In Jerusalem, Israel offered a ceasefire but the Jordanians were not interested. The muezzin loudspeakers on the Dome of the Rock cried, “Take up your weapons and take back your country stolen by the Jews.” At 12:45, the Jordanians occupied Government House: it happened to be the UN headquarters but it dominated Jerusalem. Dayan immediately ordered it to be stormed, and it fell after four hours’ fighting. To the north, Israeli mortars and artillery fired on the Jordanians.
Dayan revered Jerusalem, but he understood that its political complexities could threaten Israel’s very existence. When the Israeli Cabinet debated whether to attack the Old City or simply silence the Jordanian guns, Dayan argued against the conquest, anxious about the responsibilities of governing the Temple Mount, but he was overruled. He delayed any action until Sinai was conquered.
“That night was hell,” wrote Hussein. “It was clear as day. The sky and earth glowed with the light of rockets and the explosions of bombs pouring from Israeli planes.” At 2:10 a.m. on 6 June, Israeli paratroopers mustered in three squads, encouraged by General Narkiss to “atone for the sin of ’48” when he himself had fought for the city. The first squad crossed no-man’s-land towards Mandelbaum Gate to take Ammunition Hill—where Allenby had stored his arsenal—in a fierce battle in which seventy-one Jordanians and thirty-five Israelis were killed. The paratroopers advanced swiftly through Sheikh Jarrah past the American Colony towards the Rockefeller Museum, which fell at 7:27.
The king still held the commanding Augusta Victoria Hospital between Mount Scopus and the Mount of Olives, and he desperately tried to save the Old City by offering a ceasefire, but it was too late. Nasser called to tell Hussein that they should claim that the U.S. and Britain had defeated the Arabs, not just Israel on its own.
Hussein sped in a jeep down into the Jordan Valley, where he encountered his troops retreating from the north. Within the Old City, the Jordanians, who had had their headquarters in the Armenian Monastery since 1948, posted fifty men at each of the gates and waited. The Israelis planned to capture the Augusta Victoria, but their Sherman tanks took a wrong turn down into the Kidron Valley and were fiercely attacked from the Lions’ Gate, losing five men and four tanks close to the Garden of Gethsemane. The Israelis sheltered in the sunken courtyard of the Virgin’s Tomb. The Old City was still not surrounded.
Dayan joined Narkiss on Mount Scopus overlooking the Old City: “What a divine view!” said Dayan, but he refused to allow any attack. However, at dawn on 7 June, the UN Security Council prepared to order a cease-fire. Menachem Begin called Eshkol to encourage an urgent assault on the Old City. Dayan was suddenly in danger of running out of time. In the War Room, he ordered Rabin to take “the most difficult and coveted target of the war.”
First the Israelis bombarded the Augusta Victoria ridge, using napalm; the Jordanians fled. Then Israeli paratroopers took the Mount of Olives and moved down towards the Garden of Gethsemane. “We occupy the heights overlooking the Old City,” the paratroop commander Colonel Motta Gur told his men. “In a little while we will enter it. The ancient city of Jerusalem which for generations we have dreamed of and striven for—we’ll be the first to enter it. The Jewish nation is awaiting our victory. Be proud. Good luck!”
At 9:45 a.m., the Israeli Sherman tanks fired at the Lions’ Gate, smashing the bus that was blocking it, and blew open the doors. Under raking Jordanian fire, the Israelis charged the gate.28 The paratroopers broke into the Via Dolorosa, and Colonel Gur led a group onto the Temple Mount. “There you are on a half-track after 2 days of fighting with shots still filling the air, and suddenly you enter this wide open space that everyone has seen before in pictures,” wrote intelligence officer Arik Akhmon, “and though I’m not religious, I don’t think there was a man who wasn’t overwhelmed with emotion. Something special had happened.” There was a skirmish with Jordanian troops before Gur announced over the radio: “The Temple Mount is in our hands!”
Meanwhile on Mount Zion, a company of the Jerusalem Brigade burst through a portal in the Zion Gate into the Armenian Quarter, hurtling down the steep hill into the Jewish Quarter, just as soldiers of the same unit broke through the Dung Gate. All headed for the Wall. Back on the Temple Mount, Gur and his paratroopers did not know how to reach it, but an old Arab showed them the Maghrebi Gate and all three companies converged simultaneously on the holy place. Holding his shofar and a Torah, the bearded Rabbi Shlomo Goren, chief chaplain of the Israeli Army, strode to the Wall and began to recite the Kaddish mourning prayer as the soldiers prayed, wept, applauded, danced and some sang the city’s new anthem “Jerusalem of Gold.”
At 2:30 p.m., Dayan, flanked by Rabin and Narkiss, entered the city, passing “smouldering tanks,” and walking through “alleys totally deserted, an eerie silence broken by sniper fire. I remembered my childhood,” said Rabin, and reported feeling “sheer excitement as we got closer” to the Kotel. As they proceeded across the Temple Mount, Dayan saw an Israeli flag atop the Dome of the Rock and “I ordered it removed immediately.” Rabin was “breathless” as he watched the “tangle of rugged battle-weary men, eyes moist with tears,” but “it was no time for weeping—a moment of redemption, of hope.”
Rabbi Goren wanted to accelerate the messianic era by dynamiting the mosques on the Temple Mount, but General Narkiss replied: “Stop it!”
“You’ll enter the history books,” said Rabbi Goren.
“I’ve already recorded my name in the history of Jerusalem,” answered Narkiss.
“This was the peak of my life,” recalled Rabin. “For years I had secretly harboured the dream that I might play a role in restoring the Western Wall to the Jewish people. Now that dream had come true and suddenly I wondered why I of all men should be privileged.” Rabin was granted the honour of naming the war: always modest and dignified, gruff and laconic, he chose the simplest name: the Six Day War. Nasser had another name for it—al-Naksa, the Reversal.
Dayan wrote a note on a piece of the paper—it read “May peace descend on the whole house of Israel”—which he placed between Herod’s ashlars. He then declared, “We’ve reunited the city, the capital of Israel, never to part it again.” But Dayan—always the Israeli who most respected, and was most respected by, the Arabs, who called him Abu Musa (son of Moses)—continued, “To our Arab neighbours, Israel extends the hand of peace and to all peoples of all faiths, we guarantee full freedom of worship. We’ve not come to conquer the holy places of others but to live with others in harmony.” As he left he plucked “some wild cyclamen of a delicate pink mauve sprouting between the Wall and the Maghrebi Gate” to give to his long-suffering wife.
Dayan thought hard about Jerusalem and created his own policy. Ten days later, he returned to al-Aqsa where, sitting in his socks with the sheikh of the Haram and the ulema, he explained that Jerusalem now belonged to Israel but the Waqf would control the Temple Mount. Even though, after 2,000 years, Jews could now finally visit the Har ha-Bayit, he ruled that they were forbidden to pray there. Dayan’s statesmanlike decision stands today.
President Nasser resigned temporarily but never relinquished power and even forgave his friend Field Marshal Amer. But the latter planned a coup d’état and, after his arrest, died mysteriously in prison. Nasser insisted that “Al-Quds can never be relinquished,” but he never recovered from the defeat, dying of a heart attack three years later. King Hussein later admitted that 5–10 June “were the worst days of my life.” He had lost half his territory—and the prize of Jerusalem. Privately, he wept for al-Quds: “I cannot accept that Jerusalem is lost in my time.”29
a Arafat claimed to have been born in Jerusalem. His mother was a Jerusalemite, but he was in fact born in Cairo. In 1933, at the age of four, he went to live with relatives for four years in the Maghrebi Quarter next to the Wall.
b As the tension rose, an old man visited the city for the last time and the world scarcely noticed: Haj Amin Husseini, the ex-mufti, prayed at al-Aqsa and then returned to his Lebanese exile, whe
re he died in 1974.
Epilogue
Everybody has two cities, his own and Jerusalem.
—TEDDY KOLLEK, interview
Through a historical catastrophe, the destruction of Jerusalem by the emperor of Rome—I was born in one of the cities of the Diaspora. But I always deemed myself a child of Jerusalem.
—S. Y. AGNON, Nobel Prize acceptance speech, 1966
The Jerusalem I was raised to love was the terrestrial gateway to the divine world where Jewish, Christian and Muslim prophets, men of vision and a sense of humanity, met—if only in the imagination.
—SARI NUSSEIBEH, Once Upon a Country
O Jerusalem, fragrant with prophets
The shortest path between heaven and earth …
A beautiful child with burned fingers and downcast eyes …
O Jerusalem, city of sorrow,
A tear lingering in your eye …
Who will wash your bloody walls?
O Jerusalem, my beloved
Tomorrow the lemon-trees will blossom; the olive-trees rejoice; your eyes will dance; and the doves fly back to your sacred towers.
—NIZAR QABBANI, Jerusalem
The Jewish people were building in Jerusalem 3,000 years ago and the Jewish people are building in Jerusalem today. Jerusalem’s not a settlement. It is our capital.
—BINYAMIN NETANYAHU, speech, 2010
Once again the centre of international storms. Neither Athens nor Rome aroused so many passions. When a Jew visits Jerusalem for the first time, it’s not the first time, it’s a homecoming.
—ELIE WIESEL, open letter to BARACK OBAMA, 2010
MORNING IN JERUSALEM: FROM THEN UNTIL NOW
The conquest transformed, elevated and complicated Jerusalem in a flash of revelation that was simultaneously messianic and apocalyptic, strategic and nationalistic. And this new vision itself altered Israel, the Palestinians and the Middle East. A decision that had been taken in panic, a conquest that was never planned, a military victory stolen from the edge of catastrophe, changed those who believed, those who believed nothing and those who craved to believe in something.
At the time none of this was clear but, in retrospect, the possession of Jerusalem gradually changed Israel’s ruling spirit, which was traditionally secular, socialist, modern, and if the state had a religion it was as much the historical science of Judaean archaeology as Orthodox Judaism.
The capture of Jerusalem elated even the most secular Jews. The craving for Zion was so deep, so ancient, so ingrained in song, prayer and myth, the exclusion from the Wall so longstanding and so painful, and the aura of holiness so powerful that even the most irreligious Jews, across the world, experienced a sensation of exhilaration that approached a religious experience and in the modern world was as close as they would ever come to one.
For the religious Jews, the heirs of those who for thousands of years, from Babylon to Cordoba and Vilna, had, as we have seen, expected imminent messianic delivery, this was a sign, a deliverance, a redemption and the fulfilment of the biblical prophecies, and the end of the Exile and Return to the gates and courts of the Temple in David’s restored city. For the many Israelis who embraced nationalistic, military Zionism, the heirs of Jabotinsky, this military victory was political and strategic—the singular, God-given chance to secure a Greater Israel with safe borders. Religious and nationalistic Jews alike shared the conviction that they must energetically embrace the exciting mission to rebuild and forever keep the Jewish Jerusalem. During the 1970s, these battalions of the messianic and the maximalist became every bit as dynamic as the majority of Israelis, who remained secular and liberal and whose centre of life was Tel Aviv, not the Holy City. But the nationalist–redemptionist programme was God’s urgent work and this divine imperative would soon alter the physiognomy and bloodstream of Jerusalem.
It was not only Jews who were affected: the much more numerous and powerful Christian evangelicals, especially those of America, also experienced this instant of almost apocalyptic ecstasy. Evangelicals believed that two of the preconditions had been met for Judgement Day: Israel was restored and Jerusalem was Jewish. All that remained was the rebuilding of the Third Temple and seven years of tribulation, followed by the battle of Armageddon when St. Michael would appear on the Mount of Olives to fight the Anti-Christ on the Temple Mount. This would culminate in the conversion or destruction of the Jews and the Second Coming and Thousand Year Reign of Jesus Christ.
The victory of the small Jewish democracy against the Soviet-armed legions of Arab despotism convinced the United States that Israel was its special friend in the most dangerous of neighbourhoods, its ally in the struggle against Communist Russia, Nasserite radicalism and Islamicist fundamentalism. America and Israel shared more than that, for they were countries built on an ideal of freedom touched by the divine: one was the new Zion, the “city on a hill,” the other the old Zion restored. American Jews were already avid supporters but now American evangelists believed that Israel had been blessed by Providence. Polls consistently claim that over 40 percent of Americans as sometime in the future expecting the Second Coming in Jerusalem. However exaggerated this may be, American Christian Zionists threw their weight behind Jewish Jerusalem, and Israel was grateful even though the role of the Jews in their doomsday scenario was a tragic one.
Israelis from west Jerusalem, from all Israel and the breadth of the Diaspora, crowded into the Old City to touch the Wall and pray there. The possession of the city was so intoxicating that giving her up became henceforth unbearable and unthinkable—and vast resources were now mobilized to make such a thing very difficult indeed. Even the pragmatic Ben-Gurion proposed from his retirement that Israel should give up the West Bank and Gaza in return for peace—but never Jerusalem.
Israel officially united the city’s two halves, expanding the municipal borders to encompass 267,800 citizens—196,800 Jews and 71,000 Arabs. Jerusalem became larger than it had ever been in its history. Scarcely before the gunbarrels had cooled, the inhabitants of the Maghrebi Quarter, founded by Saladin’s son Afdal, were evacuated to new homes, their houses demolished to open the space before the Wall for the first time. After centuries of cramped, confined, harassed worship in a 9-foot-long alleyway, the airy, light space of the new plaza at the paramount Jewish shrine was itself a liberation; Jews flocked to pray there. The dilapidated Jewish Quarter was restored, its dynamited synagogues rebuilt and resanctified, its ravaged squares and alleys repaved and embellished, Orthodox religious schools—yeshivas—were created or repaired, all in gleaming golden stone.
Science was celebrated too: Israeli archaeologists started to excavate the united city. The long Western Wall was divided between the rabbis, who controlled the praying area to north of the Maghrebi Gate, and the archaeologists, who could dig to the south. Around the Wall, in the Muslim and Jewish Quarters, and in the City of David, they uncovered such astounding treasures—Canaanite fortifications, Judaean seals, Herodian foundations, Maccabean and Byzantine walls, Roman streets, Umayyad palaces, Ayyubid gates, Crusader churches—that their scientific finds seemed to fuse with the political-religious enthusiasm. The stones they uncovered—from the wall of Hezekiah and Herod’s ashlars tossed down by the Roman soldiers to the paving of Hadrian’s Cardo—became permanent displays in the restored Old City.
Teddy Kollek, the mayor of west Jerusalem who was re-elected to run the united city for twenty-eight years, worked hard to reassure the Arabs, becoming the face of the liberal Israeli instinct to unify the city under Jewish rule but also to respect Arab Jerusalem.a As under the Mandate, the prosperous Jerusalem attracted Arabs from the West Bank—their population doubled in ten years. Now the conquest encouraged Israelis of all parties, but especially nationalists and redemptionist Zionists, to secure the conquest by creating “facts on the ground”; the building of new Jewish suburbs around Arab east Jerusalem began immediately.
At first, Arab opposition was muted; many Palestinians worked in Israel or with Israe
lis, and, as a young boy visiting Jerusalem, I remember days spent with Palestinian and Israeli friends in their houses in Jerusalem and the West Bank, never realizing that this period of goodwill and mixing would very soon become the exception to the rule. Abroad, things were different. Yasser Arafat and his Fatah took over the PLO in 1969. Fatah intensified its guerrilla attacks on Israel while another faction, the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, pioneered the new spectacle of hijacking aeroplanes as well as embracing the more traditional killing of civilians.
The Temple Mount, as Dayan had understood, brought with it an awesome responsibility. On 21 August 1969, an Australian Christ-ian, David Rohan, who seems to have suffered from the Jerusalem Syndrome,b set fire to al-Aqsa Mosque to accelerate the Second Coming. The blaze destroyed Nur al-Din’s minbar placed there by Saladin, and kindled rumours of a Jewish conspiracy to seize the Temple Mount, which in turn unleashed Arab riots.
In “Black September” 1970, King Hussein defeated and expelled Arafat and the PLO, who had challenged his control of Jordan. Arafat moved his headquarters to Lebanon and Fatah embarked on an international campaign of hijacking and killing of civilians to bring the Palestinian cause to the attention of the world—this was carnage as political theatre. In 1972, Fatah gunmen, using “Black September” as a front, murdered eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. In response, Mossad, Israel’s secret service, hunted down the perpetrators across Europe.
On the Day of Atonement in October 1973, Nasser’s successor, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, launched a successful surprise attack, in collusion with Syria, against an overconfident Israel. The Arabs scored early successes, discrediting defence minister Moshe Dayan who almost lost his nerve after two days of reverses. However, the Israelis, supplied by an American airlift, rallied and the war made the name of General Ariel Sharon who led the Israeli counter-attack across the Suez Canal. Soon afterwards, the Arab League persuaded King Hussein to recognize the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinians.
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