Now in June 1967 this perception has been overturned. On her own, the forces of Israel have repelled powerful enemies bent on her destruction and have prevailed over these foes in spectacular fashion. A new archetype has been born in the eyes of the world: the Warrior Jew.
Now to the names of Joshua and Gideon, Saul and David, Judah Maccabee and Simon Bar-Kochva must be added Rabin and Gavish, Sharon and Tal and Yoffe and hundreds more. The army of Israel has taken its place among the world’s elite corps-at-arms. Commanders of the IDF will now be summoned to speak in the halls of the great warrior nations, at Sandhurst and the École de Guerre, at Annapolis and West Point, at war colleges and military academies around the world.
The hearts of Diaspora Jews swell now with pride. Cables and telegrams of congratulations flood our embassies. The wide world seems to share our joy.
This will change, however.
This new conqueror, the Warrior Jew, finds himself responsible now for a million and a quarter Arabs who hate him, who will never be reconciled to his rule, and who would eat him raw in the night.
What will he do?
My every instinct cries for grace, generosity, greatness of heart. Is this folly?
The only time during the war that I lost my temper was when I learned that one of our paratroopers had mounted an Israeli flag atop the Dome of the Rock. I would have flown there on wings and torn that standard down with my teeth.
I have been accused of being too friendly to our Arab neighbors. “He is an Arab,” said one minister of me. This man meant that my nature was to lie and cheat, to devise with cunning, and to favor that position only that would advance my own cause.
In this single particular, my accuser is right: I do have the deepest respect and affection for my Arab friends.
When I learned after the cease-fire that our tanks had crossed the Jordan, I ordered all Israeli forces pulled back at once and all bridges destroyed. The message: Israel has no territorial ambitions east of the Jordan River.
When I learned, not long after this, that Arab men and women by the hundreds were fording the seasonably shallow stream bringing farm produce to market in Jordan’s East Bank cities, I ordered the spans restored. Temporary bridges were put in place immediately, one at Jericho and another at Damia, below Nablus.
Life for the families of the West Bank involves daily intercourse with relatives and friends on the east side of the river. Farmers and merchants trade, wives go to market, students trek to school.
Let this commerce return. Let us not disrupt it. Let life be as it has been for the people of East Jerusalem and Nablus and Jericho, of Hebron and Ramallah and Bethlehem.
The eleventh commandment asserts the imperative to be strong. But strength, like any weapon, can be misused and misapplied. It can become a liability.
In what manner, then, must we Israelis be strong?
We must be strong enough to yield, when yielding serves the long-term good of all. We must be strong enough to see the other fellow’s side, to act with clemency, to extend the hand of friendship.
In the first hours after the cease-fire, I did not dream that Israel would hold on to the lands that our forces had captured from Jordan—what we Jews call Judea and Samaria, and the world calls the West Bank. I thought we would give these territories back in a few months. A settlement would be negotiated. King Hussein would promise peace, and we would take it.
Moshe Dayan meets with West Bank sheikhs.
Photo by Micha Bar-Am.
But when I traveled to Jericho and Bethlehem during the next few days, I changed my mind. Yesterday I drove in an army command car to the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron. The cave and the fields roundabout are said to have been purchased by Abraham to hold his remains as well as those of Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah. It had never occurred to me that the state would take possession of this site. I assumed without thinking that it would be returned in due course to Jordan. But when I got there and felt the emotion of the place, I knew that this would never happen.
Judea and Samaria are the lands within which the ancient Israelites dwelt. These hills make up the spine of the biblical kingdom of Israel. Upon these highland slopes, and not on the coastal plain below, our forefathers pitched their tents and grazed their flocks. Our warrior race took root here, on these stony prominences from which their children have been debarred for two millennia.
We shall have these heights back now. We will affirm possession of them, but not to be clutched and held apart from others. Those wrongs that have been done to the Jewish people we must never inflict on others. We must return justice for malice and extend an open hand to a clenched fist. Not only because such acts are right, or because their apparition advances our standing among the nations, but because a gesture of goodwill must eventually be reciprocated by an enemy, if we must wait a thousand years.
Many of my countrymen have accused me of squandering in this hour a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. War has unbolted the gate, my critics declare. Boundaries may be redrawn. Populations may shift.
Let the Arabs flee, they say. Build a golden highway for them out of Israel. Kalkilya and a hundred other towns will empty overnight, I was told. You have only to stand aside and let it happen.
I could not.
When I was growing up in Nahalal, my family and others shared the land with a Bedouin clan that had grazed its flocks upon these fields for as long as men could remember. Those boys were my playmates. At plowing time they toiled at my side. We took our lunch together among the furrows. I danced at their weddings and they danced at mine.
I collected my brother Zorik’s body from a different furrow, in a field not far from those of Nahalal, shot down by Syrian Druzes during the War of Independence. Yet I called to council the very men who had slain him and put to them the case that their lives would be better as part of Israel than beneath the thumb of Syria.
To these tribal warriors, blood for blood is the eternal law. They could not believe that one whose brother had been shot down only days earlier could extend the hand of amity to those who had taken that brave man’s life.
Those men became my friends and remain so to this day.
When I would see in the fields an Arab woman bending to light a fire or to care for a child, I saw my own mother. I saw Devorah Dayan and I saw Deborah of the Book of Judges. This land has soaked up the blood of Jew and Arab for almost four thousand years.
Can we not share it now in peace?
Zalman Shoval, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, 1990–1993 and 1998–2000:
Dayan saw further than all his contemporaries save Ben-Gurion, who had become by ’67 too old. But even he could not see far enough. Who else has?
Arab heads of state work only for their own or their nations’ self-interest. The Russians’ greed and bellicosity never change. Even the well-intentioned West has been unable to produce a statesman of sufficient vision.
None exists even today.
Mordechai “Morele” Bar-On served as Moshe Dayan’s office chief from 1956 to 1957 and later as head of the History Branch of the IDF General Staff. He is the author of numerous works on the history and politics of Israel and the Middle East, including Moshe Dayan: Israel’s Controversial Hero (2012):
What you must understand about Dayan, in order to make sense of his decisions at this hour, is that he grew up among Arabs. He loved them. He saw the Arabs, particularly the Bedouin, as figures from the Bible.
Dayan had great respect not only for the educated Arab elite but also for the tribesmen and the tenders of flocks. There is a famous story of Dayan’s youth. He had a Bedouin friend named Wahsh (Wolf) from a tribe that lived near Nahalal. As boys they plowed together and worked at each other’s sides; they shared meals in the fields and became very close. Later, when Dayan was nineteen or so, a dispute arose between this tribe and the Jews of Nahalal. A brawl
broke out, in which Dayan’s friend Wolf hit him over the head with a club, knocking him unconscious and fracturing his skull.
Still Dayan invited Wolf and the chiefs of his tribe to his own wedding a year later and shook his friend’s hand in reconciliation.
This kind of relationship was deep in the bones of Dayan.
His paramount object at first in administering the newly conquered territories was that life go on for the local populace as it had always. Dayan envisioned an “invisible government of occupation.” He would displace no mayors or rural councils, alter no local ordinances. No Israeli flag would fly over municipal offices. Military posts, when they were set up, would be tucked out of sight, in the country. “We must permit local Arabs to run their own lives without having to see or talk to any Israeli officials so long as they don’t break the law.”
Of course, such an arrangement was impossible. No amount of local autonomy, even prosperity, could quench the national aspirations of the Arab people on land they claimed as their own.
In Israel we began hearing a new name: Yasir Arafat, chief of Fatah, the Palestinian guerrilla organization.
Arab bombs began going off in Jewish cities; mines were being planted along roads; Israeli civilians were being shot in the streets.
By August 1967, just two months after the war, the Arab campaign of terror had begun.
Shlomo Gazit, minister in charge of the Territories, 1967–1974, chief of the Military Intelligence Directorate, 1974–1978:
Dayan wrote and delivered a eulogy a decade before the ’67 War, which I believed then, and do to this day, to be one of the great speeches of the twentieth century. Certainly it is among the truest.
A young Israeli named Roy Rotberg had moved south from Tel Aviv to take charge of defense and to work the land at Kibbutz Nahal Oz, adjacent to the Gaza Strip. Within meters of the Jewish cultivation sprawled the refugee camps of the Arabs who had been displaced from these lands by war.
One morning on his way to the fields Roy was murdered by a party from these Arab camps.
Here are the words spoken by Moshe Dayan, who was then army chief of staff, over Roy Rotberg’s grave, April 19, 1957:
Early yesterday morning Roy was murdered. The quiet of the spring morning dazzled him and he did not see those waiting in ambush for him along the line of the furrow.
Let us not cast blame on Roy’s murderers today. It is pointless to remark upon their unquenchable hatred of us. For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza while before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages, which they and their fathers called their own, into our estate.
It is not among the Arabs in Gaza, but in our own midst that we must seek Roy’s blood. How did we shut our eyes and refuse to look squarely at ourselves and acknowledge, in all its cruelty, the calling of our generation? Have we forgotten that this group of young people building a Jewish future at Nahal Oz bears upon its shoulders the heavy gates of Arab Gaza? Behind those gates hundreds of thousands of eyes and hands pray that we will weaken so that they may tear us to pieces. Have we forgotten that?
We are the generation of settlers. We know that without the steel helmet and the cannon’s muzzle we will not be able to plant a tree or build a home. Our children will not survive if we do not dig shelters, and without barbed wire and a machine gun we will not be able to pave roads or drill for water. Millions of Jews who were annihilated because they did not have a country cry out to us from the ashes of history, commanding us to settle and build a land for our people.
But beyond the furrow border, a sea of hatred and vengeance swells, waiting for the day when calm will sap our vigilance, the day when we will heed the ambassadors of malevolent hypocrisy who call upon us to lay down our arms.
Roy’s blood cries out to us from his torn body. A thousand times we have sworn to ourselves that our blood shall not be shed in vain, but yesterday again we were tempted, we listened, we believed.
Let us make a reckoning with ourselves today. Let us no longer deceive ourselves but instead look facts in the face and see the abiding hatred that fills the lives of the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who live around us, waiting for the moment to shed our blood. Let us not avert our eyes lest our arms slacken.
This is the decree of our generation. This is the choice of our lives—to be prepared and armed, strong and determined, lest the sword be stricken from our fist and our lives be cut down.
The young Roy who left Tel Aviv to build his home at the gates of Gaza and to serve as our bulwark was blinded by the light in his heart. He did not see the flash of the sword. The yearning for peace rendered him deaf to the voice of lurking murder. The gates of Gaza were too heavy for him and they overcame him.
Would the ascension of the Warrior Jew mark a step forward, closer to peace in the Middle East? Or had it propelled us farther along the path to wars without end?
One thing was certain. What was done could not be undone. There was now, and would be in the future, no going back.
58.
“IF I FORGET THEE, O JERUSALEM”
Behind the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the morning our paratroop battalion reached the Western Wall, my eye fell upon a row of water spigots, outdoors behind the holy site, with a concrete sluiceway and drains beneath. For worshippers to wash their hands or feet, I imagined, before entering the sacred precinct.
Yoram Zamosh, commander of “A” Company, Paratroop Battalion 71:
Arab prisoners were being rounded up then—not just soldiers but local officials and dignitaries. They understood now the magnitude of their calamity. I saw more than one brave man sobbing, his face buried in his hands.
Some soldier, we heard, had mounted an Israeli flag atop the Dome of the Rock. In fury Moshe Dayan ordered it taken down. He was right, of course. Let us in this hour of victory show the respect to our enemies’ faith that they have not shown to ours.
Paratroopers under orders began releasing the Arab officials. Let them go home. Let normal life return. Let our neighbors worship, let them live, let them work and study and raise their families as before.
The barricades between Jewish and Arab Jerusalem will come down now. The minefields and the barbed wire will be cleared.
We will have one Jerusalem.
I am not the foremost officer in my battalion. Nor was I our commander’s favorite. Uzi permitted my formation, “A” Company, to be first through the Lion’s Gate primarily because I wanted it so badly. I imagine he thought, Zamosh is religious. Let him be first.
But what does “religious” mean?
The Jewish religion is not a faith that prizes blind obedience or collective adherence to dogma. Our tradition is cerebral. We debate. We argue. The question is always holier than the answer.
The primal Jewish issue is justice. Judaism is a religion of the law, and the seminal concept of the law is that the minority must be protected.
In the Jewish faith, you study. You wrestle with issues. You are a scholar. You deliberate, you dispute. A Jew asks over and over, “What is fair? What is just? Who is a good man, and why?”
I spent only one winter in the yeshiva. What I learned, more than Torah, was to love the teachers, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook and “the saintly Nazir,” Rabbi David Cohen, who embodied these pursuits with such honor and integrity. I learned not so much from them as through them, by watching their actions, hearing their speech, and observing the way they conducted themselves. I learned the history of the Jewish people, the incredible suffering endured by millions over so many centuries, and of Jerusalem, the centrality of this place in the soul of the people, their neshama, and why our return to this site means so much.
The Kotel. The Western Wall, as it is called in English. How did so much hope and passion come to be attached to a wall? Not even the wall of a temple, which the Kotel is not, but even humbler, a retaining wall for the mount upon which the r
azed temple had once stood. A ruin. How could this mean so much to me? How could it mean so much to our paratroopers who had never studied, who knew nothing of Torah, who did not even know how to pray?
A wall is unlike any other holy site. A wall is a foundation. It is what remains when all that had once risen above it has been swept away.
A wall evokes primal emotion, particularly when it is built into the land, when the far side is not open space but the fundament of the earth itself. When one stands with worshipful purpose before the expanse of a wall, particularly one that dwarfs his person, that rises above him and extends on both sides, an emotion arises from the heart that is unlike the feeling evoked by any other religious experience. How different, compared to, say, worshipping in a cathedral or within a great hall or at the foot of some monumental tower.
One approaches the Western Wall as an individual. No rabbi stands beside you. Set your palms against the stones. Is God present? Will the stone conduct your prayers to Him? Around you stand others of your faith; you feel their presence and the intention of their coming, but you remain yourself alone.
Are you bereft? Is your spirit impoverished? Set your brow against the stone. Feel its surface with your fingertips. Myself, I cannot come within thirty paces of the Wall without tears.
The ancient Greeks considered Delphi the epicenter of the world. This is the Wall to me. All superfluity has been stripped from this site and from ourselves.
Here the enemies of my people have devastated all that they could. What remains? This fundament alone, which they failed to raze only because it was beneath their notice. The armored legions of our enemies have passed on, leaving only this wall. In the twenty centuries since, those who hate us have defiled it and piled trash before it and even relieved themselves against it. They have neglected it, permitted slums to be built up around it. This only makes it more precious to us.
That morning of June 7, I can’t remember exactly when this happened—maybe on the way down to the Wall with Moshe Stempel and the others. At some point we were climbing the stairs—Yair Levanon, Dov Gruner, Moshe Milo, and I—when we noticed a scrawl, freshly scratched into the stone, in Hebrew:
The Lion's Gate: On the Front Lines of the Six Day War Page 39