by Yaël Dayan
We had to move on, and with nightfall, we were advancing very slowly. The wind was blowing. The route climbing up the higher plateau was not fit for a convoy like ours, and soon the reconnaissance patrol ordered us to stop. We hit a mine field and we had to wait until the engineers cleared a path through it. We didn’t budge and simply registered the proximity of danger. Arik was listening in on the next frequency when he repeated what he heard. His voice had a dream-like quality as he said: “The Old City of Jerusalem is in our hands.” The news was passed from jeep to tank, from the engineers’ bulldozers to the supply trucks, from the mobile hospital unit to the artillery, and clusters of huddled men, tired and hungry and weary, started singing softly “Jerusalem of Gold,” in hoarse but wistful voices. As if this song was a prayer, answering the prayers of thousands of years. We couldn’t move, but we had wings. The night was cold and the wind brushed us with cutting grains of sand, but there was a warmth of surging feelings and an unseen rainbow in the desert sky.
A few hours earlier, my father had walked with Rabin, then Chief of Staff, and Uzi Narkiss, then head of Central Command, through the gates of the Old City, in the footsteps of the paratroopers. They entered the Lions’ Gate, turned left, and reached the Temple Mount. The Israeli flag was hoisted on the spire of the Dome of the Rock (and it was typical of my father that he ordered it down, refraining from any national demonstrative acts regarding the holy sites). They turned right through the Mograbi Gate and into the narrow plaza in front of the Wailing Wall. Father, dramatically aware of the historic moment, scribbled on a note: “May peace descend upon the whole house of Israel,” and inserted the folded paper into an opening between the ashlars. The place was crowded with soldiers who had been in the battle, some wounded and many weeping, touching the huge stones and praying softly. For most of them, it was the first prayer ever.
On leaving the Western Wall, he was asked to say a few words, and later in the Sinai I heard his voice, as did my brothers in their units, my mother and grandparents, as did every Israeli wherever he was, words spoken with wisdom and thought but expressing a great emotion. He didn’t really speak to us, but for us. He said: “We have returned to the holiest of our sites, and will never again be separated from it. To our Arab neighbors, Israel extends the hand of peace, and to the peoples of all faiths we guarantee full freedom of worship and of religious rights. We have come, not to conquer the holy places of others, nor to diminish by the slightest measure their religious rights, but to ensure the unity of the city and to live in it with others in harmony.” He ordered to open wide the gates of the Old City wall and authorized full traffic between Jerusalem and the new city. Jordan and Israel had announced their readiness to accept a ceasefire. The West Bank, all the way to the Jordan River, was in our hands, and the fight on the eastern front was over.
Earlier, on June 7, Father had authorized an advance all the way to the canal, and we were heading there, clearing pockets of resistance along the way. He was never happy about this decision, and appeared to have made it under pressure. “The Army established facts in the field and I had no choice.” Tal’s division reached the canal city of Qantara, and when we stopped and established base in Bir Hasana, and later Bir Gofgafa, the entire Sinai Peninsula was in Israeli hands.
My first “visit” to the canal was with my father and Ezer, who picked me up in our HQ as if we were going on a sightseeing trip. We had so much to tell each other, but in fact said very little. He held my arm as we walked along to the helicopter pad, and he smiled when he told me: “Arik thought very highly of you.” It was more than easy to return the compliment. We flew, following the road to the canal, looking down at the pathetic sight of the destroyed convoys along it. Ismailia was bathed in red poinciana trees in blossom, and I exclaimed: “Look how beautiful.” He answered: “And if it weren’t beautiful, it would be just as important.” We sat on the small bridge at Qantara, our feet dangling above the waveless water. A large Polish Airlines sign offered trips to Warsaw, and a couple of swollen corpses were floating toward us in the water. “It must be unbearable to be part of a defeated army,” he said, looking at the corpses. I felt slightly nauseated, as we were having a K-rations lunch, sitting there. He talked about Jerusalem, Hebron, Jericho, and the Golan Heights. I mentioned how eager I was to go to east Jerusalem soon, and he raised his brow and smiled. “What’s the hurry? You’ll be able to visit it even with your children …” I noticed, although I don’t think anyone else did, that I looked at Dov when he said this.
Egypt agreed to a ceasefire on June 9, and allayed whatever earlier fears my father had concerning Russian intervention and Israel’s ability to fight fully on all fronts. He ordered the Northern Command to launch a full attack on Syria and destroy the fortified emplacements on the Golan Heights. The cabinet approved the order retroactively later in the day. On Saturday, June 10, Father flew north, and followed closely the bitter assault on the slopes and cliffs along the Golan plateau. The city of Kuneitra was empty as our forces reached it, and Syria asked for a ceasefire. On June 12, visiting the Heights, Father canceled his ban regarding Mount Hermon. Professor Neeman, serving as a reservist, but a noted physicist, convinced him that holding the peak would advance the science of astronomy in Israel.
The Six-Day War was over. It not only removed threats to our existence but also added to the chances of a realistic peace, or so we believed at the time. We were near Damascus, but not down their throats; near Cairo, but clearly had no intent to keep any of the Sinai if there was a chance to negotiate peace; and we had a Jerusalem united, which was the fulfillment of the dream of generations, rather than a subject for negotiation.
I was a happy woman. Falling in love during a war made heart-searching, over-analysis, fancy courting, a need for compliments, and the customary doubts obsolete. Full exposure of good qualities and shortcomings, in a brief and compressed period of time, provided a tremendous shortcut. I knew Dov was the man with whom I wanted to share my life, and in fewer words he expressed the same feeling.
I was back home, in the full sense of the word. Being my father’s daughter those past few weeks was not merely a privilege; it was some kind of blessing, and a grace. If I had a worry in the world, it had to do with how long a man’s finest hour—or a nation’s, at that—can last; and must the attainment of a peak be followed by some kind of downfall.
PART
Four
ELEVEN : BETWEEN TWO WARS
The aftermath of the Six-Day War was a state of euphoric confusion. About eight hundred families mourned the death in battle of their dear ones, and hundreds of thousands swarmed through the cities and bazaars of the West Bank cities. Dozens of Victory Albums were in print, glamourizing the short war in texts and photographs, and we all felt like supermen. The change from the pre-war depression to the unbelievable new map proved almost indigestible.
If the Arabs were astonished at their humiliating defeat, we were overwhelmed by victory, and my father nearly took advantage of the general confusion to establish facts and patterns with regard to the new situation. He was not shooting from the hip, or working out ad-hoc solutions. It was a lifetime chance to implement ideas and theories concerning our whole future predicament. He believed in “living together.” He believed in physical proximity and in dialogue. He truly, and permanently, felt that this was a war to end all wars, if we established close contact with the local population in the occupied territories, without imposing on their autonomy. His new job as cabinet minister in charge of the occupied territories made him in a sense supreme military governor of 69,000 square kilometers and a population of 1,150,000, comprising city dwellers, Jordanian citizens, West Bank farmers, and a multitude of refugees living in cluttered camps. He acted fast. After removing all roadblocks, mines, and barbed wire separating west and east Jerusalem, he proceeded to order all soldiers and guards removed from all control points. He reinstated the High Moslem Council in control over the Temple Mount and its mosques. The curfew which had been
imposed for the few days following the end of the war was lifted. Refugees who had left their villages and cities were returning to their places, and he made sure they could repair, with government help in supplies and machinery, their damaged homes. He brushed aside predictions of bloodshed and allowed all Israeli Arabs and West Bank inhabitants to freely attend the Friday prayers in the mosque of Al-Aqsa, and restored within weeks all administrative responsibilities to the municipal authorities.
The income of the West Bank was derived largely from agricultural exports to Jordan and other Arab countries, and with a farmer’s intuition paralleling his statesman’s foresight, he took a major step, assuring outlets for the summer produce. Visiting a site referred to as the “vegetable market,” he watched the “illegal” passage of trucks, carts, and people loaded with agricultural produce, crossing the Jordan at its shallowest point. The crossing was allowed, but only with stringent formalities which he simplified by issuing orders on the spot. In a short while, and before the rainy season, he arranged with the Jordanian authorities to reconstruct two bridges and open them up to traffic of goods from west to east, with a minimum of delay. Jordan gave its assent, accepting reality, but the move was initiated by Father, encountering not insignificant opposition in the cabinet. It was termed “Dayan’s open-bridges policy,” alluding to an attitude and a political concept far beyond the supply of fresh tomatoes to Kuwait and Iraq. “Normalization” was his key word, and he did indeed feel at home in the houses of the mayors of Hebron and Bethlehem; he understood the prayer for rain of the fellahin in the Jericho valley and with great delight fitted into the bargaining world of the bazaars, searching for new archaeological treasures.
Somewhere, he suffered from confusion too, or perhaps from an optimistic oversimplification. Though he did take into account Arab terrorism, he overestimated the capacity of the local population to disassociate itself from it. His enemy was Jordan, and he was not sensitive enough to the growing gap between the Hashemite king and his Palestinian subordinates. Eshkol, Golda Meir, and other cabinet veterans preferred to remain blind to the complexity of “Palestinian entity,” and the Begin group in the government didn’t ignore the mounting Palestinian plea for self-determination but dismissed it as invalid and entertained hopes of annexation. Hussein did not dare tackle the peace offers. He didn’t rush to the phone or even appreciate the liberal governing of the territories, and on the whole regarded the reinforcement of the Palestinian element in his kingdom as a threat. The open-bridges policy was a success, but it had to be backed by a carrot-and-stick policy in face of the spread of terrorism. Strong measures had to be applied against families and individuals who harbored terrorists. Exile, the blowing up of houses, after evacuating the occupants, proved effective, and the majority of the population took heed and ceased cooperating with the infiltrators. None of the actions Father took immediately after the war was premature, but his hopes for quick, result-bearing negotiations certainly were.
I did not indulge in the post-war euphoria. Two close friends of mine had died in the war, on the Golan Heights, and for a long while their loss overshadowed the ecstasy and joy everybody seemed to be immersed in. The vulgarity that undoubtedly was a form of exorcising bottled-up fears and insecurities was at times frightening. I felt as uncomfortable as I did in Rio’s football stadium when the national cup was won and a spontaneous carnival couldn’t be controlled. I walked with Dov in the Old City, and I did have a sense of “returning” and “liberating” rather than occupying, but visiting Hebron or Bethlehem, or witnessing the hysterical shopping spree of Israelis in the bazaars—the attitude of “It’s all ours now,” and a certain megalomania that was evident—repulsed me. On the Golan Heights, looking at the settlements below, now far from artillery range, I felt good again, but my personal, emotional, dramatic decision was overwhelming, and I did anything but concentrate on my surroundings. For it was then that I decided to get married.
I was almost twenty-eight. I had written four books—the last, Death Had Two Sons, was about to be published—and I had just undergone an experience that brought me face to face with the elementary, skeletal basics of life and death. If I had always said, as an excuse to myself and others, that when it happens, it just will, and there was no way to predict or maneuver—I found myself facing precisely that. I simply knew that I wished to spend my life with this man. I sensed love and realized friendship and security. I had no doubts or second thoughts, and if I was scared stiff, it was not from some anticipation of a loss of liberty or of limits on my personality but rather the fear of my own ability to accommodate unconditional giving, and receiving. We were not young kids in love, but mature adults who had wandered alone and rather independently through similar corridors of the human experience. We were satisfied, almost blasé, and though there were grounds to explore together like parenthood and the routine of family life, we both had our share of intellect and experience, well molded and formed, to invest into the partnership. Dov was born in Czechoslovakia, in the Carpatho-Russian sector that had changed sovereigns, languages, and nationalities many times. He arrived in Israel as a student on the eve of World War II, and except for a younger brother, his entire family had died in Nazi concentration camps. His education was superior to mine, and long years of Army service, as a combat infantryman in Jerusalem during the War of Independence, as a paratrooper during the Sinai Campaign, and as an instructor in the National War College, had been interspersed with secret missions in diplomatic posts in Europe. He was a colonel when we met, and more than fifteen years my senior. What we had in common didn’t come from similarity of background but from convictions and reasoning which were the result of two separate life lines. We had a great respect for each other’s individuality and privacy, and I suppose our opposing temperaments complemented each other.
My brother Assi was about to marry his high-school sweetheart. The wedding had been planned before the war, and to the list of guests were now added invitations to West Bank dignitaries, mayors and sheikhs, Army officers and cabinet ministers. Dov and I had a brainstorm. We handed in our marriage application in the rabbinical registration office, and we decided to hitch a ride on Assi and Aharona’s wedding. The comparatively minor task of telling my parents made me feel inexplicably faint.
It was a hot July morning. My father was shaving, and the bathroom door was ajar. My mother was making the bed in their bedroom. I felt my knees buckle as I summoned as casual a voice as I could and, leaning on the open door, said: “I think you should be the first to know. I’m getting married, and I thought we could join with Assi in a double wedding, cheaper by two …” Only after he kissed and embraced me, shaving cream and all, did it occur to him to ask whom I intended to marry … His happiness for me was evident. His trust in my choice, however, touched me enormously. When he did ask me who exactly Dov was, he was only half listening to my vague reply. He had his own ways of finding out, and probably within the hour knew more about Dov than I did. My mother reacted much the same way, only with tears in her eyes and a great concern for the technicalities involved. As happy as they were for me, there was also an element of relief in their joy. I could have married someone else, out of the country and the faith, out of their context. I could tell my parents, referring to Dov: “You haven’t lost a daughter, you’ve gained a son,” and they could easily say to themselves that they had regained their own daughter. We added a few names to the list of guests. Dov’s brother and some second cousins were coming from the States, and Maskit dressmakers worked extra hours to prepare my wedding gown in time. Father acted like a bridegroom himself. He pampered me with my favorite fruit, gave me some of his precious antique pieces, worked at night moving stones in the garden to make it look perfect, and daily announced the good reports he had about Dov. The two of them met with me and Mother one evening for an “introductory” dinner. For once, I didn’t worry whether or not my father would like someone I cared for. Dov’s integrity and wisdom were there for all to see. He never trie
d to impress, and he dared contradict when he wished to differ. My mother simply liked him, without reservations. The wedding was held on July 22 in the Zahala garden, and was a lavish mixture of the popular and the elegant. It served as a victory ball as well, and Assi and Aharona, who would have had to stand through it alone, were rather grateful to share it with Dov and me. It wasn’t intimate, romantic, or personal, but we were all carried away in a whirlpool of festivities. Arik Sharon was Dov’s best man, and in general a patron of our love. Ben-Gurion beamed with delight, having known and liked Dov for many years. And my grandparents, Rachel, Zvi, and Shmuel were grateful to have lived to see the day. Judging by the congratulations, I almost felt like a nearly hopeless case being salvaged by a benevolent, self-sacrificing gentleman.
The chief rabbi of the Army conducted our ceremony, and Assi’s followed: he had chosen to be married by a civilian rabbi. When the eating, drinking, and dancing were over, my father simply said: “It’s so wonderful to see you really happy.” Dov and I drove to his apartment, and the only romantic gesture he offered was to carry me in his arms across the threshold. We were married, we were lovers, but above all we were friends. It wasn’t a mere coincidence that the nation’s and my father’s finest hour, which was also a turning point, produced my own happiest moments and days.
My daily life had a pleasant routine. I worked on a war diary, having a deadline to meet, and read proofs of the new novel. Mother helped me with the settling-down process, though neither Dov nor I had any grand ambitions concerning wallpaper or furnishings. I cooked, laundered, and kept house, and these routines were not new to me. Mostly, I wanted to get pregnant, and quickly. I promised myself, many years before, that I would have my first baby before I was thirty. I visited Zahala daily, and when I didn’t, my father summoned me over. The fact that I was married now did not mean separation or detachment as far as he was concerned, though he said he missed our early-morning talks.