Moshe and I can’t hear what Yoffe says to Uzi. We’re too far away. But we see the color drain from our commander’s cheeks. Uzi’s head bows. He covers his face with his hands.
44.
THE LEGACY OF EMPIRE
Hussein will lose Jerusalem now. Our paratroopers will complete the conquest of the eastern half of the city. It is only a matter of time.
Moshe Dayan is minister of defense.
This day has started for me at 07:45 with the issuing of instructions to Chief of Staff Rabin for the continuation of operations on the Sinai front. “Complete the conquest of the Gaza Strip. Clear the El Arish axis. Advance west but remain ten kilometers short of the Canal. Prepare to attack southward to Kusseima.” Now, at last, I have a few minutes to turn to Jerusalem.
Why has King Hussein entered the war? A message was sent to him from Prime Minister Eshkol on the first morning of the war, several messages, in fact, pledging that if Jordan undertook no hostile action against Israel, Israel would take none against her. These notes were not sent out of personal regard for Hussein, though Eshkol surely feels this, as do I. They were dispatched out of Israeli self-interest. Contending with Nasser’s divisions in Sinai strains the IDF’s resources to capacity; the last thing we need is a second front against Hussein.
The king understands this. He understands as well that Israel’s forces, taxed as they may be at this hour, are still sufficient to rout him and every tank and gun he possesses. His air force has already been reduced to wreckage. If he presses his aggression, he will lose his army and probably all of the West Bank.
Yet Hussein has struck.
This is the Middle East. We are all shackled to lines drawn on maps by the British and the French, with the assent of the Russians, in the waning months of World War I.
Hussein’s Jordan is a made-up nation. It was created out of whole cloth (as Transjordan first, in 1921) by the imperial powers, to serve their own interests. Jordan’s borders reflect no tribal or political reality. Iraq is another fiction, patched together out of three Ottoman satrapies. Arabia’s borders are similarly arbitrary, as are Syria’s and Lebanon’s.
And of course our own.
Hussein is mistrusted by the Egyptians, despised by the Syrians, and tolerated for the most part by his own people. Of what blood are the Jordanians? A third are of Bedouin stock, kin of Hussein’s grandfather and the Hashemite order. The other two-thirds are Palestinian Arabs—refugees, many of them, from our War of Independence. In the sleeves of their galabiyas nest the keys to the homes they lost when the Arab Legion attacked infant Israel in ’48 and they, the villagers and farmers, fled across the Jordan, awaiting the victory and the return that never came.
Atop this incendiary mix perches Hussein.
King Hussein of Jordan addresses the international press, June 7, 1967.
He has made common cause with his enemy Nasser, whom he now calls brother. What scenarios must have played out in the king’s mind as he and his counselors sought a solution during the days leading up to war? Victory allied with Nasser would produce what? A second Holocaust across all Israel, with Jordan’s Palestinian masses running riot? The Egyptian dictator, flush with triumph, establishing a pan-Arab state with himself at the head? Armed intervention by the United States and the Soviet Union? A nuclear clash between the superpowers? World War III?
This, for Hussein, is the cheeriest scenario. What of the others?
If Jordan holds aloof from the fight and Egypt loses, Nasser will denounce Hussein as a traitor to the Arab cause; the Palestinians will revolt, joined perhaps by the army. Hussein will be deposed, if not murdered outright, along with his family. The government will be replaced by rule of the generals or the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
If Jordan holds aloof and the Arabs win, Nasser will not even have to call for Hussein’s deposition. The king will be dead already at the hands of his own people, or decamped to exile with the royal family to Paris or the Potomac, while Nasser’s army rolls across the Negev and seizes Amman.
The prospects are nearly as grim under the fourth scenario.
If Hussein allies himself with Nasser and Israel wins, the king loses Jerusalem and probably the West Bank. He has a chance of retaining his throne, however, perhaps even a shred of personal honor. This, clearly, is why Hussein has placed his army under Egyptian command. He will be blamed for defeat, should it come. There is no escaping that. But he can point the finger at others in the wake of vanquishment and be believed by some.
But a catastrophe of honor stands at the core of such a decision. This is the loss of the holy places. For centuries Hashemite monarchs have accounted themselves guardians of Islam, though they have lost care of her two holiest places, Mecca and Medina, to the Saudis. Hussein’s branch of the family yet retains defense of Jerusalem’s jewels, the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Here is the foundation upon which much of the king’s political legitimacy is based.
Hussein will lose these sacred sites now.
It will not surprise me, should that hour come, if the king takes his own life.
But the gravest peril of such an outcome falls not upon Hussein, but upon me. The fatal hazard is not to Jordan, but to Israel.
With the success of the paratroopers’ preliminary assault, and that of our Harel and Jerusalem Brigades and other units, sealing three of the four overland approaches to the city, the possibility—I almost said “inevitability”—now exists of an Israeli Jerusalem.
I am in the city now. With the regional commanders I have made a dash in a military convoy to Mount Scopus, our toehold on the heights that ring the eastern extremity. Hussein’s Arab Legion still holds the Augusta Victoria Ridge and the Mount of Olives. It still holds the Old City.
Shall we take it?
The momentum of events builds to this. By this I mean the blood shed this night and this day by our paratroopers and by the soldiers of the Jerusalem and Harel Brigades; the emotion of the nation as it realizes not only that it will not be destroyed by its enemies, as it feared so desperately less than forty-eight hours ago, but that its forces may prevail in unprecedented measure; and the pure military necessity of seizing all enemy-held positions that may aid the foe in bringing up additional troops and tanks with the intention of dislodging our forces from the gains they have already achieved.
Dwarfing these elements, of course, is the final component: the millennial opportunity of taking back from our enemies the Jewish people’s most sacred site, the Western Wall. Two thousand years of exile cry out for this. I wish to bring it about no less than my countrymen. What is the alternative? Do I wish to be remembered as the commander who stood at the threshold of the greatest feat of arms in Jewish history and refused to let his brothers consummate it?
Yet I cannot give my approval.
Ministers and generals may be aflame to enact their agendas. I don’t blame them. In their place I would feel the same. But my role is to see beyond the immediate elation that such an outcome would produce.
I am haunted by Sinai, 1957. I remember ultimatums from Moscow and less bellicose but equally insistent communiqués from the White House and Whitehall and the Quai d’Orsay. I remember cables between Prime Minister Ben-Gurion and Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and diplomatic prose dispatched beneath the letterhead of the United Nations. Translation: That prize, which you Jews have won by the blood of your sons, must be restored to those who burn for your destruction and who daily arm and rearm toward that end. In the name of regional stability. In the name of reason. In the name of peace.
I understand the position of the United States and of the United Nations. I even understand the Soviets. I don’t want World War III any more than they do.
Capturing Sinai and being forced to abandon it was, for Israel, like amputating a limb. To endure the same in Jerusalem would be unthinkable.
This i
s what I fear.
How will the Arab world react to the presence of Israeli paratroopers on the Temple Mount or the sight of Jewish half-tracks in the square before the Dome of the Rock? Will the other nations of Islam take arms, backed by the Soviets, while the United States, France, and Britain stand aside? What will two hundred million Muslims do when they behold on their television screens the flag of Israel flying over the Al-Aqsa Mosque?
If we enter the Old City, our paratroopers will be fighting house to house along the Via Dolorosa. How will the Vatican respond to that? Where Christian pilgrims tread the Stations of the Cross, our soldiers will be advancing street by street, room by room, with the enemy resisting by means of booby traps and snipers and ambushes, a real dirty business. I cannot authorize artillery or air strikes anywhere near the holy sites, and the Old City holds nothing but holy sites.
What is the alternative? Can I tell Motta Gur’s brave paratroopers, nineteen-year-olds straight from the kibbutz, that they may not fire upon that church in whose upper story the enemy has emplaced a Goryunov machine gun? Or that they are forbidden to return fire upon that mosque from whose minaret tower Arab snipers are cutting down their brothers?
I must back our paratroopers. I will join them myself. Then what? How will three hundred million Roman Catholics respond when Israeli mortar rounds tear holes in the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre or Jewish machine guns shred the shrine where Jesus presided over the Last Supper?
Hussein himself will be desperate to preserve his honor in the eyes of the Arab world. At the last gasp, what will stop him from blowing up the Dome of the Rock and blaming it on the Jews? Such an act need not even be ordered by Cairo or Amman. It will take only one desperate patriot, one fanatic willing to act on his own.
Whom will the world blame then?
What will be the consequences for Israel and the future?
I hate myself for even thinking such thoughts. I would give ten years of my life to be in Sinai with Sharon and Gorodish, shouting, “Follow me!” Yet someone must take care for such prospects.
What, then, is my plan? What alternative do I propose?
Capture the heights that surround Jerusalem. Cut off the Old City. Seize Augusta Victoria Ridge. Take the Mount of Olives. Let our air force finish destroying Jordanian and Iraqi armor attempting to come up via the Jordan Valley. Set a ring of Israeli steel around the Old City. Leave one avenue of escape for the Arab Legion to slip away by night.
Preserve the holy sites.
Let the city fall by itself.
This is my alternative.
So I say no to Narkiss, and no to Eshkol and Eban and Begin and to Motta Gur and to everyone.
You cannot have the Old City.
Not yet.
45.
THE CHICKEN FRICASSEE HOUSE
My men have found me an excellent command post. It’s in a house on Wadi Joz Street, home to an affluent Arab family. The building is four stories, abutting the dry wadi and the slope that ascends to the Augusta Victoria Ridge. From my windows on the second floor I can see the whole valley.
Uzi Eilam commands Paratroop Battalion 71.
Morning and afternoon have come and gone. We know now the extent of casualties suffered by the brigade last night. Battalion 66 has lost thirty-six men on Ammunition Hill. Such a number is beyond tears. Yossi Fratkin’s Battalion 28 has suffered heavily, too. But both have seized their objectives, and so have we.
My command group has taken special care to be respectful of the Arab family whose home we now occupy. Our team uses only two rooms. I have given orders that no man is to touch any item of property or to speak to a member of the family, particularly the women, except as he would address his own mother and sisters.
The date is now June 6, the second day of the war. At 16:00 the battalion commanders and their staffs meet with Motta Gur, the brigade commander, in a courtyard of the Rockefeller Museum. The place is still under fire from Arab Legionnaires atop the Old City walls. In fact, Battalion 28 is pinned down on several terraces.
We receive the order to capture the Augusta Victoria Ridge and the Mount of Olives this night. The assignment is given to my battalion. The formation will be reinforced by two special companies, one from our own brigade and another belonging to Danny Matt’s paratroop brigade, though Danny himself is still in Sinai with his other two battalions. We will have tanks in support, Motta informs us, as well as mortars and artillery.
The reason this task has been given to my battalion is that we have suffered the fewest casualties so far.
The commanders have assembled in a courtyard on the western side of the museum. Already I have in mind the basic concept for the assault. I will present the plan to Motta as soon as I work out the particulars.
As I’m concentrating on this, I feel a hand on my shoulder. Rabbi Shlomo Goren appears. Rabbi Goren is the chief religious officer of the IDF. He is dressed in red paratroop boots and combat fatigues. To call Rabbi Goren larger than life would be an understatement. He is a paratrooper. A general. He wears a beard worthy of an Old Testament patriarch, with politics to match.
We talk. Rabbi Goren tells me that his mother is buried in the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives. I make him a promise. If Battalion 71 succeeds in capturing the site, I will walk with him personally and find the stone of his mother. Rabbi Goren says nothing about the Old City. No one does. The idea of capturing the Western Wall or the Temple Mount remains beyond the scale of our hopes or our imagination.
The only person who brings the subject up is my “A” Company commander, Yoram Zamosh. I ask Motta again about Zamosh’s request of last night. If the brigade should receive orders to liberate the Old City, will Motta permit Zamosh’s men to lead the way?
Again Motta approves, without a moment’s hesitation.
Uzi Eilat, “B” Company commander:
It is no accident that our battalion has suffered the fewest casualties. This is Uzi’s doing. He will never speak of this. He is too modest. But the men know. We know.
Soldiers love a commander who takes care for their lives. I have heard Uzi faulted, with good cause, for putting his own life at risk, chasing after snipers not once but twice during the night. I have seen him in his jeep racing from position to position along Wadi Joz Street, exposing himself repeatedly to enemy fire. Uzi will own up to this, I am sure. But such courage is why we will all walk through fire for him.
Tonight? The battalion is spread out in groups of five and ten, in combat posts along the valley floor facing the ridge of Augusta Victoria. The slope ascends above us. Open ground with very little cover—olive groves, a few scattered buildings, and one odd hotel called the Palace.
The ridge takes its name from the Augusta Victoria Hospital, which sits big and wide on the summit. It was built by Kaiser Wilhelm, somebody tells me, in the early years of this century. The Jordanians have held this ground since 1948. They have had nineteen years to string wire, sow mines, and build bunkers. They are on the Mount of Olives, too. Assaulting that one will be even worse.
How do foot soldiers attack a hill?
I can think of only one way.
Meir Shalit, sergeant in “B” Company:
The assault has been postponed. Thank God.
The word is being passed right now.
We had been organized into assault elements. It was going to be another night attack. Tanks were supposed to lead the way this time. Suddenly out of the darkness we begin hearing a ferocious firefight several hundred meters behind us and to our right, beneath the Old City walls.
No one knows what is happening. Runners are dashing to the various assault elements; radio transmissions are coming in from Brigade:
Stand down from assault positions.
Prepare defensive posts.
Get ready to be attacked.
Yoram Zamosh, “A” Company commander:
/> What has happened is one of those fiascos that occur in war when a complicated operation is initiated in darkness. A company of Sherman tanks has been assigned to support, in fact to lead, our battalion’s assault up the hill. But the vehicles come from two separate units whose radios are not compatible. A jerry-rigged system has been hastily thrown together.
The tanks have assembled out of sight of the enemy in a courtyard of the Rockefeller Museum. They are supposed to descend into the valley between our Israeli positions and the rising slope that leads to the Augusta Victoria Ridge. From there they will lead the attack by advancing up a street called Shmuel Ben Adaya.
In “A” Company we are ready to go. Our orders are to follow the jeeps of the Sayeret, the Reconnaissance Company under Micha Kapusta. They will advance immediately after the tanks.
But in the darkness, under heavy fire, the lead tank has taken a wrong turn. Instead of going left then right onto Ben Adaya Street, which leads up the ridge, it has turned immediately right onto the Jericho Road, which runs parallel to and directly beneath the eastern wall of the Old City. The other tanks have followed. Now they are trapped. Arab Legionnaires atop the wall are pouring small-arms and antitank fire onto them, point-blank.
One tank, we will hear later, has become stuck atop the narrow bridge that crosses between the Garden of Gethsemane and the Church of Jehoshaphat. The tank is under relentless fire from the Old City walls. The driver hears an order from his commander to advance. His turret is pointing forward, along the road that leads safely off the bridge, but he does not realize in the darkness and confusion that the tank itself is oriented sideways. When he advances the throttle, the tank plunges off the precipice. A Sherman tank weighs thirty-two tons. This mass flips over in midair and crashes upside down into the dry wadi below. Miraculously, the crew survives. This is just the beginning of the chaos.
The Lion's Gate: On the Front Lines of the Six Day War Page 31