_______________________________
In May 1967, Egypt blockaded the Straits of Tiran, closing the Red Sea to Israeli shipping, then moved its armies into the Sinai Desert. These moves, which came as the result of a false intelligence report—a Soviet agent said Israel was amassing its soldiers on its northern border—were followed by weeks of threats issued from Arab capitals: “If Israel tries to set the region on fire, then Israel itself will be completely destroyed in this fire” (President Gamal Nasser, Egypt); “Our goal is clear—to wipe Israel off the map. We shall meet in Tel Aviv and Haifa” (President Ardur Aref, Iraq); “The war of liberation will not end except by Israel’s abolition” (King Hussein, Jordan).
Abba Eban, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, traveled the world seeking assurance or support, but everywhere was turned away. The UN, led by Secretary General U Thant, withdrew its peacekeeping force from the Sinai as the Egyptians moved in—the very development that the peacekeepers had been there to prevent. The UN force had been stationed in the Sinai since 1956, as part of the settlement that ended the Suez Crisis, during which Israel, France, and Britain invaded Egypt and seized the Suez Canal, which had been nationalized by Nasser. To Israelis, the removal of the peacekeepers, meant to guarantee the nation’s security, felt like a betrayal, like being left to fate.* (U Thant later called it the great mistake of his career.) But when Abba Eban went to the White House for help, he was met only with riddles. “You will be alone,” Lyndon Johnson told him, “only if you go alone.”
This is how Hugh Smythe, of the State Department, analyzed the crisis for the president: “On the scale we have Israel, an unviable client state whose value to the U.S. is primarily emotional, balanced with the full range of vital strategic, political, commercial/economic interests represented by the Arabs.”
It was the old Jewish nightmare of abandonment. Take, for example, that statement from Cairo. It echoed a statement made by Hitler before the Second World War—a fact not lost on Israelis. “If the Jews think they can bring about an international world war to annihilate the European races,” Hitler had said, “then the result will not be the annihilation of the European races, but the annihilation of the Jews.”
There is a rhetorical term for this: it’s called a false premise.
(If . . . then.)
The noose tightened. Commerce stopped. Israelis were on the verge of hysteria. In Tel Aviv, the streets were ghostly, the buildings stark against the sea. The city squares had that strange feeling you get in old horror movies, when the crowd walks stiffly, with frozen faces, as a disc-shaped UFO hovers above—then, suddenly, a woman screams and swoons, which sends the crowd racing, boiling over, because we’re all going to die!
Yitzhak Rabin was the chief of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). He was forty-five years old, a kind of Sabra aristocrat. He had been recruited to the Hagana—irregulars trained to defend the early Jewish settlements in Palestine*—by Moshe Dayan himself, and was then asked to join the Hagana’s elite unit, the Palmach (“Strike Force”). Rabin was famous for daring exploits, especially his raid on the internment camp at Atilt, where he spirited dozens of Jewish refugees through the wire. (Paul Newman based his character in Exodus on Rabin.) He was, in short, the Israeli as imagined by the Jewesses of Long Island: the blond, bare-chested new Jew, with a gun in his hand and wire cutters between his teeth.
Rabin learned of the Egyptian move into Sinai while watching a military parade in Jerusalem. He was sitting in the bleachers, saluting and smiling, when a lieutenant whispered in his ear. He listened, nodded, then slipped away to headquarters, where he could study the photos and question the generals. Enemy soldiers were massing on every border. Israel’s only southern port had been blockaded. The nation itself was being choked. The situation was so dire, in fact, that the only sensible course seemed to be a preemptive strike: kill him before he kills you. Rabin was told that with each passing day the chances of success dwindled—because the Egyptians were bringing in more troops, because their lines of supply were becoming fixed. If Israel struck first, Israel would be blamed for the war, and called the aggressor, and so be without allies. This is what President Johnson meant by “You will be alone only if you go alone.” But if Israel waited, it might be destroyed, and so never need allies again. The dilemma was expressed most succinctly (this is Israel in a nutshell) by General Yigal Allon: “If we preempt the world will condemn us, and we will survive.”
For a time, Rabin did nothing. This indecision was taken by many as a sign of weakness, even fear. In fact, he seemed nervous, shaky. According to his wife, he was getting no sleep, was hardly eating, was staring at maps, estimating the dead, comparing scenarios, living on coffee and cigarettes. He felt responsible not just for the here and now of Israel, but for the fate of the Jews—ten years from now, a hundred years from now.
On May 22, 1967, three weeks after Egypt closed the Straits, Rabin was summoned by David Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion called on Rabin instead of the prime minister, Levi Eshkol, because Ben-Gurion had built the state, so he knew how it worked—the politician is the public face, gives the speeches, comforts the children, the hysterical, overwrought, and weak; but the military and its leaders, the elite first anointed in the age of Wingate, are ultimately responsible.*
Ben-Gurion had retired to a farm in the desert a few years before. He was eighty. His hair was falling out; he was haunted and pessimistic. He did not go to synagogue, did not say the prayers or wear tfillin, but he was as Jewish as can be. He knew the world had ended several times, and would end again and again. He sat in his office, the blinds drawn, desert light streaming through the slats. He served Rabin tea, asked questions, then cut him short. (The human voice can be a cold, hard thing.)
He said, Where are our allies?
He said, What are our options?
He said, It is you, Yitzhak! This is your fault!
He said, You did this!
He said, The end of the Jewish people, this is what you have taken on yourself.
I’m imagining these words. The men were alone, the old Jew and the Sabra, who was handsome and strong but starting to buckle. Too much pressure, too much responsibility. “You have led the state into a grave situation,” said Ben-Gurion. (These are the exact words according to Rabin’s memoirs.) “We must not go to war. We are isolated. You bear the responsibility.”
Rabin stepped out of the house, waved for his driver, lit a cigarette, exhaled. To a general on the eve of war, all smoke is smoke from cannons. He slumped in the backseat, looking at the hills going by. He was in a daze.
Finally, the driver asked, “What did the old man say?”
“The old man . . .” said Rabin. “The old man is not happy.”
Later, speaking to no one, Rabin muttered, “The higher you climb, the higher the wall.”
This was probably a statement of general anxiety: what a bridge thinks as it starts to collapse. He said it the way you say, “The bastards got me by the throat!” Or: “When will it be enough?” That is, as an expression of personal frustration. But I think Rabin was saying more, even if this was not his intention. That’s the power of language. Rabin was like Jesus: a saint who will never get old, who was killed in public in Jerusalem. He was speaking in parables. “The higher you climb, the higher the wall.” It’s the paradox of Jewish history: the farther you travel, the farther you are from your destination. With every passing year, Zionists, who have accomplished so much in the last century, who created a state, who won the wars, who built an economy, who raised generations of new Jews, seem more distant from their dream of normalcy. “The higher you climb, the higher the wall.”
Rabin went to the Pit, the bunker beneath Tel Aviv where the military had its headquarters. He spoke with Moshe Dayan, who was then serving as defense minister. According to Dayan, who wrote about the meeting in his autobiography, Rabin was in a bad way—“unsure of himself, perplexed, nervously chain-smoking.”
“So what did the old man say?” asked Dayan.
Rabin mumbled, excused himself, went home, collapsed. His wife found him on the floor. She called Eliyahu Gilon, the army’s chief doctor. He examined Rabin, listened to his heart, looked in his eyes—murky green—checked his blood pressure, then diagnosed “acute anxiety disorder.” In other words, on the eve of battle, Israel’s commanding general had had a nervous breakdown. He was given a tranquilizer and sent to bed. Leah Rabin made the necessary phone calls. Rabin’s condition was kept as quiet as possible; news of it might panic the public. Newspaper reporters were told that he had suffered a bout of “nicotine poisoning.”
“I sank into a profound crisis brought on by guilt that I had led the country into war under the most difficult circumstances,” Rabin said later. “Everything was on my shoulders, rightly or wrong. I had eaten almost nothing for nine days, hadn’t slept, was smoking non-stop, and was exhausted.”
Ezer Weizman, the commander of the air force, went to visit Rabin, sat by his bed, talked in a soft voice. Rabin was depressed, said he would resign. Weizman took Rabin’s hand and said, “Please, Yitzhak, just get better.”*
There is a storied tradition of such breakdowns in Israel. (Levi Eshkol, who was then prime minister, broke down a few weeks before Rabin.†) Such swoons are explained either by the nature of the Jews (a sensitive people), or by the nature of the threat, which is existential. It’s not just the fortunes of the state that are in jeopardy, but the state’s very existence, thus the existence of the people.
Rabin stayed in bed for thirty hours. When he returned to the Pit, he was weak, unsteady. One of the first people to greet him was General Haim Bar-Lev. “Yitzhak was not—how shall I say it?—in full form,” Bar-Lev wrote. “Of course, he was briefed on all the developments, but he lacked his usual strength.”
Rabin met the prime minister in the Knesset. He offered his resignation, which was refused, went back to the Pit, and gave the order for the preemptive strike. It had been planned down to the most minute detail. It was called Operation Nahshonim after the chief of Judah, the first tribe to walk between the parted waters during the Exodus. Nahshonim led from the front (“After me!”), setting the example for the other tribes to follow. With this name, all middle distance was obliterated: there was just then and just now, with the modern warriors burning a trail back across the Red Sea.
_______
Pilots crossing runways, climbing into cockpits, pulling on helmets, fighter planes, Mirages and Mysteres, with their short wings and blunt cannons,* huddled together as if for warmth. 7:40 a.m. The mission commander, Motti Hod, is on the radio: “The spirit of Israel’s heroes accompany us to battle,” he says. “From Joshua Bin-Nun, King David, the Maccabees, we shall draw strength and courage to strike the Egyptians who threaten our safety, our independence, our future. Fly at the enemy, destroy him and scatter him through the desert so Israel may live.” Again, the middle distance—which is yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that—is gone, and all we have is two thousand years ago and right now: time is a moving picture of eternity.
The planes go up, one after another, the contrails twisting away. The pilots shut off their transmitters. It’s radio silence from here. If a pilot needs to communicate, he does so with hand signals. If his engine fails and he needs to ditch, he does it coolly and quietly, almost politely. Bobs in the sea till someone can come pluck him out. The planes traveled in waves. Group B headed south, over the Negev and the Red Sea, into Egypt. Imagine what those pilots saw, closed in their helmets, closed in their heads, their radios off, the ancient towns of the West Bank speeding beneath them, then the sea, with shafts of light penetrating to the bottom, lighting up the reef, which is a wall holier than the Western Wall, because the Western Wall is dead but the reef is ribboned with life. “It is just an extraordinary experience,” an Israeli pilot explained, “flying above Bethlehem, Hebron, Jericho, feeling this time we’re fighting on our historic homeland.”†
Group A went over the Mediterranean. If you were in a boat off Gaza at 7:45 a.m., on June 6, 1967, you would have been amazed by the sight, plane after plane, flying so low you could see the eyes of the pilots, under their helmets, all looking in the same direction. They flew a hundred miles out to sea, turned in a pivot, like a school of fish pivoting in the shallows, then rushed back toward Cairo. A mile from their targets, the runways and towers used by the Egyptian air force, they climbed to nine thousand feet. Radar screen blank one moment, then a blizzard of dots, each an enemy jet, not on the edge of the screen, but in the middle, here. Then, two by two, the dots vanished; the planes were diving.
The plan was designed around intelligence gathered years before by Wolfgang Lotz, a German Jew who had presented himself to the Egyptians as a Nazi SS officer wanting to exchange military know-how for protection. Lotz was found out in 1964 and executed, but not before he had given the Israelis the location and the configuration of every runway in Egypt, the name and rank of every pilot, war plans, flight schedules, rotations. The Israelis knew Egypt expected an attack from the east, at first light, jets flying out of the rising sun. (Egypt sent its pilots up each morning to patrol the eastern skies; by 8:00 a.m. they were back on their bases.) So the Israelis attacked from the west, the sea, arriving after 8:00 a.m., when the Egyptian pilots were in their mess halls. The first wave knocked out most of Egypt’s runways, grounding its planes and leaving its skies undefended. The next wave strafed Egyptian pilots running to their planes. The third wave took its time, methodically destroying the Egyptian air force on the ground—bombers, then MiG fighters. In the first thirty minutes, Egypt lost more than two hundred planes—half its fleet. “A fighter jet is the deadliest weapon in existence—in the sky,” Motti Hod said. “On the ground, it’s defenseless.”
Israeli tanks crossed into the Sinai. Wherever it was engaged, the Egyptian army, beset by rumors and confusion—What happened to the air force? Who is in charge?—came apart like wet paper: some units fought, some units retreated, some units fled. The sky above the desert was buzzing with Israeli jets. They strafed, bombed, strafed again. Egyptians were captured, wounded, scattered, and killed. These scenes—a generation after the Holocaust, following weeks in which Israelis felt abandoned by the world—inspired awe: Jews in Jeeps, Jews in tanks, crossing the desert, routing their enemies, missiles whistling, planes circling, like something awesome prophesied in Joel. “The Egyptian Sixth Division entered a terrible killing field,” wrote Ariel Sharon. “It was a valley of death. For miles the desert was covered by ruined tanks and burned armored personnel carriers. Bodies littered the ground, and here and there you came across groups of Egyptians with their hands behind their heads.”
Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back:
I had never seen a battlefield before 1967 and at first didn’t understand what I was looking at. Riding through the Sinai Desert, I thought it odd that so many canvas or burlap sacks should have fallen from passing trucks. I soon realized that these bursting brown sacks were corpses. Then I smelled them. Then I saw vultures feeding, and dogs or jackals. Then suddenly there was an Egyptian trench with many corpses leaning on parapets and putrefying, bare limbs baking in the sun like meat and a stink like rotting cardboard. The corpses first swelled, ballooned, then burst their uniform seams. They trickled away; eyes liquefied, ran from the sockets; and the skull quickly came through the face.
The Hebrews followed a column of smoke through the desert, and now the Israelis were doing the same—only it was not the smoke of the Lord, but the smoke of guns. (You are what you follow.) Tanks rumbled by. Men marched in rank, weapons gleaming. Israel took more prisoners than it could feed, so began to free enlisted men, take their weapons, send them back across the canal. The Egyptian officers stripped off their insignia and claimed to be grunts. But the Israelis identified the officers by their underwear: enlisted men wore army-issue cotton briefs; the officers wore silk. Oh, the trouble made for the men in cotton by the men in silk! “Those with silk drawers we shipped off to the POW camps,” wrote Sharon. “Those in cotton were sent back to the Canal.”
Jordan made a determined effort to stay out of the war. King Hussein was, after all, a kind of moderate, more willing to make peace with Israel than any other Arab leader. In the first hours after the preemptive strike, when everything was smoky confusion, he seemed to ponder: If I go in, I open my people to ruin and myself to revolt; if I stay out, I forfeit the spoils and ostracize my nation. Nasser sent Hussein a cable (he must have known the war was already lost) in which he said Israel had been defeated and Jordan must enter the fight if she wanted to share in the victory. The Jordanians began shelling West Jerusalem, rounds coming out of long metal tubes, the kind worked by two men, a loader and a shooter, one dropping in the ordnance, the other hitting the switch: VOOOOOM!
Six thousand shells landed in West Jerusalem. One hit Hadassah Hospital, shattering a section of stained glass designed by Marc Chagall. Every American Jew who has been frog-marched through Jerusalem, from landmark to landmark—this happened here, that happened there; bow before this, weep before that—has seen these windows, which depict the twelve tribes of Israel. They filter the sunlight to a beautiful blue, so you feel you are on the bottom of a Jewish Sea. You meditate on the windows, or on the meaning of the windows, or try to meditate but feel nothing, so feel guilty, so meditate on that.
Israel did not immediately respond to the shelling. The strategists argued against opening another front while war was still being waged in the south. Some worried about the long-term effects of such a campaign, fought not in the Sinai, which is nowhere, a hall you pass through on your way someplace else, but in the West Bank, Judea, and Samaria, the heartland of the ancient kingdom. Thirty-five miles wide at its widest point, this was part of the territory the UN originally set aside for a Palestinian state, but it had been occupied by Jordan since the ’48 War.* Its population was Palestinian, either people who had always lived there, or refugees from what became Israel. By defeating Jordan, Israel would take possession of the ancient hills, but also of a hostile population.
By June 5, however, the shelling had become intolerable. Buildings were hit all over the city. Israeli pilots took off from bases across the country. They met Jordanian pilots in the sky above the West Bank. In Nablus, people stood on their balconies to watch the dogfights. Dozens of Jordanian planes were shot down in the first hour: the whine of a dying engine, a trail of black smoke, the impact lighting up the distant hills. Israeli planes ghosted over Hebron, Bethlehem. They flew over herds, sheep thrown into the sudden dusk of jet shadows. They dropped bombs on the Jordanian army, hit fixed guns and barracks. The sound of the blasts was immense and swept across the valley like a wave, breaking on the cliffs of Moab. When the infantry moved in, the Jordanians fell away, away, away. By morning, the Jordanians had retreated across the Jordan River. It was in this way, without quite meaning to, that Israel took possession of the West Bank.
East Jerusalem remained in Jordanian hands. The city had been divided in the ’48 War. East was separated from West by a no-man’s-land of pillboxes and checkpoints and trenches and wire. The Jewish Quarter of the Old City had been razed, the holy places closed to Jews. The Wailing Wall, which could be seen from tall buildings in the modern city, was as far away as it had been at any time since the Roman Expulsion. To go there from the West, you had to pass through the Mandelbaum gate, where travelers were required to show a certificate of baptism proving they were not Jews.* This only made the ancient city more alluring.
Jewish soldiers were positioned on every side of the ancient city. It was like the Remington print in which the Indians creep up on the fort through the tall grass. Meanwhile, a grand argument was raging among Israelis. It pitted officers in the field, who were gung-ho to take the Old City, against commanders in the Pit, who were not so sure: Do we really want ancient Jerusalem with its mosques and its churches and its cargo of history? Is it our destiny, or is it a tangent from the primary mission, which is to escape history? They worried about the international response: Would the Christian nations boycott Israel? Would the Muslim nations attack? To Ben-Gurion, Jerusalem was a dangerous mirage; you follow it like you follow the Sirens’ song onto the rocks. Tel Aviv is modern Israel, he said. Jerusalem is a grave. But Menachem Begin (and others on the right) said that Israel was obligated to take the Old City. Only then would the dream be fulfilled. We must go all the way, even if it drives us insane.
Moshe Dayan opposed the invasion of East Jerusalem. At first, anyway. For the same reasons as Ben-Gurion. I mean, who wants it? Nothing but ghosts and dust. He warned his generals to “keep out of all that Vatican!”* But events have a logic of their own—there is a direction to the tide. Something wants you to behave in a certain way. No one knows where this comes from. Maybe it’s the collective will of the people. (That’s what Tolstoy believed.) Or maybe it’s your own subconscious. No Jew who grew up with the Bible, who in his sleep was haunted by visions of the man astride the white horse and the proud towers burning, could be so close to the still point without taking that last step.
On June 7, 1967, Moshe Dayan gave the order, qualified with the following: “No heavy weapons in the Old City.” A stray shell hits the Dome and it’s World War III. The attack was led by a thirty-seven-year-old colonel named Mordechai “Motta” Gur. He was slender and dark with eyes that shade of Jewish green that suddenly seemed less like the green of money than the green of uniforms and tanks. He led the paratroopers through the hills above the Old City. You can follow their route as you follow the stations of the cross: first to the Intercontinental Hotel on the Mount of Olives, which is barnacled with graves and glows white in the sun. From the entrance of the hotel, you can see the shrines across the valley. Through Gur’s binoculars, the Jordanian soldiers were close in their pillboxes and trucks. Then to Abu Dis, an Arab town that commands the hills east of the city. Then to the valley of Gethsemane, where Jesus prayed on his last night. Gur spoke to his men on the radio: “We occupy the heights overlooking Jerusalem, which, for generations, we have dreamt of and striven for,” he said. “We will be the first to enter. Israel awaits this historic hour. Be proud. Good luck.”
At 9:45 a.m., a Sherman tank crossed the valley, its cannon clicked into place, took aim at the Lion’s Gate: Ka-bam! Paratroopers poured through the breach. History is a film in reverse: Jewish soldiers rushing back into Jerusalem, fighting on the ramparts, beneath the standards. (As the Arabs say, “What has been taken by force can only be restored by force.”) Other soldiers breached other gates, and soon the city was filled with Israelis. Bullets whistled past. Gunmen hid in windows. Israelis walked behind half-tracks, armored trucks with treads in back and wheels in front, like a mythological beast, head of a lion, body of a snake. Now and then, a sniper fell from a window like a sack of coins, coming apart on the stones. There was every kind of noise: gunfire, grenades, screams, prayers, curses, the throb of diesel engines, the whine of jet planes. There was every kind of color: green of Jeeps, brown of stone, black of guns, red of blood, blue of sky. There was every kind of smell and taste: spice from the market, incense and sweat, meat twitching on the lines, bodies in the dumps, copper in your mouth.
The battle was intense but short. The Israelis outnumbered the Jordanians, had better guns, were better trained and more motivated. They were fighting for history, whereas the Jordanians knew they had been abandoned, that their officers and army had gone across the river. These were grunts, having been left in the city in the manner of a bookmark, to save a place. If they fought, they fought only for fear of capture. Hundreds surrendered. The windows of the Jewish Quarter, which after 1948 had been destroyed by Muslims, were filled with white flags. Men came out with their hands up, fell to their knees.
Israeli soldiers converged on the street beneath the Dome of the Rock, ran up the stone ramp, then burst through the Mugrabi Gate and onto the Temple Mount. Where God fashioned Adam. Where Abraham bound Isaac. Where the Temple stood. Where the Zealots made their stand. There was a visual shock: going from a dark alley, where there is no sun, into a plaza filled with light, the roofs of the city suddenly below. (This is why mountaintops are holy.) There was a brief exchange of fire; then it was over. Clerics came out of Al Aqsa Mosque and stood before Captain Gur, heads bowed. They surrendered, then led the Israelis into the mosque, where a cache of weapons was hidden. Gur then radioed Uzi Narkis, his commander, and spoke the sentence that became iconic in Israel: “The Temple Mount is in our hands.”
Israeli soldiers wandered in and out of the mosques, stunned. They had gone through the looking glass, into a landscape many had seen only from a great distance, in a book, through binoculars.
Arik Akhmon (one of the first soldiers to reach the Dome):
There you are, on a half track after two days of fighting, with shots still filling the air, suddenly you enter this wide open space that everyone has seen before in pictures, and though I’m not religious, I don’t think there was a man up there who wasn’t overwhelmed. Something special had happened.
There are photographs: soldiers on their knees, weeping; soldiers looking on with dumbstruck eyes; a crowd of soldiers posed before the Dome, like fishermen showing off a catch; soldiers assembled in rows, as you assemble for the end-of-the-year photo. (In these, the Temple Mount is the fanciful backdrop painted on the studio photographer’s screen.) Israelis pulled down the Jordanian flag and ran up their own. It was not just victory that excited them. It was victory coming after the weeks of anticipation and fear, itself coming in the context of the Holocaust. It was a release, pure glee. It finally seemed that the Jews had a future, a place in the world. There was a sense of the miraculous; even the atheists felt it. All that has happened since—war, occupation, settlement, terror—is just a hangover from that perfect moment.
Motta Gur asked a Muslim cleric if he knew the way to the Western Wall. The man took the captain by the wrist and led him to the stone stairs that went down to the holy place.* Gur and his men came out in front of the wall as another group of Israelis arrived from the opposite direction. The soldiers brushed the stones with their fingertips as you might brush the fur of a sleeping animal, thrilled and afraid. The Wall formed one side of a narrow alley. To see the whole thing, you had to look up, which meant these soldiers were looking at a narrow band of sky, and so were in the position of small men imploring. I have a postcard that shows an Israeli with a gun slung across his back—he carries it the way Bruce Springsteen carries his guitar while playing harmonica—bowed to the Wall in prayer. It expresses the mood of modern Zionism: vulnerability plus power, sorrow in a moment of great joy.
Among the first soldiers on the Mount that day was a compact man with a wild gray beard and piercing eyes. He wore fatigues, but did not look like an officer. He had traveled to St. Stephen’s Gate by Jeep, and from there, went on foot. He did not notice the gunfire or the shells exploding around him. He was carrying a Torah scroll and a shofar. When he spotted the ramp that led to the Temple Mount, he broke into a sprint. This was Shlomo Goren, an Israeli general, a veteran of the paratroopers who, in 1967, served as the military’s chief rabbi.
Goren grew up in a town outside Haifa and was educated at a yeshiva, where he learned, among other things, to read the Book as if it were a country, and to live in the country as if it were a book—in which every object is placed, a thing in itself but also a symbol. Take for example that shofar, which, even now, he is raising to his lips and blowing, the strangled blast added to the cacophony of shouts and cries and shots and engines. To Goren, it’s a ram’s horn, but also a symbol that tells the Jews on the Mount: “Break! You are nearing the end!” According to Hasidic legend, the Messiah, on the day of Judgment, will blow a shofar made from the ram that Abraham sacrificed on this mountain in place of Isaac.
Goren went into the Dome of the Rock and touched the old stone, said to be the foundation stone of the world. He opened the Torah scroll and read, swaying and chanting. According to a newspaper account, he then made the following statement: “I, General Shlomo Goren, chief rabbi of the Israel Defense Forces, have come to this place never to leave it.” Goren was among the first of a new kind of New Jew, driven mad by the victory of 1967. Religious men who once believed that by creating a state, Zionists were forcing the hand of God came to believe, because of the scope of the victory, that the creation of modern Israel was evidently the will of God. As such, the state must populate the entire land promised in the Torah. It was the start of an era. In the way that all Russian literature is said to have come out from under Gogol’s overcoat, the entire settler movement was blown out of Shlomo Goren’s shofar.
Rabbi Goren found Uzi Narkis, the commanding officer on the Mount. Goren took him by the sleeve, pulled him aside, spoke in a whisper. These men appear as members of a comic duo that has performed often in our history: the crazy Jew with his mind fixed on the next world and the rational Jew with his mind fixed on the here and now. First they’re playing a basement room in Vilna, then they’re playing the big Zionist convention in New York, then they’re playing for the troops during a war, one in fatigues, the other in fatigues and a prayer shawl.
GOREN: General! General! Now is the time! Do it!
NARKIS: Do what, Rabbi!
GOREN: One hundred explosives. In the Mosque of Omar. That’s all we need. That’s enough. The whole thing will come down, and once and for all we’ll be done with it.
NARKIS: Rabbi, stop.
GOREN: Listen to me, Uzi! If you do this, you will go down in the history of your people!
NARKIS: I’ve already put my name in Jerusalem’s history.
GOREN: Uzi, you don’t grasp the meaning of this. This is an opportunity that can be exploited. Now we can do it. Tomorrow it will be impossible.
NARKIS: Rabbi, if you don’t stop now, I’m taking you to jail.*
Moshe Dayan arrived in the Old City after the fighting had ended. In his autobiography, he writes of approaching Jerusalem from the west, driving through the Lion’s Gate, walking to the Temple Mount. He shuddered when he saw the Israeli flag over the Dome. “Down!” he said. “Take it down.”
“If there is one thing we should refrain from doing,” he explained, “it is putting flags on top of the mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.”
Dayan was slender, small. His distinct accessory was the patch that covered his left eye, which he’d lost while scouting in Lebanon for the British during World War II. (He was looking through binoculars, saw a flash, a bullet came through the lens.) The patch gave him a fierce bearing, but he was a humorous man. He took the long view. He came onto the scene at the Mount like a cool drink of water. Just the opposite of Rabbi Goren, he behaved not as if the world were ending but as if it would go on and on. He shook hands, smiled, went down the ancient steps. He stood before the Western Wall. “The narrow plaza was crowded with soldiers who had taken part in the grim battle for Jerusalem,” he wrote. “All were moved, some wept, many prayed, all stretched out their hands to touch the stones.”
Dayan met with Muslim clerics the following day. When he reached the entrance of Al Aqsa, he told his staff to wait outside, unstrapped his sidearm, took off his shoes. The mosque is cavernous, with a pitched ceiling that mimics the vault of heaven. He sat crosslegged on a carpet, surrounded by imams. Here’s the first thing he said: What can I do for you? He was like a Chicago politician meeting with a ward boss. You get to the center and here’s what you find: men cross-legged on the floor trading chits.
We need water, said the imam. We need electricity.
Dayan signaled a member of his staff.
Water and electricity, he said. Get them going.
He turned back to the imam.
What else?
There are too many people here, said the imam. Too many soldiers. The people can’t attend to their prayers.
Let’s talk abut that, said Dayan.
He and the imam then worked out the arrangements that, for the most part, are still followed in the holy places: Israelis would keep off the Mount, which would remain under Muslim control. This decision was given additional weight by the chief rabbi of Israel, who, over the objection of Shlomo Goren, advised Jews to stay off the platform. In this era, he explained, when all Jews are presumed to have come in contact with the dead, there is no one pure enough to tread near the holy of holies, the precise location of which has been lost.* Zerah Warhaftig, Israel’s minister of religious affairs, later told Amos Elon that even though the Temple Mount had been Jewish property since King David “paid the full price for it (fifty shekels) to Araunah the Jebusite,” the rabbis were willing to wait: “We won’t take possession until the Messiah comes,” he said. Jews were instead directed to the Western Wall, which would be under Israeli control. In this way, each community would have its own religious space.
Israeli officials flooded the city. It was a pilgrimage. Even the most worldly spoke of it in religious terms—how they stood before the Wall, which was covered in flowers, which was breathing, soft like skin, which was bleeding, wet with tears. A mad moment at the end of a mad age. Yitzhak Rabin wrote a prayer on a piece of paper and shoved it between the stones. Whoever does this is talking to history, worshipping the past. “It was the peak of my life,” he said. “For years I secretly harbored the dream that I might play a role in restoring the Western Wall to the Jewish people. Now that dream had come true, and I wondered why I, of all men, should be so privileged.”
He gave a speech:
The sacrifices of our comrades have not been in vain. The countless generations of Jews murdered, martyred and massacred for the sake of Jerusalem say to you, Comfort yet, our people, console the mothers and the fathers whose sacrifices have brought about redemption.
In less than a week, Israel had destroyed the Egyptian air force and defeated its army, opened the Straits of Tiran and taken possession of the Sinai Peninsula—Jewish soldiers were now stationed on the Suez Canal—defeated Jordan and conquered the West Bank, including its capital in East Jerusalem, and defeated Syria, taking possession of the Golan Heights in the north.
The phrase “Six-Day War” first appeared in The New York Times about two months later. The name, which is not properly descriptive—by most measures, the war lasted more than a week—stuck because it echoed the holiest numbers in the Jewish lexicon: six days of creation, six million dead. The war was named like a TV show, with a demographic in mind: the Holocaust-haunted Jews of the world. It’s a slogan: Six-Day War. It tells you that the story of modern Israel is the story of creation: something from nothing, desert in bloom—it’s a miracle beyond normal history, so beyond question, so beyond doubt. It’s a matter of faith. The United States, the most Christian nation on earth, really began supplying Israel with weapons only after the war—in part, I’m convinced, because, by winning, Israel proved it had won back the blessing of God.
Israel agreed to a cease-fire with Egypt on June 8; with Syria, on June 10. That night, bulldozers rumbled into the Old City through the Dung Gate, then idled at the edge of Mugrabi, an Arab neighborhood of ramshackle stone houses beneath the Temple Mount. (These stone houses remind me of center-hall colonials across the street from the Bahai Temple in Wilmette, Illinois, which is towering and awesome; the mundane in the shadow of the divine.) Israeli soldiers then went from house to house, banging on doors, ordering people out. Most of the inhabitants had fled at the start of the war, but there were stragglers: women and children, the same sort who stayed behind when Unit 101 brought down Kibbya. These people were marched through the streets, their numbers growing as dust grows before the broom, swept onto buses and taken away.
The bulldozers flicked on their headlights, shifted into gear, lowered their plows. By morning, the entire neighborhood had been knocked down. The stone was pushed into piles, then carried by trucks to dumps east of the city. In this way, the plaza where Jews gather before the Western Wall—it’s familiar to any tourist—was carved from the destruction of an Arab neighborhood. It’s like Piazza San Pietro in Rome, or Piazza San Marco in Venice: a transitional space where you leave behind the noise and commotion of the market and prepare to confront the sacred. The fact that it was built from the ruin of old homes is typical: Because our peace always comes on the back of someone else’s disaster. Because epoch leads to epoch. Because the Jews built on the Muslims, who built on the Christians, who built on the Romans, who built on the Jews.
The Israelis knew they were doing something the international community would prevent if they could, condemn if they couldn’t. (By the rules in the United Nations Charter, it was an illegal population transfer.) Which is why they did it so fast, the moment the war was over, in the middle of the night. “Do it now!” Teddy Kollek, the mayor of Jerusalem, told Moshe Dayan. “It may be impossible later, and it must be done!” It was in this same moment that Rabbi Goren asked Uzi Narkis to blow up the Dome of the Rock. Dayan did not blow up the Dome of the Rock; he tore down Mugrabi instead. He wanted to make a place in Jerusalem for the Jews. He called it either/or: either make room beneath the Wall, or the Jewish crowds will wander to the nearest open area, which was the Temple Mount. Dayan cleared Mugrabi to protect the mosques, he said, and to prevent another confrontation, this time not between armies but between religious communities, that could turn into a religious war. Dayan was channeling Jewish euphoria away from the flashpoint.
He was also working against time, not merely because the eyes of the world were on him, but because, in 1967, Shavuot, an ancient festival in which Jews, if able, travel to Jerusalem, fell on June 15, a week after the cease-fire. With the city in Jewish hands for the first time in millennia, the crowds would be enormous. In fact, two hundred thousand made the trip that year—8 percent of Israel’s population. They filled the streets wall to wall, tower to tower. Imagine it! The city restored, the pilgrims returned, each in his own dream, in his own Bible, which had been a book and was again a place.
Jerusalem is composed of rings—as was the Temple—that get holier as you approach the center: first the desert, crossed by highways, dotted by towns; then the outskirts; then the new city, with its traffic and its mirrored buildings; then the Old City, with its markets and its monasteries; then, at the center of the Old City, at the center of the center, in place but also in time, is this Western Wall, which, in the hours after the victory, was fronted by a sea of hysterical Jews.
Look at this scene. Fix it. Underline it. Because this is the moment the Jews went batty. This is the moment the ripes turned brown. This is the moment people were touched in the head, contracted the Syndrome, went howling down the alleys of the haunted city. This is the moment the old man in the deli realized he was a hero in a book. Jewish soldiers fighting in Jerusalem, the shofar blown on the Temple Mount, the Israeli flag hanging over the Golden Dome—the images were simply too intense. No one could live with them and keep a clear mind. People went mad, came to sense the coming end. For what are these but the sort of things you expect to witness at the start of act 3, at the close of which everything will burn and the secret author will finally be revealed.
Gershom Gorenberg, The End of Days:
The creation of Israel in 1948 and its conquest of Jerusalem in 1967 are not ordinary history. For those inclined to hear them, they are divine proclamations that the hour is near. For literalists, the venue for the final events is Jerusalem—and at its center, the Temple Mount.
This is when the Rabbi Gorens took a leading role in Jewish history, when the secular and pragmatic began to give way to the apocalyptic and eschatological. In the process, some Israelis forgot reality and began to think of themselves as a strong nation with a powerful army. Some came to love the gun, to see in violence a form of self-expression, a rebuke to the weak way of the ghetto Jew. In this way, some lost sight of the original mission, which had been about saving and redeeming people and instead became about holding and redeeming land. Some grew obsessed with the land. Settling it, dying for it. Historians sometimes say that after 1967, Israel went from being David to being Goliath; but that’s not true. Israel is still David, only it’s David in his middle years, after he has won, tasted power, summoned Bathsheba. The story of David ends with the toothless king standing in the gates of a town, weeping for his lost son, Absalom, O Absalom. The story of Israel, much of it, remains to be written.
*The United States currently has 960 soldiers in the Sinai. These men serve the same function the UN force was to serve before 1967.
*The Hagana became the Israel Defense Forces, that is, the regular army, in 1948.
*Politicians come and go, but a strong general can go on for decades. (See Sharon.)
*Ezer Weizman was Chaim Weizmann’s nephew. He was a historian as well as a fighter pilot, having flown in the Second World War in the RAF. These details come from his memoirs.
†At the start of the crisis, Eshkol, while trying to calm the public, instead seemed to crack up during a live speech. “The speech was awaited with expectancy,” wrote Moshe Dayan. “In every house, in every tent and tank in the field, ears were glued to the radio. At last there would be a clear analysis of the crisis, a lucid presentation of government thinking. But the Prime Minister faltered and bumbled through his address, stumbling over words. What the public heard was the halting phrases of a man unsure of himself. The effect was catastrophic. Public doubt gave way to deep concern.”
*The United States did not really supply Israel with aircraft until after the Six-Day War.
†This pilot died a few days later; he was shot down above Syria.
*Jews lived in the West Bank until the mid-twentieth century, when they were driven out first by mobs, then by armies.
*Or you could travel to Europe, catch a plane to Amman, then drive back to Jerusalem from the east. The longest ten yards you will ever cross—this is what A. J. Liebling, a Jew, so not in possession of a certificate of baptism, did when reporting a story about the city for The New Yorker.
*Gershom Gorenberg, The Accidental Empire.
*This bookends a moment, following the capture of Jerusalem by Omar in ad 638, when an old Jew came out of the shadows to lead a Muslim general to the Temple Mount.
*Narkis told this story on his deathbed to a reporter named Nadav Shragai. It has since appeared in several books, including Six Days of War, by Michael Oren, and The Accidental Empire, by Gershom Gorenberg.
*This ruling was promptly violated by Shmuel Gonen, who, in August 1967, on Tish B’Av, the Ninth of Av, which marks the anniversary of the destruction of the Second Temple, went up to the Mount with a Torah scroll, an ark, and a pulpit, to pray. He was quickly taken away.