Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation

by Yossi Klein Halevi

  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 71
st 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.”