Naomi and I were a young couple, without children at that time, and with very little money. We spent most Saturdays walking and exploring the city. It was a happy time. I must confess, however, that during those romantic perambulations I kept one eye out, as any Israeli officer would, for the tactical implications presented by the high ground and the low, the layouts of the streets and intersections, and the placement of man-made obstacles and fortifications.
I doubt that any officer in Brigade 55 knows Jerusalem as intimately as I.
Now, in the convoy of jeeps hastening up to the city, I am searching my memory for likely breakthrough points and potential lines of advance. Mortar rounds are falling when we reach Schneller Camp, headquarters of the local reserve brigade. Choking smoke fills the streets. From the operations officer of this formation we battalion and company commanders get a quick briefing and a few poor maps. Then Motta Gur, our brigade commander, pulls us aside, to a narrow street clear of the shelling, and lays out the concept of attack. He has worked this out in his head on the drive up to the city.
“Will we assault the Old City?” one commander asks.
“No!” is Motta’s emphatic reply. “Our task for now is, first, to relieve the garrison of 120 Israeli soldiers who are surrounded on Mount Scopus, and, second, to seize positions in East Jerusalem from which we can defend the city if the enemy brings up tanks and troops from the Jordan Valley.”
In other words, we must break through the Jordanian border defenses and capture the strategic ground east of the Old City.
The brigade, Motta says, will mount an assault across the Green Line—the 1948 armistice boundary between Israel and Jordan—along a sector demarcated on the north by Ammunition Hill and the Jordanian Police School, in the center by the neighborhoods of Sheikh Jerrah and Wadi Joz, and in the south by the American Colony and the Rockefeller Museum.
We are three battalion commanders—myself commanding Battalion 71, Yossi Yoffe leading Battalion 66, and Yossi Fratkin in charge of Battalion 28. Motta gives us an hour to prepare a plan for his approval. The buses carrying the soldiers of the brigade are on the way from Givat Brenner now. We will attack tonight, as soon as the men can be brought up and moved into position.
Each of the brigade’s three battalions is given a specific objective in this night’s operation. Battalion 66 will seize Ammunition Hill and the Jordanian Police School, then assault across the high ground to liberate the Israeli enclave on Mount Scopus.
My battalion, 71, will advance through the Arab neighborhoods of Sheikh Jerrah and Wadi Joz, “cleaning” these of enemy defenders and positions of resistance. We will move into positions from which the battalion will be able to assault the Augusta Victoria Ridge, adjacent to Mount Scopus, when and if such orders shall be issued.
Battalion 28 will break through the Jordanian defenses immediately after my battalion (our role is to clear the way for them), advancing on our right. These troops will neutralize enemy defenses in the quarter of the American Colony and the Rockefeller Museum. Together with our battalion they will seize the road junction beneath the northwest corner of the Old City walls and hold it, should the site be attacked, as is anticipated, by enemy reinforcements of armor and infantry advancing from the south and east.
The brigade will have a handful of ancient Sherman tanks in support and possibly a bit of artillery. We will have our own mortars. Motta says he may even be able to scare us up a few half-tracks to use as ambulances.
No further mention is made of the Old City.
Though Brigade 55 is a reserve formation, and a newly constituted one at that, it possesses no shortage of proven commanders and heroes stretching back to the days of Unit 101 and earlier. Meir Har-Zion has joined his friend Micha Kapusta, who has brought his recon company from Sinai, volunteering to serve in any capacity. Katcha Cahaner commands a company in Battalion 28; five minutes into the fighting he will replace the battalion’s fallen deputy commander, finishing the war in that post. My own second-in-command, Dan Ziv, is a holder of Israel’s highest decoration for valor from the battle at the Mitla Pass in ’56. Our brigade commander, Motta Gur, has led companies in Unit 101 and Battalion 890 under Arik Sharon. He fought at Mitla as well. I myself have a Medal of Courage, the Itur HaOz, from Operation Black Arrow. I have served as well for a year as Sharon’s intelligence officer in Battalion 890. Many of Brigade 55’s company and platoon commanders have trained under and served alongside Dayan, Sharon, and Rabin, as well as Uzi Narkiss, Aharon Davidi, Raful Eitan, Dado Elazar, and other legendary combat commanders.
But no one has assaulted a city. None has fought house to house in a locality of this scale. And no one has thrown together a plan of attack in sixty minutes, then put it into action, at night, with virtually no supporting armor or heavy weapons, in an urban environment that is a maze and a mystery to most of his men.
And that city is Jerusalem.
Sites sacred to three great religions intrude upon every potential axis of advance. As a battalion commander leading more than five hundred men, every one of whose lives is precious to me, this means one thing: I and my paratroopers will be constrained tactically in ways unimaginable in any other urban environment. The enemy may fire upon us from the Garden of Gethsemane. May we return fire upon this holy precinct? My soldiers may be shelled from positions adjacent to the Dome of the Rock or the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Our mortar batteries may be called upon to return fire on sites contiguous to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. How can we do this? What degree of force may we bring to bear?
Every officer is aware of these excruciating constrictions. That we may be compelled by the religious and historical inviolability of the battleground to place our men’s lives in jeopardy is a prospect none of us even wants to think about.
Zeev Barkai is a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant, operations officer of Paratroop Battalion 71:
Who knows the city? I certainly don’t. What is the American Colony? Where is Sheikh Jerrah? Augusta Victoria and the Mount of Olives are just names to me. And I’m Uzi’s operations officer! I’m supposed not only to know this stuff but be able to explain it to the guys who will be fighting in these places only a couple of hours from now.
We’re on a rooftop. Shells are dropping randomly. Three hours ago we were rigging our jump gear, preparing to drop by parachute into the Sinai Desert. Now we’re in Jerusalem.
“Have you seen the maps?”
Uzi Eilat comes up to me. He’s our “B” Company commander, a tough kibbutznik, twenty-six years old, from Beit Hashita near Mount Gilboa.
“I haven’t seen a damn thing.”
“There’s one the size of a napkin, and a few blurry aerial photos. That’s it.”
Eilat tells me he has it from an unimpeachable source that the Jerusalem Brigade has an office full of beautiful maps, maps they’ve been developing for years for just this moment.
“How can we get them?”
He laughs and shakes his head.
The building whose roof we’re on is called a shikun. It was designed to be part living quarters, part blockhouse. The walls on the Jordanian side are triple thick; gunports have been cut into the roofline. Families live in the apartments below. In fact, mothers are shuttling back and forth in the street right now, bringing our paratroopers hot tea and cakes. Shells keep falling. When they hit a building, they punch sharp holes, making a boom like thunder. When a round lands in the street, it explodes with a fierce, sharp bang that rings and rebounds between the walls of the stone buildings. Sniper and machine-gun fire is constant enough to make you keep your head down, but 90 percent of it seems aimed at nothing.
I cross the roof, looking for Yoram Zamosh, our “A” Company commander. He’s a religious guy. He knows the city.
I find him with his radioman, Moshe Milo. Zamosh gives me a quick orientation, kneeling and drawing a map in the stone grit of the rooftop.
“Think
of the city as the English letter ‘D.’”
His finger traces a vertical stroke.
“This is the Green Line. It divides the city. Israelis on the left—the west—Jordanians on the right.”
East of the vertical stroke Zamosh draws a curved line, swelling outward like the bulge in a “D.” This line represents the collar of hills that dominate the city. Mount Scopus at the top, Augusta Victoria Ridge in the middle, the Mount of Olives at the bottom.
The Jordanians hold all three.
Our brigade will have to take this high ground, Zamosh says—the Mount Scopus enclave first, because that’s where 120 of our people are cut off and surrounded.
At the southern end of the curved line, Zamosh sketches a rough square. This is the Old City. That’s where the Western Wall is, and a lot of other religious stuff that he hasn’t got time to tell me about.
The Old City is held by the Arab Legion.
That, I do know.
But Zamosh’s finger-drawn map helps. I’m starting to get a picture.
Uzi Eilat commands “B” Company of Battalion 71:
It’s afternoon but the streets are already dark. Smoke. Thick, choking stuff. Our operations officer, Zeev Barkai, points out the cars parked along the curb. Every tire is flat, every window shattered from shrapnel. We and the other company commanders confer with our battalion commander, Uzi Eilam, in the shelter of a wall.
Uzi says the plan is to attack East Jerusalem, but nobody yet knows how or where. I ask when. “Soon,” Uzi says. He has to run to meet with Motta Gur, our brigade commander. Get up on a rooftop, he tells us, and see what you can see.
I don’t know the city. The landmarks mean nothing to me. We have to spring from rooftop to rooftop because the Jordanian snipers keep finding us. Someone says we may assault the Mandelbaum Gate. I don’t know what that is.
Yoram Zamosh commands “A” Company:
When I came home to the kibbutz in ’66 after six years of army service, I got married. My wife and I were very happy. We worked hard; we were planning a family. The army, of course, is very secular; after six years of life in the barracks and the field, I confess I had lost quite a bit of my spiritual focus. This did not go unnoticed in a religious community like mine, Kibbutz Yavne. One day several of the elders approached me.
“Zamosh, it is time for you to start taking yourself seriously. Winter is here; there is no work in the fields. Take six months and go study in the yeshiva.”
There was an excellent religious academy right next door to Kibbutz Yavne, but I didn’t want to commute from home. I wanted to live and study full-time. I will do as you suggest, I told the elders, but it must be in Jerusalem.
I enrolled in Yeshiva Mercaz HaRav Kook. HaRav Kook means the academy of the legendary Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of modern Israel, who died in 1935 and was succeeded by his son, Zvi Yehuda Kook. To say you did your studies under either of these rabbis is like saying you sat at the feet of the Pope in Vatican City. The experience changed my life in every way. What had been to me the shiny but superficial surface of a sea became the great depths of an ocean.
In the evenings after studies, I used to lead groups of students exploring the streets of the Holy City. I got in trouble for this. In the yeshiva you are supposed to study Torah and nothing else. The case was brought to Rabbi Kook. He considered my nightly rambles and approved them. “To walk in Jerusalem,” he declared, “is to study Torah.”
So I know the city. I have hiked every street.
Beit HaKerem is a quarter at the western edge. From our rooftop reconnaissance posts along the Green Line we officers drive back west now, in the jeeps, five kilometers clear of the city center and the shelling. The soldiers have come up from Givat Brenner. The buses pour into Beit HaKerem’s central square.
It’s safe here, a good marshaling place, well back from the Jordanian artillery. I find my men. Our battalion commander, Uzi Eilam, catches me for a moment. He has made up his plan of attack, he says, and now must get it approved by Motta Gur, who commands our brigade.
On the first rooftop, forty-five minutes ago, I got the chance to speak with Uzi aside. I have made this request: If the battalion gets the green light to enter the Old City, will he let “A” Company go first? Will he let my company lead the way into King David’s capital?
Uzi has promised that he will check with Motta.
Uzi Eilat commands “B” Company of Battalion 71:
It’s dark now. Our battalion commander, Uzi Eilam, runs a short, very focused commanders’ meeting in a tiny apartment with the civilian family present. The mother and daughters bring us coffee and sandwiches. In the streets the people’s morale is very low. Everyone is hunkered in shelters. They fear for us and for themselves. But no one leaves.
Zamosh has gotten into his head the idea that our brigade may get orders to enter the Old City. This is very important to him. Me? I couldn’t care less. I am thinking of one thing only:
I have now seventy soldiers alive and in one piece. I want to come back with seventy soldiers in the same state.
I don’t give a damn about the Old City.
Uzi shows us a map of Jerusalem. It’s the only one he has. He passes out several fuzzy aerial photos. As hard as I squint, I can make sense of none of these.
I’m a kibbutznik from the north, from the Valley of Jezreel. What do I know of Jerusalem? As a commander you know only two things: what higher command wants your men to do, and what they actually can do.
The whole city is under blackout. We huddle under a single lightbulb. Uzi explains his plan. The street the battalion will marshal on is called Shmuel Hanavi. Samuel the Prophet Street.
“Where is it?” I ask.
“Go up the street till you get to the orchard.”
“Which orchard?”
“You’ll know it when you see it.”
With that, I go out to the buses to brief my soldiers. I tell them that I have served with Uzi Eilam for six years. In every operation, he has picked “B” Company to go first.
“Understand?”
One more thing. Motta has given Uzi and the other battalion commanders the option of holding off the assault till morning, when the brigade will have air support.
The commanders have elected not to wait.
We will go now.
We are night animals.
42.
SAMUEL THE PROPHET STREET
No streets feel as dark as those of a city under blackout in war. Our drivers grope through the maze of lanes and alleys, at the pace of a walking man, behind headlamps painted blue and narrowed to slits. Already buses are getting lost.
Uzi Eilam commands Paratroop Battalion 71.
We are moving forward to Samuel the Prophet Street. I know an alley there, called Gemul. On a night ten years ago, when I served as deputy to Meir Har-Zion, we set an ambush on that site to protect a supply convoy heading toward Mount Scopus.
Gemul, tonight, will be our breakthrough point.
Why have I chosen this site? It’s obscure. Out of the way. The last place anyone would pick to cross. The march-up is safe. A line of buildings protects the approach both from enemy fire and, more important, from observation.
There are adjacent lanes in which our companies can marshal before descending the slope into no-man’s-land. Gemul Alley is broad enough for us to advance in force but defined enough to keep our column from straying off the axis of advance.
H-hour is forty minutes from now. With luck we can get the men into position in fifteen or twenty minutes.
I have presented two plans to Motta. The first is a frontal assault on the Mandelbaum Gate. There is a phrase in Hebrew, hafooch al hafooch. It means “upside down of upside down.” In baseball, a pitcher in a situation that demands a curve ball may choose in fact to throw a curve ball, figuring that the batter will
never expect him to do something so obvious.
This is the logic of hafooch al hafooch.
My battalion could assault Mandelbaum, the most heavily fortified post in the city, figuring the Jordanians would never believe we would do such a crazy thing.
Motta smiles when I suggest this.
“Uzi, that is too clever by half.”
So here we are, on Samuel the Prophet Street.
Dan Ziv is my second-in-command. He is the best and most experienced soldier in the battalion. With such an officer, one has no need to issue instructions in detail. I tell Dan what needs to be done. He will figure out the best way to do it.
I shuttle back up the hill to the soldiers materializing out of the darkness. The men move swiftly, crouched and silent, into the shadows of the lanes beneath the buildings. None of us has experienced this type of fighting before. The battalion has had only one day of training in urban combat, and I had to argue strenuously with brigade staff to get us those few hours, appropriating a vacant school complex in the Ben Shemen Youth Village to run my soldiers through house-to-house and close-quarters fighting drills.
As the men find their places within their platoons and companies, I speak individually and collectively to my officers. Such good men! Dan Ziv, Zeev Barkai, Uzi Eilat, Moshe Peled, Yoram Zamosh, many more. I find Zamosh with his 1st Platoon commander, Yair Levanon. “Do your men understand what they must do?”
Levanon points east into the dark. “Go that way and don’t stop till we reach Amman.” He and Zamosh are ready. I rap them warmly on the shoulders.
Against all probability, a respectable plan has taken shape. It’s simple. Its demands lie within the battalion’s capabilities. On paper it should work.
But we all know what happens to paper, and to plans.
Dan Ziv is deputy commander of Paratroop Battalion 71:
At midnight Uzi tells me to pick the precise breakthrough point. I take my two radiomen and go down the slope of Gemul Alley. Samuel the Prophet Street is behind and above us, with the first men of our battalion and part of Battalion 28 coming up and finding their way into the shadows in the lanes and the side streets.
The Lion's Gate: On the Front Lines of the Six Day War Page 28