Six Days (33 page)

0830

The sun had come up over the Judean desert and crept across the Mount of Olives. It was burning away the shadows around the minarets of Jerusalem's mosques and the towers of its churches. Colonel Mordechai Gur, commander of the Israeli paratroop brigade, looked down from his position on the Mount of Olives. The Old City, the ancient walled heart of Jerusalem, was laid out below him. Gur's view of the Old City was dominated by a great mosque, the Dome of the Rock. Muslims believe it marks the spot where the prophet Mohammed ascended to paradise on a staircase of light. The Dome had been the first sight of Jerusalem for every traveller coming over the crest of the Mount of Olives since it was built at the end of the seventh century – and for every invader. The Crusaders, the Ottomans and the British had all stood on the Mount of Olives, coveting the holy city laid out below them. And now, on another beautiful June morning, it was the turn of Colonel Gur and his paratroopers.

Gur had just sent three companies of men down to the walls of the city. His main objective lay deep inside the Old City, just beyond the Dome of the Rock. It was a narrow lane in the Moroccan quarter. Muslims called it al-Buraq road because they believed it was where Mohammed had tethered the winged horse of that name that had brought him to Jerusalem from Mecca. A high wall ran along one side of the lane. It was built of massive, evenly cut smooth stones. It is known as the Wailing Wall. For Jews it was the holiest place in the world to pray. Two thousand years earlier it was the western wall of the compound surrounding King Herod's second Jewish temple. It was torn down and most of Jerusalem's Jews dispersed by the Romans after a revolt in the first century. But detailed descriptions of the temple survived in Jewish holy writings. It had been a splendid place, massive, stone-built and decorated with gold. Now, in 1967, the Jews were fighting their way back. The founding generation of Israelis were mainly secular socialists. Ancient symbols had not, at first, meant that much to them. But as they drew closer to the heart of Jerusalem, they seemed to matter more and more.

Velni and Ronen, two journalists from Israeli army radio, were on the roof of the trade union building in Jerusalem, monitoring the battlefield radio traffic on army walkie-talkies. Suddenly they recognised Gur's voice, giving orders to occupy the Old City: ‘Come in all battalion commanders. We are sitting on the mountain range which looks down on the Old City and are about to enter it. All our generations have been striving and dreaming about the Old City … We will be the first to enter it … tanks will enter the Lion's Gate. Move to the gate! Rendezvous on the open square above it.'

With them was the chief rabbi of the Israeli army, Shlomo Goren. He had arrived back from the fighting in Gaza the day before, his face covered in soot, telling Narkiss: ‘Who cares about the south? Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, they are what count! You'll make history!' Now Goren dashed to his car to catch up with the soldiers. The two young reporters jumped in behind him.

Opposite the Mount of Olives is St Stephen's Gate, one of the seven great entrances to Jerusalem. It is also known as Lion's Gate because the king of the beasts is carved into its stone portico. Gur could see his men running up the steep road behind the tanks. He got into his half-track, and raced down to join them.

‘I told my driver, Ben Zur, a bearded fellow weighing some fifteen stone, to speed on ahead. We passed the tanks and saw the gate before us with a car burning outside it. There wasn't a lot of room but I told him to drive on and so we passed the burning car and saw the gate half-open in front.' Gur wondered for a second whether the gate was booby-trapped. Then he gave another order: ‘Ben Zur, move! He stepped on the gas, flung the door sideways and to hell and we crunched on over all the stones that had fallen from above and blocked our way.' The Israelis were inside the Old City.

The
Sunday Times
photographer Don McCullin was playing catch-up. He was tearing up the road to Jerusalem with a reporter called Colin Simpson. Now that Israel was close to an historic victory, it had given up its strategy of blacking out the news. McCullin, Simpson and a few others had been picked up by an elderly Israeli De Havilland Rapide in Cyprus and flown into Tel Aviv. The Jerusalem road was so peaceful that they started to worry that they had missed the war completely. On the radio the BBC quoted reports that the Old City had already been taken. In Jerusalem McCullin and Simpson bumped into a group of soldiers from the 1st Jerusalem Regiment. They explained to the forward company commander that, ‘If he was set upon making Jewish history, it was only fit and proper that the
Sunday Times
should be with him to record it. We were accepted right away, and moved off with them through the olive groves.'

Also driving up from Tel Aviv was Ava Yotvat, whose husband Moshe had been wounded outside Ramallah. The road felt quiet and tense. At midnight an officer had knocked on her door to tell her the bad news. She found her husband at Hadassah hospital at Ein Karem in West Jerusalem. It was treating so many casualties from the street fighting that she thought he was being ignored. She took him back to Tel Aviv, where the main hospital had prepared hundreds of beds for casualties who had never materialised. Delighted to be doing something, doctors swarmed around him.

McCullin followed the soldiers from the Jerusalem Regiment as they advanced towards Dung Gate, one of the southern entrances to the Old City.

We took a lot of casualties in that first hundred yards inside the gate, coming under heavy sniper fire, bullets ricocheting in all directions as we fanned out … So exposed were we that if the Arabs had used mortars we would not have stood a chance … suddenly a Jordanian soldier ran out in front of us with his hands up. He did not appear to be armed, but everybody was jittery because of the snipers, as we all hit the ground. The Jordanian was blown to bits … the unit was moving further down the street when the lead man was shot dead, and a few yards later the next man received a bullet through his chest. A doctor came up to me and started screaming for a knife to cut away the man's clothing, though I failed to understand the torrent of Hebrew until someone said ‘knife' in English and I fumbled for mine while the man died.'

The streets of West Jerusalem were almost deserted, except for occasional army jeeps careering round corners and up the empty avenues. One of them was Goren's jeep. They raced through the city towards the Mandelbaum gate, the crossing point between the two sides of Jerusalem, where they abandoned the jeep. Goren was carrying scrolls of the Jewish bible, the Torah, and a
shofar,
a bugle made from ram's horn which Jewish tradition dictated should be blown at auspicious occasions. The two journalists followed, ducked along the line of the city wall, working their way down to St Stephen's Gate.

At Dung Gate the Israelis were winning. Palestinians and some of the Jordanians who had not left started to surrender. Some of the soldiers threw away their uniforms and changed into civilian clothes, even suits of striped pyjamas. Don McCullin saw the Israelis obeying orders that been issued not to harm the holy places. ‘On more than one occasion I watched Israelis hold their fire when sniped at from the roofs of religious buildings of any persuasion.'

The Palestinian dentist John Tleel peered out from under the pillows, blankets and thick sticking plaster he had used to block up the windows of his house in the Christian quarter. He saw Israeli paratroopers advancing, cautiously. At first, like many others in and around the Old City, he thought they might be Iraqis. Then for the first time since the city was divided in 1948, he realised that he was listening to Hebrew. The soldiers kept their backs to the walls and ‘were advancing with extreme caution, watching their steps … with guns pointed out in front of them, they were on extreme alert'. He went back into his house to tell his friends and family what was happening. At first, they did not believe it could be possible.

After Colonel Gur, the commander of Israel's 55th Paratroop Brigade, led his men into the Old City through St Stephen's Gate, his driver Ben Zur swung their half-track to the left, flattening a motorcycle that stood in the way. They drove into the compound that encloses the great mosques and the site of the ancient Jewish temple. Anwar al Khatib, the Jordanian governor of Jerusalem, was waiting with the mayor. They told Gur that the army had withdrawn and there would be no more resistance.

Coming up not far behind Gur and his men were Uzi Narkiss and the IDF's deputy chief of staff, Chaim Bar Lev. As they were about to follow his troops through St Stephen's Gate into the Old City, Narkiss radioed Gur to find out where he was. Gur came up with what, for Israelis, are the most famous few lines of the 1967 war. ‘The Temple Mount is ours!' Narkiss did not believe him. ‘I repeat,' said Gur, ‘the Temple Mount is ours. I'm standing next to the Mosque of Omar [the Dome of the Rock] now. The Wailing Wall is a minute away.'

Narkiss and Bar Lev drove fast up the slope that led to St Stephen's Gate. Paratroopers were still exchanging fire with men on the battlements. Dead bodies lay around the street. They abandoned their jeep, Narkiss threw a smoke grenade to give them some cover and they went forward on foot. They climbed over a tank that was stuck in the arch.

Yoel Herzl, Narkiss's adjutant, caught up with the generals a few minutes later. They were lying on the ground, pinned down by a sniper. Herzl noticed that a cloth on a second floor window in a building opposite was twitching. Asking the paratroopers to cover him, he ran over to the entrance. Moving as quietly as he could, he went up the stairs. Through an open door, he saw a red keffiyeh, the distinctive headscarf worn by Jordanian soldiers. It was the sniper.

‘I emptied a clip from my Uzi into him. Until today I feel bad about it. It was a split-second thing. That's war. The fastest stays alive. If you think, you're dead.

‘After that things moved very fast. Everyone was looking round for the way to the Wall, running like crazy, but we couldn't find the way. Rabbi Goren was there. He said follow me. He was carrying a Bible. We kept on running and we got to the Wall. Of the people who liberated it, I was the seventh.'

Yossi Ronen, the young reporter from army radio who was with Goren, said the Rabbi ‘did not stop blowing the shofar and reciting prayers. His enthusiasm affected the soldiers and from every direction came cries of “Amen!” The paratroopers burst into song, and I forgot I was supposed to be an objective reporter and joined them in singing “Jerusalem of Gold” … the commanders gave short, emotional speeches.' Narkiss remembered his failure to capture the Old City in 1948. ‘Never has there been such a thing, for those standing here right now … We all kneel before history.'

For Israelis it was the emotional climax not just of the war, but of their first nineteen years of independence. All the men there were deeply moved by the capture of the Jewish people's most evocative and holy place. Many of them wept. The photographer David Rubinger and the BBC correspondent Michael Elkins, highly secular Israelis who had followed the first troops to the Wall, were swept up in it. ‘We were all crying. It wasn't religious weeping. It was relief. We had felt doomed, sentenced to death. Then someone took off the noose and said you're not just free, you're King. It seemed like a miracle.' They still had jobs to do. Rubinger lay on the floor of the narrow alley that ran along the wall to get some sense of the wall's height, and then with tears pouring down his face started taking pictures of stunned, awed and exhausted paratroopers.

Major Doron Mor, second in command of Battalion 66, started worrying when he saw the narrow lane in front of the Wall full of soldiers ‘in ecstasy'. He had already lost thirty-six men in the battle for Jerusalem and did not want to lose any more. ‘I was afraid one Jordanian sniper in one window would shoot all of them. We started to push the soldiers out, because it was very dangerous.'

Sinai

Herzl Bodinger, the Israeli pilot, was returning from another attack on Bir Tamada. He tuned his radio to Voice of Israel, so his direction-finding equipment could zero in on the signal to get him home, while he caught up with the news. They announced that the Temple Mount was in Israeli hands, and played ‘Jerusalem of Gold'. Bodinger, not a religious man, was surprised that he was so overjoyed. General Yeshayahu Gavish, commander of Israel's forces in the Sinai, was in a half-track at Bir Gifgafah when he heard the same news. It was his biggest thrill of the war. ‘Then I thought, Oh shit, they stole all the glory.'

Nablus, West Bank

Around eleven o'clock Palestinians ran through the streets, shouting that the Algerians were coming. A crowd on the edge of Nablus was throwing rice at an armoured column that was rolling into the town from the east, from the direction of Tubas and the East Bank of the Jordan. If they weren't Algerians, perhaps they were Iraqis. The people in the crowd didn't mind. Cairo Radio had been full of the contributions to the war effort made by Arab brothers. Now their saviours were coming.

But the tanks were Israeli, from General Peled's division. The troops were bemused by their reception. ‘Thousands stood at the entrance to Nablus, waving white handkerchiefs and applauding … we entered the town and were surprised … the population was friendly.'

When an Israeli soldier tried to disarm one of the Palestinians, shooting started. More Israeli tanks arrived later from the west, after they had finally scattered the 40th Armoured Brigade at the Qabatiya crossroads, where fighting had started again at dawn. While the Israeli tanks were manoeuvring, armed Palestinian civilians opened fire. For six hours there was a confused gun battle. Jordanian tanks that had been at the other end of the town got involved. Outside Nablus other Jordanian tanks managed to break out towards the Damiya bridge over the river Jordan, to get to the relative safety of the East Bank. Raymonda Hawa Tawil, a middle-class Palestinian housewife, was in the cellar with her children, who were petrified as explosions and gunfire came closer and grew louder. ‘Mama, what's happening? Mama will we die? What do Jews look like?' Around seven in the evening Tawil heard a voice speak through a loudspeaker. ‘The town has surrendered. We will not harm you if you put up white flags. Anyone who goes outside does so at the risk of his life. The Mayor of Nablus requests you to surrender.' The announcement was in literary Arabic. It reminded Tawil of when, as a child, she heard Israelis making the same sort of announcement when Nazareth surrendered in 1948. King Hussein came on the radio, exhorting them to defend themselves tooth and nail. An old man in the shelter tried to cheer them all up. ‘My false teeth are barely sharp enough to eat a sandwich … bite 'em with your own teeth!' Now, in 1967, fighting and sniping went on into the night.