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

by Steven Pressfield

  IF I FORGET THEE, O JERUSALEM, MAY MY RIGHT HAND FORGET ITS CUNNING.

  This is a verse from Psalm 137, which also contains the line “By the rivers of Babylon, we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion.”

  It is the lament of an exile. And a vow to return, somehow, to the land from which he has been expelled.

  Who could have inscribed this verse? We debated this later. A Jew, for certain. But from where? And when?

  Could he have been a soldier—from Canada perhaps, a member of the UN peacekeeping force? The Jordanians permitted foreigners to visit the Old City at certain seasons of the year. Perhaps this Jewish soldier managed to acquire a forged baptismal certificate, as the Jordanians required. He pretended to be a Christian. He got himself included in a party of visitors. Seizing a moment perhaps, unnoticed by the others, he knelt and scratched this prayer into the face of the stone.

  Who among us is not in exile? Is not exile the spiritual condition of the human race? Isn’t that what we share, when all differences of language, tribe, and history have been stripped away: the sense that we are estranged at our core from—what? From God? From our higher nature? From who we might be or become, from who we truly are?

  What, then, does the exile desire beyond all other boons? Home. To come home. To set his feet upon those stones that are his, which belong to him and to which he belongs.

  When we of “A” Company entered the Lion’s Gate on the morning of June 7, our object, despite the ongoing gunfire and the danger from enemy snipers, was only to reach the Wall. Moshe Stempel had joined us then, my dear friend and our deputy brigade commander. Together we had swept across the Temple Mount and passed through the Moroccan Gate. We were on the steps above the Wall, but had not yet gone down to take possession of it.

  Stempel ordered me to send one of my men down while the rest of us followed him back up to find a place above the Wall where we could hang the flag of Israel that I had carried all night and all day and all night and day again.

  I picked a young sergeant named Dov Gruner.

  This Dov Gruner was not the first to bear that name. The original Dov Gruner, after whom ours was named, had been a fighter for the Irgun Zvai Leumi, the underground paramilitary organization that fought the British during Mandate days, before Israel had achieved its statehood.

  English soldiers captured this first Dov Gruner and put him on trial for participating in an assault on the police station at Ramat Gan. He was sentenced to death by hanging. At the final hour he was offered a reprieve, if he would admit his guilt.

  Dov Gruner would not.

  He refused to defend himself, standing upon the principle that to do so would be to acknowledge the legitimacy of the British court. On the last day of his life Dov Gruner wrote to his commander, Menachem Begin, and to his comrades in the Irgun:

  Of course I want to live: who does not? I too could have said: “Let the future take care of the future” . . . I could even have left the country altogether for a safer life in America, but this would not have satisfied me either as a Jew or as a Zionist.

  There are many schools of thought as to how a Jew should choose his way of life. One way is that of the assimilationists who have renounced their Jewishness. There is also another way, the way of those who call themselves “Zionists”—the way of negotiation and compromise . . .

  The only way that seems, to my mind, to be right is the way of the Irgun Zvai Leumi, the way of courage and daring without renouncing a single inch of our homeland . . .

  I am writing this while awaiting the hangman. This is not a moment at which I can lie, and I swear that if I had to begin my life anew I would have chosen the exact same path, regardless of the consequences for myself.

  Dov Gruner was hanged at Acre prison on April 16, 1947. As it chanced, his brother’s wife had recently given birth to a son, whom they had named Dov.

  This boy grew to be our Dov.

  Moshe Stempel was asked once by a journalist, “Why did you pick Dov Gruner to be first to the Wall?”

  “I did not pick him,” Stempel replied. “History did.”

  Moshe Stempel was killed one year later, in the Jordan Valley, pursuing Palestinian terrorists who had penetrated the border. Stempel was hit in the first exchange of fire, but continued to lead the pursuit, under fire, until he was killed. Years earlier, in 1955, he had been awarded the Itur HaOz for valor on an operation near Khan Younis in which, as happened later when he was killed, he had been wounded but continued to fight until the mission had been completed.

  Stempel built our brigade. He put it together, no one else. He had a chest like a bull and wrists as big around as most men’s arms.

  When we had pinned the flag of Israel to the grillwork above the Wall, our little group stood and sang the national anthem. A photographer, Eli Landau, was recording the historic moment with his camera. Stempel tugged my body between himself and the lens. He hid his face so that no film could be made of his tears.

  Stempel held my arm in a grip of iron. Twice he tried to speak and twice his voice failed. He pulled me so close that the brows of our helmets were touching.

  “Zamosh!” Stempel said, with such emotion that I can hear the words still, though he spoke them almost fifty years ago. “Zamosh, if my grandfather, if my great-grandfather, if any of my family who have been murdered in pogroms and in the death camps . . . if they could know, somehow, even for one second, that I, their grandson, would be standing here at this hour, in this place, wearing the red boots of an Israeli paratrooper . . . if they could know this, Zamosh, for just one instant, they would suffer death a thousand times and count it as nothing.”

  Stempel gripped my arm as if he would never let go.

  “We shall never, never leave this place,” he said. “Never will we give this up. Never.”

  59.

  NECHEMIAH HOUSE

  At the end of the war, I flew Arik Sharon out of Sinai in my helicopter. In his 1989 autobiography, Warrior, Sharon wrote that I was in tears at the controls because I had just learned of the death of my brother Nechemiah.

  Cheetah Cohen, after retiring from the air force in 1974 as a colonel, flew for twenty-five years as a captain with El Al. He was elected to the Knesset in 1999 and served two terms, dedicating himself to drafting a constitution for the state of Israel. He retired for the third time in 2006.

  I have no memory of that flight. I know that many have lost brothers and sons and fathers, even entire families, for this idea, this dream of a homeland that belongs to the Jewish people alone.

  I think of my grandfather, who grew and sold fruits from his orchards in Turkey, my grandfather Eliezer, after whom I am named, who called his family together in 1918 following the fall of the Ottoman Empire and declared: I will emigrate to start a new life in Jerusalem. Which of you will come with me?

  He came to this old-new country, Eretz Yisrael, which was not a country at all but only a farm here, a plot of grazing land there, purchased from absentee Ottoman landlords and registered, one patch at a time, under the British, under Mandate Palestine. Not a country at all, but only a dream, Herzl’s dream and Jabotinsky’s dream and Joseph Trumpeldor’s dream. Yosi Ben-Hanan’s family came, to Jerusalem as well, and Moshe Dayan’s mother and father came, settling near Galilee on the first kibbutz, and a family named Scheinermann came, hebraizing their name to Sharon, and hundreds and then thousands more came, too.

  Today, a child is born in Israel and wishes to grow to be an artist, a musician, to start a family and a business and maybe to get rich. Then, such aspirations seemed decades ahead of us, if they would or could come at all. You dreamed in those days only of the land, the pitiless, beautiful land, of how to make this soil yield enough so that your family could survive one more season in this place, which was our dream, our life, our ancient home. You thought of the land and how to protect it, to shield the young orange trees, to defend th
e pipelines, to guard the livestock. You learned to keep watch, to fight if you must, to never relax your vigilance, as our European brothers and sisters were so tragically doing at that very hour.

  Those families like mine who settled in Jerusalem faced a different kind of struggle. The city was small then and very poor, without industry or trade, confined almost entirely within the one-kilometer-square walls of the Old City. Those Jews who came to Jerusalem came for reasons of the spirit, to be near the holy places. They felt no shame at being poor. To be in this place was everything to them.

  My grandfather built his home outside the walls, believing in the city’s future. Life was hard. Many could not endure. My brothers and I looked on as families faltered and failed. We watched them as the struggle became more than they could bear.

  The father would leave first. “He is traveling to America,” the children would say. One day tickets would arrive by post from across the sea. The young ones would vanish next. Finally the wife. The wife was always last. She would slip away in the night. Next day the family’s place was empty.

  Somehow a nation arose from these few penniless Jews, who dreamed Herzl’s dream, Weizmann’s dream, Ben-Gurion’s dream, and fought to make it come true. I am a fighter pilot and a helicopter squadron commander. My son Amir is a captain in the tank corps; Yuval is a captain and a fighter pilot. Tamar, my daughter, served as operations sergeant in a helicopter squadron.

  A nation is born in blood and purchases with blood its right to stand in the ranks with other nations.

  Here is how my Six Day War ended.

  I flew back to Tel Nof Air Base, that final Saturday, from the Golan Heights. My squadron had been ferrying Danny Matt’s paratroopers to various crossroads and strategic points in a mad dash to secure the heights and prevent our enemies from using them again to shell our innocent farmers in the flatlands below.

  We had won! The word “victory” was on every man’s lips. At Tel Nof the mood was jubilation.

  I forget how—maybe somebody called me—but I was summoned to the base commander’s office. Colonel Shefer had been wounded and replaced by his deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Jacob Agassi.

  I knew Agassi well, a good pilot and a good man. He said, “Cheetah, prepare yourself for terrible news.”

  He told me that Nechemiah had been killed.

  “Your brother died on the first day of the war, in the first hours. The decision was taken not to tell you. Your role in the fighting was too important. The air force needed you too much.”

  I remember nothing after that.

  I was in a car, that day maybe, perhaps the day after. Officers were driving me somewhere. I was not capable of driving myself. The automobile pulled up and stopped before my father and mother’s house. I remember thinking, I cannot get out of this car. I cannot go into that house.

  The most painful part, through those terrible first weeks, was that Nechemiah’s body had been buried by his comrades near the spot where he fell, in Gaza, on Kibbutz Be’eri, just south of Nahal Oz. So we could not bring him home to Jerusalem. When I went to the army to apply for restoration of my brother’s remains, they told me I could not have them.

  You must wait a year, I was told.

  That is the law, the religious law.

  When I informed my mother of this, I thought she would dissolve in despair. She became first wounded, then grief-stricken, then indignant. Somehow she found her way to Rabbi Goren, the chief religious officer of the army, the man who had sounded the shofar at the Western Wall.

  Rabbi Goren sat for an hour with my father and mother. When the appointment ended, my mother was calm again. She had become resigned. If such indeed was the law, as Rabbi Goren had explained, then it must be obeyed.

  Nechemiah’s body was brought to Jerusalem and buried in the military cemetery on Mount Herzl on May 15, 1968. My father never went to visit the grave. He could not bear it. I survived those days thanks only to my wife, Ela, and to the necessity of continuing to fly missions.

  Israel had won a war, but a new war had succeeded it. There would be more wars after that. The need to defend our people was never going to end.

  Less than three months after the cease-fire, on September 1, 1967, the leaders of the Arab nations met in Khartoum. At this summit they declared in regard to Israel the notorious “Three No’s.”

  No recognition, no negotiations, no peace.

  Waves of terror had already begun. In our helicopters we chased the fedayeen and the terrorist infiltrators, dropping assault forces and interdiction elements.

  One day, six months after the war, a phone call came from Avram Arnan, the commander of the Sayeret Matkal, Israel’s special forces, in which Nechemiah had served.

  “Cheetah, perhaps you are not aware of how deeply your brother was loved by the men of the Unit. We know how modest Nechemiah was. He would never speak of this to you, or to anyone, even if he had known the extent of his friends’ devotion.”

  Arnan told me that he and the men of the Sayeret Matkal had acquired a house in Jerusalem.

  “We want to dedicate this house to Nechemiah, to establish it as a special place to honor his memory.”

  I could not speak. This kind of honor is accorded to generals and to field marshals, not to captains.

  Nechemiah Cohen.

  Courtesy of Amir Cohen.

  Arnan said he wanted to show me the house. “Can you leave your squadron, Cheetah, just for a couple of hours, and come with me in my jeep? It’s a beautiful house, but I want to be sure you approve of it. If not, we will find another.”

  So we drove, Arnan and I.

  When we reached the old British railway station on the Bethlehem Road, I thought to myself, This is the neighborhood of my brother’s combat outpost, that day when Ela and I and our children visited him, just before the war.

  Arnan’s jeep began to climb the hill to Abu Tor.

  I said to him, “Did you know that I spoke for the last time with Nechemiah here at Abu Tor, on the terrace of an abandoned Arab house that his men were using as a command post?”

  “No, I did not.”

  Arnan’s jeep turned into a final narrow lane. We came out of shadow and into a bright, open space.

  “There it is,” he said.

  It was the house, the same house.

  “Avram, did you know? Did you pick this house because it had been Nechemiah’s final post?”

  “I had no idea.”

  Tears came to Arnan’s eyes. I had never seen him cry before and never saw him cry again.

  “Are you sure, Cheetah? Are you sure this house is the one?”

  “Of course! I embraced my brother for the last time right there, on that terrace.”

  The house was dedicated on December 31, 1967. It was given the name Bet Nechemiah—“Nechemiah House.”

  Two hundred people attended the ceremony. Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin took a place up front; Teddy Kollek, the mayor of Jerusalem, stood beside him. The dedication speech was delivered by Ehud Barak, the future prime minister, Nechemiah’s dear friend and fellow commander in the Sayeret Matkal, and the only soldier of Israel who would earn as many citations for valor as he.

  My family, you must remember, are simple people. For my father and mother, this honor was more than they could comprehend. They knew that their youngest son was a hero. But they had not realized how beloved Nechemiah was as a man and as a friend.

  I, too, was overwhelmed. I had come straight from the squadron; I was not prepared for the grief that suddenly overtook me. My family was weeping; they did not know what to make of the illustrious personages attending with such emotion to honor their child. You must remember, too, that everything the special forces did was secret. Even the names of the men were not known outside the Unit.

  The feats that Nechemiah had performed were never mentioned in the
press or known even within the army; his reputation was not public. He was known only within his own formation.

  Ehud Barak in his remarks barely mentioned war, nor did he glorify Nechemiah’s deeds or accomplishments. He spoke instead—in plain, simple prose—of how hard my brother had worked to prepare himself and his men for combat, of how diligently he had trained himself and them to achieve excellence, and of how little attention and credit he sought for himself. Barak’s tribute could not have been more heartfelt or more eloquent. Yet in truth, I remember little of it. The moment was too heartbreaking.

  My brother was gone.

  No victory, however sweet, no exploit of arms, no righting of ancient wrongs, not the recovery of the Holy City itself could bring him back, or restore to the nation her other fallen sons, of this war and others.

  From this alone could our hearts draw solace: Nechemiah had come home.

  Here at last, on these stony slopes where he and I and Uri had played as children, my brother could find rest.

  The ceremony ended. Family and friends began, soberly and in silence, to file out. The day was cold and bright. The eye could see for miles in the clear December air.

  Outside, on the terrace where my brother and I had parted for the final time, I stopped and looked to the north. From the eminence atop Abu Tor the walls of the Old City seemed close enough to touch. I could see clearly the poplar grove above the Western Wall—and the stones of the Wall itself, lit by the afternoon sun.

  I thought, No longer will this site, my nation’s holiest, be cut off from the Jewish people. No more will it be desecrated and dishonored. No longer will it reside in the hands of our enemies.

  This is our Jerusalem, my brothers’ and mine.