The Lion's Gate: On the Front Lines of the Six Day War

by Steven Pressfield

  Lieutenant Zeev Barkai is the twenty-three-year-old operations officer of Paratroop Battalion 71.

  We’re at Givat Brenner now, a kibbutz near Tel Nof Air Base. It’s Monday morning, the first day of the war. The men have been divided into jump groups and given their jump numbers and jump bags. In the bag are your weapon and your gear. You jump with the bag suspended between your knees.

  Givat Brenner is citrus orchards. The entire brigade, all three battalions, is camped here among the groves. All morning we have been hearing and seeing Israeli warplanes take off from Tel Nof. They come screaming past the treetops in formations of four—Mirages and Vautours and other types that I don’t recognize. No one tells us anything. The only news we have is from our transistor radios, and that news is all bad.

  Radio Cairo is reporting that IAF fighter jets are attacking Egyptian bases in Sinai and across the Canal. According to the Egyptians, seventy Israeli warplanes have already been shot down. This is a calamity. Our air force has only, what, two hundred planes?

  Wait, a new report: Eighty Israeli aircraft have been shot down. No, ninety. Can this be true? Radio Israel is mum. All reports are boilerplate. Blah blah heavy fighting, blah blah great struggle.

  Our parachutes have arrived. At Tel Nof the planes are warming up—the Nords and Dakotas from which we will jump tonight at El Arish. One battalion, 66, has already left for the field to board the aircraft.

  Our battalion is 71. Uzi Eilam is our commander. My job as operations officer is to stay glued to his shoulder, so I am privy to the latest news, which continues to be nothing. Not even Uzi knows what’s going on.

  We jumped two days ago, Saturday, a brigade-strength rehearsal at Ashkelon on the coast. Jumping is always a mess, even under ideal circumstances. Men break their legs. Wind scatters the formation; companies and platoons become separated. No one has good memories of jumping at the Mitla Pass in ’56.

  Tonight we will jump at El Arish in Sinai. Only the officers know this. Uzi will tell the men this morning. He has already made one speech about treating prisoners properly and refraining from looting.

  At 10:05 an air force sergeant from Tel Nof pedals up to our camp on a bicycle. “Cairo West is ashes,” he tells us. This is apparently an Egyptian airfield. We’ve never heard of it. The bicycle sergeant tells us not to believe a word we hear over Nasser’s radio. It’s all bullshit. Propaganda. The IAF has blown the hell out of eleven Egyptian airfields and is rearming and refueling to do it again. The sergeant promises to come back with more news as soon as he gets it.

  Someone asks why we’re not hearing this over Radio Israel. The brass is holding the news back, says the sergeant, because we want the Egyptians to keep lying. If the UN believes Nasser is winning, they will not intervene to force a cease-fire, and if the Russians believe it, they won’t send their own troops to help Nasser.

  “Cheer up, guys. The way things are going, you might not have to jump at all.”

  Paratroopers have their own crazy way of thinking. Two minutes ago we were all pissing in our pants about jumping tonight at El Arish. The Egyptians have a division or more there, with modern Soviet T-54 and T-55 tanks as well as the huge World War II Stalins and powerful SU-100 tank destroyers. Paratroopers travel light. What can we do against such armament when the heaviest stuff we’ll have will be a few air-dropped jeeps and a handful of bazookas and 106-millimeter recoilless rifles?

  That was two minutes ago.

  Now, with news of the air force’s success, our fears have flipped over. Now we’re afraid we’ll be left out of the war entirely.

  No combat jump.

  No El Arish.

  The trucks arrive to take back our parachutes. Morale plunges further.

  Wait! Here comes the bicycle sergeant with more news of the air force’s successes.

  “Go to hell!” our men are shouting. “Get outta here!”

  “What’s the matter with you guys?”

  Our company commanders cluster around Uzi, the battalion commander, along with officers and senior noncommissioned officers from the other two battalions, 28 and 66.

  Apparently the El Arish jump really has been scratched. Our guys in Sinai are advancing so fast they don’t need us anymore.

  “What does this mean, Uzi? Will we miss out on the whole show?”

  Uzi reassures the officers. “We’ll get something good—don’t worry.”

  He has just spoken to Colonel Motta Gur, our brigade commander. Motta, Uzi swears, is on fire for action. He is lobbying the generals right now. Motta will not let us be left out. He will get us something good.

  38.

  “WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN JERUSALEM?”

  I was filling my car with petrol when the shells started falling. I had a business meeting in Jerusalem at noon, but I had arrived early, so I decided to stop and fill up at a gas station I knew on a street near the King David Hotel. All of a sudden the shooting started. My watch read 11:15. Shells were exploding in the streets. Men and boys sprinted for cover. In the lane a policeman was shot by a Jordanian sniper firing from the Old City walls.

  Ruth Dayan is Moshe Dayan’s wife. She and her husband have been married since 1935 and have three grown children. Sons Assi and Udi have been mobilized and are serving now with their reserve units. Daughter Yael is with Arik Sharon’s headquarters in Sinai.

  I had no idea there was going to be a war today. How was I to know? At breakfast my husband said nothing. He was fooling me just as he had misled the reporters from the New York Times and the Daily Mail and even young Winston Churchill, grandson of the great Winston, and his father, Randolph, who had flown from London to Israel as journalists, eager to cover the apocalypse. Winston asked Moshe yesterday, man to man, how soon he anticipated the outbreak of hostilities. Should he and his father return to England or was war imminent?

  “Nothing will happen for at least two weeks, if it happens at all,” said my husband.

  So Winston and Randolph Churchill went home.

  Of course, Moshe knew the war was starting. He had given the orders!

  Now here I am, crouching below the window line in the petrol station office while bullets are whizzing past outside. The phones are still working. I’m trying to reach my sister Reumah. I’m the only woman in the garage; the men are all lying flat on the floor. I’m not afraid. I can see hillsides burning above the neighborhood of Yemin Moshe, but the Jordanian shelling does not seem furious, as it would if it were meant to precede an imminent assault. The rhythm of the explosions feels random, as if King Hussein’s artillerymen are firing at whatever targets strike their fancy—if in fact they are aiming at all.

  When I get through to my husband’s office, he reacts with shock and surprise. “What in the world are you doing in Jerusalem?”

  “I told you this morning I had a business appointment.”

  Well, he says, you can’t come back by the main road; it’s under artillery bombardment. He will be driving up to Jerusalem himself, Moshe says, to be sworn in as minister of defense. Well, I say, shells are landing close by; I’m heading to the King David Hotel before this whole block blows up.

  To understand Jerusalem you must grasp its geography. The city is high. One goes “up to” Jerusalem. The Old City measures one square kilometer. It is surrounded by walls of rugged Jerusalem stone that look ancient enough to have been set in place by David or Solomon but in fact were erected by the Ottoman emperor Suleiman the Magnificent in the 1500s.

  Jerusalem was King David’s capital. He attacked and conquered the city around 1000 BCE, selecting the site because it was the one part of the kingdom that belonged to no tribe of Israel. All could convene here in peace. David brought the Ark of the Covenant here. His son Solomon built the Great Temple, where the ark resided within the Holy of Holies. Mount Zion lies just outside the Old City walls, David’s Tower just within.

  The Old City has be
en identified as the site of the biblical Mount Moriah, upon which God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, and where an angel stayed that terrible blade. Canaanites and Israelites have held this city, as have Assyrians and Persians, Babylonians and Romans and Hasmoneans, Byzantines, Mamelukes, Turks, and Crusaders. The Ottomans ruled for centuries, before the British succeeded them under the Mandate of the League of Nations.

  Seven great gates (some name as many as eleven) give entry to the Old City, of which the most famous are the Zion Gate, the Jaffa Gate, the Damascus Gate, and the Lion’s Gate.

  Within the Old City walls lies Judaism’s holiest site, the Western Wall and the ruins of Solomon’s Temple. Christians presenting baptismal certificates may enter the Old City during certain holy seasons via the Mandelbaum Gate, the lone diplomatic accessway between Arab East Jerusalem and our own West Jerusalem. But the way is barred to Jews at all times.

  The Jewish Quarter was razed by the Jordanians when they captured the Old City in 1948. All of its nearly sixty synagogues were destroyed or desecrated and its inhabitants killed or driven out. No Jew may enter, to pray before or even to glimpse the Wailing Wall.

  Sites sacred to Christians and Muslims lie within and without the walls of the ancient city. The Lion’s Gate Road leads directly into the Via Dolorosa, whose stones Jesus of Nazareth trod, bearing the cross upon which he would be crucified. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre lies footsteps away. It was built, so legend declares, on Golgotha itself, the Hill of the Skull. A slab inside the church is said to be the very one upon which Jesus’s body was laid after the crucifixion.

  Immediately east of the Old City walls, in a hollow of the Kidron Valley, lies the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus was betrayed in his final hours. Above this, at the summit of the city, towers the Temple Mount, upon which stand the Dome of the Rock, third holiest site in Islam, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The prophet Muhammad is said to have ascended to heaven from this spot.

  Around these ancient quarters, the contemporary city has grown up.

  Jordanian cannons are firing now from the collar of hills to the east, whose southernmost eminence is the Mount of Olives, which dominates the Old City and Jewish Jerusalem.

  The Knesset, Israel’s parliament, is sited here, in West Jerusalem. This is where Moshe will be sworn in. He will be driving up from the Kirya in Tel Aviv, from General Headquarters.

  My husband and I know the city well. In 1948, immediately after the War of Independence, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion appointed Moshe military commander of Jerusalem. If you look at the cease-fire maps, you will see his initials, “M.D.,” next to the Green Line. My husband drew these, with his counterpart of the Arab Legion, Lieutenant Colonel Abdullah al-Tell, with whom we both became good friends. The agreement, signed in November 1948, was called the “absolute and sincere cease-fire.”

  My own family goes back for decades in Jerusalem. My mother was the first woman driver in the Jewish city, in the 1920s. She had a Morris Minor that she drove every winter to Lebanon to ski.

  My mother ran the first Arab-Jewish kindergarten in Jerusalem. We lived then in the Talbiya neighborhood near the Dormition Abbey, upon whose site the Last Supper is said to have taken place. My parents attended the London School of Economics. They spoke six languages and were socialists to the bone.

  My husband and I met and fell in love on the moshav—the cooperative farming village—at Nahalal. I was a student at the village’s excellent agricultural school. One time I was assigned to the milking in the dairy’s quarantine shed—just me, alone at three in the morning with twelve sick cows who kicked violently each time I tried to approach. I confess I sat down and cried. Suddenly Moshe appeared. He had come to help me. This he did, sweetly and masterfully. Many nights he and I would hose down the cowsheds, standing in rubber boots beneath the light of a single lantern. I thought, Life does not get any happier than this! One morning I made a decision. I said to myself, Why am I getting up early to milk the community’s cows? Why don’t I get up early and milk the Dayans’ cows instead?

  After that, Moshe and I were never apart.

  This is how a nation is built. We young people could see it then. We are creating a new kind of Jew and a new species of community—one couple, one family, one village at a time.

  When the shelling slackens I make my way to the King David Hotel, where I leave my car. Teddy Kollek is Jewish Jerusalem’s young mayor. He escorts me to city hall, very calm and unruffled, and from there across the slope to the Knesset. My husband will send soldiers to have my car driven home.

  At the Knesset, Moshe is waiting, directing the war via multiple military radios and telephones. The swearing-in cannot begin. Prime Minister Eshkol has not yet arrived.

  Two of my husband’s most frequently used words are “moron” and “idiot.” He does not direct these now toward the PM (who is in my opinion a good man and an extremely able leader, worn down, alas, by ill health and the terrible pressures of his office), but rather at himself, for agreeing to this ridiculous ceremonial trek in the hour of our nation’s gravest and most immediate peril.

  I tell Moshe the details of the shelling and of my taking shelter in the petrol station. He laughs and puts his arm around me. “Someone give Ruth a combat badge!”

  39.

  JERUSALEM OF GOLD

  When word arrives that our brigade is being sent up to Jerusalem, I think, Dammit! That is my reaction and everyone else’s, though in stronger language.

  Sergeant Moshe Milo is Captain Yoram Zamosh’s radioman and good friend in “A” Company of Paratroop Battalion 71.

  We are paratroopers. We are the elite. Now, we’re thinking, the generals are exiling us to some meaningless security assignment, protecting the city that the Jordanians will never be reckless enough to attack. We will sit on our hands and miss the war completely.

  In Israel in ’67 the army is too poor to have its own trucks for troop transport. We must use civilian vehicles, called up under the mobilization plan. Israel’s national public transportation company is called Egged. That’s what our brigade gets—the same Egged buses that take tourists sightseeing, and even city buses and school buses, with the same civilian drivers.

  Five buses have been assigned to us in “A” Company. It takes a hundred or a hundred twenty to transport the full brigade. Our driver is a famous soccer player named Yehoshua “Shia” Glazer. He’s an old guy, forty years old. He becomes like our father.

  Each paratrooper is assigned a seat on a bus. That seat will be his for as long as the war lasts. I scratch my initials into the metal plate in front of mine. We have had the same buses and the same drivers for the whole three weeks of the waiting period.

  Now here they are again, our familiar Egged buses, pulling up to the orchard at Givat Brenner. And here we are again, lining up to board them to be driven up to Jerusalem instead of jumping at night from Nords and Dakotas over Sinai. This is embarrassing. We feel frustrated.

  We will not get our combat jump.

  We will not get a red border for our jump wings.

  Captain Yoram Zamosh, “A” Company commander:

  The company commanders have been called together and sent up to Jerusalem ahead of the men and the buses. Time is four or four thirty in the afternoon. The idea is to get up to the city in daylight, so the commanders can assess the situation on the ground and come up with a plan of action.

  We’re in jeeps, a convoy of about twenty. I’m with Dan Ziv, the deputy battalion commander, and Uzi Eilat, commander of “B” Company. There’s no ceremony to the departure. We throw our stuff in the back of the jeep and take off.

  Dan Ziv is a head shorter than I and about ten years older. He is a bona fide hero of Israel, holder of the Itur HaGvura, the nation’s highest decoration for valor, for his actions at the Mitla Pass in 1956. Uzi Eilat is just as tough, a farmer from Beit Hashita, a kibbutz up north around Mount Gilboa.
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  I’m not a hero at all. My aim is to do my job and keep my men safe. That will be glory enough for me, if I can achieve it.

  Our convoy travels on back roads through Tsomet Nahson to Hartuv and from there to Sha’ar HaGai. Jerusalem is about sixty kilometers from Tel Nof. You cross the coastal plain and climb into the hills. We take the bypass roads because the Jordanians have mortars and artillery in the hills along the main highway. This is the shape of our country according to the 1948 armistice. From Tel Aviv, Jerusalem lies at the end of a narrow corridor that can be brought under enemy fire along its entire length.

  The road we’re on is narrow, one lane each way. Traffic is moving in one direction only, up to Jerusalem. Tanks from a reserve brigade—ancient Shermans, no match for the new Jordanian Pattons—shoulder our jeeps off the pavement. It’s a mess, a slow-crawling jam of jeeps and command cars, tenders, ambulances, fuel tankers, and ammunition trucks.

  I know the soldiers in my company are angry and frustrated at getting sent to what they believe will be old man’s duty, manning defensive positions far, far away from the real fighting in the Sinai Desert. My feeling is the opposite.

  Jerusalem!

  Can this be the hour, after two thousand years?

  Will we be the ones?

  Meir Shalit is a nineteen-year-old sergeant in Paratroop Battalion 71:

  My kibbutz is a place called Grofit. In Israel in ’67, saying you come from Grofit is like saying your home is on the moon. Grofit is a patch of palms and melons deep in the Arava wilderness on the way to Eilat. One paved road runs from Beersheba, 190 kilometers. There’s a phrase in Hebrew, Sof haolam smolah—“Go to the end of the world, then turn left.” That’s my home.

  Seventeen guys from Grofit are paratroopers in Battalion 71. We are nineteen, twenty years old. One is twenty-one. He’s the old man. On the kibbutz there is only one phone. No newspapers. We know nothing. A jeep drives up from Eilat and tells us, “Be ready, you will be mobilized soon.” Then we hear that a bus is coming. We gather in the square in the evening with our girlfriends. No weapons, no equipment, just shirts and shorts.