After the Tall Timber (12 page)

On Sunday night, at Rehovoth, the professors’ wives were just completing their course in how to render assistance at the Kaplan Hospital if war should break out. The cement walls of the still uncompleted building in which they met were lined with stretchers and sawhorses to put the stretchers on. The women were issued forms, in duplicate, on which they could check off a doctor’s diagnosis, and thereby save him the time of writing things down himself. The lecturer, normally a gynecologist, warned the women that even to a seasoned medical man a casualty of war looks different from any other sort of patient. After the first four hours, he assured them, they would get used to it. He reviewed the forms with them, the ways of ascertaining the wounded man’s identity (the pockets of civilian casualties, who did not, of course, have dog tags, would have to be searched), and he went down the checklist for gravity of wounds—mild, medium, serious, mortal. There were several questions about the word “mortal.” The doctor had used the wrong word in Hebrew—one meaning “mortal” in the sense of “human being.” The matter was soon cleared up. One of the women crouched on the floor with her hands locked behind her head to show the position her daughter in kindergarten had been taught to adopt in case of bombing. “ ‘This is how the bunny sits,’ she told me,” the woman said. “ ‘See the bunny ears?’ ”

Late Sunday night, the Army informed the civilian guard at Rehovoth that they might let up on the security watch.

On Monday, June 5th: at 8 A.M. the air-raid sirens went off all over Israel, and everyone knew that the country was at war. In one of the bomb shelters at the Institute, five languages were being spoken, with absolute calm, by scientists, children, visitors, and maids. A few minutes later, the all clear sounded, and everyone went to work, as though it were an ordinary day. General Dayan’s voice came over the radio, speaking to the troops and announcing that tank battles were taking place at that moment in the Negev. “
Attaque à l’aube
,” one of the scientists said as he walked to his laboratory. “That’s good for us. It means that we’ve got the rising sun in the east behind us. In the Negev, the sun is pretty blinding.”

At 10 A.M. Monday, in his office, Meyer Weisgal, the president of the Weizmann Institute, an important Zionist, a good friend of the late Chaim Weizmann, and one of the greatest fund-raisers of all time, was dictating—to his wife, Shirley—some telegrams to Americans, appealing for funds for war relief. Guns could be heard in the distance, planes were screaming overhead, and sirens, which the Weisgals ignored, went off from time to time. “Send them full-rate, Mrs. Weisgal,” said Yaki, their chauffeur and handyman. “We’re going to win this war.” When Mr. Weisgal had finished dictating, the telegrams were taken into the next room for his secretary to type. As guns, planes, and sirens continued to sound (by this time, it was becoming nearly impossible to distinguish the alert from the all clear, so that half of Israel was undoubtedly going down into the shelters while the other half was coming out of them), Mr. Weisgal told a joke. A Jew, he said was walking down the street, crying bitterly. A friend approached and asked him what was the matter.

“You see,” said the Jew, “I am an optimist.”

“An optimist?” said the friend. “Then why are you crying?”

“So,” said the Jew. “You think in these times it’s so easy to be an optimist?”

Someone turned on the radio, where the code names of units designated for full mobilization were being read out: Alternating Current, Pleasant Shaving, Peace and Greetings, Electric Broiler, Bitter Rice, Silver Lining, Wedding March, Gates of Salvation. There were twenty-three in all, and buses were lining the main street of Rehovoth to pick up the men called to duty.

There were more thundering sounds, and Mrs. Weisgal said, “When I think of the casualties. When I think of the mothers.” The siren went off again.

“Don’t listen,” Mr. Weisgal said, and instructed her to read him a letter that had arrived that morning. The letter, written five days before, was about the situation in Israel. “ ‘ . . . I was afflicted by a sense of absolute despair,”’ Mrs. Weisgal read aloud, “ ‘which has since left me.”’ Everyone laughed.

Toward eleven o’clock, a man with a helmet, a briefcase, and a civil-defense armband came in. “The news is good,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Mrs. Weisgal asked.

“I can’t say,” he said, and left.

Toward afternoon, the sirens became fewer. In a taxi gathering hitchhikers on the route to Tel Aviv, someone, apparently American, said, “There is always the Sixth Fleet, in case something happens.”

“My impression is that something has happened,” an Israeli replied mildly.

A passenger suddenly announced in Yiddish that he had four sons at the front—he was not at liberty to reveal which front—and that since he himself had been a member of the Palmach, the commando unit of the pre-independence Army of Israel, he had written them that he hoped they would not give him cause to be ashamed of them. Three of them had been born after the war of 1948. “
Aber zie machen gut
,” he said firmly. “
Unzere kinder machen gut
.”

Tel Aviv, on the first afternoon of the war, was not much changed, except that all windows had been taped in accordance with instructions delivered over Kol Yisroel. Word had come that several kibbutzim along the Gaza Strip were being shelled, that Ein Gev, near the Syrian frontier, was under fire, that Haifa and Jerusalem were being attacked, and that for some reason the resort of Nethanya and the Arab village of Safad were being bombed. People seemed most worried about the civilian population of Jerusalem. An English translation of Dayan’s speech to the troops was broadcast, announcing that the Arabs were being supported from Kuwait to Algeria. “I need not tell you,” he added, in brief remarks to the civilian population, “that we are a small people but a courageous one  . . .”

On Tuesday morning at five, in Tel Aviv, there was an air-raid alarm (it turned out to have been a mistake); there had been none during the night. Bus service to Jerusalem was almost normal, except that, on account of Israeli Army emplacements, buses had to make a detour of several kilometers through En Karem. On one bus, Kol Yisroel was audible, and, looking over into Jordan from the highway, one could see smoke rising from a town on Jordan’s wedge into Israel and verify the report that Israeli troops were taking Latrun. Because Jerusalem had been shelled throughout the night (the Egyptian general, who, under the terms of the Hussein-Nasser pact, had been put in charge of Jordan’s Army, had often in the past expressed his belief in the shelling of civilians, since it diverted troops to their defense), and was still being shelled by day, most of the population of the city was in shelters. Israeli troops were attacking gun emplacements in the Old City, taking care to observe the order to preserve the monuments of all faiths, if possible. The King David Hotel had incurred minor damage—a tree down, a few broken windows, some slight injuries to members of the staff, but Zvi Avrame, who had been called up, was now wearing a uniform and seemed enormously gratified.

In the streets outside, a few helmeted civilians and some restless little boys kept telling one another to walk close to the walls and to run across streets leading toward Jordan. From several directions, there was the sound of machine-gun and mortar fire. In the early afternoon, three journalists walked into the government press office and were received with cheers. Accredited to Jordan, they had been stationed in the Old City, unable to file copy, for several days. When the Israeli troops came, they had simply walked across into the New City to file their copy there. Then they walked back again. It was announced that General Dayan had had tea on Mount Scopus that morning.

Sometime in the course of Tuesday, an Army official called a meeting of intellectuals in an office in Tel Aviv. He had invited delegates from Rehovoth, from Technion, from the Academy, and from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. (Because of the peculiar configuration of the shelling at that hour, the professors from Jerusalem were unable to attend.) He wanted to ask their advice on a number of questions, and to brief them on the progress of the war. The war was succeeding so far beyond the most optimistic expectations that there were problems that must be faced at once. The entire Egyptian Army had been mobilized at the front when the war began, but Israel had spent the tense waiting period retraining reserves and repairing machinery, and the Egyptian Air Force had been destroyed in the first hours of Monday morning. Apparently misled by the true reports over Kol Yisroel that many Israeli border settlements had been attacked, and by the false reports from the Voice of Thunder in Cairo that Beersheba had been taken and that Tel Aviv was in flames, King Hussein of Jordan—to the surprise and special regret of Israel—had entered the war by noon, and in the afternoon the Jordanian Air Force was destroyed as well. The Syrians, originally the country most rabidly committed to the immediate extermination of Israel, were apparently enraged by the reconciliation between Nasser and Hussein, whom Damascus was still determined to overthrow. Syria had entered the war by degrees throughout the day, and by nightfall the Syrian Air Force was destroyed.

Fighting was going well on the ground on all fronts, and the problem was where to stop. Hussein, it seemed, was powerless to forbid the shelling of Jerusalem by Jordanian troops under Egyptian command, so it would be necessary for the Israelis to take the Old City. (The Rockefeller Institute, containing the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Army spokesman announced, smiling ironically at the particular stir of interest that this aroused in his scholarly audience, had already been captured.) It was clear that Jerusalem could not be divided again. Would it be a good idea to announce plans to internationalize the Old City before it was completely in Israeli hands? There was another problem, he went on: captured Egyptian documents, which had been translated only the night before, revealed that Nasser was far more seriously committed to the destruction of Israelis as Jews, and far more taken with the old Nazi programs, than had been supposed; plans, on the Nazi model, had been drawn up for the time after Israel’s defeat. The question was whether to release these documents. What Israel wanted from this war, after all, was a lasting peace with its Arab neighbors. The two primary obstacles to this peace were the problems of Jerusalem and the Arab refugees. These problems could be solved. What purpose would be served in humiliating an already defeated Arab people by revealing the plans its leader may have had for destroying civilians? The question was discussed, inconclusively, for some time.

Finally, the spokesman raised a question that had been puzzling the administration: What had happened to Egypt’s missiles? Were the ones shown so often on parade merely dummies? He mentioned the other possibilities: mechanical failure, fear of a mythical superweapon at Rehovoth, or pressure from Moscow to avoid what would have been purely futile destruction of cities. This led him to another matter: the Russians were not famous for their loyalty to losers, and the Arabs had lost. Was there any point in approaching the Russians now—or, at least, the Rumanians, who had declared themselves in such moderate terms? Several professors of Russian descent expressed themselves emotionally on the prospect of a rapprochement with their native land, but the others seemed skeptical. Certain questions, the spokesman said, in concluding the discussion (several professors present had to return to their laboratories or their military units), would simply be resolved by events, but, he said, “We will settle for nothing but peace this time.”

In the blacked-out living room of Professor David Samuel, on Tuesday, the second night of the war (which had ceased, after its first few hours of uncertainty, to seem, except at the front, anything like war in the movies), the members of the household were gathered: Professor Samuel; his wife, Rinna; Tally, a girl of eighteen, who had been studying for her baccalaureate examinations; Yoram, a boy of fifteen, who had been compulsively volunteering for every kind of service since the war broke out; and Naomi, a girl of three, who had slept on Monday night in the shelter, and who now went to bed making siren noises. Tally said that her English exam for the following morning had been cancelled—“obviously.” And Yoram announced that not only had he been put in charge of any fractures that might occur if his school were bombed but he was being called out that night for courier duty. “Well, if you think I relish the idea  . . .” his mother began, and then simply advised him to change his undershirt. At nine, Professor Samuel left on some errand about which no one asked, and which was to occupy him until morning.

Kol Yisroel reported, with the understatement that it was to display throughout the war, that fighting had now penetrated to the Egyptian side of the Sinai border. (In fact, Gaza had fallen, and soldiers were already beginning to find pairs and clusters of boots in the desert, which, they knew from the 1956 Sinai campaign, meant that the Egyptians were in barefoot rout.) The
Jerusalem Post
for the day, in mentioning the fact that casualties were beginning to come into Israeli hospitals, and that all of them were patient and brave, did not neglect to mention a soldier who, with one eye shot away and the other damaged, was as brave as the rest. He was a Jordanian legionnaire, the
Post
reported and he kept repeating the only Hebrew words he knew: “We are brothers. We are brothers.”

Someone mentioned that a Hebrew idiom for Arabs is “cousins,” or “sons of our uncle,” and that although the connotation was slightly pejorative, it need not always be that way. Someone praised the bravery, in particular, of the Jordanian legionnaires.

“I really think the reason we fight better is because we have no hinterland,” Yoram said. “We can’t swim to America. We simply have nowhere else to go.” He left through the blacked-out doorway and went into the moonlight, to begin his courier duty. “A perfect night for bombing,” he said, looking into the clear sky. But there were no alarms at all that night.

On Wednesday morning, the casualties began pouring out of buses into the Kaplan Hospital, where the Rehovoth wives were waiting to work. Tally’s class at school was called to help out, and Professor Samuel remarked as he drove her to the hospital, “I don’t know what these girls are going to see there.” The wounded were silent, and as each stretcher was brought in it was immediately surrounded by many volunteers of both sexes, solicitous of the comfort of the wounded man. It turned out that among those critically wounded on the previous day was the son of the gynecologist who had had difficulty with the word “mortal” three nights before. “For us, you know, the Army, it isn’t an anonymous thing,” someone remarked. “To us, everyone killed at the front is a tragedy.”