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

by Steven Pressfield

  Suddenly here is the bus and we are on it. No one tells us where we’re going. I have half a minute to clutch my sweetheart, Malka, who will later become my wife. She’s crying. “Take a bus to Tel Aviv,” I tell her. “Tell my mother that my battalion has been called up and that I am fine.”

  My mother too has no phone. It is 1967.

  Now, a few weeks later, our seventeen guys and a few hundred others are on a different bus, this time bound for Jerusalem. You would think a Jew would know all about Jerusalem, but I am as ignorant as a turnip. The Wailing Wall is there? Don’t pull my leg. Mount Moriah? Tell me again, did something important happen there?

  There is a popular song now called “Jerusalem of Gold.” The radio plays it every twenty minutes. Some of the guys on the bus are singing it now. It seems to mean a lot to them.

  On the buses we are jammed shoulder to shoulder with our packs and weapons and equipment. The little Uzi submachine guns are not too bad, but the bazookas and radios and, worse, the bangalore torpedoes and demolition charges fill every centimeter of space. It’s hot. The road is terrible.

  A bangalore torpedo is a device for blowing up barbed-wire entanglements and clearing paths through minefields. A bangalore is basically an iron pipe, about a meter and a half long, packed with explosives. In combat, our engineers, or just regular paratroopers like us, will slide the bangalores forward along the ground under the tangles of concertina wire, prime the detonator, then scramble back out of the way. If a barrier of barbed wire is too wide for a single bangalore to reach from front to back, two or more can be sleeved together to make one long charge that will, theoretically, do the job.

  Do we even need bangalores? What is our mission? Why are we even going to Jerusalem? In the buses we are interrogating one another, as if each expects the guy next to him to know more than he does.

  We are the blind leading the blind.

  Yoram Zamosh, “A” Company commander:

  At Latrun, halfway to Jerusalem, our convoy starts receiving mortar fire. A truck in front of our jeep takes a direct hit and blows sky-high, a big, powerful blast that fills the air with dust and smoke and sends men diving into ditches and medics rushing forward to help the wounded. All of a sudden it feels like war. It smells like war.

  In Abu Ghosh, Israeli tanks in the street begin shooting to the north, toward Kiryat Anavim, Ma’ale HaHamisha, and Givat Har Adar—Radar Hill. I check my watch. It’s 17:30, five thirty in the afternoon. We’re in the outskirts of the city now. Streets are empty. You see fires here and there, shells land randomly, ambulances appear out of the smoke, followed or led by police cars. We come to a gas station on Malkei Israel Street. Two small boys in T-shirts are sitting on a little hill of sand. “What are you doing here?” we ask. “We want to see the war.” They’re the only ones on the street.

  Schneller Camp is the headquarters of the Jerusalem Brigade, the reserve infantry force charged with the defense of the city. Wounded men are being carried on stretchers out of the gate. Someone says that Jordanian artillery has zeroed in on the compound; it’s too dangerous for us to enter.

  I run into my friend Amos Ne’eman, a kibbutznik from Beit Hashita. He’s the operations officer of the Jerusalem Brigade. He gives us a few maps (we have none) and directs us to a nearby rooftop in the Batei Pagi neighborhood. “You’ll be able to see from there.”

  “See what?”

  “Whatever you can.”

  Sergeant Moshe Milo, Captain Zamosh’s radioman:

  Some in the buses think it is silly to sing “Jerusalem of Gold,” and I would have agreed with them two hours ago. But now we are here. The setting sun is reflecting off the white stones of the city. I am thinking of a story of Rabbi Akiva.

  When Rabbi Akiva and his wife were very young, before he was even a rabbi, they were so poor that they had to sleep in a barn. (This was 1,900 years ago, in the first century CE.) One morning when Rabbi Akiva awoke, the sun’s rays chanced to glisten upon a few stalks of straw that had caught in his wife’s hair, shining like gold. Rabbi Akiva was deeply in love with his bride. He felt ashamed that their straits were such that they must take shelter under a roof beside sheep and goats.

  “One day,” he promised, “I will get you a Jerusalem of gold.”

  For centuries Jews have wondered what Rabbi Akiva meant. What was a “Jerusalem of gold”? Some kind of jewelry? The meaning could not be literal. How could he give his bride a city of gold?

  Here is what I think. I think the word “Jerusalem” signified to Rabbi Akiva something unattainable, a great prize, like paradise, the ultimate crown and gift of love.

  Who are we, paratroopers on this bus, to speak, or even to think, of such matters? But in many ways that is what Jerusalem means to us too, even if we seldom give it thought and cannot put it into words.

  Jerusalem is not a capital of wealth or empire. It is sited upon no river or harbor or overland trade route. It is not a hub of finance or commerce. Fashion or the arts have no place here. Jerusalem possesses no natural resources. Its location is of minimal strategic value. It is not London or Paris, Moscow or New York.

  Jerusalem is a city of the spirit, a capital of the soul.

  Let us make pilgrimage there, you and I, just once in our lifetimes. The wretched and the weary, the bereft and the broken in spirit: Let these tread Jerusalem’s stones for one moment only, and, behold, each and every is made whole.

  This is the Jerusalem Rabbi Akiva meant when he promised it, of gold, to the bride he worshipped. This, too, I believe, is what the poet William Blake sought to communicate in his poem, which became even for the English an anthem of the spirit:

  I will not cease from Mental Fight,

  Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:

  Till we have built Jerusalem,

  In England’s green and pleasant Land.

  In Hebrew, har means “mountain.” Overlooking Jerusalem on Har HaTsofim, Mount Scopus, is a Jewish enclave surrounded on three sides by territory occupied by the Jordanians. The site contains the original Hadassah Hospital and several buildings of Hebrew University. The 1948 armistice safeguards this precinct, which is manned by a detachment of about a hundred twenty Israelis—eighty-five police and thirty-three civilians. Every two weeks the garrison is relieved and food and supplies are brought in, protected by a UN convoy. I have been among the soldiers (we had to dress as police officers, to adhere to the armistice) to man this outpost.

  Sergeant Moshe Milo.

  From Mount Scopus you look out over Jerusalem. You can see the Old City. On watch, I used to stand at a certain elevated vantage, searching with my eyes for the poplar grove that stands above the Western Wall. My name is Moshe, and I felt like Moses on Mount Nevo: I could see the Promised Land but would never be permitted to enter.

  That is Jerusalem to every Jew. The Old City stands as the highest aspiration, the soul center of the people. Jerusalem is that which is longed for, dreamed of, prayed for—yet something that you believe you will never see and never touch. For two thousand years others have held this place. Babylonians, Persians, Romans, Hasmoneans, Byzantines, Muslims, Crusaders, Mamelukes, Ottomans, the British—for two millennia they have ruled this capital, which is sacred to our nation.

  Where were we throughout these centuries?

  Driven across oceans, scattered in Diaspora among the lands of strangers who hated us—exiled, outcast, subject to inquisitions, purges, pogroms. Laws are passed by barons and senators of our host nations, by whose edict we are forbidden to own land or property, to study or enter the learned professions, to govern ourselves, to marry. “Passion plays” are performed, in which the agony of our hosts’ avatars are experienced as ecstasies by the faithful. At the heart of these rituals resides a devil, and the devil is us: the Jew.

  Depicted as a rat, a parasite, subhuman, grotesque; rendered with horns and cloven hooves; portrayed as eater
s of babies, vampires sucking blood in satanic rituals; vilified, calumniated, made infamous, and all from this lone ground: the fact that we possess no state, no home, no country, as every other people on earth.

  We have a nation now at last. A Jewish state exists. Our country holds half of Jerusalem. But it is the vacant half, the barren half, the half that excludes the Old City and our people’s most sacred sites. This I think on Mount Scopus, manning my post above Israel’s ancient capital. I think that the exile of the Jews has not yet come to an end.

  Now here we are, paratroopers on buses.

  What is our mission? We don’t know. Why do we hasten to Jerusalem? No one has told us. Yet each man, in his heart, cannot but feel and ask:

  Can deliverance for David’s city be at hand? Is this the hour at last?

  No one dares speak or even think this, so we sing “Jerusalem of Gold.” I am not the only one who must hide tears.

  40.

  THE MOMENTUM OF EVENTS

  By my orders issued this afternoon, June 5, Paratroop Brigade 55 has been detached as an element of Ugda Tal. I have canceled the combat jump that had been planned for tonight at El Arish in Sinai.

  The 55th Brigade has been reassigned to the defense of Jewish West Jerusalem. Brigade commander Motta Gur and his senior officers are on their way to the city at this moment, traveling from Tel Nof in a convoy of jeeps. Their instructions are to assess the tactical situation and report back to the General Staff as soon as possible with their conclusions and plans of action.

  Moshe Dayan is minister of defense.

  I hate the sending of troops to Jerusalem. The act is the issue of the recklessness of one man: Jordan’s King Hussein. I know Hussein well. He is not a rash leader, nor as a rule imprudent or irresponsible. But his throne rides upon the tiger’s back. To preserve it he has had to put his head into the tiger’s mouth.

  The tiger is not Egypt. It is the anti-Israel fervor of Hussein’s own people. Two-thirds of Jordan’s population are Palestinian Arabs, displaced from their homes during the War of Independence in 1948. Nasser’s general Riad now commands Jordan’s armed forces. Hussein has ceded this power to him. He has had to, to quell his own mob. When Hussein returned from Cairo six days ago, having concluded with Egypt an alliance of war, the crowd swamped his limousine in joy and lifted the vehicle physically off the ground.

  This morning Hussein’s air force has attacked Israel. His long-range artillery has loosed barrages aimed at our air base at Ramat David; shells have fallen in civilian neighborhoods of Tel Aviv. Hussein’s batteries continue to bombard Jewish West Jerusalem. By day’s end his artillery will have fired six thousand rounds into the city. The king himself at 09:30 over Radio Amman has denounced “Zionist aggression” and declared that “the hour of revenge has come.”

  These actions of Hussein could be discounted, possibly, as the “making of a demonstration” to satisfy his Arab allies. But not the king’s—or General Riad’s—moves on the ground in Jerusalem. Troops of the Arab Legion have seized Jebel Mukaber, the high ground in southern Jerusalem upon which sits Government House, which had been the British high commissioner’s residence in Mandate Palestine and which now serves as headquarters for UNTSO, the United Nations Truce Supervising Organization. This site is critical because it dominates the road to Bethlehem and Hebron, Jordanian cities in the West Bank from which Arab reinforcements—Hussein’s two brigades of Patton tanks, not to mention the Iraqi brigades that may have entered Jordan from the east—may advance. Jordanian troops are reported advancing as well on the Israeli enclave on Mount Scopus.

  I have ordered reserve forces forward to dislodge the Legionnaires from Government House and to seize all strategic road junctions by which enemy columns may approach Mount Scopus from the north. I have been compelled as well to send armored columns toward Jenin in the northern West Bank to silence Jordan’s guns firing into the cities of our coastal plain. These actions must be taken. There is no alternative. But we are playing with fire. The last thing Israel’s overtaxed forces need at this hour is the opening of a second front in the east.

  What, in the end, is the job of the minister of defense?

  Not the planning of war, nor of any individual battle. Long before I assumed my post, these designs were in place. I direct no clashes on the ground or in the air. My role as an emblem of national decisiveness was critical for morale in the three or four days prior to commencement of hostilities. But that need has now largely passed.

  What task, then, am I called to perform?

  I must manage the war, yes. But beyond that and indivisible from it, my task is to see beyond the curvature of the earth. My charge is to discern and to direct for the nation’s advantage, so much as this is possible, the momentum of events.

  The army wants all of Sinai. It wants to see its tanks on the eastern bank of the Suez Canal. This is one element of the momentum of events. A second element is evolving even now along our eastern front: the clash with Hussein and Jordan.

  This day in Jerusalem, taking shelter from enemy shells in a broom closet beneath the Knesset, Menachem Begin has begun pressing for an assault on the Old City. The regional commander, General Uzi Narkiss, has approached me already with this ambition. Even the army’s chief rabbi, Shlomo Goren, is quoting scripture:

  In the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates . . .

  There is a phrase in Hebrew, Eretz Israel HaShlema. It means “Greater Israel”—biblical Israel, the land that God gave to Abraham, to Moses, to the Twelve Tribes.

  Israel’s current borders are, in the view of the champions of this cause, but a poor and shameful shadow of Eretz Israel HaShlema. The nation holds only half of our ancient capital Jerusalem. Judea and Samaria languish under Arab rule. Our holiest sites, the Western Wall and the Tomb of the Patriarchs, remain in enemy hands, where no Jew may tread, let alone worship.

  The passion of the Jewish people to reclaim these prizes is a primary and perilous component of the logic of events.

  Can I contain it?

  In the academies of war, students are instructed in the tactical level, the operational level, and the strategic level. Beyond these, ministers manipulate the political level, the diplomatic level, the international level.

  I must contend with all these, and the levels beyond.

  The critical component is time. The future. It is fair for Gavish or Tal or Sharon to declare, “Take all of Sinai” and “Seize the Canal.” This is the fighting commander’s charge, to exploit success, to capitalize upon advantage.

  Nor do I contest the legitimacy of the passion of Begin and Narkiss and Goren for the liberation of the Old City of Jerusalem. I share this dream myself. What Jew doesn’t?

  But someone must consider the effect of these acts, should they be accomplished—not only today but tomorrow, next week, and not only here, in this theater, the Middle East, but in Moscow and Washington, in the political capitals of the world. Nor may I in my deliberations leave out the centers of finance, of oil and energy, of trade by sea and air.

  We in Israel do not contend against only one opponent or do battle upon merely one field. Behind Egypt and Syria stands the Soviet Union, which fears for its influence and prestige not only in the Middle East but also in other quarters of the globe. A reverse in our theater may overturn Russia’s positions in Africa or Southeast Asia. Heaven only knows what debate is taking place now in the Politburo and the Kremlin.

  At the antipodal pole from the Soviet Union stands the United States, whose objects and concerns, high-minded in the main, are even more dangerous for our vulnerable nation on account of their unintended and unforeseeable consequences.

  Beyond these actors looms world opinion, the unpredictable and unknowable passions of the global audience, which may rally this day on behalf of the un
derdog Jews, then turn, tomorrow, and demand from us retrenchment and retreat.

  Like a wildfire on a mountain, events create their own logic. When I was a boy I fought such conflagrations. I watched my sheep bolt and saw my goats break their necks in mad rushes over precipices.

  Eshkol, now, believes in the army. Abba Eban has turned hawk too. Events have captured both of them. Menachem Begin recounts with passion the story of a fellow convict under the Soviets, an atheist and internationalist his whole life who, at the point of death aboard a prison train bound for Siberia, beseeched Begin and others to sing for him Israel’s anthem, “Hatikva.”

  The land.

  Eretz Israel HaShlema.

  Of all our nation’s ministers and commanders, Begin represents the most passionate articulation of this vision of return and reconquest. His blood is on fire with it. I cannot say he is wrong. But his fervor, seized upon by others of our people, will, I fear, unchecked by me, produce catastrophe in the end.

  41.

  NIGHT ANIMALS

  I know Jerusalem well. After the Sinai Campaign in 1956 I served for three months as second-in-command to the legendary paratrooper Meir Har-Zion, with a battalion of commandos assigned to guard the city. Our soldiers manned posts along the Green Line. Wherever there was an Israeli position, a Jordanian post sat across from it. We got to know the Arab Legionnaires. We exchanged news with them across the barbed wire, the minefields, and the sandbagged barricades.

  Major Uzi Eilam commands Battalion 71 of Paratroop Brigade 55.

  I lived in Jerusalem again a few years later, on a break from service. I was an engineering student. My wife, Naomi, was finishing medical school. We lived in a small apartment at 18 Hapalmach Street in Rehavia.