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

by Steven Pressfield

  Dayan grasps the necessity of coalition building. But he cannot do it. He is Joshua. He understands the sword and the land and cares for nothing else.

  In a way, Dayan’s time is passing, too.

  Months after the war, the Arab leaders in the West Bank declared a strike. Dayan called them together, all the notables of Judea and Samaria. He respected them and they respected him. He said, “Listen, I am minister of defense. My concern is security. If you want to strike, I will not stop you unless you provoke violence. So a woman from Tel Aviv who wants to buy elastic bands for her panties will buy them in Tel Aviv instead of Ramallah? I’m pulling the army out of your towns and cities. If you want to strike, strike.”

  Twenty-four hours later, the strike ended.

  But the world is changing. The idea of local autonomy for the Arabs in the occupied territories, this is not good enough. It is not an accommodation that will stand. Jordan won’t take the West Bank back, not under conditions that Israel can accept. Hussein doesn’t want the Palestinians, either.

  We’re stuck. Dayan can see this. He can see what is coming. But he has no answer for it.

  No one does.

  55.

  THE GHOST COMPANY

  Eli Rikovitz, platoon commander in the Recon Company of the 7th Armored Brigade:

  The war has ended. A week has passed. Our brigade has been pulled back from the Canal. Reserve units have come up to take our place.

  Our company is quartered now at Bir Gafgafa in central Sinai. Bir Gafgafa is a huge Egyptian base, with an airfield and room for an entire division.

  We settle in tents. In daytime we train, to keep busy. But at night there is nothing to do. It begins to hit us, at last, how many of our friends we have lost.

  Ori Orr, Recon Company commander:

  Because the 7th Armored Brigade is a regular-army unit, the men of our company will not be released and sent home like soldiers in the reserves. We’ll get a leave, probably soon. But we in Recon are in regular service and will continue on active duty, some of us for two years or more. Some will make the army their career.

  I will. I am in to stay.

  Menachem Shoval, Recon trooper:

  In the desert you have a fire at night. You gather around. You sing songs, tell stories.

  No longer. We can’t.

  The army is sending entertainers out. Singers and comedians perform for the troops, to keep morale up. Soldiers from other outfits laugh and cheer. Not us. We can stand only our own company, yet when we’re together we say nothing.

  We don’t go over what has happened. We don’t speak with one another, trying to make sense of our feelings. We shut up. Everyone stays inside himself.

  Dubi Tevet, Recon trooper:

  A few Israeli families have gotten permission to come out to Sinai, to seek the places where their dear ones have fallen. They arrive, wordless and grief-stricken, driving their own private cars—Peugeots and Studebaker Larks, Dodge Darts and Citroën Deux Chevaux.

  There can be no sight more heartbreaking than that of a mourning mother or, worse, a wife who has become a widow, standing bereft in this wilderness.

  Menachem Shoval, Recon trooper:

  The euphoria of victory has taken possession of all Israel. Our company is not touched by that. We are totally detached.

  At Jebel Libni, the brigade holds a victory parade. Gorodish stands on a platform and makes a speech, some say a great one, which the radio plays over and over. “Be strong and brave, my brothers, heroes of fame!”

  This means nothing to us. We don’t know what he’s talking about.

  Eli Rikovitz, Recon platoon commander:

  The most celebrated phrase in Gorodish’s speech is “We looked death in the eye, and he looked away.”

  This may be true for the brigade. It is not true for us in Recon. We looked death in the eye, but death did not look away. He took as many of us as he wanted.

  Boaz Amitai, Recon platoon commander:

  I can take you now to the ditch at the entrance to the Jiradi where I kept my head down when the Egyptian air bursts were coming in, and to the spot at El Arish where I got shot. I can show you the turn of the road where Yossi Elgamis died, the slope where Avigdor Kahalani got burned, the spot where Ehud Elad was killed.

  Menachem Shoval, Recon trofoper:

  I am carrying Shaul Groag’s shaving kit. I took it from the back of his jeep after he was killed. It’s crazy to keep it. An army toilet kit. An army towel. There’s nothing personal of Shaul at all.

  Yet I cannot throw it away. I am carrying it for a month and a half, so that one day I can give it to Shaul’s parents and say, what, “This is all that’s left”?

  Eli Rikovitz:

  When a company as tightly bound as ours suffers such losses, the individuals do one of two things. They pull together or they move apart.

  Ours is coming apart.

  Dubi Tevet:

  Someone has made a sign with our unit insignia and this title: The Ghost Company. That is what we are.

  It will get worse when we go home.

  Eli Rikovitz and Ori Orr at Bir Gafgafa. The sign reads THE GHOST COMPANY.

  Ori Orr:

  Eli has come to me and suggested that he and I pay a visit to every family who has suffered a loss.

  The first person we go to is Boaz, in the hospital. His wound is healing.

  “I’ll go with you,” he says.

  Menachem Shoval:

  The army has an official system for notifying families of the deaths of their loved ones. But who knows how long this process might take, or how impersonal such a notification might be?

  I decide I will go myself, as soon as possible, to the families of those who have been my friends.

  Eli Rikovitz:

  The hardest is one family who turns us away. The mother looks out through the window and sees me and Ori and Boaz coming up the walk.

  “Go back! Get away from here! You have taken my child!” She locks the door and refuses even to speak to us.

  We could not visit another family that day.

  Ori Orr:

  The way the mother chased us, you could see she wasn’t blaming us or holding us personally responsible for her son’s death. She simply could not accept the reality that her beloved child would never return.

  Perhaps she believed that if she never heard the words “Your son has been killed,” he would still be alive.

  Menachem Shoval:

  What can I tell a father who asks me, “How did my son die?” What can I say that will ease his anguish?

  I feel so perplexed and so helpless.

  And yet the slightest recollection, a joke that the son had told, some silly youthful prank he had played . . . the memory of these means the world. A mother, a father cling to such scraps as these.

  “Your son was not afraid.”

  “He led us forward.”

  The parents’ hearts break, yet they cannot learn enough of acts taken or words spoken by their son.

  Moshe Perry:

  Chen Rosenberg was my friend. Ten years after he was killed, I am still carrying his photo in my wallet. I am out of the army, married. I have children. Yet Chen’s picture is still in my wallet.

  Nehama Nissenbaum, mother of Benzi Nissenbaum:

  I survived the Holocaust, but my son did not survive the Six Day War. I visit the cemetery once every three weeks. I light a candle, leave a few flowers, and go home and think, If only he were still alive.

  But that is what life has given us, what fate has given us.

  Bat Sheva Hofert, sister of Shlomo Kenigsbuch:

  I lost both my brothers in the Six Day War, and thirty-six years later I lost both my sons. All four are buried in the Kfar Sava military cemetery. In the Jewish tradition, when one visits a grave she sets a small stone as a token of remembrance. But how ma
ny stones can one heart carry?

  I often think, How happy we would be if they were all still alive. All I know is that it’s not in our hands, certainly not in mine. All that remains is the grief and the pain, but still you keep going.

  I refuse to give in.

  Never.

  56.

  A WEDDING AT ZAHALA

  I did not participate in the postwar euphoria. I had lost dear friends and this overshadowed for me the joy that others seemed to be experiencing so keenly.

  Reserve lieutenant Yael Dayan has completed her assignment as a correspondent with Arik Sharon’s division and been released from active duty.

  The days passed with surprising swiftness. You woke each morning expecting to grasp at last the fullness of the altered reality, and realized with evening that this had eluded you again. Clearly the equation of might had been overthrown. Old borders and armistices were null and void. Israel had become the indisputable power in the region. It could speak in a new language, and must be spoken to in a new way.

  Dov and I drove to Jerusalem. He had fought here in the Old City in ’48 and knew every turn and alley. But I could not hear his stories. The experience was too overwhelming.

  We went to the Western Wall. I was almost surprised to see that it was an actual wall. I had expected, what, a receptacle of tears, an abstraction, a vessel of hope and longing?

  My father had told me that in one of the cabinet meetings in which the liberation of the Old City was being debated, two ministers spoke in favor of leaving the holy places in Jordanian hands. Better that these remain a dream, the ministers argued. The same sentiment could be seen in the expressions of the armed soldiers who walked, amazed, among the souks and lanes.

  The wall was a wall. Gray blocks of stone, monumental in scale and lovely with age, with sprigs of hyssop sprouting in the fissures. Jaffa Gate, Damascus Gate, David’s Tower, the Lion’s Gate. I could absorb none of these. It was too soon.

  We drove to Bethlehem, to the Church of the Nativity. Yesterday tanks and armored half-tracks had patrolled these streets. Today souvenir hunters haggle for camels carved in wood, exclaiming at the bargain prices, while tourists poke their noses into courtyards of private dwellings as if all belonged to them. I struggled between shame and acceptance. Please, can we get out of here?

  Dov drove us back to Mount Scopus. Old Jerusalem lay before us like a dream that had come true but in whose reality one could not yet believe. On the way home Dov asked me to marry him.

  I was almost twenty-eight. My brother Assi had set a date to wed his high school sweetheart, Aharona. I knew I had found in Dov the man with whom I wished to spend the rest of my life. With joy we planned a double wedding. The date was July 22—Yud Aleph beTammuz by the Hebrew calendar—the date on which my mother’s parents had been married in 1915, and, twenty years afterward to the day, my mother and father as well.

  The wedding was held in the garden at Zahala. Ben-Gurion attended, very merry. Danny Kaye came, a longtime family friend. Arik Sharon was Dov’s best man. A number of West Bank sheikhs and mayors joined in the celebration as well. They were all friends of my mother and father.

  57.

  THE WARRIOR JEW

  Moshe Dayan:

  A few months before the Six Day War, I went to Vietnam. I traveled in the capacity of a journalist. I was writing a series of articles for the Israeli newspaper Maariv and for the New York Times. But, of course, everywhere I went, I was treated as a soldier.

  Americans are the most openhearted people on earth, and none more so than GIs and Marines in the field. I accompanied these young men on many patrols in the jungle, no doubt sowing gray hairs among those officers who were charged with my safety. The field is the only place for me when there is fighting. Maps and dispatches are poor approximations of the reality on the ground, and a joyride in a helicopter 5,000 feet above the jungle tells me nothing.

  At first the American soldiers and Marines did not believe that I was the Moshe Dayan they had heard of. They recognized my eye patch from newsreels and television, but they could not give credence to the idea that a “big general” was down there with them, humping through the muck at their sides. Only when I spoke and they heard my Hebrew-accented English did they smile and gather around. What happened then was extraordinary, and it happened over and over. An Airborne lieutenant would speak to me out of earshot of his commanders. “We should be fighting like you Israelis.”

  “What do you mean?” I would ask.

  “I mean get in there and fuck some people up.”

  Often I was regarded by higher-ranking officers as if I possessed some secret. I was asked how I would fight a war in Southeast Asia. How would the IDF handle this?

  I elected not to answer. The Vietnam War was lost the hour it began.

  But what struck me was the tremendous respect with which American fighters viewed the Israeli military. I saw again and again wide grins and fist pumps.

  Moshe Dayan accompanies American troops in Vietnam as a journalist a few months before the Six Day War.

  I was at army headquarters in Tel Aviv when word came on June 7, 1967, that our paratroopers had reached the Western Wall. I knew I must go at once. I went with Chief of Staff Rabin and head of Central Command Uzi Narkiss. We three must arrive at the wall together, I declared, and it must be in uniform, with helmets.

  Why? Not for the Israeli people alone, but for the eyes of the world. For the Marines in the rice paddies. For the Russians and the English and for Diaspora Jews around the globe.

  Israel needs America. She needs allies in every land. Ours is not a Jewish story alone. It is a testament for all the world.

  When historians set the events of the twentieth century into perspective, such monumental movements as the rise and collapse of totalitarianism, communism, and fascism will be overshadowed, I believe, by the saga of the return of the Jewish people to their ancient homeland. Why? Why do I believe that the destiny of such a tiny country merits such significance?

  Because each nation of the earth represents a portion of the collective soul.

  The Jewish people stand not for themselves alone, but as an archetype within the greater world psyche. As the British or Romans, say, may be said to represent empire in all its facets, and the races of Africa (and the Arabs to some extent) may be characterized as representing that element of the collective whose lot for centuries has been that of the conquered, the oppressed, and the exploited, so we Jews have come to carry the weight of a people in diaspora, a nation in exile.

  Exile means weakness. It means vulnerability. The exile is the whipping boy. He is the last allowed aboard the boat and the first thrown over the side.

  At the exile’s door are laid the evils of the society in which he dwells as a stranger. On him is projected the wickedness of the hearts of those upon whose succor his survival depends. He becomes inevitably the sinister one, the schemer in secret, the conspirator, the devious, the dark hand. This is true of all exiles in all lands in all centuries.

  If there is a universal disease of the modern era, I believe it is the malady of exile. This affliction is experienced on the individual level as well as on the national and the racial—the agony of feeling that one is a part of nothing, that he belongs nowhere and to no one.

  Exile is the torment of being held apart (or of holding oneself apart) from one’s own deepest essence and his truest, most primal legacy.

  What brings a nation or an individual out of exile? Only return—physically, emotionally, and spiritually—to the place of its birth.

  In the army of France in the 1890s was an officer of Jewish descent named Alfred Dreyfus. Dreyfus was wrongly convicted of treason and subjected to the most violent and despicable anti-Semitic attacks. Émile Zola wrote his famous editorial “J’Accuse” in Dreyfus’s defense in 1898.

  Theodor Herzl was a secular Jewish reporter assigned
to cover Dreyfus’s trial. Herzl was appalled to hear the mob chanting, “Kill the Jew! Kill the Jew!” That such hatred could exist in a cultured, civilized nation in which the Jewish community had thrived for centuries (and for which tens of thousands of Jewish soldiers had given their lives in France’s wars) signified to Herzl the futility of the notion of cultural assimilation.

  If this could happen in France, Herzl concluded, it could happen anywhere.

  Today, if you walk southeast from the Israeli embassy on the rue Rabelais along the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in the direction of the Place Vendôme, you will pass the Église Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption and, continuing on, turn into a quiet, prosperous-looking street called the Rue Cambon. Walk now to the small hotel at no. 36; lift your eyes to the wall above. You will see a white marble plaque with these words in French and Hebrew:

  HERE, IN 1895, THEODOR HERZL, FOUNDER OF THE ZIONIST MOVEMENT, WROTE THE JEWISH STATE, THE PROPHETIC WORK THAT FORETOLD AND ANNOUNCED THE RESURRECTION OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL.

  In the succeeding decades, we Jews came home. There was a mighty justice to this, which the world perceived and of which it approved. A people who had wandered rootless for two thousand years claimed at last its ancient portion. The Jewish people had a home now. We had land. We had guns. By 1948, we had a flag. This repatriation remained incomplete, however, because the eastern half of our ancient capital, Jerusalem, home of our most sacred sites, abided in the hands of our enemies.

  The Sinai victory of 1956 put Israel on the map as a military force. But that triumph was rendered inconclusive by the perception that it had been effected under the aegis of the allied powers, England and France. The Jews, it was believed by many even among our own people, could not have achieved this victory alone.