The Pope’s reference at the U.N. to birth control, urging the world to increase the food supply and decrease poverty rather than the population, revealed his awareness that the world expects him to make a pronouncement on the subject. He stated frankly in the Cavallari interview that he did not know the answer to the problem. “The world asks us what we think about [birth control] and we must give an answer,” he said. “We cannot remain silent. It is difficult to know what to say. For centuries the Church has not had to face such problems. And this matter is a little strange for churchmen to be handling, and even embarrassing from the human point of view. So the committees are meeting. Papers and reports have been piling up. We have had to do a great deal of studying, you know. But now we have to make a decision. Only we can do that. Deciding is not as easy as studying. But we have to say something. What can we say? God must enlighten us.”
Paul’s quandary over this problem is similar to the undogmatic and searching approach of the majority of the Council Fathers to the many new and difficult problems that confronted them. This, as we know from history, is quite unlike the juridical and dogmatic attitudes of earlier Councils. Some answers have been provided by Vatican II, but more questions have been raised. As Dr. A. C. Outler, the Methodist observer delegate, remarked before a gathering of the American hierarchy in Rome shortly before the Council’s end, “Far less has been accomplished than has been made possible. More frontiers have been opened than occupied.” In retrospect, Vatican II’s crowning achievement will probably be to have opened doors.
Flora Lewis
JULY 1, 1967 (SIX DAY WAR)
IT WILL BE some time before the precise details of how the first shots were fired in the Arab-Israeli war can be set down with full assurance. But everybody in Israel has a story about the first shots he happened to hear. They came as no real surprise, because those of us who were there had all seen fear and anger pressing, always more urgently, for release. But they still came as a shock.
A few minutes before eleven-thirty on Monday morning, June 5th, in Jerusalem, I heard rifle pings. The sound was not unusual in Jerusalem. A number of streets on the Jewish side of the city had been blocked for years by cement or metal walls, built to spoil the view of snipers from the other side. I happened to be walking down Jaffa Road, carrying my typewriter, to a car I had rented an hour earlier. Renting the car had been a precaution, but neither the solicitous girl at the rental agency nor I had mentioned the reason while we filled out the forms. The radio had broadcast a special bulletin at 8:10 A.M. announcing an outbreak of firing on the Sinai front. Shortly afterward, there had been an air-raid alert in Tel Aviv. At nine, instead of giving the news, the broadcaster had droned out a coded mobilization order, naming each unit and its station. Many men and women had already gone in the successive call-ups during three weeks of growing menace. Now there would be no more drivers and probably no more taxis, because Israel’s reserve forces draw upon civilian vehicles as well as civilian manpower. But neither the broadcasts nor the first few shots really made it clear that war had started. There had been so many incidents, so many explosions. Zvi Avrami, the manager of the King David Hotel, where I was staying, had been eager to discuss the situation as he gave me street directions that morning. “It is very depressing, Madam,” he had said to me. “If it comes, we’ll win. But who needs it?” Then he had gone off to get his uniform and report for duty. (The next time I saw him, he was running the St. George Hotel, on the other side of Jerusalem, where occupation headquarters had been established. But that was much later—a hundred hours later.)
As I walked along Jaffa Road that morning, I became aware that the rifle fire was not stopping after two or three cracks. In a minute or so, I heard machine-gun bursts, and then there was the thud of a mortar. Some of the people on the street ran. I didn’t know for sure where the car was, so I ducked into an alcove leading to a shop and found with great relief that I still had my city map in my hand. I studied it while I waited for the shooting to end. Across the street, a young man was carefully washing his store window before putting up tape.
Even the most expected of battles must take a while to penetrate the unwilling mind. That is what happened in Jerusalem. The shelters had long been prepared. A wave of panic buying of food and candles had come and gone a week before. I knew that Tamar Kollek, the wife of Jerusalem’s Mayor, had had some unhappy talks with her neighbors, because, although sand had been distributed throughout the town for fire prevention in case of air raids, the Kolleks and their neighbors were still waiting for their share. “I told them our street was last,” Mrs. Kollek said. “And the people weren’t pleased.” In her own modest apartment, the only precaution she had taken was to move her husband’s collection of pre-Roman earthenware jugs down from the top of a bookshelf to the floor, along with some framed gouaches of the Marc Chagall window designs for the Hadassah Medical Center that had been given to the Kolleks by the painter. A large collection of ancient jewelry, opalescent glass, and other archeological finds that the Kolleks had assembled over the years were not moved from two crammed vitrines in the sitting room. (The Mayor, known to nearly everyone in the city as Teddy—Israel being perhaps the only country in the world to use first names even more quickly than America—told me later he had not thought Jerusalem would come under heavy attack. He had expected some shooting, of course, and quite possibly an effort to cut off the Israelis in the city, but not sustained direct shelling. “It was too obvious that it could work both ways—that the Jordanians were just as vulnerable as we,” he said, in weary puzzlement when it was over. “But King Hussein put his armies under an Egyptian commander, and he lost control.”)
When the attack did come, the sirens and the radio warned everyone into the shelters. There was no compulsion, no pushing, no curfew. You could roam the empty streets if you wished. But almost everybody knew just what he had to do, and did it. I never saw or heard of a case of panic—not even a forgotten dog howling in the road.
I found the car, which luckily had not been hit, and drove back to the King David Hotel. It is only a few hundred feet from the border, within easy range on three sides, but it is built of the rosy Jerusalem stone that gives the city both its beauty and its solid strength. (Throughout Jerusalem, I noticed afterward, the rough blocks of stone had resisted everything except direct shell hits.) An empty bus was standing in the middle of the road blocking the hotel’s driveway, so I parked across the street in front of the Y.M.C.A. and then ran. The bus passengers, half of them children, were in the hotel. They had been coming up to Jerusalem from a village down the valley when they had suddenly found that they were being fired at. The driver, a dark Yemenite, had stomped down on the accelerator and zigzagged as evasively as possible around mountain curves until he reached the first big building. There he had slammed on the brakes and ordered everybody out to shelter. The hotel barman, Reuven Gat—formerly Robert Guth, of Vienna—was distributing free lemonade to the children.
Men in battle dress with steel helmets, barely recognizable as the clerks and waiters who had been wearing very different uniforms when I had gone out two hours before, were milling around near the door, their rifles and tommy guns tossed casually on the carpet….
About twelve-thirty, a shell fell some fifteen feet in front of the hotel entrance—the one unexposed side. It smashed a tree and sent blast waves through the lobby. Fragments of the shell wounded several men. They were given first aid and taken away in an ambulance. At that point, the rest of us were urged down to the basement night club, which served as a shelter, its high windows having been sand-bagged. Some Englishmen were at the bar, drinking gin-and-tonic. To my surprise, I found that lunch was being served. It seemed a good idea to eat, because there was no telling when there would be another chance. Reuven Gat recited the menu—grapefruit or noodle soup, liver or boiled chicken, salad, pastry or compote. He was nervous, but he took all the greater care to polish the glasses, pour the wine for tasting, serve from the left, and remove pl
ates from the right. It seemed an odd way to serve a meal under such circumstances, but he worked with the same extreme consideration all through the week. (After the war ended, he learned that his son had been knifed to death while trying to rescue some wounded friends in the Old City. I went to speak to him when I heard about it. “His name was Avraham,” he told me. “We called him Avi. He was nineteen and a half. He didn’t live yet. He was only starting a life.” The father’s face was frozen in a peculiar grimace, and he scrubbed the bar all the time he talked, rubbing so hard it seemed that he would have worn through a thinner piece of wood.)…
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Throughout the night, we learned later, major battles were being fought at the edges of the southern desert. The Gaza Strip had been cut off, and the northernmost Israeli column had split, in order to begin encirclement of Egypt’s 7th Division. To the Israeli staff’s surprise, the Egyptians had diluted their tremendous force along the Sinai coastal road and the parallel inland road on the Beersheba-Ismailia line. They were moving south. The Israelis could not know whether this was the start of an Egyptian effort to drive across the southern half of Israel, possibly to link up with Jordanian forces and cut off Elath, or whether the Egyptians, believing that the Israeli main thrust would come down the coast of the Gulf of Aqaba to the Strait of Tiran and the strongpoint at Sharm-el-Sheik, were moving to block that virtually impassable route. In any case, the reason mattered less than the opportunity the Egyptian maneuvers offered.
Flexibility based on thorough planning is one of the main elements of the Israeli Army’s strength. It was born of necessity. The Jewish fighters in Palestine and, since they built their state, in Israel have always been outnumbered in both men and equipment. Ben-Gurion had long before developed the concept of flexible response as the principle for protection of the early, isolated settlements. The defense forces, in those days called Hashomer, were part-time farmers and part-time soldiers. Strict economy of weapons, quick reaction and change of plan, the best possible communications and intelligence, and, above all, the use of imaginative variations on the military norm were the rules worked out to reverse the odds. Those ground rules were not changed in the nineteen-thirties, when Hashomer gave way to the Jewish underground army, Haganah, nor have they now been changed. General Yesheyahu Gavish, who commanded the entire battle against Egypt, put it simply: “All our planning has to be for a brief war—quick attack, quick advance, quick victory, and home again to work.” Government officials estimate that it cost Israel fifteen to twenty million dollars a day in lost crops and production to maintain its partial mobilization in the three weeks of tension before the war. Three months of that would have ruined the state.
Brigadier General Ariel Sharon, a towering man with a soft face and a great soft middle bulging over the top of his camouflage trousers, commanded the Israeli division ordered to break through Abu Ageila on the Beersheba-Ismailia line. He met well-entrenched and superior forces, and when it was over he gave an explanation of his success in the form of a recollection of the action he had seen in an earlier campaign: “I would say the Egyptian is a good soldier, a disciplined soldier, but I think the commanders are very poor. I would not trust them. We do not think they have any fighting spirit. They are very good where everything is very simple, they are well organized, and they are very good at shooting. I must tell you a story about something that happened twelve years ago. We attacked an Egyptian battalion in the same area, at Sabha, near Nitzana, and managed in a few minutes to destroy the position. Then a few weeks later we attacked the Syrians, and we put the prisoners together, the officers separate. The Syrians asked the Egyptians how it could have happened that a battalion in a fortified defensive position, mined and equipped with heavy artillery, was defeated in a few minutes. The Egyptians answered, ‘Those Jews just won’t attack in proper order.’ ”
Attack itself, preempting the choice of time and place, is, the Israelis believe, an indispensable part of their country’s defense strategy. Israel has no fallback lines, no reserves in either geography or manpower. The whole country is the front, and all that lies behind it is the sea. As the Israelis see it, if they did not fight beyond their borders, they would have little left to fight for. In the same way, the forces must all be used at once. The regular Army numbers some forty thousand. Even Jordan, the least populous and, since 1948, the least aggressive of Israel’s neighbors—apart from Lebanon—had an army of fifty-five thousand. Egypt had put more than a hundred thousand men in the Sinai Desert and still had armies left to guard its Nile heartland.
I asked Major General Itzhak Rabin, the Chief of Staff, how he accounted for the vastly superior gunnery and technical expertise that enabled his tank crews of schoolteachers, businessmen, bus drivers, and waiters to pick off Egypt’s professionals. (Of course, air supremacy made a crucial difference, but 90 percent of the approximately six hundred Egyptian tanks destroyed were taken out by Israeli tanks. On the second day of the war, one Israeli tank battalion finished off a brigade of a hundred and sixty-seven Egyptian tanks by what the generals call “sniping”—one shot at a time.) General Rabin said the answer was training, although most of the Israeli tankmen are civilians eleven months of the year. Then he added, “And it has something to do with the people, too.”
Israel mobilized requires almost every able body, either under arms or to operate the most urgently essential services. Even children helped in the period of partial mobilization by replacing postmen and delivering milk. Of course, some exceptions have to be made in a population of two million seven hundred thousand. The quarter of a million Arabs inside Israel’s borders before the war were not called to serve. Neither were members of Jerusalem’s ultra-orthodox Naturei Karta sect, who preach that all violent resistance is a sin, even though they do not hesitate to stone those who violate the Sabbath by driving cars, or their codes of modesty by wearing sleeveless dresses and short skirts, or their view of chastity by permitting boys and girls to swim together. Obviously, they would be no boon to the armed forces. In many parts of the country, local rabbis of just as orthodox persuasion endorsed the government’s call to defend the state, and men went off to war, but the extremists of Jerusalem would have no part in it. Some of them refuse even to recognize the State of Israel—to use its postage stamps or to pay its taxes—because they hold to the Biblical text that prophesies restoration of the Jewish nation in its ancient home by the Messiah. Since there has been no Messiah, they insist there can be no legal state. (When the Old City of Jerusalem was taken, the troops had to pass through the orthodox quarter of Mea Shearim, many of them driving captured Jordanian tanks and trucks. The people massed at the Mandelbaum Gate—the only crossing point between the two sides of Jerusalem before the war—and lined the streets to cheer. For once, the Hasidim, in the fur hats and black caftans they have copied from fourteenth-century Polish aristocrats, allowed others to mingle with them and did not cover their faces at the sight of a camera to prevent violation of the Biblical injunction against images. Their young boys, in knickers and black stockings, jumped and shouted with excitement as the victorious warriors passed. The older men watched with evidently torn feelings. They really did not approve, and their demeanor showed it. Nevertheless, for the first time in nineteen years, they would be able to make pilgrimages to the Jewish Holy Places—above all to the Wailing Wall. With mournfully ecstatic faces, even they seemed to be celebrating the fruits of the violence they condemn.)
Once the fight began, there was no pause. In the south, the Israeli columns fought for seventy-two hours without a break, day and night. When a replacement unit was needed at the vicious battle of Mitla Pass, deep in the desert, General Avram Yaffe moved one into line without a halt in firing. “It was difficult to make the maneuver without our own tanks shooting at each other,” he said later, with a diffident smile to cover what seemed to be embarrassment at sounding boastful. “But we took care and we did it without a mishap.” General Yaffe, a very tall and broad man who happily des
cribes himself as more bear than man, heads Israel’s Nature Conservation Board when he is not called upon to head a tank division. He knows the desert as an Englishman knows his garden. During prewar mobilization, he stopped more than once to climb out of a tank and collect a few dry seeds, which he placed tenderly in matchboxes. “This plant doesn’t exist anywhere else in Israel,” he remarked with delight on one occasion, according to a colleague. “It must be sturdy to live here in the desert.” He has organized effective campaigns to save two species of gazelle that were on the verge of extinction in the Middle East. His great dream is to acquire eight or ten oryx—a magnificent Arabian Desert deer, very few of which are left—and turn them out to breed in a Sinai nature preserve….
· · ·
Late that evening, I ran into Arthur Veysey, of the Chicago Tribune, who had just arrived from Jordanian territory. He had staked out what might have been the royal box for the night battle, and he invited me to see some of the sights from it. It was a large balcony, complete with lounge chairs, on the fourth floor of the King David, facing the Old City wall. Reuven Gat, the barman, had waited up after the cook had gone, and he provided a bottle of well-chilled rosé and a stack of matzoth—all he could find—for me to take upstairs. On that we dined as we watched the spectacle that was being played out all around us.
The sense of theatre was inescapable. We knew that men were dying of real wounds, that children were hunched underground in real terror, that the earth was being heaped with the garbage of war. But all that we could actually see was a scene of incomparable drama, and even beauty. At the far right of our panorama, a whole hillside flickered in flame. The crops of Ramat Rachel, an Israeli settlement on a finger of Jewish Jerusalem surrounded by Jordan, had been set afire by shells. At center left, the tower of the Victoria Augusta Hospital was burning like a Yule log atop the Mount of Olives. There were tracers, and an occasional flash and boom, but when a non-explosive noise broke in it was always something thoroughly bucolic—a lone cock or, for a moment, a donkey. Then, suddenly, the darkness was driven back. The Israelis had mounted a giant searchlight on one of their tall buildings. Its beam flooded the entire horizon in a milky glow. Above, on a line drawn as sharply as the line of a proscenium, was black velvet sky speckled with tinsel stars—perhaps a bit too bright and too profuse for a perfectly tasteful setting. The outlines, the shadows, the mutely luminescent colors of the landscape beneath were exactly right. The Garden of Gethsemane, the village of Bethany, the towers and spires and domes and minarets that represent in stone the origin of universal faiths stood out in detail, seemingly eternal beside the cypress groves. The buzz and the racing wing lights of a pair of fighters arched overhead toward the horizon and disappeared. A minute later, two or three great orange flares dawdled down against the backdrop. The searchlight snapped off when they disappeared. It was as though the curtain had come down. But we waited, and there was more to the spectacle. First came the sound of shells being fired from big guns behind us. One—two—three—four. We counted the seconds until the explosive flashes rose behind the hills, and counted again, this time to six, for the thunder to return. It happened over and over again in that Biblical panorama, with its undelivered message of peace. Gradually, through the night, the firing toward us from the other side diminished. The rifles and machine guns never stopped altogether, but they seemed irrelevant to the spectacle. We never even thought to duck behind the balcony wall, though we took care to show no light.
The 60s Page 37
