THE MORNING AFTER
SPORADIC GUNFIRE CEASED. The Jordanian soldiers who remained in the Old City surrendered or else slipped into civilian clothes. Paratroopers patrolled the empty market and the Arab neighborhoods outside the walls. Arab men were randomly detained, but most were soon released. A doctor from the 55th Brigade helped an Arab woman give birth.
The Arab population—close to 70,000 people, 25 percent of the population of reunited Jerusalem—was under curfew, at the mercy of an unknown enemy. From many windows hung pieces of white cloth, improvised flags of surrender.
What would they have done to us and our families, paratroopers said to each other, if they had won the war?
IN DAZED JOY, thousands of Jews headed for the Western Wall. Simply walking several hundred meters across the city’s border seemed to defy a law of nature. Not all the mines had been cleared, and one man lost a leg; but nothing could stop the crowds.
Meir Ariel watched them moving toward the Wall. “People of Israel!” he called out to no one in particular. “Now you can enter the Old City. But before you came here, a hail of lead entered the bodies of my friends.”
An ultra-Orthodox Jew at the Wall told Yoske Balagan, “We prayed the whole time for you.”
“Thank you very much,” replied Yoske. “But I’m more grateful to the IDF, which equipped me with an Uzi.”
A REPORTER FOR the Yiddish radio station circulated among the paratroopers, asking if anyone spoke mama loshen, the mother tongue. Yoske directed him to Aryeh Weiner, the kibbutznik from Netzer Sereni who had come alone to Israel on a refugee boat at age twelve. Weiner had just placed a note in a crack between the stones, which contained this prayer: “I hope I win the lottery.”
“How did you get here?” the reporter asked him.
“We parachuted into the Old City,” Weiner lied, unable to speak straight-faced in Yiddish.
Weiner’s version was transmitted to the Yiddish-speaking world: The paratroopers had descended onto the Holy City like angels.
SOME ISRAELIS CAME TO LOOT. They smashed windows and pried open the shutters of shops on Salah a-Din Street, just outside the Old City walls, filling their cars with groceries and clothes. Paratroopers found themselves patrolling to thwart not only Arab attacks but Israeli plundering. “Jerusalem of gold?” one paratrooper shouted at looters. “Jerusalem of shit!”
Among themselves, paratroopers argued the moral gradations of looting. Was it permitted to take food from a grocery if you intended to eat it immediately, but not permitted to hoard? Could one take cheap tourist memorabilia, like postcards, but not electronic goods? One paratrooper argued: Why should civilians loot when we who fought get nothing? Another paratrooper, who had helped himself to food in a shuttered Arab grocery, searched for the owner to pay him.
Yoel Bin-Nun’s unit was patrolling in East Jerusalem when they noticed an Israeli walking with a big radio on his shoulder. Yoel’s officer, a kibbutznik, grabbed the radio, threw it to the ground, and smashed it with his boot. Yoel caught his eye and offered a grateful smile.
MOTTA SENT ARIK to escort David Ben-Gurion to the Western Wall. The country’s first prime minister and his wife, Paula, had been brought to the old border by Ezer Weizman, the former air force commander and now IDF’s chief of operations. Weizman said that the Ben-Gurions would ride with him, and that Arik should follow. “I represent the paratroopers,” Arik said. “I want to be with Ben-Gurion.” Weizman wasn’t used to taking orders, let alone from a major, but he wasn’t about to argue with one of Motta’s men the day after the reunification of Jerusalem. Arik and Ezer exchanged jeeps, and Arik sat beside Ben-Gurion.
Ben-Gurion, kibbutznik’s floppy hat atop his white winged hair, was silent. To Arik, he seemed in shock. Arik too preferred silence: he had just learned the names of the fallen from his old unit, Company A. Paula, though, didn’t stop talking. She asked Arik about a relative of hers whom she thought was in the 55th Brigade, and Arik assured her he wasn’t. She insisted he was.
Arik had always seemed to just miss his moment. But now he was exactly where he was meant to be. Whatever failures he had experienced and whatever disappointments still awaited him, he had had the privilege of being among the liberators of Jerusalem.
ADA GEVA FOUND a note in her cubby in the dining room: “A friend of Avital’s called to say he’s been lightly wounded.” Of course “lightly wounded,” thought Ada; what else would Avital say?
Without visible reaction, as if she’d expected this news all along, she returned to her room and packed a bag. Then she went to tell Avital’s parents. “I’m going to see him,” she said. “In the middle of a war?” asked Kuba. “How will you get there?” “Hitching,” she replied.
She began walking toward the road. Kuba borrowed a kibbutz car and drove her to Jerusalem.
In the Bikur Cholim hospital, the halls were crowded with wounded men on mattresses. Some were screaming; most were still. Ada was impressed with the calmness of the staff. The way it’s supposed to be—
She approached the nurses’ station. There was no list of the wounded, and no one could tell her where Avital was. And so Ada and Kuba went from room to room. Ada, nearsighted, peered at the wounded. Which one is mine? They’re all mine—
She saw a head entirely bandaged, except for lips, nostrils, and a single eye. She squeezed between the beds, bent down, and kissed the luminous blue eye of the boy of the orchards.
TO THE SYRIAN FRONT
THE EGYPTIAN AND JORDANIAN ARMIES were routed. The IDF had reached the Suez Canal and the Jordan River—conquering the West Bank, ancient Judea and Samaria. Hebron, Nablus, Bethlehem—biblical geography had suddenly converged with the borders of modern Israel.
There was fighting on the Syrian front. The Syrians were shelling kibbutzim in the Galilee, and after initial hesitation, Defense Minister Dayan ordered the IDF to take the Golan Heights.
Motta and Arik went to IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv to get their next assignment. Stay in Jerusalem and keep the peace, they were told; other units will take over from here. Motta insisted on joining the Golan battle. When Israel is at war, he argued, the paratroopers don’t patrol the home front.
And so the men of the 55th boarded buses again, this time heading north. Some joked: now they want us to take Damascus. Most sat or smoked in silence.
Meir Ariel wrote. He was completing the takeoff on “Jerusalem of Gold” that he’d begun in the Rockefeller. His Hebrew was elegant, eccentric: “In your darkness, Jerusalem,” the song began. The complicated word he chose for “in your darkness,” b’machshakayich, was hardly part of daily speech. Meir borrowed it from the Psalms: “The dark places of the land are full of the habitations of violence.” Had Meir the kibbutznik been reading Psalms during the war, seeking divine protection?
He invented words—like the verb ragum, literally “mortared,” by which he meant, under mortar attack: “The battalion, mortared, pushed onward / all blood and smoke / and mother after mother entered / into the community of the bereaved.”
Meir had intended to rebuke Naomi Shemer’s naïveté; but he too couldn’t help celebrating Jerusalem: “In your darkness Jerusalem / we found a loving heart / when we came to expand your borders / and disperse a foe.” The refrain couldn’t sustain its bleakness: “Jerusalem of iron / and of lead and of blackness / to your walls we summoned freedom.”
THE CONVOY OF BUSES stopped along the Boulevard of the Kibbutzim, a two-lane road of palm trees behind which spread some of the country’s leading kibbutzim. Just ahead was the Sea of Galilee, and beyond it, the Golan Heights.
Many of the paratroopers were from kibbutzim in the area. Word instantly spread, and hundreds of mothers and fathers and wives appeared. There were relieved embraces with husbands and sons. And there were hushed conversations about the wounded and the dead.
Quietly, the bereaved walked slowly back toward the gates of their kibbutzim, to share their grief with the collective.
THE LAST WAR
THE IDF CONQUERED the Golan Heights before the 55th Brigade managed to reach the front. By Saturday, June 10, the Six-Day War was over.
On Sunday morning, June 11, after a Shabbat rest in kibbutzim in the north, the paratroopers rode back to Jerusalem, to be discharged. On Meir’s bus they sang the song he had taught them over Shabbat: “Jerusalem of iron / and of lead and of blackness.” This is our song, friends told him. Perhaps because it was written by one of them; perhaps because it protested sentimentality, but affirmed the war’s justness.
The buses took a shortcut through the Jordan Valley, until a few days earlier Jordanian territory. On one side of the narrow road were the desert hills of the West Bank, on the other, the plains of Jordan and mountains beyond. The border was unmarked, the Middle East open.
Along the road were lines of refugees, barefoot children and women balancing all of their possessions in bundles on their heads. The buses stopped, and soldiers got off to offer water. Some refugees, suspicious, drank from the canteens only after the men drank first.
Arik rode back to Jerusalem with Motta. “The wars are over,” said Arik.
Surely now the Arabs would understand the futility of trying to destroy Israel. “You’ve been retired, Motta,” he added, smiling. “But don’t worry, I’ll help you find a civilian job.”
THE ROW OF RAMSHACKLE HOUSES facing the Western Wall was bulldozed, and now a large plaza, white with dust, replaced the alley that had been able to accommodate at most a few dozen people. The several hundred residents of the Mughrabi Quarter, as the cluster of houses was known, were moved to a refugee camp on the northern edge of the city.
When Udi Adiv’s unit passed the area near the Wall, he was stunned. The stone alley with its gray filtered light, the intimacy and the mystery—gone. In its place a plaza as flat and glaring as the cotton fields of his kibbutz. Udi looked at the piles of rubble that had once been homes, and thought, Whatever the Zionists touch, they destroy—
THE NEW EXPANSE at the Wall disturbed Yoel Bin-Nun too. But Yoel saw it as an act of surrender. Clearly the government was trying to divert Jewish attachment to the Mount by creating a pilgrimage site below, so that each of the faiths would have its own ample area. How could the Western Wall—a mere retaining wall of the Temple, without intrinsic holiness—possibly replace the Mount? And how could a victorious Israel forfeit its claim to Judaism’s holiest site?
Yoel devised a plan: the area around the Dome of the Rock would be cordoned off, while along the edge of the Mount, where pilgrims are permitted by Jewish law to step, a synagogue would be built.
Yoel would have happily shared his plan with the government. But no one was asking his opinion.
A HERO OF ISRAEL
IN THE AMPHITHEATER on Mount Scopus, weeds grew in the cracked stone benches, and thistles covered the sloping earth. Nearby were the empty buildings of the original Hebrew University campus, abandoned in 1948.
But now the amphitheater was getting an instant facelift. It was Monday, June 12, and tonight some of Israel’s leading performers were to assemble on its stage for a victory concert in honor of the 55th Brigade. And so paratroopers were cleaning benches and clearing debris.
In a small grove near the amphitheater, Arik sat under a pine tree, dealing with arrangements for the discharge of the brigade. He was interrupted by an officer from the 28th Battalion. “Arik, listen, Meir Ariel has written an important song, something like ‘Jerusalem of Gold’ but from our point of view. I’ve asked him to sing it tonight but he refuses. I know he respects you; I need you to talk to him.”
Arik felt an almost fatherly responsibility toward Meir. Arik believed he was at least partly responsible for Meir having joined the paratroopers in the first place.
They had met in 1959. Arik was twenty-six, Meir nearly eighteen. Arik had been given time off from his duties at Netzer Sereni to work as coordinator of the youth division of the Ichud (Unity) movement, the social democratic kibbutz federation to which Netzer Sereni belonged. His job was to organize seminars and hikes, and most of all to instill enthusiasm among kibbutz youth, many of whom were showing signs of ideological apathy.
One evening Arik drove to Mishmarot, a kibbutz on a back road behind the village of Pardes Hanna, south of Haifa and near the coast. Mishmarot, small and peripheral, was considered a problematic kibbutz, lacking ideological passion.
Arik entered the youth club, but the dozen teenagers playing backgammon and strumming guitars ignored him. “Hevreh,” he called out, “my name is Arik, I’m from the Ichud, and I want to talk to you about some things that could be interesting for you.”
Arik prodded them into a circle. One teenage boy with curly black hair remained sitting on a windowsill, blatantly disinterested.
“The movement can provide a range of activities for you,” said Arik.
“It’s all nonsense,” said the teenager on the windowsill.
“Why nonsense?” asked Arik.
“The ‘movement’ ”—he spoke the word with mockery—“is interested in itself, not in us.”
“Of course the movement has its own interests,” said Arik. “But that doesn’t negate your interests.”
“And what will happen if we don’t get involved; will the movement throw us out?”
Arik detected not just contempt but a legitimate anger at the rigidity of the kibbutz.
“What’s your name?” asked Arik.
“Meir,” he said.
“Listen, Meir, no one is going to throw you out of the movement. But you’d be missing out on a chance to connect with young people from other kibbutzim in activities you would enjoy and that would help you grow.”
“Look, Arik, we’re a small kibbutz, nothing much happens here. It’s a shame for you to waste your time with us.”
Afterward Arik approached Meir.
“Tell me, Meir, you’re in twelfth grade, right? What are your plans for next year?”
“Not sure,” Meir said.
“A guy like you, kibbutznik, strong spirit, you belong among us in the paratroopers.”
“I’ll think about it.”
ARIK WALKED OVER to the area where the men of the 28th Battalion had laid their sleeping bags and found Meir.
“The hevreh want you to sing the song you wrote about Jerusalem,” said Arik.
“There’s no way,” Meir said. “It’s just something I wrote, stam. I just want to forget the war and get out of here.”
“Show me the song, Meir.”
Meir retrieved a sheet from his shirt pocket. Arik read the lyrics, written in small script.
“Meir?” said Arik. “You have to do this. If you refuse, I’ll order you to sing.”
“Singing can’t be ordered.”
“Meir, with everything we’ve been through—you owe it to your friends.”
Meir nodded.
TOWARD SUNSET, THE MEN of the 55th Brigade gathered in the amphitheater. In the distance rose the desert hills of the West Bank and the Dead Sea beyond: the new landscape of Israel.
The heroes of Jerusalem wanted nothing more than to go home. Not even performances by the country’s leading singers could rouse them. One offered an old song of longing for Zion, “From the peak of Mount Scopus, I offer you peace, Jerusalem.” Few sang along or even bothered to applaud. Arik nodded off.
The MC, an actress named Rivka Michaeli, announced, “There is a soldier here—” Someone whispered into her ear. “Meir Ariel, who is invited to come to the stage.”
“Me-ir! Me-ir!” friends chanted, clapping rhythmically.
Meir ascended to the stage. One of the performers, Nehama Hendel, played on her guitar the opening chords of “Jerusalem of Gold.” His voice surprisingly strong, enunciating each word, Meir began, “In your darkness, Jerusalem, we found a loving heart / when we came to expand your borders and disperse a foe / Dawn abruptly rose / not yet whitened and already red.”
When he came to the refrain—“Jerusalem of iron, and of lead and of blackness / to your walls we summoned freedom”—some in the audience joined in.
By the next refrain, everyone seemed to be singing. When Meir ended—“Jerusalem of gold / and of lead and of dream / may peace dwell forever between your walls”—the audience continued to sing. Arik, deeply moved by the unexpected power of Meir’s presence, sang too.
As the crowd began to disperse, Rivka Michaeli approached Meir and asked him to sing again for her tape recorder. Some of Meir’s friends stayed behind and sang along on the refrain.
The recording was broadcast next morning on the radio. In those three minutes, Meir Ariel became a hero of Israel.
VICTORS, MOURNERS
THE THREE BATTALIONS of the 55th Brigade assembled on the Temple Mount for a victory lineup. Only a week earlier they had been boarding buses ascending in a slow convoy to Jerusalem.
They gathered in the area between the Dome of the Rock and the silver-domed Al-Aqsa Mosque. The ceremony was delayed for the wounded. Motta had given the order that those who could be moved from their hospital beds should be brought to the ceremony.
Yoel Bin-Nun stood at the foot of the steps leading up to the Dome of the Rock. Any farther, and he risked treading on the area of the Holy of Holies.
“Why aren’t you going up?” a kibbutznik asked him.
“This is the area of the Temple,” Yoel explained. “A victory lineup could have been done at the Wall. I see the bulldozers have already cleared the area,” he added sarcastically.
“But Yoel, isn’t the Temple Mount the essence?”
Yoel savored the irony: here was a kibbutznik from Hashomer Hatzair berating a Kookian for seemingly underplaying the centrality of the Temple Mount. Kibbutzniks and Kookniks together: that’s what made the victory possible.
In two days, Israel would be celebrating the holiday of Shavuot, marking the giving of the Torah at Sinai. For Yoel, it was also the festival of Jewish unity: the Torah was received by the whole people of Israel, functioning like a single body with one heart. And not since Sinai had the Jews been as united as they were in these last weeks. The spiritual calculus was self-evident: disunity brings destruction; unity, redemption.
The midday sun was strong, and men began removing their helmets. One dropped to the stone ground, then another, until there was a volley of crashing helmets. To Hanan Porat, it seemed a spontaneous ceremony marking the end of the war, perhaps the end of all war.
Accompanied by nurses, the wounded arrived, in casts and on wheelchairs. Avital Geva wasn’t among them: he was recovering from one operation and awaiting the next.
The intact rushed over to the wounded. There were hugs, anxious inquiries about missing friends.
Then the men lined up by battalion and faced the Dome of the Rock. Motta, Stempel, and Uzi Narkiss stood before the soldiers. Motta had asked Arik to join them, but he preferred to stand with his staff.
I would gladly have forgone this victory, thought Arik, had it not been forced on us.
Motta addressed his men: “Many Jews risked their lives, throughout our long history, to come to Jerusalem and live in it. Innumerable songs expressed the deep longing. . . . In the War of Independence, great efforts were made to return to the nation its heart—the Old City and the Western Wall.
“To you fell the great honor of completing the circle, to return to the nation its capital and the center of its holiness.
“Many paratroopers, including our closest friends, the most veteran and the best among us, fell in the difficult battle. It was a merciless battle, in which you functioned as a body that pushes aside everything in its way without noting its wounds. You didn’t complain. . . . Instead, you aspired only forward. . . .
“Jerusalem is yours—forever.”
THE BRIGADE WAS discharged, but the officers stayed on for debriefings and hospital visits. Motta asked Arik to remain in uniform for another three months, until the fall semester at university, to prepare the final report on the battle for Jerusalem. Arik had had other plans. He needed to make up exams. And he intended to marry Yehudit Hazan. But he couldn’t say no to Motta.
That night, the two men shared a hotel room. After showering, they sat in their underwear, on the edge of their beds. “Tell me who,” said Motta.
Until then, Motta hadn’t had a complete list of the brigade’s dead. Arik began reciting from memory the names of their fallen friends, over twenty of the brigade’s veterans alone, with whom they’d served since the mid-1950s.
Motta broke out in loud sobs.
Arik couldn’t remember the last time he had wept; that was a privilege denied him. He bowed his head, averting his gaze to give Motta an approximation of privacy, and waited until the weeping passed.