavish agreed, and served in the IDF for the next three decades.
On July 26 1956, President Nasser of Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal Company. Britain, France and Israel planned a military operation to regain control of the Canal. In what came to be known in Israel as “the Sinai Campaign”, Gavish, as the IDF’s head of operations, was instrumental in preparing an Israeli invasion. It took the IDF only a few days to seize the desert, but under international pressure, they withdrew in March 1957.
After the 1967 War Gavish was a candidate to replace Yitzhak Rabin as the IDF Chief of Staff, and when he failed to get the job he resigned. He was the CEO of the Koor Industries, conglomerate until his retirement.
In 1973, when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel in the Yom Kippur War, Gavish was called back to the military as commander of the Shlomo District in southern Sinai. In 2016 he published his memoir Sadin Adom (“Red Sheet”).
In a recent interview, Gavish said of the key figures in the Six-Day War: “Prime minister Levi Eshkol is gone, defence minister Moshe Dayan is gone, IDF Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin is gone. I remain alone. It saddens me. That generation is no more.”
For years, Gavish would start the day with a swim before heading to schools or military bases to share his knowledge with pupils and soldiers.
Yeshayahu Gavish’s wife Gita predeceased him; they had two children.
Yeshayahu Gavish, born August 25 1925, died October 3 2024