A CHANGE IN PLAN
THE WAR IS about to begin,” Motta said to Arik.
It was Sunday morning, June 4. “Run over to southern command,” Motta instructed, “for a final update on El Arish.”
Arik drove two hours south to Beersheba. The IDF, he learned, was about to launch a preemptive strike against Egypt, and the paratroopers were being sent to Tel Nof, the air force base from where they would be flown to Sinai. Busy with briefings, Arik forgot about the intelligence material on Jerusalem he’d promised to return.
For the third time in less than two weeks, the 55th moved camp. The men loaded mortars and machine guns and crates of bullets and C-rations onto buses. They relocated to a grove of eucalyptus trees located between Tel Nof and Givat Brenner, Arik Achmon’s childhood kibbutz. Arik couldn’t see the kibbutz, whose lights were blacked out. All these years he’d tried to wipe Givat Brenner from his memory. But the loss of his childhood home remained his deepest grief.
The men were told to dig foxholes, but many found the earth too hard and so simply lay on the ground for a few hours of restless sleep. Some smoked and paced. One young man broke out laughing for no apparent reason.
“Moisheleh,” Arik said to Stempel-Peles with a touch of envy, “how do you feel about being in the first helicopter?”
Moisheleh was scheduled to lead the team that would land near El Arish and mark the area for the parachute drop.
“Here’s how I see it,” said Moisheleh. “The helicopter lands, I step out, take a piss, and then the war begins.”
The brigade’s officers were told to lecture their men about gas warfare. Just in case: the Egyptian army had used poison gas in its war in Yemen. Arik didn’t bother; who had time for such nonsense?
07:10, MONDAY, JUNE 5. Dozens of Mirages and Mystères began taking off from Tel Nof and heading south. The planes were flying so low over the trees that Yoel Bin-Nun thought he could lift his hand and touch their wings.
For the next ninety minutes, planes took off and returned and took off again.
Exhausted, energized, paratroopers gathered around transistor radios and heard the laconic announcement by the IDF spokesman: Hostilities have broken out on the southern front. There was no hint that Israeli planes had almost entirely destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground, and that the war in the south had just been decided.
Some paratroopers tuned into Radio Cairo’s Hebrew broadcast. It urged Israelis to raise white flags before the conquering Egyptian army, which in a few hours would reach Tel Aviv.
On Israel Radio, the military commentator noted that all Israelis, whether or not they normally prayed, were united in the prayer that the “Guardian of Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.”
Motta and Arik were summoned to a briefing in Tel Nof. Ground forces were advancing into Gaza and Sinai faster than expected, they were told. El Arish might well be conquered before the paratroopers even got there. The 55th was no longer needed in Sinai. Instead, the brigade’s three battalions would be separated: one would be dispatched to protect Lod Airport, while the other two would await a new assignment.
Arik was devastated. Nineteen fifty-six all over again, only worse—
As they left the briefing, Motta said quietly, “Arik, I won’t let them do it to us.”
14:00. General Uzi Narkiss, commander of the central front, summoned Motta, along with Arik, to his headquarters near Tel Aviv. The paratroopers, said Narkiss, were being sent to Jerusalem.
A few hours earlier, Narkiss explained, the Jordanian army had opened indiscriminate fire on the Jewish neighborhoods of West Jerusalem. Hundreds of apartments had been hit; dozens were wounded. The Israeli government had sent a message to Jordan’s King Hussein: Stay out of the war, and we won’t attack. Hussein ignored the offer.
Narkiss had fought in the failed battle for the Old City of Jerusalem in 1948. Then, the poorly equipped and outnumbered defenders of the Jewish Quarter had been overwhelmed by the Jordanian Legion, which expelled the Jewish residents and destroyed the centuries-old quarter, turning synagogues into stables and latrines. Since then, Jordan had barred Israelis from praying at the Western Wall. Now, though, the Old City might be within reach again.
Your mission, Narkiss said to Motta, is to break through the formidable barriers of minefields and trenches separating East and West Jerusalem and reach the Israeli enclave on Mount Scopus. But, he added, “Be prepared to take the Old City. I hope you will erase the shame of 1948.”
Arik wasn’t interested in historical calculations. His only concern was to thwart the enemy, not to regain a stone wall where the pious once prayed. Until explicitly stated otherwise, their mission was to protect the garrison on Mount Scopus, nothing more.
Arik’s new assignment was to fine-tune the rough plan that Motta had devised two days earlier during their impulsive trip to the Jerusalem front. Within the next few hours, the 55th Brigade would be moving to Jerusalem; by early morning, they would be crossing the no-man’s-land that cut across the city. In assembling the data for an attack on El Arish, Arik had had nearly two weeks and access to the most detailed intelligence. To help formulate a battle plan for Jerusalem, he had twelve hours.
AND THEN ARIK remembered: the two intelligence files on Jerusalem. What a stroke of luck that he hadn’t returned them. He would keep those now to distribute among the officers. Still, the several hundred street maps and aerial photographs contained in those files were hardly adequate. The brigade would need several thousand maps and photos to distribute among the units.
Arik instructed two staff members to drive to central command headquarters. There should be enough intelligence material there, he said, to amply equip the brigade. “Take an empty van,” he added. “You’ll need it for all the boxes.”
But when Arik’s men arrived at headquarters, they were told: Other units got here first. There’s nothing left.
INTO BLACKNESS
DEEPLY TANNED FROM nearly two weeks in the sun, the men of the 55th boarded requisitioned tour buses and headed toward Jerusalem.
The convoy took a back route, partly on dirt roads, to avoid Jordanian shelling of the Jerusalem–Tel Aviv highway. The bus aisles were crowded with guns and ammunition belts. Dust penetrated the windows and mingled with the haze of cigarette smoke. Some men tried to nap. One soldier held up a grenade pin, which he’d been saving for a practical joke, and called out, “Anyone lose this?”
Some sang along with the radio, which was playing only Hebrew songs, many about the desert, in solidarity with the soldiers fighting in Sinai. Then the play list shifted to songs about Jerusalem.
“Maybe we’ll liberate the Western Wall,” someone said.
“Hey, Yoske, why don’t you build us a wall?” someone else called out to Yoske Balagan, whose latest job had been working as a building contractor.
A religious soldier read aloud psalms extolling Jerusalem. When he paused, secular soldiers urged him to continue.
Around the Harel intersection, named for the Palmach brigade that had helped break the 1948 siege around Jerusalem, the convoy turned onto the highway—a three-lane road whose middle lane was intended for those daring to pass from either side. Explosions were audible. Traffic was slowed by tanks and trucks heading toward the besieged city. The bus convoy barely moved. Soldiers shouted at the drivers to step on the gas. Some pounded on the seats before them, as if prodding a horse.
Yoel watched the landscape and recalled his first trip to Jerusalem, with his third-grade class. As they approached, the teacher had pointed out a minaret on a hill and said, “That is Nebi Samuel, burial place of Samuel the Prophet. From there Jordanian cannons bombarded Jerusalem in 1948.”
“Can they bomb us again?” a child asked.
Approaching Jerusalem now, Yoel looked across the valley at Nebi Samuel and saw smoke rising from artillery positions. The Jordanians were firing on Jerusalem.
MOTTA AND ARIK and Amos Yaron, the brigade’s operations officer, were driven to Jerusalem in a requisitioned Oldsmobile, hardly better than the Kaiser: it too overheated on the steep incline to the capital.
Together they fine-tuned Motta’s plan. One battalion would cut through Wadi Joz, a valley on the Jordanian side of the line, and head toward Mount Scopus. A second battalion would seize Ammunition Hill, a Jordanian stronghold overlooking the main road to Mount Scopus. Meanwhile a third battalion would conquer the Rockefeller Museum just outside the Old City, and there await the government’s decision about whether to enter its walls.
The Oldsmobile sped through Jerusalem’s empty streets and came to an army base close to no-man’s-land. A concrete wall separated the brick barracks from the stone apartment buildings of the ultra-Orthodox streets. As if sensing Motta’s arrival, Jordanian mortars began exploding around the barracks.
Arik ran to the office of the intelligence officer. “Give me whatever you have,” Arik said. “Nothing’s left,” replied the officer; “the other units took everything.” With all the calm he could summon, Arik told himself, We could be facing a catastrophe.
THE BUSES, SLOW AND WEIGHTED, entered Jerusalem toward evening. They were met by the sound of explosives. Instinctively men reached for their guns. Avital Geva noted that he’d never heard such loud explosions in training exercises. Though the shells were falling on the other side of town, they seemed to be crashing into the next street.
Aside from ambulances, the streets of Western Jerusalem were entirely still. The paratroopers tried to rouse the silenced city with song: “Jerusalem of gold, and of copper and of light!”
They disembarked on Herzl Boulevard, flanked with low, stone-faced apartment buildings. Word spread: The paratroopers are here. Residents emerged from shelters, invited the young men into their homes for sandwiches and coffee and seltzer with raspberry syrup. A dentist offered to check their teeth. Why do Jews need to be hit on the head, wondered Yoske Balagan, in order to be nice to each other?
An elderly woman handed an Israeli flag to Yoram Zamosh, a twenty-five-year-old captain and one of the brigade’s few religious officers. Hang this over the liberated wall, she said. Zamosh happened to be the right address for that request: a student at Mercaz, he’d often climbed the rooftops overlooking no-man’s-land with a telescope, seeking glimpses of the Western Wall. “I’ll do it,” promised Zamosh.
JUST BEFORE NIGHTFALL, Arik Achmon took the commanders of the 66th and 71st Battalions on a tour of the border. The commander of the 28th Battalion, a Galilee farmer, got lost in the maze of ultra-Orthodox streets and missed the briefing. For the two other battalion commanders, this was their first glimpse of the imminent battlefield. They stood on the roof of an apartment house mere meters from the barbed wire fence. Arik told them what he knew, which wasn’t much: Over there is Ammunition Hill; farther south, Abramov Garden. The goal of the 66th and 71st was Mount Scopus; the goal of the 28th was the Rockefeller Museum. Arik didn’t mention the Old City; it wasn’t on his mind.
Then he joined Motta and Uzi Narkiss, commander of the front, on another rooftop. Narkiss offered Motta two options: either cross at midnight—less than four hours away—or wait until morning, when air cover could be provided. Motta opted for the cover of night: there was, he argued, only limited use for air power in urban warfare. But, he added, midnight was too soon to prepare the brigade for crossing; give us another two hours. Narkiss agreed.
ON HERZL BOULEVARD, the company commanders briefed their men. One group met in the apartment of an officer’s cousin; others gathered around the dimmed headlights of a bus. The officers used the maps and aerial photographs from Arik’s two files, stretched thin among the companies. If not for those two files, the brigade would be entering battle entirely blind.
Even so, the briefings were barely intelligible: a flash of light on a map of strange streets, a photograph almost invisible in the darkness.
For the four hundred men of the 28th Battalion, only a handful of maps and aerial photographs were available of their destination, the area around the Rockefeller Museum. Avital Geva shined a flashlight onto one of the photographs, covered with red arrows pointing in directions that only confused him, and tried to explain their mission to the men of Company D. He knew that the crossing point was a place called Abramov Garden that wasn’t a garden but a hill overlooking no-man’s-land, and that the destination was the Rockefeller. But he didn’t know anything more than that, not even the names of the streets that led to the museum. “We start here—” He pointed to no-man’s land. “And then we go there—” He pointed toward the Rockefeller. Where were the enemy positions? What was the strength of their numbers? Avital couldn’t say.
An officer looking for someone to take him on a reconnaissance mission to the front called out, “Is there anyone here from Jerusalem who knows the way?”
GRENADES FASTENED TO ammunition belts. Bullet clips in shirt pockets for rapid reloading. Canteens. Bandages.
23:00. The men boarded the buses. A slow-moving convoy, without headlights. A soldier who knew the city walked in front, guiding the buses toward no-man’s-land. Yet even native Jerusalemites could scarcely find their way in the near-total darkness. One bus, transporting the sappers of the 71st Battalion, who were supposed to lead the breakthrough at Abramov Garden, couldn’t be located. The driver had panicked and turned back.
It took nearly two hours for the convoy to reach the ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods near the front, ordinarily a brief drive from Herzl Boulevard.
The men of the 28th disembarked near the Bikur Cholim hospital, ten minutes’ walk from the border.
They walked in two slow lines, on either side of the street, each man trusting the footsteps of the man before him. The blacked-out streets were illuminated only by exploding flashes.
They came to Beit Yisrael, an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood with gray stone houses. Several houses seemed dropped randomly at the edge of no-man’s-land.
Avital Geva, together with his commander and friend from Ein Shemer, Haggai Erlichman, led the line of Company D. With Haggai beside him, Avital felt more secure. Haggai had fought in the retaliation raids of the 1950s, but unlike some others never told stories of his heroism. Avital respected his reticence.
Udi Adiv, the antiwar kibbutznik, found himself behind a veteran of the unit who had fought in the 1956 war. “What’s it like to be in combat?” Udi asked, seeking the reassurance of experience. “You feel your whole body exposed,” the veteran replied quietly. “You wonder which part will be hurt.” “Don’t you get used to it?” Udi asked. “You never get used to it,” the other man said.
THE COMPANIES SPREAD into the side streets and alleys around Abramov Garden, overlooking no-man’s-land. In about an hour, at 02:00, the men of the 71st Battalion were scheduled to blow open a path through the minefield, to be followed by the men of the 28th.
Yoel Bin-Nun of the 28th Battalion was told by his officer to strap a radio on his back and follow him. Their mission was to find the 71st, attach themselves to its tail end, and then point flashlights to help the men of the 28th cross into no-man’s-land.
The two men ran through the streets. But in the darkness they could see almost nothing.
They came to an ultra-Orthodox yeshiva. There in the courtyard, several dozen men from the 71st were gathered, preparing to move out. Paratroopers in an ultra-Orthodox yeshiva! marveled Yoel. The Jewish people is being gathered together.
“MY FACE! MY FACE!”
02:15. THE SAPPERS from the 71st—their wayward bus had turned up at the last moment—approached no-man’s-land. They encountered their first surprise: a line of Israeli barbed wire that hadn’t appeared in the aerial photos. They flattened the wire with their boots and reached the border fifty meters away. There they laid bangalores, long metal tubes filled with dynamite, under a row of barbed wire. They blew the beginnings of a scorched path, fifty centimeters wide and free of mines. Then they entered the breach, blew holes through the next three layers of barbed wire, stretched the bangalores farther, and extended the safe passageway through no-man’s-land, which they marked with white tape.
One by one, paratroopers from the 71st descended the slope into a valley of thistles. A tank offered cover. The sky turned red and white with arcing flares. Over no-man’s-land rose clouds of smoke, providing cover for the men running single file along the scorched path.
Jordanian soldiers, in bunkers and in houses, returned fire. Burning buildings lit the night. Yet the Jordanians failed to notice the paratroopers moving toward them and aimed over their heads. Mortar shells fell into side streets around Abramov Garden. Directly into the men of the 28th Battalion, Company D.
Pavement exploded. Houses blew open. Soldiers crouched behind cars and stone walls. Some lay down, exposed, gripping the ground.
A flash of light: Avital Geva fell backward, bleeding from his shoulders and knees. Someone rushed to help, but another mortar exploded and he fell too. Haggai appraised the wounds of both men: not critical. Avital was propped against a stone wall. His helmet was removed, to help him breathe more easily.
An explosion. “My face!” screamed Avital. “My face!” Blood covered his eyes. “I can’t see!” He steadied himself. Haggai noted Avital’s self-control.
Someone jump-started a car, and Avital was driven a few blocks away to the Bikur Cholim hospital. He dimly discerned a corridor crowded with wounded men, some lying on cots and stretchers, others leaning against the wall. Then he passed out.
BLINDING FLASHES, DISTORTIONS of light.
Udi Adiv hid in a doorway, terrified. “Medic!” came anguished cries from the street.
This wasn’t Udi’s war; he had mentally opted out before it began. Still, he couldn’t refuse a call for help. He ran into the street and joined one of the teams ferrying stretchers to a first aid station. They laid the wounded man beside several others; in the dim light of a kerosene lamp he thought he saw an eyeball hanging from its socket. He turned away and went to retrieve another wounded soldier, feeling every part of his body exposed.
THE BATTLE HADN’T even been engaged, and the paratroopers were being decimated. They’d been taught to charge when ambushed, but the enemy was invisible and beyond reach. In Company D alone, fully one-third of its ninety-two men were wounded before they even crossed the line. Stretchers ran out; men with severed limbs lay in the street. The less injured tried to lift those more seriously wounded. Some could only moan; some couldn’t even moan.
A basement shelter crowded with ultra-Orthodox families became a first aid station. Old people brought blankets and water; modest women who never exposed their knees and elbows in public tore their dresses for bandages.
A medic, hearing the whistle of an incoming mortar shell, leaped onto the man he was treating; the medic was killed, the patient saved. Another medic died in an explosion at a first aid station. He was Yossi Yochai, whose imminent wedding had been celebrated in the tent synagogue of the 28th Battalion.
THE JORDANIANS CONTINUED to fire on the streets behind Abramov Garden, still unaware that the paratroopers were heading toward them.
A waning crescent moon rose. The last men of the 71st passed through the barbed wire. Yoel’s officer radioed the commander of the 28th, and its men began appearing from the alleys. Some had lost connection with their companies and joined other units. Yoel and his officer crouched at either side of the opening and aimed their flashlights at the men gathering behind them. “Pirtzah pirtzah pirtzah”—Breach breach breach—Yoel repeated like a chant.
ARIK ACHMON STOOD on the rooftop of a four-story building overlooking no-man’s-land, where Motta had established his operational headquarters, and wished he were down below, leading his former unit, Company A, across the line.
“Sit on the radio,” Motta told Arik. “I need to think.”
This was Arik’s second sleepless night. If he was exhausted, he didn’t notice. He suddenly remembered that tonight, according to the Hebrew lunar calendar, was his birthday. Though he preferred the English date, his parents, passionate Hebraists, had always celebrated the Hebrew date. He was pleased by the confluence of his birthday with this moment.
HOW DO YOU GET TO THE ROCKEFELLER?
04:30. WITH THE first light, most of the men of the 28th Battalion had crossed no-man’s-land. The men of Company D remained behind, evacuating their wounded.
The Rockefeller Museum, a fortresslike building with an octagonal tower, was no more than a fifteen-minute walk from the breakthrough point. Two companies turned right, past the now-deserted American Colony, a gracious hotel with arched passageways and courtyard fountain and Armenian-tiled hallways.
Jordanian soldiers hiding in houses and in the minaret of a mosque fired on the advancing line. One Israeli officer was shot in the thigh and lay in the road, blood spurting from an open vein. “Keep going,” he told his men.
The paratroopers came to a fork in the road, beneath the bell tower of St. George’s Cathedral. The battalion commander detected shooting to his right and directed the line of paratroopers there, onto Nablus Road.
In fact, they were supposed to turn left, onto Salah a-Din Street. The mistake was disastrous. Almost all the Jordanian positions were concentrated on Nablus Road, facing no-man’s-land. Had the paratroopers turned onto Salah a-Din Street, they would have encountered little resistance and arrived at the Rockefeller within minutes. But when the Jordanians realized that the paratroopers were advancing directly behind them, they simply turned their machine guns around and transformed Nablus Road into a battleground.
The battalion commander radioed for help. Motta dispatched Moisheleh. Arik asked Motta to allow him to go too, but Motta insisted Arik remain with him. Maybe we should move the command post closer to the line, Arik suggested. Motta rejected that idea, too; this was a good vantage point from which to manage the three battalions.
AS PARATROOPERS MOVED along Nablus Road, shooting came from side streets and rooftops, from every direction and no direction. A machine gun inside the YMCA building on Nablus Road fired on the street. An Israeli tank silenced the position.
A paratrooper entered a courtyard, came face-to-face with a Jordanian soldier. The Israeli emptied his Uzi into the Jordanian, then threw up.
From the back of an alley, a machine gun fired on the slowly advancing line. A paratrooper tried to take out the position with a grenade, but was wounded. Another paratrooper entered to retrieve him, but he too was shot. A third, a fourth: the alley filled with the dead and dying. Among the dead was Yehoshua Diamant, the big man who had carried the groom, Yossi Yochai, on his shoulders during the Sabbath celebration in the tent camp.
SHELLS EXPLODED AROUND Motta’s rooftop headquarters. Three shells hit the building’s facade, blowing off the roof’s railing. A journalist from the IDF newspaper went into shock and couldn’t move. Arik put his arm around him and said, “From now on, you stay close to me.”
IN THE CHAOS of the night, Yoel Bin-Nun had found himself crossing no-man’s-land with only a part of his company. As dawn rose, the men ran, zigzag, across the narrow scorched path. They reached a clearing on the other side and took cover behind boulders.
Their commander, Michael Odem, had no map of the area. He pointed in what he thought was the general direction of the Rockefeller Museum, the 28th Battalion’s destination, and led his men through an alley alongside the American Colony Hotel. They climbed over walls and fences, cut through gardens of bougainvillea and jasmine, and came to Wadi Joz, the valley between Mount Scopus and the Old City.
They found an old man wandering alone. Where is the Rockefeller? Odem asked in Arabic. The old man claimed he didn’t know. Odem slapped him. The old man insisted: I don’t know. The unit moved on, and saw, just up the road, the octagonal white tower of the Rockefeller.
They came across two men from the 71st Battalion. One was wounded. Odem told Yoel and three others to grab a stretcher and take the wounded man to the first aid station, back up the hill near the American Colony.
They reached the station without incident. Yoel took the opportunity to say his morning prayers. He began to recite from memory: “Blessed are You, Lord of the World, Who girds Israel with strength. . . .” Yoel had no phylacteries; they couldn’t fit in his ammunition pouches. He missed the strength of binding himself in the black straps, missed fastening the boxes filled with prayers on forehead and forearm, opposite the heart, joining thought, emotion, and action in the service of God. But he was wearing other straps—attached to his gun, holding up his pouches. He looked out onto no-man’s-land, but now from the east. “Blessed are You, Lord of the World, Who crowns Israel in glory. . . .”
ODEM’S UNIT APPROACHED the Rockefeller. The walled compound was a white fortress of modernity facing the ancient walls of the Old City. The road along the Rockefeller led to the Lions’ Gate, one of the Old City’s seven entrances.
Odem divided his men into two groups. One ran toward the courtyard behind the museum and found a back entrance. The men shot open the lock on the door. Inside, several Jordanian soldiers tried to escape but were taken prisoner.
The second group ran around the corner toward the front entrance, directly across from the ten-meter-high wall of the Old City. Snipers fired from slits intended for bowmen, wounding a paratrooper. His friends threw grenades toward the wall but missed. They tried to shoot open the museum’s front door, but it was bolted shut and they had no explosives. The firing from the wall intensified. They found a side door and smashed their way through.
The Jordanian flag flying from the tower was replaced with an Israeli flag. The paratroopers cheered. Jordanian soldiers on the wall fired toward the flag, but failed to bring it down.
THE SURVIVORS OF Company D reached the Rockefeller. By the time they had crossed no-man’s-land, Jordanian positions had been destroyed, and they arrived at the museum without firing a shot.
Udi Adiv and several others were dispatched to positions behind a concrete wall facing the much higher wall surrounding the Old City. It was a senseless order: the paratroopers were exposed to Jordanian soldiers firing down at them from the Old City wall, barely twenty meters away. Udi returned fire, but without aiming, hoping not to hurt anyone.
The soldier beside him slumped over. Udi didn’t know his name, only the name of his kibbutz. Udi held him. Then he saw the bullet hole through his forehead. Something was oozing. Udi, in horror, thought it might be brains.
MOTTA AND HIS staff left their rooftop post, boarded three half-tracks, and drove toward the Rockefeller. The entourage included three archaeologists who had found their way to Motta’s rooftop and asked to be taken along if he conquered the museum, where they hoped to find Dead Sea scrolls, writings of the ancient Jewish sect the Essenes.
Another commander might have dismissed the request as a distraction. But Motta was keenly aware that the battle for Jerusalem was different from other battles. He kept a detailed diary, recording not only military details but also poetic moments, like the anti-Zionist Hasid who helped evacuate wounded “Zionist” soldiers. For Motta, archaeologists, no less than paratroopers, belonged to this war, which was about not only survival but also retrieval: what had been taken from the Jewish people was about to be returned.
The half-tracks missed the turn into the rear courtyard of the museum and arrived at the Old City wall. Arik looked up and saw Jordanian soldiers just above them. “Turn around!” he shouted at the driver. The half-track U-turned before the Jordanians noticed its presence. The two other half-tracks followed. “We were almost killed back there,” Arik told Motta, as they pulled into the rear courtyard of the Rockefeller.
BY LATE MORNING, the Arab areas outside the Old City, including Nablus Road, were under the control of the 55th Brigade. Soldiers from the 28th Battalion found their way to the Rockefeller, awaiting a government decision on a final assault on the Old City.
From inside the Rockefeller’s thick walls, one could almost imagine that the war was over. For the first time since arriving in Jerusalem the evening before, the men removed their helmets and ammunition belts. Exhausted, they curled up in the hallways, on the cool stone floor.
After searching in vain for scrolls, the three archaeologists organized a tour of the museum for the paratroopers.
“HISTORY WILL NEVER FORGIVE YOU”
A JEEP ENTERED the rear courtyard of the Rockefeller, and out leaped Rabbi Shlomo Goren, chief chaplain of the Israeli army. Just what we need, thought Arik: the nudnik.
Hawk-faced, with a graying beard, Rabbi Goren had spent the first day of the war in Sinai. His jeep had been hit, a soldier beside him killed. Then the rabbi heard that the paratroopers were on their way to Jerusalem, and he rushed up to the bombarded city. He had appeared the night before at Motta’s command post, demanding to be included in the breakthrough into the Old City. For the last twelve hours he’d crisscrossed the battle zone, oblivious to shelling.
In truth, Arik respected Goren. The rabbi had courage. After the 1948 war, he had won permission from the Jordanians to search a battlefield for the remains of Israeli soldiers; entering a minefield, Goren leaped from one boulder to another, collecting body parts for burial.
Arik appreciated the rabbi for transforming the army into a place where religious Jews could feel at home. Goren brought synagogues to every base and made army kitchens kosher. He created a corpus of religious rulings on military issues, which halacha, or Jewish law, had neglected during two thousand years of Jewish powerlessness. For Goren, participation in the army, defending the Jewish people in its land, was a supreme religious value, superseding other sacred principles, like Sabbath observance. Goren not just permitted but obligated a soldier to violate the Sabbath and ride in a jeep on patrol.
Goren was the son-in-law of one of Mercaz’s most beloved figures, Rabbi David Cohen, known as a nazir, an ascetic who, in anticipation of the return of prophecy to Israel, had assumed the biblical stringencies of the holy man who didn’t drink wine or cut his hair. He may well have been the first nazir since biblical times. The nazir had added a new austerity: in 1948, when the Old City fell, he took a vow not to leave his home until Jewish sovereignty was restored to all of Jerusalem. Except on a few occasions, he had kept his vow.
Goren was one of the generation’s leading authorities on religious law, and he made sure that no one forgot it. He fought constantly with fellow rabbis over status and honor. And now here he was, exactly where he was meant to be—chief chaplain with the rank of general in the first Jewish army in twenty centuries, camped outside the walls of the Old City.
Motta greeted Goren as an old friend.
“Nu, Motta, are we moving?” asked Goren.
“I’m sorry, Rabbi. Maybe you’ll manage to get [government] permission to enter.”
“What? There’s no permission? . . . I don’t understand. . . . Maybe anyway, Motta—”
“Rabbi, we paratroopers are disciplined—”
“History will never forgive you. To be here and not enter!”
“I take my orders from my commanders,” said Motta.
THE ISRAELI CABINET was divided about whether to take the Old City. Menachem Begin, leader of the right, along with hawkish Labor ministers, insisted that Israel couldn’t forfeit the historic opportunity. Leaders of the religious Zionist faction, the National Religious Party, elderly and cautious men, were opposed; the world wouldn’t let Israel rule Jerusalem, they feared. Moshe Dayan wondered aloud whether Israel needed “this Vatican,” the religiously charged ancient part of Jerusalem. Prime Minister Eshkol was ambivalent.
THE VETERANS FROM Unit 101, now members of an elite scouts’ unit, showed up at the Rockefeller. Like Rabbi Goren, they had begun the war in Sinai, but when it became clear they were no longer needed there they’d come in a convoy of jeeps and offered themselves to Motta’s service. “Nu, vaiter?”—So, what’s next?—the scouts’ commander, Micha Kapusta, asked in Yiddish.
“I’ll put you to good use,” said Motta. “Just don’t go running around on your own.”
The immediate plan was to conquer a Jordanian army camp next to Augusta Victoria Hospital on the Mount of Olives. Augusta Victoria was the highest point overlooking the Old City from the east. If the government did approve an invasion of the Old City, the paratroopers would be prepared to attack simultaneously from the Rockefeller and from the Mount of Olives.
With nightfall, Motta dispatched a tank column to Augusta Victoria. The tank commanders were instructed to turn sharply left at an intersection about a hundred meters past the museum, leading east, up to the Mount of Olives.
Five World War II–era Sherman tanks without night-vision equipment moved out in single column. In the blackout covering the city it was nearly impossible to see. The tanks missed the turn and continued straight ahead, south, under the wall of the Old City.
A bazooka shell hit the third tank in the column, igniting its camouflage netting. The commander tried to put out the flames and was hit by gunfire. The four other tanks continued past the Lions’ Gate and stopped on a small bridge over the Valley of Kidron, between the Old City and the church at Gethsemane, where Jesus prayed before the Crucifixion.
Where are you? Motta radioed the tank column commander. I don’t know, the commander replied. Motta decided to continue the mission and instructed the scouts’ unit to head toward Augusta Victoria in place of the missing tanks.
Arik stood outside the Rockefeller with Yishai Zimmerman, who was to lead the scouts to Augusta Victoria. Arik pointed toward the elusive intersection . “There’s a sharp left turn going up to the Mount of Olives,” he said. “You can’t see it from here, and it’s very easy to miss. Dir balak [be careful], don’t miss that turn. Otherwise, you’ll find yourselves exposed directly under the Old City wall.”
“Trust me,” Zimmerman reassured him. “Everything will be okay.”
But Zimmerman too missed the turn. Jordanian soldiers were waiting for the scouts as their six jeeps approached the Kidron bridge. Arik heard shooting. A jeep sped back into the Rockefeller courtyard, bearing Zimmerman, bleeding profusely.
Jordanian flares exposed the small Israeli convoy. A machine gun positioned below the Old City wall opened fire. The jeeps reached the Kidron bridge. A scout was killed, and others leaped over the bridge, a seven-meter fall. One man held on to the edge with burned hands. A jeep tried to turn around and crashed into the jeep just behind it. The lead tank too tried to turn around and toppled into the valley below.
A soldier was on fire. Another rushed over, tearing off the wounded man’s clothes. Shoot me, the burning man pleaded. His rescuer hoisted him over his shoulders. A Jordanian bullet hit the wounded man in the head.
The main part of the scouts’ column hadn’t yet left the area near the Rockefeller. Arik ran toward the jeeps. “Stop!” he shouted at Kapusta, the commander.
Motta ordered tanks from another unit to prepare to move out, toward Augusta Victoria. “Arik,” said Motta, “take Kapusta and make order in the balagan”—the chaos.
Arik and Kapusta headed on foot toward the bridge to help extricate the jeeps trapped near Gethsemane; they had no idea that the tanks were there too. As they approached the corner of the Old City wall, a Jordanian soldier aimed a bazooka. The shell exploded two meters from where they stood. They flew in the air. Stumbled up: intact.
They ran across the road, away from the wall, descending onto the slope just below the road and leading into the valley. Out of sight of the snipers, they began walking toward the bridge.
The air smelled of explosives; Arik’s lungs burned. But the shooting had stopped, and it seemed safe now to retrieve the wounded. “I’ll take it from here,” said Kapusta.
Meanwhile Motta had received an order from central command: Suspend the attack on Augusta Victoria. A column of Jordanian tanks was believed to be heading toward Jerusalem from the Jericho road. The paratroopers were to organize the city’s defense.
SERGEANT MEIR ARIEL collapsed in the arched hallway of the Rockefeller, near a glass case displaying Canaanite figurines. How was he supposed to sleep? He had seen dead bodies. He had seen a friend wounded in the leg by machine gun fire. He had almost been killed. A bullet meant for his gut had been absorbed by his canteen; when the water trickled down his leg, he wondered if he’d wet himself.
Meir had distinguished himself in the paratroopers as a misfit. As a draftee he would show up for roll call unshaven, shoelaces dangling; once, before jumping out of a plane, he threw up. He was often caught in the female barracks, and his punishment was to dig holes, one meter wide and one meter deep. Those punishments became so routine that Meir would anticipate them by watering the ground to soften it for the next round of digging. Yet somehow Meir had persevered, invariably forgiven by his officers, who were charmed by this young man with long black curls who played guitar around the campfire to his own compositions.
After seizing the Rockefeller, some of the guys in Meir’s unit had posed for a photograph holding a Jordanian flag, and they’d insisted Meir join them. Reluctantly, he stood at the edge of the group; when the camera flashed, he turned away. The look on his face said, What am I doing in this victory pose?
Meir wanted to be a singer, or maybe a filmmaker. Something other than what he was: a tractor driver in the cotton fields of Kibbutz Mishmarot. Meir observed himself with the perplexed distance of an outsider. What was this collection of random personas—human, male, kibbutznik, Israeli—cobbled together and demanding coherence? And now he might be about to die. He didn’t object to dying if that meant protecting his family, his father, who had survived exile in Siberia for Zionist activities, his kibbutz, which made place for every misfit, including him. The Jews deserved their safe corner in this world. His objection was that he might die without discovering who he was.
Meir was thinking now of Naomi Shemer’s song. “Jerusalem of gold, and of copper and of light . . .” Its sweetness tormented him.
He retrieved a pen that he always kept, just in case a line to a song appeared, and wrote on the back of an envelope: “In your darkness Jerusalem . . .”
The words conformed to Shemer’s melody. Meir was writing a parody, nothing more, a song for a future campfire. “Jerusalem of iron and of lead and of blackness . . .”
“Meir,” a friend interrupted, “no one is going to pick up your mail here.”
“I’m just doodling,” said Meir.