Motta rushed into the courtyard. Bodies missing limbs, wounded lying in blood. “All of you inside!” Motta shouted. “More shells are about to fall!” The medics ignored him.
“BEN-TZUR, DRIVE!”
08:30. MOTTA AND HIS STAFF left the Rockefeller in a half-track and a four-wheel-drive command car, accompanied by a column of tanks and the survivors of the reconnaissance unit. Arik had mapped out an alternative route to Augusta Victoria: through the valley known as Wadi Joz, away from the Old City and toward Mount Scopus, and then a right turn up to the Mount of Olives.
Meanwhile, the 71st and the 66th were converging on Augusta Victoria. The puzzled commanders radioed Motta’s portable headquarters: We’re encountering no resistance.
Where were the Jordanians?
“Motta,” said Arik, “my estimation is that the Jordanians have stopped fighting.”
In fact most of the Jordanian soldiers—including the units based inside the Old City—had retreated in the middle of the night toward Jericho. The failure of the Israeli commandos to take the ridge overlooking the Old City had, ironically, kept the road to Jericho open, allowing the Jordanians inside the walls to join the retreat. Only a few remained behind, apparently unaware that the Jordanian army was no longer functioning. Though Arik didn’t know it, the Old City lay open.
Nor were there any Jordanian tanks. The intelligence had been wrong: There would be no Jordanian counterattack.
09:15. STANDING INSIDE Motta’s half-track, Arik received this message from central command: “Go into the Old City immediately and capture it.” The government had given its approval.
Arik, his tone deliberately understated, passed on the message to Motta. “Confirm receipt of the order,” replied Motta, “and tell them we’ll execute it right away.”
Motta’s half-track drove along the ridge of the Mount of Olives.
Arik radioed central command: What is the strength of the Jordanians inside the walls? On the Temple Mount? As usual, there was no specific intelligence.
The half-track parked near the multi-arched entrance of the Intercontinental Hotel, overlooking the Lions’ Gate.
Motta sat on the ground and gazed at the walled city. It was a bright, cool morning, and the sun was on his back. The gold and silver domes of the Temple Mount glowed before him. He closed his eyes, as if in prayer. He was about to enter the Jewish pantheon, along with King David, who’d conquered Jerusalem and turned it into his capital; Judah the Maccabee, who’d purified the Temple after its desecration by the Hellenists; Bar Kochba, who’d thrown himself against Rome and lost the Jews’ last desperate battle for Jerusalem. Then came the centuries of enforced separation, landscape transformed into memory. And now landscape was reemerging from dream, shimmering back into tangible reach.
Until this moment, Arik had felt no historical resonance in the battle for Jerusalem. They had come to the city to protect its Jews, nothing more. But now his thoughts too drifted into history. The paratroopers were about to become the first soldiers of a sovereign Jewish state in eighteen centuries to enter the capital of the Jewish people. Even for Arik Achmon, that was a disorienting thought.
Arik forced his attention back to practicalities. He aimed his binoculars at the Temple Mount. No sign of movement. Were they walking into an ambush?
Motta took the radio and addressed his three battalion commanders. “Fifty-Fifth Paratrooper Brigade,” he began, deliberately violating army regulations against identifying a unit over the radio during combat, recording the moment for history, “we are sitting on the ridge overlooking the Old City, and soon we shall enter it—the Old City of Jerusalem, which generations have dreamed of and longed for. We will be the first to enter . . . Twenty-Eighth and Seventy-First Battalions—move toward the Lions’ Gate! Sixty-Sixth Battalion—follow them. Move, move toward the gate.”
The men of the 28th left the Rockefeller in two columns and headed toward the Lions’ Gate. A shot from the wall hit a soldier in the neck. Yoel Bin-Nun rushed toward him. Someone else reached the wounded man first and stanched the spurting blood. Meanwhile, a kibbutznik jump-started a parked car. Yoel helped lift the wounded man inside, and the car sped off to the hospital.
Rabbi Goren appeared on foot, holding a shofar and a small Torah scroll. Goren seemed oblivious to the sporadic shooting from the wall; he hadn’t bothered to put on a helmet. He seemed to Yoel to embody Jewish history, which couldn’t wait any longer for this moment.
“Where’s Yossi Fradkin?” Goren shouted to no one in particular, seeking out the commander of the 28th. “They told me he is going to the Temple Mount!”
The Temple Mount, Yoel repeated to himself. Soon we will be standing on the Temple Mount— What did it mean? The Temple Mount had been so inaccessible that Jews could only imagine reclaiming it in the time of the Messiah.
And yet here was Yoel, heading toward the holiest place on earth in the boots of war, in the company not of prophets but of pork-eating kibbutzniks. “Like dreamers,” the Psalmist wrote of the Jews returning to Zion. Perhaps he was suggesting not only joy but dislocation.
MOTTA’S HALF-TRACK DROVE slowly down the hill, on a narrow road paved through the Mount of Olives’ ancient Jewish cemetery. Many of the tombstones were broken, vandalized. Arik’s grandfather was buried here.
They passed the arched facade of the Church of All Nations, onto the bridge over the Valley of Kidron. The bodies of four Israeli scouts killed the night before lay beside a charred jeep. Arik turned away.
“Sa, Ben-Tzur!” Motta shouted to his driver. Ben-Tzur, drive!
A steep, narrow road led up to two massive, bronze-plated wooden doors; on either side was a relief of two lions.
10:12. An Israeli tank shell blew open the left door, which collapsed backward. The right door, still standing, was splintered. A bus parked nearby caught fire, filling the half-opened entrance with smoke. “Ben-Tzur, sa!” Motta shouted. Drive!
Ben-Tzur went into first gear, drove around the smoking bus, then crashed through the right door. A pile of stones dislodged from the arch lay just beyond the gate; they drove over it onto a narrow cobblestone road. The Via Dolorosa.
Total silence. For the first time since they’d come to Jerusalem, Arik felt afraid. They were alone in the Old City, entirely exposed. Snipers could aim from any of the stone buildings hemming them in.
Arik held a map of the Old City. “Turn left!” he called.
“Ben-Tzur, sa!” Motta repeated. Drive!
They rode onto a strip of asphalt. Past a Jordanian tent encampment: abandoned.
A motorcycle lay before them. Ben-Tzur stopped. Motta turned toward Arik: “Booby-trapped?”
Motta didn’t wait for an answer. “Ben-Tzur, sa!” Over the motorcycle. The half-track shook, but continued intact.
To their right was a wide outdoor staircase, leading up to the Dome of the Rock.
Motta and Arik ran up the stairs.
They came to the gold-domed building. Its facade was covered with blue-and-green-patterned tiles, conveying the movement of the sea. To Arik, Motta appeared in a trance. You are now his bodyguard—
Arik circled the perimeter of the plaza: No Jordanians. Silence.
Motta leaned against a wall, as if to steady himself. He took the radio: “Cease fire,” he ordered the battalion commanders. “All units, cease firing.” Then, radioing Uzi Narkiss, commander of the central front, Motta Gur said, “The Temple Mount is in our hands.”
He was not only reporting. He was restating a claim.
Motta’s communications officer, Orni, produced an Israeli flag from his pouch. “Should we hang it on top of the Dome?” Arik asked Motta.
“Yallah,” Motta replied—Go on.
Arik and Orni approached the copper doors, intending to hoist the flag onto the crescent moon atop the dome. The entrance was bolted; Arik shot it open with his Uzi.
The men entered the domed silence, boots on thick patterned carpets. Somewhere in here, some Jewish authoritie
s believed, had been the Holy of Holies, the inner sanctum of the Temple where the Divine Presence was concentrated. The rabbis had forbidden Jews from ascending the Mount after the destruction of the Temple, for fear of trespassing on the ultimate sacred ground. Arik knew none of this, and it wouldn’t have mattered to him if he did. Nor was Arik thinking about how the image of an Israeli flag flying over an Islamic holy place would affect Muslims. He thought only about raising the flag, a cry of victory.
Orni and Arik ascended a staircase to the balcony overlooking the sanctuary. A door opened onto a fenced-off ledge; they were now outside the dome. A hatch protruded from one of the gold plates. Lifting the plate and climbing through, they found themselves in an empty space, barely a meter wide, between the gold dome and a dome made of stone. A ladder embedded in the stone led upward to another hatch in the gold dome. They opened that second hatch and found themselves once again outside, but this time on top of the gold dome. Standing on Arik’s shoulders, Orni reached up and fastened the Israeli flag to the Islamic crescent.
Arik looked out at the city of white stone, and the Judean Desert just beyond. For a few moments there were no plans to finalize, no areas to secure, only an overwhelming sense of vindication.
THE MESSIAH AND ELIJAH COME TO THE WALL
CAPTAIN YORAM ZAMOSH reached the Mount. Zamosh was the Mercaz student who had been given an Israeli flag by an elderly woman just before the battle and who had promised to hang it on the Wall.
Motta’s deputy, Moisheleh Stempel-Peles, along with several other paratroopers, was searching for a way down to the Wall, and Zamosh joined them. They came upon an old Arab man in a white robe, an official of the Waqf, the Islamic trust in charge of the Mount. He pointed them toward a fenced-off ledge.
The paratroopers stepped onto the ledge. Below them—the Wall. From his ammunition belt Zamosh extracted the flag and fastened it onto the fence. Then the men sang “Hatikvah,” the national anthem.
Zamosh recalled a legend he’d learned as a child: when the Roman legion commanded by Titus burned the Temple, priests threw its keys toward heaven, and a hand reached out and retrieved them for safekeeping. Now, Zamosh thought, the keys had been returned.
RABBI GOREN HURRIED toward the Lions’ Gate. There were shots; Goren ignored them. Yossi Fradkin, commander of the 28th Battalion, told Goren to move close to a wall. Goren ignored him too. “Rabbi,” Fradkin said, “you’re in the way.”
“No one moves me,” said Goren.
THE THREE BATTALIONS converged on the Lions’ Gate, turning into a single mass.
A lone sniper fired from a minaret; a paratrooper silenced him.
Rabbi Goren reached the Temple Mount. “You handle him,” Motta said to Arik.
Arik escorted Goren and his assistant into the Dome of the Rock. “What do you say, Major”—Goren turned to Arik—“to blow or not to blow?”
Goren’s assistant, standing behind the rabbi, shook his head vehemently at Arik: No! If Goren blew the shofar inside the Dome of the Rock, he would be staking a religious claim that could create a holy war with Islam. Arik didn’t understand the implications of blowing the shofar here, but he yielded to the assistant’s opposition.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” said Arik, and Goren relented.
DEFENSE MINISTER MOSHE DAYAN stood on Mount Scopus and, raising binoculars to his single eye, watched the Temple Mount across the valley.
Dayan had lost an eye on a commando raid in 1941 against French Vichy forces in Lebanon. He had been looking through binoculars when a bullet hit the lens, splintering glass and metal casing into his left eye. He lay conscious without anesthetic for twelve hours before reaching a hospital. It felt, he later said, as if sledgehammers were pounding his head. The pounding, though eased, never stopped.
Now, seeing an Israeli flag flying over the Dome of the Rock, Dayan was appalled. He radioed Motta: You’re going to set the whole Middle East on fire. Remove the flag immediately.
Motta relayed the order to Arik, who dispatched one of his men: he couldn’t bear to do it himself.
RABBI GOREN SENT his assistant, Rabbi Menachem Hacohen, to retrieve Rabbi Zvi Yehudah and Goren’s father-in-law, the nazir, the ascetic. The first civilians at the liberated wall, Goren insisted, must be the rabbis of Mercaz.
Hacohen borrowed a jeep mounted with a cannon and drove to the house of the nazir. The elderly man in long white hair and beard wasn’t speaking: he had recently taken a vow of silence. Hacohen told him, “I’ve come to bring you to the Wall.” Overwhelmed, the nazir followed him out the front door wearing only socks; his wife ran after him with shoes.
Next stop: Rabbi Zvi Yehudah. Hacohen found the rabbi in prayer. “I’ve come to take you to the Wall,” Hacohen said. Rabbi Zvi Yehudah seemed stunned, uncomprehending. Hacohen removed the elderly man’s prayer shawl and phylacteries, lifted him into his arms, and carried him to the jeep.
YOEL BIN-NUN APPROACHED the Lions’ Gate. Spread before him was the landscape of messianic dream. Terraced into the Mount of Olives were thousands of flat tombstones, of Jews who had chosen to be buried directly across from the Temple Mount, to be resurrected when the Messiah came. In the Valley of Kidron rose the conical stone monument called the Pillar of Absalom, after the rebellious son of King David, founder of the messianic line. Nearby, embedded in the Old City wall, was the Gate of Mercy, through which, according to tradition, the Messiah would enter, and which had been sealed by Muslims to thwart the redeemer of Israel.
Yoel ran up the steep road leading to the Lions’ Gate, past the still-smoking bus, and through the crowded gate.
When he reached the steps leading to the Dome of the Rock, he abruptly stopped: beyond lay the region of the Holy of Holies.
He felt lightheaded, as if on a mountain peak. To move from battle to this—
He couldn’t pray: prayer seemed inadequate. What was left to ask for? He felt himself to be an answered prayer to all those who had believed this day would come, that Jewish history would vindicate Jewish faith.
He studied the topography. “This was the women’s area of the Temple,” he told a friend. “How do you know, Yoel?” his friend asked, surprised. Yoel explained that he happened to be studying the laws of the Temple just before the war, and he could plainly see the Talmud’s description of the layout of the Mount.
Young men on their way up the stairs stopped to ask Yoel directions to the Western Wall. Yoel shrugged; the Wall didn’t interest him. The Jews had prayed there only because they’d been barred from the Mount. Why descend to the place of lamenting God’s absence from the place that celebrated His glory?
Yoel thought of his high school rabbi, who had claimed that Israel’s failure to control the Temple Mount was proof that God had rejected Zionism. What was the rabbi thinking now?
“So, Yoel, what do you say?” his kibbutznik officer asked.
“Two thousand years of exile are over,” replied Yoel.
HANAN PORAT, a student of the Mercaz yeshiva who was part of the 66th Battalion, walked along the Mount of Olives, overlooking the Old City.
Hanan had been spared the trench fighting on Ammunition Hill; instead, his company had veered toward the Jordanian-held building on the border known as the Police School, which fell after a brief battle, and then proceeded toward Mount Scopus.
But this morning, only minutes earlier, Hanan’s beloved officer had been killed just beside him, by an unknown attacker. Hanan had stood over the body, unable to move, until pried away by a friend.
He was still in shock when he saw a jeep, with two elderly bearded men in the back seat, pass between the two columns of paratroopers moving along either side of the road. Was he hallucinating? Impossible—there was Rabbi Zvi Yehudah and the nazir, both in helmets, fedoras held on their laps. Hanan ran out of the line. “Rabbi Zvi Yehudah!” he shouted. “Rabbi Zvi Yehudah!” The old men couldn’t hear him. Hanan continued shouting, waving his arms, running after the vision of holiness long after the jeep h
ad sped away.
AVITAL GEVA AWOKE in the Bikur Cholim hospital, head covered with bandages. He didn’t know what day it was. He tried to remember when he had last been conscious. He assumed he was in a hospital.
He had already undergone several operations to remove shrapnel from his forehead. Fragments had lodged two millimeters above one eye; shrapnel remained in his legs and shoulders.
He heard shouts. “Reunited Jerusalem!” “The heroic paratroopers!” “The wall!” Jerusalem reunited? The paratroopers at the Wall? His last memory had been of slaughter in blacked-out streets. All had seemed lost then, the battle over before it began. Too medicated to speak, Avital felt desperate with questions. How many of his men had survived? Who among them had reached the Wall? And how could he not be with them?
YISRAEL SHTIGLITZ, a Mercaz student, reached the Temple Mount. Unlike his friend, Yoel, he didn’t linger but headed for the Western Wall. For Shtiglitz, the Wall was home: he had been there often as a child, before the establishment of the state. He recalled how Arabs had forbidden Jews to bring chairs to the Wall or read there from the Torah. One Shabbat, as Shtiglitz stood beside his father in prayer, an Arab man on a donkey rode into the worshippers, scattering them with his stick. The humiliation of a powerless people. But now Shtiglitz had returned to the Wall as a liberator.
A soldier told Shtiglitz that two bearded old Jews had been seen on the Mount, heading down toward the Wall. What are you talking about? Shtiglitz demanded. How could elderly Jews be wandering around a war zone? Then he understood: They’ve come. The Messiah, accompanied by Elijah the Prophet. If Jewish soldiers were on the Temple Mount, why not that?
Shtiglitz ran down the stone steps leading from the Temple Mount to the narrow space that separated a row of houses from the Wall—a foundation of boulders, rising in gradually smaller layers of stone, caper bushes growing in the cracks.
Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation Page 12