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 dis
ciplined—”
“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.
Chapter 6
“THE TEMPLE MOUNT IS IN OUR HANDS”
FRIENDLY FIRE
GET SOME SLEEP, that’s an order,” Motta said to Arik, who hadn’t slept in two nights. “But first check on the readiness of the Seventy-First Battalion.”
Of all the battalions, the 71st had emerged most intact from the battle for Jerusalem. In less than twenty-four hours, the brigade had suffered nearly a hundred dead and four hundred wounded. The most devastated battalion was the 66th, whose men had fought the t
oughest battle, hand-to-hand combat with elite Jordanian troops in the trenches of Ammunition Hill. With the conquest of Ammunition Hill, the road to the besieged Israeli enclave on Mount Scopus lay open, and the survivors of the 66th were heading there now.
Arik left the Rockefeller, where the 28th Battalion was camped, and began making the rounds of the 71st, whose men were spread through the Arab neighborhoods outside the Old City walls, in hotels and in the houses of families who had fled the fighting.
Arik briefed the commanders about plans to stop the Jordanian tanks said to be heading toward Jerusalem.
02:00. Red-eyed, unwashed, Arik returned to the Rockefeller, lay on the stone floor, rolled his jacket into a pillow, and slept.
Two hours later, Motta woke him. An order had come from central command to resume the attack on Augusta Victoria. In securing the eastern ridge, the paratroopers would be the first line of defense against the Jordanian tanks.
06:00. ISRAELI ARTILLERY began shelling the Muslim Quarter inside the Old City, where Jordanian units had been concentrated. “Avoid the Temple Mount,” Motta ordered, though the Jordanians had established a military position there too.
Motta and Arik stood on the roof of a house just above the Rockefeller, where the brigade command had set up a field headquarters. Several soldiers were smoking in the museum courtyard. Jordanian POWs sat with bound hands beneath a corrugated roof.
A shell fell just outside the walled courtyard. Motta ran downstairs. “Get inside!” he shouted to the soldiers. Motta’s communications officer phoned central command, to determine whether the shell was Jordanian or Israeli. No one knew.
It was Israeli. And then, before the soldiers and the POWs could move inside, another two errant shells fell.
Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation Page 11