Trump Heights is a monument to folly

Beirut: At seven in the morning of June 5^th, 1967, Israeli warplanes took off to launch a surprise attack that would destroy the air forces of Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq while they were still on the ground. The Syrian defence minister, Hafez al Assad, ordered a counterattack by his ground forces, tanks rumbling down from the Golan Heights on Israel’s northeastern border. The offensive was given the code-name Operation ‘Nasser’, or Victory. It was, as Guy Laron writes in his book The Six Day War, a ‘pathetic…ignominious failure’. Laron describes a litany of incompetence. A diversionary attack on a kibbutz in the Galilee was seen off by a bunch of Israeli reservists, pensioners and high school students. The main offensive petered out when Syrian units got lost and failed to meet at the rendezvous point. Those that did join the attack found that their tanks were too wide to cross the narrow bridges into Israel.