by Jeremy Bowen
We took a lot of casualties in that first hundred yards inside the gate, coming under heavy sniper fire, bullets ricocheting in all directions as we fanned out … So exposed were we that if the Arabs had used mortars we would not have stood a chance … suddenly a Jordanian soldier ran out in front of us with his hands up. He did not appear to be armed, but everybody was jittery because of the snipers, as we all hit the ground. The Jordanian was blown to bits … the unit was moving further down the street when the lead man was shot dead, and a few yards later the next man received a bullet through his chest. A doctor came up to me and started screaming for a knife to cut away the man’s clothing, though I failed to understand the torrent of Hebrew until someone said ‘knife’ in English and I fumbled for mine while the man died.’
The streets of West Jerusalem were almost deserted, except for occasional army jeeps careering round corners and up the empty avenues. One of them was Goren’s jeep. They raced through the city towards the Mandelbaum gate, the crossing point between the two sides of Jerusalem, where they abandoned the jeep. Goren was carrying scrolls of the Jewish bible, the Torah, and a shofar, a bugle made from ram’s horn which Jewish tradition dictated should be blown at auspicious occasions. The two journalists followed, ducked along the line of the city wall, working their way down to St Stephen’s Gate.
At Dung Gate the Israelis were winning. Palestinians and some of the Jordanians who had not left started to surrender. Some of the soldiers threw away their uniforms and changed into civilian clothes, even suits of striped pyjamas. Don McCullin saw the Israelis obeying orders that been issued not to harm the holy places. ‘On more than one occasion I watched Israelis hold their fire when sniped at from the roofs of religious buildings of any persuasion.’
The Palestinian dentist John Tleel peered out from under the pillows, blankets and thick sticking plaster he had used to block up the windows of his house in the Christian quarter. He saw Israeli paratroopers advancing, cautiously. At first, like many others in and around the Old City, he thought they might be Iraqis. Then for the first time since the city was divided in 1948, he realised that he was listening to Hebrew. The soldiers kept their backs to the walls and ‘were advancing with extreme caution, watching their steps … with guns pointed out in front of them, they were on extreme alert’. He went back into his house to tell his friends and family what was happening. At first, they did not believe it could be possible.
After Colonel Gur, the commander of Israel’s 55th Paratroop Brigade, led his men into the Old City through St Stephen’s Gate, his driver Ben Zur swung their half-track to the left, flattening a motorcycle that stood in the way. They drove into the compound that encloses the great mosques and the site of the ancient Jewish temple. Anwar al Khatib, the Jordanian governor of Jerusalem, was waiting with the mayor. They told Gur that the army had withdrawn and there would be no more resistance.
Coming up not far behind Gur and his men were Uzi Narkiss and the IDF’s deputy chief of staff, Chaim Bar Lev. As they were about to follow his troops through St Stephen’s Gate into the Old City, Narkiss radioed Gur to find out where he was. Gur came up with what, for Israelis, are the most famous few lines of the 1967 war. ‘The Temple Mount is ours!’ Narkiss did not believe him. ‘I repeat,’ said Gur, ‘the Temple Mount is ours. I’m standing next to the Mosque of Omar [the Dome of the Rock] now. The Wailing Wall is a minute away.’
Narkiss and Bar Lev drove fast up the slope that led to St Stephen’s Gate. Paratroopers were still exchanging fire with men on the battlements. Dead bodies lay around the street. They abandoned their jeep, Narkiss threw a smoke grenade to give them some cover and they went forward on foot. They climbed over a tank that was stuck in the arch.
Yoel Herzl, Narkiss’s adjutant, caught up with the generals a few minutes later. They were lying on the ground, pinned down by a sniper. Herzl noticed that a cloth on a second floor window in a building opposite was twitching. Asking the paratroopers to cover him, he ran over to the entrance. Moving as quietly as he could, he went up the stairs. Through an open door, he saw a red keffiyeh, the distinctive headscarf worn by Jordanian soldiers. It was the sniper.
‘I emptied a clip from my Uzi into him. Until today I feel bad about it. It was a split-second thing. That’s war. The fastest stays alive. If you think, you’re dead.
‘After that things moved very fast. Everyone was looking round for the way to the Wall, running like crazy, but we couldn’t find the way. Rabbi Goren was there. He said follow me. He was carrying a Bible. We kept on running and we got to the Wall. Of the people who liberated it, I was the seventh.’
Yossi Ronen, the young reporter from army radio who was with Goren, said the Rabbi ‘did not stop blowing the shofar and reciting prayers. His enthusiasm affected the soldiers and from every direction came cries of “Amen!” The paratroopers burst into song, and I forgot I was supposed to be an objective reporter and joined them in singing “Jerusalem of Gold” … the commanders gave short, emotional speeches.’ Narkiss remembered his failure to capture the Old City in 1948. ‘Never has there been such a thing, for those standing here right now … We all kneel before history.’
For Israelis it was the emotional climax not just of the war, but of their first nineteen years of independence. All the men there were deeply moved by the capture of the Jewish people’s most evocative and holy place. Many of them wept. The photographer David Rubinger and the BBC correspondent Michael Elkins, highly secular Israelis who had followed the first troops to the Wall, were swept up in it. ‘We were all crying. It wasn’t religious weeping. It was relief. We had felt doomed, sentenced to death. Then someone took off the noose and said you’re not just free, you’re King. It seemed like a miracle.’ They still had jobs to do. Rubinger lay on the floor of the narrow alley that ran along the wall to get some sense of the wall’s height, and then with tears pouring down his face started taking pictures of stunned, awed and exhausted paratroopers.
Major Doron Mor, second in command of Battalion 66, started worrying when he saw the narrow lane in front of the Wall full of soldiers ‘in ecstasy’. He had already lost thirty-six men in the battle for Jerusalem and did not want to lose any more. ‘I was afraid one Jordanian sniper in one window would shoot all of them. We started to push the soldiers out, because it was very dangerous.’
Sinai
Herzl Bodinger, the Israeli pilot, was returning from another attack on Bir Tamada. He tuned his radio to Voice of Israel, so his direction-finding equipment could zero in on the signal to get him home, while he caught up with the news. They announced that the Temple Mount was in Israeli hands, and played ‘Jerusalem of Gold’. Bodinger, not a religious man, was surprised that he was so overjoyed. General Yeshayahu Gavish, commander of Israel’s forces in the Sinai, was in a half-track at Bir Gifgafah when he heard the same news. It was his biggest thrill of the war. ‘Then I thought, Oh shit, they stole all the glory.’
Nablus, West Bank
Around eleven o’clock Palestinians ran through the streets, shouting that the Algerians were coming. A crowd on the edge of Nablus was throwing rice at an armoured column that was rolling into the town from the east, from the direction of Tubas and the East Bank of the Jordan. If they weren’t Algerians, perhaps they were Iraqis. The people in the crowd didn’t mind. Cairo Radio had been full of the contributions to the war effort made by Arab brothers. Now their saviours were coming.
But the tanks were Israeli, from General Peled’s division. The troops were bemused by their reception. ‘Thousands stood at the entrance to Nablus, waving white handkerchiefs and applauding … we entered the town and were surprised … the population was friendly.’
When an Israeli soldier tried to disarm one of the Palestinians, shooting started. More Israeli tanks arrived later from the west, after they had finally scattered the 40th Armoured Brigade at the Qabatiya crossroads, where fighting had started again at dawn. While the Israeli tanks were manoeuvring, armed Palestinian civilians opened fire. For si
x hours there was a confused gun battle. Jordanian tanks that had been at the other end of the town got involved. Outside Nablus other Jordanian tanks managed to break out towards the Damiya bridge over the river Jordan, to get to the relative safety of the East Bank. Raymonda Hawa Tawil, a middle-class Palestinian housewife, was in the cellar with her children, who were petrified as explosions and gunfire came closer and grew louder. ‘Mama, what’s happening? Mama will we die? What do Jews look like?’ Around seven in the evening Tawil heard a voice speak through a loudspeaker. ‘The town has surrendered. We will not harm you if you put up white flags. Anyone who goes outside does so at the risk of his life. The Mayor of Nablus requests you to surrender.’ The announcement was in literary Arabic. It reminded Tawil of when, as a child, she heard Israelis making the same sort of announcement when Nazareth surrendered in 1948. King Hussein came on the radio, exhorting them to defend themselves tooth and nail. An old man in the shelter tried to cheer them all up. ‘My false teeth are barely sharp enough to eat a sandwich … bite ’em with your own teeth!’ Now, in 1967, fighting and sniping went on into the night.
* * *
By mid-afternoon Israel was fighting the clock as well as what was left of the Jordanian army. It always knew that once the Security Council passed a ceasefire resolution, the time for military action started running out. Israel wanted the entire West Bank as well as Jerusalem by the time it stopped shooting. Both sides blamed each other for breaking the ceasefire, which King Hussein had accepted in the early hours of the morning. Certainly, Israel had a greater interest in continuing the fight. It pressed home fierce attacks against columns of Jordanian forces that were retreating down from the high mountains of the West Bank into the Jordan valley, the lowest place on earth, on their way out of the West Bank. Israeli warplanes – at least 100 according to the Jordanians – strafed and bombed them and, in some places, they were shelled by Israeli tanks. Without air cover, they were at the Israelis’ mercy.
The Israeli air force flew 597 sorties against Jordan during the war, 549 of them for ground attack. Sharif Zaid Ben Shaker, the cousin of King Hussein, felt like he had been on the wrong end of most of them. He commanded the 60th Armoured Brigade which lost forty of its eighty tanks, mainly to air attack. ‘When you’re strafed you have to jump out of your vehicle – I was in a Land Rover – and throw yourself into a ditch. They hit the wireless car behind me. They used a lot of napalm. A napalm bomb ricocheted on the asphalt near me, went about 200 yards and exploded. God was on my side.’
Even though King Hussein had long since dropped his desire for a secret ceasefire, broadcasting his acceptance of the UN resolution on Radio Jordan, the Israelis continued to press home their attacks. A few Jordanian units kept on fighting. Most were trying to cross to the East Bank or to melt away into the west. The US ambassador, Findley Burns, in Amman, feared that the Israelis were trying to destroy the Jordanian army completely. He was so concerned about what that could do to the stability of Jordan that he urged President Johnson to phone Prime Minister Eshkol to push Israel to respect the ceasefire. Burns was also acutely aware that almost every Jordanian believed the United States could stop the Israeli onslaught if it wanted to – and if it did not, he feared some of the thousand-plus Americans in Jordan could face ‘mob violence’.
Bethlehem, 1500
When the war started Badial Raheb, a young mother, was better prepared than most of her neighbours in Milk Grotto Street in Bethlehem. It is a narrow lane that runs along the side of the Church of the Nativity, which Christians believe was built on the place where Jesus was born. Her husband Bishara Raheb owned a bookshop. He followed the news closely. When he was in the house the radio was always on, especially Saut al Arab, the Voice of the Arabs from Cairo. Bishara discounted most of its bragging, bloodthirsty propaganda, but he hoped that the Arabs were strong enough to win the war that he was convinced was coming. Badial was not sure. It was clear to her that the Arabs were more than simply disunited. They were ready to betray each other, which was much worse. How could they fight Israel in such a state? She was worried. She had a four-year-old son, Mitri, and she was expecting another child. Together, Badial and Bishara prepared for the war, stockpiling food.
Jordan’s Hittin Infantry Brigade pulled out of Bethlehem at midday without a fight. The Mayor of Bethlehem surrendered the town to a task force from the Jerusalem Infantry Brigade, which entered Bethlehem at three in the afternoon. By then the Rahebs had covered the windows of their house with cardboard. They wanted to make the place look empty, so they would be ignored by the invaders. The family retreated down to a basement room that was protected by a thick stone wall. The electricity and the water were cut but they had candles and there was a well. In their basement they could hear the sounds of war. The prospect of Israeli soldiers coming to their town was terrifying. People were talking about the massacre of Deir Yasin in 1948. Some of the Rahebs’ neighbours who thought it would happen again left for Jordan. Badial started to feel very unsafe, even in their well-protected stone cellar. She decided to cross the road to take refuge in the Church of the Nativity. Getting to its door was agonising, even though it was no more than two dozen yards away. Her little boy Mitri had a leg in plaster from an accident just before the war. With them as well was Bishara’s old aunt, well into her eighties and barely able to walk.
The ancient church was full. It was very dark. The electricity had been cut and the people were frightened to light candles, which might have attracted attention. As her eyes got used to the dark, Badial Raheb saw that hundreds had gathered there, so many that she struggled to find somewhere for her family to sit down.
Cairo
The Soviet military attaché was granted an audience with Field Marshal Amer at his headquarters, in the brand new defence ministry building in Nasser City, one of Cairo’s newest suburbs. Sergei Tarasenko, an attaché at the Embassy, was with him as interpreter. The atmosphere around the ministry was not what Tarasenko expected – no checkpoints, no barriers and no guards. The first soldiers that they saw were at the entrance to the building. An immaculately turned-out officer opened the door for the Soviet party. Somewhere in the background there were three soldiers with a light anti-aircraft gun.
They went down in a lift what seemed to be a long way and were shown into a big room. Around ten senior officers were sitting there. Tarasenko was bemused. ‘I was expecting to see them extremely active, messengers running in all directions, to hear orders and reprimands shouted into the telephone or walkie-talkies. Instead there was complete stillness and quiet. The officers were sipping coffee and exchanging quiet remarks. Some of them were listening to small transistor radios.’
Amer’s office was just off the big, quiet room. He was in an armchair next to a small table. Tarasenko’s attention was caught by a six-inch split in a seam in the usually immaculate Amer’s uniform. The Russians knew already it was going badly for Egypt. Now they started to think it could be even worse. Over Arabic coffee the military attaché asked Amer what was happening at the front. Amer, ‘with unsuppressed irritation’, said the main item on his agenda at that precise moment was Nasser’s decision to close the Suez canal, which Amer seemed convinced had turned the war into an international conflict. The Soviet military attaché started asking specific questions. Where was the front line? What happened to particular units? What was happening in Ishmalia? Amer did not answer the questions. ‘It was obvious that Amer himself had no idea of what was happening on the battlefields. My impression was that he had been taking drugs, or just switched off.’
Amer livened up only when he insisted that Egypt was now fighting the United States as well as Israel. The Israeli air force, Amer claimed, more preposterously than ever, had been destroyed by the air forces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. The war was being continued by the Americans, who were flying operations from their aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean. In the circumstances, Egypt expected the Soviet Union to offer its support. The military attaché asked for proof. H
ad they shot down an American plane? Or captured an American pilot? Amer was ‘almost rude’. He explained to the two Russians that it was all so well known and obvious that no proof was needed. Besides, the downed aircraft had all fallen into the sea and sunk. With that, he called the meeting to a halt.
Outside Amer’s bunker, in the real world, Cairo had a quiet morning, after a night of air raids on factories and on the Cairo West military airbase. Rumours that a disaster had occurred in Sinai was spreading around the capital. Local journalists at the official Middle East News Agency were accusing the Soviets of betraying Egypt. Why hadn’t they intervened? Why was the army surprised that the Americans and the British helped Israel? Some were suggesting that it would be just as bad if London and Washington’s denials were true, because it meant that the Egyptian army had disastrously underestimated the Israelis. Even Nasser was being criticised. One reporter from his regime’s favourite newspaper, al-Ahram, said Nasser had two choices left: to kill himself or leave the country.
‘Despair settled over the city,’ according to Trevor Armbrister, one of the twenty-two American reporters in Cairo covering the war. Even the Nile was quiet. A few feluccas drifted downstream with their sails furled. Troops in combat fatigues with bayonets fixed guarded the bridges. Just past midday Armbrister and his twenty-two colleagues were ‘rounded up and taken to the Nile hotel, a dingy establishment facing the Corniche. As we milled around the entrance, a convoy of military vehicles rumbled by loaded with sand bags and artillery shells. We’d seen such convoys before, and the troops had always been singing. Now they were silent. The Egyptians made it clear that we were under house arrest. A blue-gowned Nubian called Mahatma guarded the hotel entrance, thrusting a thick black arm in front of anyone who attempted even to peer outside.’ The hotel restaurant had been moved to the boiler room, ‘a smelly cavern abuzz with flies’. For lunch they were served some dried meat they thought had come from a camel. ‘Waiters in filthy galabias plopped six bottles of beer on the table. There would be no more until the war was over. The beer factory was closed.’ They listened to reports from the BBC and Voice of America on shortwave radios and wondered how long their internment would last.