Six Days of War

by Michael B. Oren

  At 12:45, Maj. Badi ‘Awad, commander of the 27th ‘Isam bin Zayt Battalion, had been listening to radio reports of Egyptian victories and of Jordan’s capture of Government House, when he received the password “Way of Happiness” (Sabil al-Sa’ada). Sent directly from Riyad’s office, this was the go-ahead for ‘Awad and two companies to proceed up the ridge. ‘Awad, stocky and tough, a veteran of the Jerusalem battle of 1948, was certain that the Israelis would counterattack with tanks. Yet he was confident of his ability to defend the position with his 400 men, his four recoilless rifles, plus some heavy machine-guns and mortars, from behind the walls of the compound.

  Known in Hebrew as Armon ha-Natziv (High Commissioner’s Palace) and in Arabic as Jabal al-Mukabbar (the Exalted Hill), the Government House compound had served as headquarters for the British Mandate and then, after 1948, for UN observers. The building occupied the easternmost point of a ridge dominating the vital axis to Bethlehem and Hebron, and could be used as a staging ground for cutting off either Arab or Jewish Jerusalem. As such, both the Israelis and the Jordanians had contingency plans for seizing the ridge in wartime. Though demilitarized under the Armistice, the area was flanked on the south and southeast by a string of fortified Jordanian emplacements, and on the West by an Israeli experimental farm and the Allenby Base. The IDF also maintained a secret lookout post on the northern slope of the ridge—the so-called isolated house—to provide advance warning of any Jordanian movements there. Yet, in contrast to Mount Scopus and the DZ’s with Syria, the ridge had rarely been a source of Jordan-Israel friction. Minor run-ins did, however, occur between Israel and the UN, such as that on May 11, when Bull complained that the UN flag had been stolen from atop Government House and replaced by a powder-blue pajama bottom of Israeli manufacture.24

  Major ‘Awad’s men dug in around the wooded perimeter of Government House, from where they directed mortar and recoilless rifle fire at Ramat Rachel, Allenby, and the Jewish section of the mixed neighborhood of Abu Tor. Bull ran out to them, furious. “I don’t remember ever having been so angry in my life,” his memoirs relate. He insisted that ‘Awad reconfirm his orders from Riyad, and the major promptly obliged, suggesting that all civilians be evacuated from the area. Bull refused, and instead barricaded himself and his workers inside the compound. From there, he tried to contact the Israeli Foreign Ministry, hoping to avert a counterattack.

  The time was 1:35 P.M.‘Awad sent an advance patrol to scout out Israeli strength at the western end of the ridge. Approaching the experimental farm, these soldiers came under fire from Rachel Kaufman, the wife of the farm’s director, and three workers armed with old Czechoslovakian guns. Reports from the farm, as well as from the “isolated house,” had corroborated Jordan’s offensive. Word had also spread to East Jerusalem where Life magazine correspondent George de Carvalo witnessed Arab residents celebrating the fall of Government House ridge and cheering, “tomorrow we shall take Tel Aviv.”

  Already alarmed by these events, the Israelis were then dumbfounded when, at 2:00, Amman Radio proclaimed the fall of Mount Scopus. Remembering how the announcement of the seizure of Government House had preceded the actual attack, Narkiss concluded that Israel’s enclave was next. “It was a sign that the Jordanians had a plan,” he later testified, “a plan revealed by their over-zealousness and their sense that their problem was at last solved.” His estimate was that hundreds of Jordan’s Patton tanks would ascend the Jordan Valley to Ramallah, and attack Mount Scopus from the rear. The journey would take eight hours.25

  Circumstances, for the Israelis, had turned critical. From Government House ridge, Jordanian forces could fan out through Jerusalem’s southern neighborhoods—Talpiot, Katamon, San Simon—and link up with troops and tanks descending Mount Scopus in the north. The entire city could be lost. In the West Bank, meanwhile, Iraq’s 8th Mechanized Brigade, reinforced by a Palestinian battalion, was proceeding to the Damiya Bridge, taking up positions formerly held by the 40th Armored Brigade. Together with the seven Jordanian brigades in the area, the Iraqis could spearhead an effort to sever Israel in half.

  These events necessitated a major reevaluation of Israel’s strategy in the east. Convening with Eshkol, Rabin and Yariv in the Pit, Dayan spoke of the need to silence the long-range guns that had already caused serious damage to Ramat David. Israeli tanks would have to attack the batteries near the West Bank city of Jenin, preferably without entering the city itself. The shelling in Jerusalem would also have to be stopped, and any Jordanian advances reversed. Most crucially, Mount Scopus would have to be relieved. In preparation for that effort, Dayan was willing to consider the capture of the Latrun Corridor, but no additional conquests. “Our purpose was to strike Egypt and no one else,” he said, “I suggest we don’t get caught up in two wars.”

  Eshkol went along with this plan, but then Rabin objected: “We’re pounding their [Jordan’s] air force, why do we have to conquer their territory at this stage?” Yariv agreed: “Hussein has to act against us, but what we’re doing now is providing him with the basis for acting.” The defense minister registered this advice, and asked that further attempts be made to convince the Jordanians to stop firing. But to Col. Lior, also present at the meeting, Dayan appeared to be contradicting himself, saying he wanted to avoid war with Jordan while opening offensives against it. “The man said one thing for posterity and protocol, and in the field did something else entirely,” he wrote. “Damn it, what did Moshe Dayan really want?”

  In the field, though, Dayan’s directives bore no such ambiguity. He gave the green light to the Northern Command to release two armored brigades to begin the assault on Jenin, and then instructed Rehavam Ze’evi, the deputy chief of operations, to draw up an attack plan for Jerusalem. The Harel Brigade’s tanks were to advance along the Jordanian-held ridge that dominated the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway, block any enemy armor descending from the north, and relieve the garrison at Mount Scopus. Simultaneously, infantry would breach the fortified Jordanian positions at the enclave’s southern foot. Government House and its ridge were to be retaken immediately.26

  The latter task fell to Lt. Col. Asher Dreizin, thirty-four, commander of reserve Battalion 161 of the Jerusalem Brigade. Shortly before the outbreak of hostilities, Rabin had told the unit that “I fought here in ‘48. I hope if we have to fight here in this war, that you will complete what we were unable to finish.” Dreizen shared that sentiment. Like many of the brigade’s regular officers, he was anxious to avoid war but also to smash the myth of the Jordanian army’s invincibility. He had already prepared a plan for regaining Government House, but when the order to attack arrived, he had time only to draw a map in the dirt and curtly brief his men. “Because of the swiftness of everything, I had a feeling that we would surprise the Jordanians,” he later told fellow officers, “Still, the operation was complicated. Confused.”

  Dreizin’s force, setting out from Allenby at 2:24, consisted of two infantry companies and eight Sherman tanks. Of the latter, several broke down en route or got stuck in the mud of the experimental farm; three tanks remained for the assault. Resistance was determined. Ensconced behind the compound’s walls, ‘Awad’s men succeeded in knocking out two of the Shermans, killing one Israeli—a company commander—and wounding seven others, among them Dreizin. But superior in firepower and numbers, the attackers eventually broke through the building’s western gate and began clearing the compound with grenades. Bull raced about frantically, shouting at the Israelis to hold their fire, that the Jordanians had already fled. Dreizin consented, and just in time: A grenade had been readied for a room found later to contain thirty UN workers, together with their wives and children.

  Relations between Israel and the UN, never ideal, were hardly enhanced by the action. The Israelis had not spared ammunition in their charge, damaging much of the compound and destroying Bull’s car. The UN chief wanted the building evacuated but the Israelis, angry that the Jordanians had so easily gained entrance to it, refused. Dreiz
in did not have time to argue, though. The battle was continuing, first on the high ground behind Government House—Antenna Hill—and then in the series of bunkers to the west and the south, each nicknamed for its shape: the Bell, the Sausage. Beyond lay the Arab villages of Sur Baher and Jabal al-Mukabbar.

  The fighting, often hand-to-hand, raged for nearly four hours. ‘Awad and his surviving men fell back to trenches held by troops of the Hittin Brigade, and called for reinforcements from the armored brigades in the Jordan Valley. None came, and the Jordanians were steadily overwhelmed. By 6:30 P.M., they had retired to Bethlehem, leaving close to 100 dead and wounded. Dreizin, twice more wounded and down to ten men and scant ammunition, was hardly in better shape. Yet the Israelis who dug in that evening on Government Hill ridge, expecting a counterattack, had indeed shattered the Jordanian army’s myth of invincibility. They also controlled south Jerusalem.27

  The Jordanian attack on Government House had not come as a surprise to Uzi Narkiss, nor was the Central Command chief disappointed. Jewish Jerusalem was being shelled and now he had the grounds for responding. At the height of that battle, at 3:10, Narkiss was offered the service of the 55th Paratrooper Brigade under Col. Mordechai “Motta” Gur. Their original assignment, a combined parachute drop and amphibious assault on al-‘Arish, had been obviated by the quick pace of the Sinai offensive; the paratroopers were packed onto buses and rushed to Jerusalem.

  “The 55th dropped on us from heaven,” Narkiss regaled his staff after the war. “The south’s heaven didn’t want them.” Though Dayan refused to entertain even the suggestion of capturing the Old City, Narkiss was set on that goal. Here, finally, was the opportunity to rectify Israel’s failure in 1948, a miraculous second chance. “However it [fighting] started in Jerusalem, I knew it would end up in the Old City,” he later admitted to his staff. No sooner had Gur arrived at Central Command than Narkiss told him, “Take whatever you can while there’s still light.” The colonel, the country’s youngest brigade commander, had fought only briefly in 1948 and only in the Negev. Nevertheless, he had been born in the Old City and shared Narkiss’s vision of its capture. He promptly positioned his paratroopers to move on both Mount Scopus and the Old City. “We will free Jerusalem!” Gur exclaimed.

  But the task would not be that simple. Gur and his officers knew little of the lay of the city. They had rarely trained for urban combat and lacked maps and aerial photographs of the battleground, many of which were destroyed in the Jordanian shelling. Now, with much of their heavy weapons and communications equipment still packed for the airdrop, the paratroopers had only five hours to formulate a plan. “Our objective was to transform the brigade into a force that would be ready to fight in Jerusalem by midnight,” recalled Col. Arik Akhmon, the 55th’s intelligence officer. “The problem was not how to do it right, but how to avoid doing it terribly.”

  Merely assembling the paratroopers proved to be a major obstacle, as the Jordanian bombardment forced the buses onto unpaved detours that were already jammed with the Harel Brigade’s vehicles. Like the paratroopers, the brigade was also a stranger to the area—all its maneuvers had been in the Negev—and ill equipped to deal with the dense minefields and rocky hillsides so inimical to tanks. “We faced two enemies—the Jordanians and the terrain,” said Col. Aharon Gal, a battalion commander, after the battle. “I couldn’t tell you which was worse.”

  To its advantage, the 10th had as its senior commander Uri Ben-Ari, a colorful, captious figure whose father had won the Iron Cross fighting for Germany in World War I, only to die in Dachau. Escaping to Palestine, Ben-Ari—born Banner—fought with the Harel Brigade in 1948, and in 1956, commanded the lead tank into Sinai. Though a financial scandal ended his military career, he continued to study German Panzer tactics, and even affected a riding crop. Of the first day of the war, he recalled, “We were all sorry about being in the Central Command…The war, we were told, started at 8:00, and by 10:30 we were still sitting around. We sat like pregnant women—we knew something was going to be born but didn’t know what.”28

  The orders finally came in the afternoon. As stipulated by Dayan, the brigade was to attack northward into the hills overlooking the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway, penetrating at three points, and then proceed east for eleven miles, through the fortified villages of Bidu, Nabi Samwil, Beit Iksa, and Sheikh ‘Abd al-‘Aziz. The goal was to reach the Ramallah-Jerusalem highway near Beit Hanina, take the Arab neighborhood of Shu‘afat, and link up with the paratroopers at Mount Scopus. By 4:00 P.M., the bulk of the forces were in place. Facing them was Jordan’s al-Hashimi Brigade, infantrymen, and two battalions of Egyptian commandos.

  Though they possessed considerable intelligence on their enemy, the Israelis were unprepared for the difficulty of the terrain and the complexities of their objectives. Two miles north of the Armistice Line, they encountered Radar Hill, a former British-built radar station, scored with bunkers and surrounded by 300 meters of mines. Col. Gal recounted: “The tanks that were supposed to cover our advance hit mines. Our forces were scattered. With no other choice, the infantry had to attack without tank cover…under a heavy Jordanian bombardment, leaping from stone to stone to avoid the mines. The battle was brutal, with knives and bayonets.” The worst problem was the mines, which, according to Ben-Ari, “were both old and new and totally unpredictable. We didn’t have equipment for clearing them…dozens of legs were lost.”29

  Two Israelis had been killed, and seven Shermans destroyed. Jordanian casualties were also relatively light: eight killed. But by midnight, the al-Hashimi Brigade was falling back to positions to the north of the road to Ramallah, leaving it open to Israeli tanks. Mount Scopus could be relieved and Arab Jerusalem severed from the northern West Bank, which itself was under attack.

  As shelling from the Jordanian Long Toms between the villages of Burqin and Ya’bad intensified in the late afternoon, an Ugdah under Brig. Gen. Elad Peled moved into position. His forces, deployed for action against Syria, had to be hastily repositioned toward Jordan, regrouping in transit. Peled was a soldier’s soldier, having served first, as a teenager, as a Haganah scout and then in a series of infantry and armored commands, culminating in his appointment as assistant to the IDF chief of operations. The terrain he entered, less mountainous than that around Jerusalem and replete with roads, was ideal for tanks. Rolling from Israel’s Jezreel Valley—site of the legendary Armageddon—into Jordan’s Dothan Valley, Elad planned to surround Jenin and compel its surrender. His force consisted of two armored brigades on loan from Northern Command, and from Central Command, a mechanized brigade of infantry. “We crossed the border at 17:00 hours and penetrated deep into enemy territory,” Peled recounted, “At the front there were batteries of anti-tank guns, but our tanks passed right through them. Only then did the [Jordanian] gunners wake up and open fire with light arms.”

  Charged with stopping Elad were three Jordanian infantry brigades and one armored brigade, along with a half-dozen supporting battalions. Part of this force had been drawn off by an Israeli feint in the northern Jordan Valley, near Beit Shean, while the rest was spread across the countryside. The stretching of Jordan’s defenses over a thirty-mile front led Col. ‘Awad Bashir Khalidi, commander of the 25th Khalid bin Walid Infantry Brigade, to protest directly to Hussein, “I appreciate your political problem in abandoning villages, but you cannot have politics and the military at the same time.” But to his advantage, Khalidi had the trenchworks and bunkers around Jenin, and thorough knowledge of the terrain. He also could count on strong reinforcements from the 40th Armored Brigade.

  The youngest brigade in the Jordanian army, commanded by Brig. Gen. Rukun al-Ghazi, the 40th boasted M-47 and M-48 Patton tanks and an infantry battalion equipped with M-113 Armored Personnel Carriers. The force had been positioned to reach Jenin area within twelve hours but then, with the outbreak of war, had been shifted south toward Jerusalem and bloodied by the IAF. Now, as the Israeli threat to Jenin materialized, Riyad ordered the briga
de north again, in daylight, fully exposing it to Israel’s aerial might. Dozens of vehicles were obliterated. Also hit was Iraq’s 8th Mechanized Brigade, en route from Mafraq to replace the 40th at Damiya.30

  The Israeli offensive began at 4:00 P.M. and involved a pincer of the armored brigades under Col. Uri Ram and Lt. Col. Moshe Bar Kokhva (Brill) swinging south and southwest, respectively, of Jenin, while the infantry of Col. Aharon Avnon descended from the north. The two axes to these destinations—the Megiddo-Jenin and Afula-Jenin roads—were both covered by Khalidi’s 25th Brigade. No sooner had the Israelis crossed the border than the Jordanians greeted them with a storm of artillery, tank, and mortar fire.

  “We thought we were the only people being attacked,” Khalidi concluded, his troops coming under heavy bombardment from both the ground and the air. His men, well concealed and armed with antitank weapons and some thirty tanks, nevertheless put up a savage resistance, at one point enveloping the lead Israeli force until they, in turn, were enveloped. At close range, the Israeli Shermans were able to penetrate the armor of the Jordanians’ more modern Pattons, and to ignite their external fuel tanks. Israeli reconnaissance companies meanwhile took the strategic ‘Arabe junction, blocking the enemy’s reinforcements.