Israel, most of whom were attending a festival at Tel Aviv's Cultural Center celebrating a state visit to Israel by Queen Elisabeth of Belgium. IDF Chief of Staff Haim Laskov and Chief of Reserves Meir Zorea were also attending. Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion had been entertaining Queen Elisabeth when the crisis began. Similarly, the neighboring Arab states, which monitored Israeli radio, believed that Israel was preparing to launch a surprise attack on them, and began to ready their own troops. Syria began moving troops to the Israeli border to prepare for an IDF attack. It took considerable efforts by the government to calm the civilian population, and international efforts to mollify the neighboring states and convince them that Israel was not preparing for war. At 11:00 PM, Kol Israel finally announced that the call-up had been just an exercise, but people in Israel and abroad began forming conspiracy theories. For example, Soviet media claimed that the mobilization was possibly "to divert the workers' attention and to allow the government to insert into the defense clause of the budget IL420 million, more than the previous year". In the following days, the local press responded bitterly to the event, referring to it as the "Night of the Ducks", since one of the call-up codes repeated on the radio was "Waterfowl", which in Hebrew translates as "water ducks". An official Commission of Inquiry was organized to investigate the decisions leading up to the event. Although the Chief of Staff, Haim Laskov, was absolved, two leading generals, Major General Meir Zorea, who served as Chief of Reserves, and Major General Yehoshafat Harkabi, who served as Chief of Military Intelligence, were forced to step down. External links The "Night of the Ducks"' Exhibition in the IDF&Defense establishment archives Israel Defense Forces 1959 in Israel