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

by Steven Pressfield

  Cheetah Cohen:

  The plan is to probe forward with the helicopters. My pilots will take Danny’s paratroopers in. Haim’s Super Frelons will fly with us, though they’re already experiencing mechanical trouble—air filters clogging with volcanic dust.

  We will advance onto the Heights, seeking pockets of resistance. When we find them we’ll overrun them, then move on to the next.

  Danny Matt:

  Our forces are in a race now, not just with the Syrians but also with the United Nations. How soon will a cease-fire be declared? How long before the first UN officials appear?

  Rafi Sivron:

  There is no doctrine for what we are doing. Not even the American airmobile units in Vietnam have a plan for such a situation. We are making it up as we go along.

  It goes like this:

  Cheetah’s helicopters are advancing to road junction Fiq on the ridgeline overlooking the Sea of Galilee along the main road that connects the southern Golan to Kuneitra in the north and to Mount Hermon. His mission is to land a force of Danny’s paratroopers, who will secure this intersection and establish an Israeli presence.

  I’m on the radio. “Cheetah, where are you?”

  “We’re at Butamiya.”

  “What? You’re supposed to be back at Fiq.”

  “We just left there. After a fight, the Syrians pulled out. So we flew after them and took Butamiya.”

  I can’t stand not to be a part of this. When Cheetah returns to Poriya to refuel and pick up more paratroopers, I march straight to his copilot, Moshe Carmeli.

  “Moshe, forgive me, I have to fly. I’m taking your seat.”

  Cheetah Cohen:

  The Heights are emptying fast. From the helicopters we can see it with our own eyes. Enemy soldiers are piling onto trucks and racing back to defend Damascus. Our warplanes are already attacking the Syrian capital. At least that’s what enemy radio is reporting.

  Is it true?

  Who knows?

  Rafi Sivron:

  Our weary pilots, flying on empty and racing against the cease-fire, continue landing troops at critical intersections and strategic points. At Butamiya, sixteen helicopters in formations of two and three land 150 to 180 paratroopers in each sortie. By nightfall we have put on the ground over 500 men.

  With this, our forces have sealed off the entire southern Golan.

  As the paratroops secure each bridgehead, conventional ground forces come up by vehicle to consolidate the position. Then the heliborne forces leapfrog ahead to take possession of the next strategic point.

  Cheetah Cohen:

  If Dayan knew what we were doing, he would have a heart attack. If the Russians knew, they would be in here with twenty divisions.

  Hey, this is Israeli improvisation!

  It is what we do best!

  Rafi Sivron:

  The helicopters fly all day, till it’s too dark to land safely. Night falls on June 10, the sixth day of the Six Day War. From the initial insertion point at Fiq, Israeli paratroopers now control the main arteries of the Golan Heights most of the way to Kuneitra, with ground troops coming up from the south to consolidate these positions.

  By evening a cease-fire is technically in place.

  No UN teams have arrived yet, however.

  Back at Poriya, our pilots collapse in exhaustion in the single tent we’ve managed to rig for them. I’m the only one still awake and on duty. Suddenly, past midnight, the phone rings.

  It’s Dado—General David Elazar—chief of the northern front. One of his brigade commanders, named Bar-Kochva, has been wounded on the Heights. Dado wants a helicopter to find this officer and evacuate him.

  I point out that the night is pitch black; the Heights are still defended in many places by Syrian troops. No helicopter can land under such conditions (in fact, one has already crashed in darkness this very evening), not to mention that every pilot I’ve got has been flying for five days straight—they are all dead-out and not even the crack of doom can wake them.

  Dado says, “I am giving you an order.” He can’t really do this; I’m under command of the air force, not the army. But I can see how important this is to him. I promise I will try. Dado says, “Good, get moving, and by the way, I know what kind of soldier Colonel Bar-Kochva is. He will not want to be evacuated.”

  Dado tells me to bring a pistol.

  “I am authorizing you to use force.”

  On cots in our tent lie twenty pilots. I might as well say they are in graves. Kicks won’t rouse them, shouting, nothing works. Finally I get one awake—a brave young flier named Itzhak Segev. He says, “Okay, let’s go.”

  The problem is we have no idea where Colonel Bar-Kochva is. We head north, refueling at first light at Kiryat Shmona, the northernmost town in Israel, then set off on our search. Around nine we’re flying over a village in the northern part of the Heights when we see below, parked by a soccer field, a grouping of trucks that looks like a command post.

  We land.

  “We’re looking for brigade commander Bar-Kochva.”

  The colonel is having coffee by the side of the road. The location is in the very north of the Golan Heights, opposite Mount Hermon, near a Druze village called Majdal Shams.

  “Sir,” I say, “I have an order from Dado to take you out of here.”

  “I refuse to go.”

  “Dado was expecting that you’d say that, so he has ordered me to use force. You have been wounded and Dado wants you flown to a hospital.”

  The colonel sighs and places a hand on my shoulder. “Young man, you are tired. You have not eaten breakfast. Sit down, let my cook fix you something. We’ll talk when you have filled your belly.”

  So we have breakfast and coffee.

  Bar-Kochva takes me aside. He indicates his wound, which is in the foot and is slight enough that he has no trouble walking.

  “What is your name? Rafi? Listen, Rafi, do you see this fighting here in these hills, on this border? This is the most important thing I have ever done or ever will do. You see I am not bleeding. If I leave my formation, my deputy will take over and he is a blockhead.”

  This is the seventh day of the Six Day War. Yesterday Dayan and the government formally agreed to a cease-fire. But up here where we are, it is still the Wild West. The northern tip of the Golan Heights remains in Syrian hands.

  “Rafi, I will give you a jeep. Follow me. The enemy is running away. We are going to conquer every acre of land that he evacuates. All we have to do is drive and drop off troops. Today is the eleventh of June. I give you my word, by the end of the day, whatever happens, you can take me to the hospital.”

  We take the jeep. The general leads in a command car. Segev and I tie down the helicopter on the soccer field and head off to conquer the northeast corner of the Golan Heights.

  From morning till end of day, we drive from crossroads to hilltop to abandoned Syrian post. Here and there the colonel’s party encounters resistance. Gunfire is exchanged, minefields must be cleared, but mostly the plateau is quiet, pastoral, beautiful. By late afternoon, when Bar-Kochva completes his loop a few kilometers north of Kuneitra, our forces from the south are driving out to meet him. At the same time from the east comes a UN cease-fire team, accompanied by Syrian officers.

  A Syrian colonel hurries to Bar-Kochva, sweating and agitated. “I pray you, stop, stop here! What you’ve got, you’ve got. But don’t go any farther!”

  The UN mission commander declares this moment the official end of the fighting. Here, at this point, both sides must stop.

  “Okay, Rafi,” Bar-Kochva says to me. “Now you may take me to the hospital.”

  And that spot became the new cease-fire line and the de facto Israeli-Syrian border, at the official end of the Six Day War, four p.m. on the eleventh of June 1967.

  BOOK EIGHT

  THE LION’S G
ATE

  53.

  THE BIOGRAPHY OF THE NATION

  I never liked Dayan. There were moments when I hated him. I saw him up close many times. I was working sensitive assignments, before the war and after, for Ben-Gurion and others, and my path crossed Dayan’s again and again.

  Nineteen years after leading the 1948 fighter mission that saved Tel Aviv, Lou Lenart continues to serve Israel as a pilot and in other capacities.

  Was anyone smarter than Dayan? Not in Dayan’s opinion. He was the brainiest person in any room, and he was not shy about letting you know it. It’s one thing to refuse to suffer fools; Dayan didn’t suffer anybody. He went where he pleased and took what he wanted. I mean anything. He operated like he was above the law, and no one, including Ben-Gurion, ever called him on it.

  Dayan had more charisma than anyone I ever met. He turned it on and off like a light switch. You either loved him or hated him, often both at the same time. I used to ask myself, What is it about this guy that drives people so crazy? Why do his generals kiss up to him one minute, then conspire to steal his credit in the next? Why do the Israeli people put him on a pedestal, then take such pleasure in tearing him down?

  One day it hit me.

  He is just like they are.

  Dayan is Israel, more even than Ben-Gurion.

  Dayan’s strengths are Israel’s strengths and his weaknesses are Israel’s weaknesses. Sometimes his strengths and weaknesses are the same thing: his brashness, his aggressiveness, his willingness to act as a law unto himself.

  Dayan’s biography is the biography of Israel: the first child (some say the second) born on the first kibbutz; scion of Labor Party bluebloods; husband of lovely cultured Ruth; father of precocious, ambitious Yael. The Brits throw him in jail in ’39, then free him in ’41 to fight on their side; he loses his eye fighting the Axis. His brother is killed in battle by the Syrian foe, but Dayan reaches out to this enemy—to the very men who fired the fatal shots—and manages to bring them over to Israel’s side. He makes them friends.

  General Uzi Narkiss, Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan, and Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin enter the Old City of Jerusalem, June 7, 1967.

  As chief of staff, Dayan shapes the army into the image of the “no alternative,” “finish the mission,” “advance at all costs” state, and of himself. He invents a new kind of Jew and embodies this bold, swashbuckling identity—eye patch and all—for the world to see.

  In Sinai and Jerusalem the army that Dayan had invented does exactly what he had taught it to do. It ignores his wishes. It takes decisions on its own. Its officers strike first and read their orders second. Dayan can’t stop them.

  I started to like him then.

  The war is building to its climax. Dayan wants to be Joshua; he wants to be David. But as minister of defense he can no longer operate by the sword alone. He has to be the wise man now. He has to be the statesman. I can see him struggling against his own Old Testament heart.

  Dayan once said, “I would rather have to rein in the eager warhorse than to prod the reluctant mule.”

  Now that horse is history. It’s the momentum of events. Dayan controls the steed for as long as he can. He’s right to say no to his generals when they first want to take the Old City, and he’s right to order “Enter by the Lion’s Gate” when he finally does.

  Dayan’s enemies have accused him of turning the procession to the Western Wall on June 7 into a calculated occasion, a staged opportunity for him to put himself in front of the news photographers and the television cameras. Of course it was. How could it not be?

  The Wall is everything. Where else would he go?

  Did Dayan deliberately cut Prime Minister Eshkol out of this moment? Hell yes. And he was right to do it. He went to the Wall with the generals, with Rabin and Narkiss.

  Why the helmets? Why the buckled chin straps? Why enter by the Lion’s Gate?

  To make this a warrior’s moment, not a politician’s. To honor the paratroopers, to tread in their footsteps. To depict for the eyes of the world that Jews have returned to their holiest site under fire. Bullets are still flying. We are operating out of military necessity, say the news photos, not from the wish for territorial aggrandizement.

  It works.

  Give Dayan credit. He knows he’s an icon. He knows his jaw and his black eye patch are the face of Israel’s armed forces to the world. He is right now to play this role—and to play it to the hilt.

  54.

  THE OLD MAN

  I am sitting with Colonel Shmuel Gorodish, commander of the 7th Armored Brigade, on the east bank of the Suez Canal, June 10, the last day of the war. Gorodish says, “If I get the order, I can go all the way to Mauritania.” To the Atlantic. “Nothing between here and there can stop us.”

  Michael Bar-Zohar is the author of Ben-Gurion: The Armed Prophet, the authorized biography of David Ben-Gurion. He is a paratrooper attached during the war to Galei Zahal, the IDF radio station.

  That is the feeling of the moment. Earlier in the day I had been farther north, at the Firdan Bridge, where Denis Cameron of Life magazine took the photo of Yosi Ben-Hanan in the waters of the Canal that would become one of the iconic images of the war.

  Ori Orr was there, the commander of the 7th Armored Brigade’s Reconnaissance Company, with his two surviving platoon commanders, Eli Rikovitz and Amos Ayalon. Their unit had suffered terribly. No one knew the numbers then, but we would learn soon that they had lost more men than any outfit of their size in the war. You could see it in their faces, burnt black from soot and gunpowder and from the sun, and in the way they stood alongside one another, as if they trusted no one in the world but themselves.

  They were the first unit to reach the Canal and the most decorated. Sixteen men killed, ten Medals of Valor.

  Another casualty of the war was Ben-Gurion. Because he had been wrong. He had believed that the armed forces of Israel could not stand up to Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, backed by the Soviet Union, without the help of America or another major power.

  Dayan was right.

  Lieutenant Yosi Ben-Hanan, photographed by Denis Cameron.

  Sharon was right, and Gavish and Tal and Gorodish.

  Begin was right. He was a player now.

  It was I, four days before the war, who told Dayan that he would be appointed minister of defense the next morning. I chased him all around the country, trying to deliver the news. Each time I got to a place, Dayan had just left. Finally in the evening I caught up with him at his home. “How do you know?” he asked. “I know,” I told him.

  He said, “You’ll come to work for me after the war.”

  Now on the banks of the Canal a soldier appears. “Is there a Bar-Zohar here? You have a phone call at the communications tent.”

  I go. Dayan is on the line. He says, “Michael, get to Tel Aviv. You start work tomorrow at eight a.m.” I say, “Moshe, do you know where I am? I’m at the Canal!”

  “Okay,” he says. “Make it eight thirty.”

  I hitchhiked all night. In Tel Aviv I stopped at Ben-Gurion’s place first because I knew he loved to see soldiers coming straight from the front. I was in my uniform, dirty as hell. That was the only time Ben-Gurion ever embraced me. I had worked with him for ten years. Never before had he put his arms around me.

  To have known Ben-Gurion in the days of his power was like serving with . . . whom? Moses? That is not far off.

  Ben-Gurion founded Israel. He was Israel. A stocky little man, remote, often rude, with that crazy shock of white hair. But when prime ministers and heads of state entered his presence, you could see them shrinking. Shrinking! That was the awe in which Ben-Gurion was held.

  He loved Dayan. “Michael, come with me,” he would say. “We must go to the floor of the Knesset.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Moshe is speaking.”

 
Dayan worshipped Ben-Gurion. One afternoon he and I attended a meeting on the top floor of the Histadrut Building in Jerusalem. The old man was addressing a delegation. “Michael,” Dayan said, “you and I will never reach to the ankles of this man. Never.”

  But now, for Ben-Gurion, the moment has passed.

  Before the war he had met with Dayan in a hotel in Beersheba where Dayan was staying while touring the army units at the front. Dayan made Ben-Gurion come to him. This would have been unthinkable a year earlier.

  On June 4, the day before the war, Dayan sent his aide Chaim Israeli to inform Ben-Gurion as a courtesy that the war would start the following morning. In public, the old man gave his blessing. But in his diary he wrote, “They are making a big mistake.” The next morning, when the news from the Egyptian front was all bad, Ben-Gurion thought, Yes, I will give Moshe a piece of my mind.

  Dayan never spoke to Ben-Gurion during the war. This hurt the old man deeply. He realized that he was not needed anymore. That was his real death. I had been urging him for years to write his memoirs. Always he scorned this. “You don’t write history, you make it!”

  But after the war he told me, “Michael, I am beginning my memoirs.” I didn’t understand at first. That was the moment when Ben-Gurion started to change, to reach out to his old enemies, to embrace the role of Father of the Nation.

  Dayan is king now. Not in Israel alone, or in the Middle East, but around the globe as well. His eye patch is recognizable in Moscow or Mongolia. He is a celebrity on a par with the most glittering in the world. I tell him, “Moshe, you’re bigger than the Beatles.”

  He does not wish to be prime minister. To perform the tedious duties of state? This is not for a man like Dayan. Sharon, who will in time achieve this office, understands that you cannot govern as a lone wolf. You must build a movement. You must cultivate the Nurses Association and the melon farmers and the crazy rabbis who believe that women are inferior to men.