“JERUSALEM OF GOLD”
MAY 1967. ON the streets of Cairo, demonstrators waved banners of skulls and crossbones and chanted, “We want war!” Caricatures in the Arab world’s government newspapers fantasized about the coming victory. An Egyptian cartoon showed a hook-nosed Jew being strangled by a Star of David; a Syrian cartoon showed a pile of skulls in the smoking ruins of Tel Aviv. One ad in an Egyptian newspaper depicted a hand plunging a knife into a Star of David, and was signed, “Nile Oils and Soaps Company.”
Barely twenty kilometers wide at its narrowest point, which happened to be around the coastal area containing most of its population, Israel could be severed in minutes. The claustrophobia that Israelis had tried to ignore—extending kibbutz fields and housing projects to the very edge of the border—was now unavoidable. The nation could field an impressive force in war—300,000 soldiers and reservists—but only at the cost of wholly mobilizing its barely three million people. The combined Arab armies confronting Israel had nearly twice as many soldiers, four times as many planes, and nearly five times as many tanks.
As young men began disappearing from Israel’s streets and fields, high school students and pensioners volunteered to take their place, working as mailmen and harvesters. The army requisitioned tour buses, taxis, private cars. Gradually, civilian Israel was absorbed into military Israel.
Shelters in apartment buildings were swept clean, trenches dug around houses, windows taped against shattering. Pits were dug in parks, in preparation for mass graves.
Aside from emptying grocery shelves—a resurgence of the refugee instinct—Israelis responded without panic. Hitching soldiers barely had to extend their hand before drivers would stop. So many high school students and pensioners volunteered for the postal service that mail was often delivered two or three times a day. Even thieves contributed to the national effort: as war approached, apartment break-ins stopped.
On May 22, a week after the crisis began, Nasser blockaded the Straits of Tiran, Israel’s southern shipping route to the east. The 55th Brigade began calling up its men.
YOEL BIN-NUN WAS haunted by his rabbi’s lament on Independence Day: “They divided my land!” Something like a heavenly voice, Yoel was convinced, had exploded in Rabbi Zvi Yehudah. At night, in a restless half-sleep, Yoel imagined Israeli soldiers entering Jericho and Hebron.
The Mercaz study hall was emptying. And then an emissary from the army appeared for Yoel. He packed a knapsack with phylacteries, a pocket Bible, a book by Rabbi Kook. Before heading out to his meeting point, he went to the school for the blind near Mercaz, to say good-bye to Esther. She wasn’t there, so he left a note: “To Esther, shlomot, peace upon you! I’m off to my unit. Don’t leave Jerusalem. Great things are going to happen here. Until we meet again, Yoel.”
THE RESERVISTS OF the 55th Brigade left young wives and girlfriends and boarded buses covered with the dust of back roads. They were brought to citrus orchards near Lod Airport, on the Jordanian border, below the hills of the West Bank. Pup tents lined the dirt paths between the trees in even rows, divided and subdivided into battalions and companies, each company with its own field kitchen.
The orchard was young, and its low-hanging branches provided thin shade against the strong sun. In the humidity of the coastal plain, men stripped to undershirts and spent the midday hours burrowed in tents, so small one could barely sit upright inside them. The only relief was provided by makeshift showers, cold water pouring from pipes. There were no outhouses: white tape marked areas where soldiers relieved themselves. The orchards filled with clouds of gnats, so bold that the men had to cover their mouths when they yawned.
Of the brigade’s 2,000 men, only one requested sick leave. Far more typically, reservists whom doctors determined weren’t fit to jump refused to be sent home. One officer appeared for duty in a cast. Young men studying abroad flew back to Lod Airport and, without stopping at home, hitched directly to the orchards.
Despite rumors of an imminent Israeli offensive in Sinai, the reservists stayed put. They dug trenches around the encampment, stood guard duty, took refresher courses in first aid and explosives, cleaned and recleaned their Uzis and Belgian FN rifles, whose long steel barrels rusted easily and required constant attention. They played backgammon and chess and amused themselves by listening to Radio Cairo’s Hebrew broadcasts, which warned the Jews to flee. They laughed at the bad Hebrew and laughed, too, at the threats. Of course we’ll win, they reassured each other; the only question is the cost.
They argued constantly, Israeli style—not to convince an opponent but to bolster one’s certainties. Was prime minister Levi Eshkol right to try to exhaust the diplomatic option, or was he showing weakness? Should we listen to the Americans and show restraint? Can we go to war without American backing?
Whatever the differences among them, they shared a growing sense of aloneness, of Jewish isolation. Israel’s foreign minister, Abba Eban, sought help in Western capitals, but no nation was prepared to stand with Israel. France, Israel’s closest ally, turned against the Jewish state. The United States, which had promised to defend Israel’s access to the Straits of Tiran when Israel withdrew from the Sinai Desert after the 1956 war, was preoccupied with Vietnam. And the UN was the UN. We can only depend on ourselves, said the young reservists, and on our fellow Jews in the Diaspora. Angry and anxious, the young Israelis increasingly sounded like the old Jews of exile they were meant to replace.
WHEN THEY TIRED of talking politics, they argued religion.
“How can you believe in God after the Holocaust?” a kibbutznik demanded of Yoel Bin-Nun.
“How can you not believe in God when He returned us to the land of Israel after the Holocaust?” said Yoel.
“Prove to me that God exists,” the kibbutznik challenged.
“Prove to me that He doesn’t,” Yoel countered.
ARIK ACHMON SPENT his days shuttling between central headquarters in Tel Aviv and southern command headquarters in the desert city of Beersheba. When the updates he sought on Egyptian troop movements weren’t forthcoming, he turned to an acquaintance in intelligence who provided the information. For Arik, there was always a friend in the right place. At night he returned to the big tent in the orchards, where his staff of ten reservists would incorporate the new material into their scenarios. They were soon able to identify every minefield, tent camp, and even sandbag position in El Arish.
Arik couldn’t bear the endless speculations among the men and the anxious huddling around transistor radios for news updates. One of his soldiers evoked the possibility of another Holocaust, and Arik waved his hand dismissively. “Of course they would destroy us if they could,” he said. “But we won’t give them the pleasure.”
Regretfully Arik acknowledged the likelihood that he wouldn’t experience frontline combat in the imminent war. Arik was now part of Motta’s inner circle. Arik would help direct the battle from behind the lines, at Motta’s side.
In the nine months since being appointed Motta’s intelligence officer, he had come to respect Motta more than any commander. Like Arik, Motta combined absolute confidence in his own judgment—he intended to one day become chief of staff—with a readiness to admit when proven wrong. During strategy sessions, even Motta’s driver felt free to question him. And Motta knew how to reassure his men: when a young reservist in the orchards admitted he was terrified of being dropped behind enemy lines, Motta recounted his own fears as a young soldier during a nighttime jump and how relieved he was when the jump was canceled.
Arik’s respect for Motta was reciprocated. Motta wrote in his diary: “What’s good about Arik: He understands the importance of precision in presenting facts, and doesn’t draw hasty conclusions.” In matters of life and death, Motta could depend on Arik.
ONE NIGHT, AFTER reviewing the latest invasion plans, Arik went for a walk through the orchards with Moisheleh Stempel-Peles, Motta’s deputy commander. They passed men sitting beside campfires, drinking Turkish coffee, arguing about the government, singing softly.
Squat, thick-necked, Moisheleh had spent the Holocaust years as a child wandering with his family through the Soviet Union. In the paratroopers, he had won a medal for valor during a retaliatory raid against a Gaza police station: under fire, he rushed to the building’s entrance to replace a defective explosive.
When Motta first told Arik that he’d chosen Moisheleh as his deputy, Arik was unimpressed. “That blockhead?” said Arik. Moisheleh’s opinion of Arik had been no better: a shvitzer, thinks he’s smarter than everyone else, and meanwhile he’s never experienced real combat. But in their nights together, each had learned to respect the other. Moisheleh was smarter, and Arik tougher, than either had realized.
They walked together in silence. “Arik, I want to tell you something,” Moisheleh said. During the 1956 Sinai campaign, he continued quietly, he had ordered his men to beat bound Egyptian POWs. “I wanted to toughen them, teach them how to be real soldiers. Now I look at myself and can’t believe what an animal I was.”
Arik nodded, grateful for Moisheleh’s trust in him.
PRESIDENT NASSER PROMISED the imminent end of the Jewish state. Radio Cairo’s Hebrew announcer urged Jews to start packing.
Israel counterattacked with song. The new hits playing from the tinny transistor radios in the orchards were rousing, defiant. One song promised that, just as the people of Israel had emerged from all the “narrow straits” of their history, so too would they emerge from the crisis over the Straits of Tiran. Another song ridiculed Nasser’s boast that he was waiting for the IDF’s chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin: “Nasser is waiting for Rabin ayayay!” The tune was so upbeat, the anticipated victory so tangible, that just hearing that song was enough to cheer the paratroopers.
In fact, no one but Rabin’s closest confidants knew that the chief of staff had suffered a brief nervous breakdown—acute anxiety, his doctor called it. Israel was facing not just a war but a war of survival, the end of the Jewish dream of sovereignty, and the responsibility had overwhelmed Rabin. Tranquilized, rested, he returned to active duty.
THE RADIO CONSTANTLY played the newest hit, “Jerusalem of Gold.” Written by Naomi Shemer, the country’s greatest songwriter, it had been first sung at the annual Hebrew song festival on Independence Day by an unknown nineteen-year-old soldier named Shuli Natan. Her harplike voice was at once quivering and strong, and a shiver seemed to go through the whole country. Israelis had suppressed their longing for the missing parts of Jerusalem, but now they were singing along with Shuli Natan, mourning their divided capital: “The city that sits in solitude / and in its heart a wall.”
The paratroopers in the orchards sang the refrain over and over: “Jerusalem of gold, and of copper and of light / I am a harp for all your songs.”
Something is happening, thought Yoel Bin-Nun. On the very day that Rabbi Zvi Yehudah had cried out for the missing places of Judea and Samaria, Shuli Natan awakened the nation’s suppressed anguish for the Old City of Jerusalem. What is God preparing us for?
THE MORALE PROBLEM OF CORPORAL UDI ADIV
IN THE HUMID, INSOMNIAC EVENING, Avital Geva joined his men quietly singing around a campfire. Avital found the singing far preferable to the endless arguments about war strategies and government policy. He didn’t believe the country faced destruction, but he feared that the coming war would be Israel’s hardest since 1948, and he expected the fighting to last for months. At best, he thought, the IDF would fight the Arabs to a draw.
Avital noted with concern that one corporal in Company D refused to join the campfire. His name was Udi Adiv, and he was from Gan Shmuel, a kibbutz just down the road from Ein Shemer. Udi seemed to have a morale problem. Some of the soldiers complained to Avital that Udi was denouncing what he called “Israel’s plans for an imperialist war against Nasser.”
Avital was wary of provoking a fight with someone from Gan Shmuel. Though Gan Shmuel and Ein Shemer were both part of the Hashomer Hatzair movement, and were located mere minutes apart, the two kibbutzim shunned each other. The rift had begun decades earlier, when several dozen members of Ein Shemer were expelled over some now-obscure ideological argument and moved a few kilometers away to Gan Shmuel. The grudge had never been forgiven. In Gan Shmuel, they referred to their garbage bins as Ein Shemers. In Ein Shemer, they mockingly called the members of Gan Shmuel —a far more prosperous kibbutz than theirs—Boazites, after the wealthy farmer of the book of Ruth. Even now, the two kibbutzim maintained separate schools. That’s all I need, thought Avital, to reopen this stupid feud between Ein Shemer and Gan Shmuel.
Udi Adiv sat in his tent, wondering what he was doing here. He tried to warn his fellow reservists: We’re being led to the slaughter for the glory of the generals! There is no “threat to Jewish survival,” Israel is in no danger from the Arab world. Nasser is a revolutionary whom progressive Israelis should embrace.
Fellow kibbutzniks berated him: Did “the generals” invent Nasser’s threats and the Arab crowds marching with genocidal banners? What was missing in Udi’s DNA that he’d lost his most basic Jewish instincts for survival? Only Udi’s tentmate, Rami, an aspiring actor, reacted to his politics with equanimity. Udi had brought with him a book of Greek tragedies, and Rami tried to distract him by discussing the plays.
“NEXT WEEK IN JERUSALEM”
ON SHABBAT AFTERNOON, in the waning light, Yoel Bin-Nun and his fellow religious soldiers sat outside the large tent that functioned as a synagogue. They ate cold canned goulash and sang songs of longing for a redeemed world.
With evening, the end of Shabbat merged into the holiday of Lag Ba’Omer and melancholy gave way to rousing song. “Bar Yochai, you are annointed, you are blessed,” the young men sang, celebrating the ancient mystic who according to legend hid in a cave from the Romans, subsisting on water and carob pods, and who died on Lag Ba’Omer.
They formed a line. Yoel Bin-Nun held the shoulder of the man before him. They danced through the tent area and came to a clearing, a makeshift parking lot. Secular soldiers stood on the hoods of jeeps and clapped along. “Next year in Jerusalem,” the religious soldiers sang. “Next week in Jerusalem!” a Mercaz student called out, and the dancers adopted the new lyric. “Next week in Jerusalem—in rebuilt Jerusalem!”
Though ordinarily not an enthusiastic dancer, Yoel was deeply moved by this outbreak of defiant joy. Finally, he thought, a moment of inspiration.
Avital Geva watched the dancers and wondered: How do they manage to go so quickly from anxiety to ecstasy? There was something forced about it, he felt. Untrustworthy.
BOOSTING MORALE
MOTTA GUR STOOD on the hood of a truck, illumined by a spotlight. It was night, and otherwise totally dark in the orchards. Motta had assembled the reservists for a talk, and after a week here, with Arab threats intensifying and no clear government policy in sight, they were restless and demoralized.
“It’s clear to me,” said Motta, “that no matter what I say, you’ll continue to complain. . . . So go ahead and slander—the government, the army, the commanders, everything.”
Laughter.
“Eisenhower writes that a soldier who doesn’t complain isn’t a soldier. So be soldiers, and complain. . . . Argue, analyze, curse, [bemoan] the home and the fields and the studies you’ve left behind. Hit as hard as you like. Just keep smiling . . .
“If we will be summoned to battle, we will go. If we will be sent home, we will go too. We are, after all, disciplined paratroopers.”
OVER THE WEEKEND, parents and wives and girlfriends appeared at the orchards. Guards halfheartedly tried to prevent them from entering, then gave up. The paths through the citrus groves filled with picnickers.
THE PLAGUE OF GNATS drawn by piles of excrement was making life in the orchards unbearable. On May 31, the tent camp was moved to a clearing in a forest of cypresses and pines. The paratroopers began to train in house-to-house combat in an abandoned British army base. But they didn’t fire their guns: the hard-pressed IDF was saving its bullets for the war.
Avital, singing, led his men on all-day hikes across sand dunes and at night on navigation exercises in the hills. They passed untended wheat fields ripe for harvest, casualties of the reservist mobilization. Avital felt the pain of those abandoned fields, of farmers who had sown but not reaped.
JORDAN JOINED THE Egyptian-Syrian military alliance. Israel was now facing a three-front war.
In Jerusalem, a national unity government formed. For the first time, an Israeli coalition included the right-wing party Herut (Freedom), headed by Menachem Begin, whom former prime minister David Ben-Gurion had refused to even refer to by name. The bitter feud between Zionism’s left and right was suspended.
Yoel Bin-Nun was ecstatic. “This is the first national unity government since the days of the kingdom of David and Solomon,” he said. Why had the Temple been destroyed? Not because of a failure of military or political strategy, argued Yoel, but because of a failure of brotherly love. Even as the Romans tightened their siege around Jerusalem, the Jews had turned against each other, burned the granaries of rival camps, and murdered rival leaders. And how will the Temple be rebuilt? concluded Yoel. By the merit of unconditional love of Jew for Jew.
On guard duty, around the campfire, Yoel spoke to secular soldiers about Israel’s spiritual destiny. Some shunned him as a “missionary,” others argued about why a secular state needed religious laws. One kibbutznik asked Yoel to teach him the writings of Rabbi Kook. They studied a passage about the rise and fall of religion, which begins with a vital insight, then decays in institutional constriction—a necessary stage, wrote Rabbi Kook, to purify and renew faith. “Just like dialectical materialism,” the kibbutznik enthused. “Dialectical idealism,” Yoel corrected.
When a friend spoke about “religious paratroopers,” Yoel interrupted him. “There are no religious paratroopers or secular paratroopers,” he said. “Only Israeli paratroopers.”
JERUSALEM, JUST IN CASE
THE BRIGADE’S BATTLE PLANS were nearly complete. “I can do a doctorate on El Arish,” said Arik Achmon.
But Motta was uneasy. Now that King Hussein had signed a military pact with Nasser, a Jordanian attack on Jewish Jerusalem couldn’t be ruled out. At the general staff there was concern the Jordanians would attack Mount Scopus, the only outpost in East Jerusalem that Israel had managed to retain after the 1948 war. Every two weeks a convoy of Israeli soldiers was escorted by the UN through Jordanian lines to Mount Scopus. The soldiers were disguised as police, because the armistice agreement forbade an Israeli military presence there. Motta feared that the Jordanians might try to attack the convoy—the next one was scheduled for the coming week—and then overrun the outpost.
“I don’t want to be caught with my pants down,” Motta said.
Motta and Arik drove to Jerusalem in Motta’s “Kaiser,” a big cranky car temporarily requisitioned by the IDF. On the road leading up from the coastal plain, the Kaiser repeatedly stalled.
Not even the brightness of a late spring day could dispel the sadness of the divided city. West Jerusalem’s main street, Jaffa Road, ended abruptly in barbed wire, just before the Old City walls. The housing projects along the border had little windows and sliding metal shutters to protect against snipers.
Motta and Arik drove into an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood. A sign, posted beside a line of laundry, read, Danger! Frontier Ahead. They stopped on the edge of a slope leading down into no-man’s-land, a tangle of barbed wire and minefields several hundred meters long. On the Jordanian side were trenches and concrete bunkers; on the Israeli side, sandbag emplacements.
Crouching behind sandbags, Motta devised a plan for defending the IDF convoy to Mount Scopus. He pointed in the direction of a bend in the road sloping up toward the mount: that’s where the convoy is likely to be attacked. It was precisely the point where a convoy heading toward Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus had been ambushed by Arab fighters in the 1948 war; seventy-nine people, mostly doctors and nurses, had been massacred. One battalion, said Motta, would head straight for the bend, while the brigade’s other two battalions would seize the high ground overlooking the area, warding off Jordanian reinforcements. “A quick operation,” he said.
Motta instructed Arik to present him with a preliminary intelligence report on Jerusalem. “It’s a full night’s work,” Arik noted, a distraction from El Arish.
“Just do it,” said Motta.
Arik drove to the command headquarters in charge of the central front, which included Jerusalem, and asked for intelligence assessments, maps, aerial photographs of Mount Scopus. You’re too late, he was told; intelligence officers from other brigades have taken the best material. Arik, of course, knew someone at headquarters, an intelligence officer who confided that there was other material. “It’s forbidden to remove this from here,” the officer said, handing him two massive folders bound by straps and containing the originals of the most sensitive documents on Jerusalem. “Dir balak”—Be careful—he warned in Arabic, “I can go to jail for this. Have it back here first thing tomorrow morning, before anyone notices it’s missing.” “Al a’rasi,” Arik reassured him, responding in Arabic—“On my head.”
That evening, Arik and his staff sifted through the folders. The material was first-rate: there were street maps, aerial photographs revealing Jordanian bunkers and sandbag positions. By midnight Arik had completed a preliminary intelligence summary. If we have to fight in Jerusalem, he told his men, at least we won’t be going in entirely cold. To himself he added, The difference between what I know about El Arish and what I know about Jerusalem is on a scale of a hundred to one.
SHABBAT MORNING, JUNE 3. In the tent synagogue there was celebration: a medic named Yossi Yochai was to be married in the coming week. Yossi was summoned to bless the Torah. Reciting the blessing—“Who has chosen us from all the nations and given us His Torah”—the groom’s voice caught.
The soldiers showered Yossi with candies and peanuts and sunflower seeds, gathered from gift packages sent by schoolchildren. One big young man named Yisrael Diamant lifted Yossi onto his shoulders and carried him outside. The others followed, dancing and singing: “The rejoicing of bride and groom will be heard in the Judean hills and in the outskirts of Jerusalem.”
