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WHILE CLOSE TO TWELVE hundred captured tanks move eastward out of Tel Aviv in four columns, the sixty ex-Kuwaiti F/A-18s have already struck three significant targets: the Egyptian military field adjacent to what will soon enough return to being called Ben Gurion International Airport, the Jordanian field outside of Jerusalem that shortly will again be called Atarot, and a constellation of four smaller former IAF airfields in the north that were taken over by Syria and Iraq. In each case, most enemy aircraft are destroyed on the ground, black smoke from the planes and the asphalt burning beneath rising in columns that can be seen as far away as Cyprus. There casual observers note the fires before American intelligence specialists underground in the island’s British bases can detect it via satellite.

The few enemy pilots able to get their planes in the air take one look at the masses of Kuwaiti Super Hornets and decline to engage. All are pursued and brought down, some over enemy territory where anti-aircraft operations were terminated a month earlier. After all, Israel has no air force.

Under the command of General Ido Baram, the newly Israeli tank force is focused on seven distinct objectives:

[1] Pierce the wall of Syrian troops surrounding Tel Aviv that is meant to prevent its population from fleeing eastward;

[2] Bypass the Egyptian force waiting for Jordanian armor to secure the city so they can enter and begin cleansing operations, then prevent the enemy fleeing south and east, an IDF tactic first used in the Yom Kippur War to bottle up Egypt’s Third Army in Sinai;

[3] Secure the international airport so that food, medicines, and ammunition can be airlifted in;

[4] Punch through Syrian troop concentrations north of Tel Aviv to reach Israel’s main power station at Hadera, hard by the ancient Roman port at Caesarea, so that Israeli military engineers and civilian employees of the Israel Electric Company can reconnect its twin turbines to the power grid supplying Tel Aviv. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard commandos who moved in early to take over the power station are now outgunned. Those who do not die in battle are collected in Caesarea’s restored amphitheater, before the war a popular venue for concerts.

[5] Meanwhile, newly re-mechanized infantry is tasked to find the point where the pipeline bringing water from the north has been truncated and reconnect it. The effort fails until Persian-speaking interrogators identify an Iranian officer who knows the spot, and by two the next morning water begins to flow in Tel Aviv—brown at first, heavy with rust flushed from the unused pipes. By first light it is clear. To the people of Tel Aviv, no event of the past twenty-four hours is more significant. So many people bathe between 6 and 8 a.m. that in much of the city there is only a trickle. No one cares.

[6] Liberate six POW camps, four in the Negev, one close to Jericho, and one just outside of Netanya at Beit Lid, where a prison meant to hold twenty-two hundred convicted Palestinian terrorists now holds over thirty thousand Israeli prisoners of war. And zero Palestinians. These were summarily executed by the Jordanian muhabarrat. Indeed, as they move forward, Israeli intelligence officers are surprised to see no guerilla resistance from either Hamas or Hezbollah; only later does it become clear both Palestinian groups were early on massacred by their Muslim brethren in order to stifle any Palestinian claim to conquered Israel.

Conditions in the POW camps are horrific. Mass starvation, little to no drinking water, and lack of latrines have brought about an epidemic of typhus and amoebic dysentery. With no medical facilities on hand, and no medicines available to members of the IDF medical corps who fell into captivity, some 70,000 of the 380,000 Israeli prisoners have perished, the death rate multiplying up to and even past the hour of liberation. Because Arab prison camp commanders provided no facilities for burial, not so much as a shovel, bodies are found simply stacked up in corners of the camps to deteriorate in the sun. The stench is so bad the first tankists to arrive are forced to re-don their gas masks. Immediately, water taps in the Arab guard barracks around the camp are opened for the POWs—it is clear there is no shortage of water, merely a shortage of interest in keeping the Israeli prisoners alive. Those guards who have not fled face gruesome deaths as the skeletons in their charge take revenge.

It is a mark of how closely the camps resemble those of an earlier attempt to solve the Jewish problem that senior officers arriving on the scene turn their backs on the dismemberment of the guards. At one camp in the Negev, guards are executed next to the single tap available to the prisoners before liberation—the tap had been set up merely to drip water, so that the POWs were compelled to queue up for hours to receive the equivalent of a teaspoon each before returning to the rear of the long lines for their next taste. From captured documents, it is learned that reducing the flow to a trickle was meant to keep the death rate at manageable levels—were all the POWs to die at once, the mess might be visible from orbiting Western satellites.

[7] After fulfilling their primary missions, two hundred tanks, among them Cobi’s, are detached from the main force to make straight for Jerusalem. Here there is resistance from Jordan’s disciplined Arab Legionnaires, some under British officers. But blessed with intimate knowledge of the capital, the Jewish tankists carve Jerusalem into segments, liberating one neighborhood after another. By day’s end most of the Legionnaires surrender, the remainder fleeing east across the nearly dry Jordan.

The Old City is left for last. It proves no challenge. Not only have its defenders melted away, but the entire population of the Muslim Quarter has decamped as well. The ancient Jewish, Christian, and Armenian Quarters are of course empty, their houses having been reserved for later use by Jordanian government officials. Like the rest of Jerusalem, the Old City is empty.

Within its walls, six major churches are found destroyed, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, along with a dozen monasteries and nunneries. Most synagogues have been used as toilets. The single exception to the destruction of non-Muslim holy sites are Russian Orthodox churches, a concession to Moscow for providing intelligence and logistical support, to say nothing of its role in the Security Council, where it vetoed even minimal efforts to succor the population of Tel Aviv and provide food and water to Israeli prisoners of war.

The Western Wall of the Second Temple, Judaism’s most holy site, is found to be demolished. Its massive rectangular stones, one measuring forty-one by eleven by eleven feet, are strewn like children’s blocks about the plaza where Jews of all persuasions, from ultra-Orthodox to Reform, prayed since the Old City’s liberation from Jordanian rule in the Six Day War of 1967.

At the sight of this wanton destruction, IDF discipline, which has held through the entire day, breaks down.

The first tank to reach what is left of the wall is commanded by an Orthodox Jew whose family, of Yemenite origin, has lived in Jerusalem since the fifteenth century. The second tank is commanded by the son of a paratrooper who died in the Israeli conquest of the Old City in 1967. No record of any communication exists between the two—at the subsequent court martial, their actions that day are termed “autonomic and unplanned.”

But only seconds after the two tanks arrive at the rubble that was the wall, they climb together to the plateau known to the Muslim world as the Noble Sanctuary, a flat plaza built over the ruins of the Holy Temple itself.

The first tank levels its 1200mm gun at the Dome of the Rock, not truly a mosque in that none worship there, but a shrine, and at point-blank range destroys it. The second tank joins in. In a matter of seconds, what is normally referred to as Islam’s third holiest site is flattened, a cloud of dust rising above what were once walls of brightly colored hand-painted ceramic tile, the blue, green, violet, and yellow of its façade rising with the red and yellow of the interior, all of it tinged with a corona of gold dust from the dome.

As the two tanks swivel toward the second structure of the Noble Sanctuary, the Mosque of Omar, General Ido’s command tank moves up to insert itself between the two Chariots and the mosque.

The words he uses as he opens communications are by now among the war’s most quoted, less a military order than a spiritual aspiration: “Enough! Remember before Whom you stand.”