|
The third day: A personal account
By Abraham Rabinovich
Veteran 'Jerusalem Post' reporter Abraham Rabinovich recalls
the day he walked past deserted Israeli and Jordanian checkpoints
to enter the Old City for the first time. Jerusalem Post staff
writer Abraham Rabinovich is author of The Battle for Jerusalem
(Jewish Publication Society).
A banshee wail startled me out of deep sleep and it took
several seconds before I registered that I was lying on a
grassy slope, that I was in Jerusalem and that there was a
war on.
It was mid-morning of Wednesday, June 7, 1967, two days into
the Six Day War. I had arrived from the US a week before to
cover the crisis for an American newspaper. Since the shooting
began I had been spending most of my time in border neighborhoods
absorbing the awesome sights and sounds of war. I could see
the impact of shells in that virtual Jerusalem, at once tangible
and unreal, just across the way. In a strange acoustical phenomenon,
the sound of explosions reverberated around the hills cupping
the city, seeming to roll round and round and grow louder
and louder until they died in a climactic thunderclap.
At night, a huge projector beam from the roof of the Histadrut
building on Straus Street periodically swept across the landscape,
pinpointing targets for artillery spotters. At first there
would be only brief spurts of light but when Jordanian artillery
failed to fire at the projector it would hold a target for
long minutes. The white cone seemed like a theatrical spotlight
on an enormous opera stage. Sometimes, when something erupted
in its center, it was like a divine finger of retribution.
The war had its own rhythm. The noise of explosions and gunfire
was deafening. But often the city was still enough to hear
the distant barking of a dog or the sound of an electric transformer
that one would ordinarily not hear on the street. Jerusalem
has never been as silent as it was during these battle lulls.
At night, darkness was virtually total. Emerging from the
blacked-out premises of The Jerusalem Post, then off Zion
Square, where I was given access to a typewriter, I had to
feel my way with hands and toes in order to reach the censor's
office in the Russian Compound two blocks away. From there
I would feel my way to the telex office in the main post office
to send my stories abroad.
The streets seemed totally empty. I was startled one night
to see a car slowly approaching without lights near the border.
It stopped alongside me and the driver asked directions. There
were two helmeted soldiers inside. They had apparently driven
a wounded comrade to hospital in the Jordanian car that they
had expropriated and were trying to find their way back to
the crossing point. I identified myself as a reporter and
asked them to take me with them but they refused.
Residents of the border areas were trapped in their homes
for the two days of the battle, sometimes less than 100 meters
from Jordanian positions. The Jordanians maintained heavy
artillery and mortar fire on the border area to break up any
Israeli attack that might be forming. (Mortars would inflict
heavy casualties on a paratroop battalion waiting in the alleys
of the Beit Yisrael quarter to cross no-man's-land opposite
the American Colony Hotel.)
Border residents, mostly at the lower end of the socio-economic
scale, bore their fate with remarkable fortitude. Virtually
all young and middle-aged men had been mobilized, leaving
womenfolk, children and the elderly. The din of battle was
all around them and it did not take an overactive mind to
imagine Arab soldiers bursting through the door. I visited
many of these houses and nowhere encountered panic. The residents
assembled on the ground floor of their buildings as instructed
by civil defense wardens before the war and formed a commune
for the duration, cooking together and sharing care of the
children. In one basement, I found the residents sitting in
a circle, most with children on their laps, taking turns telling
stories.
ABOUT 3 a.m. on the first night, I was on Shivtei Yisrael
Street when a heavy barrage suddenly began to descend. Colonel
Mordechai Gur's paratroop brigade had begun its attack on
the northern end of the Jordanian line between the American
Colony Hotel and Ammunition Hill, and the Jordanians were
shelling with everything they had all along the border.
Shaken by the intensity of the blasts, I ducked into a building
and found an empty lobby which had too many windows to offer
a sense of security. Hearing voices behind a door I knocked
and was invited in. The room was totally dark but hands guided
me to a place where I could sit. They had gathered there,
a voice said, because it was an inside room with no windows.
Someone said they numbered nine but I could not see anyone.
I could hear children but all the voices were calm.
The room was stifling hot. They sat in darkness, a voice
explained, because the electricity was off and candles would
raise the temperature. Someone offered me water. I never saw
the people I spent that hour with. When I emerged from the
building, dawn was beginning to light the sky. All the cars
on the street were sitting on tires flattened by shrapnel
and the cars themselves looked like pincushions. The pungent
smell of gas hung heavily in the air from holed canisters
of cooking gas. Tree limbs and utility wires covered the street.
Overhead, tracers from the Jordanian lines sailed prettily
towards the center of the Israeli side of the city.
From a balcony in Musrara on the second night of the war,
I could hear a great rumbling sound from beyond the Mount
of Olives where the air force was attacking a Jordanian tank
column. Fire raged through part of Augusta Victoria on the
Mount of Olives and through a Jordanian army barracks at its
foot. The flames seemed to form the outline of a great truncated
cross burning silently over Jerusalem.
I had snatched only a few hours of sleep during the two days
and by Wednesday morning was exhausted. Passing through Independence
Park, I lay down and promptly fell asleep. The Jordanian shelling
had stopped but the overhead wail woke me after only a short
nap. The sound was traveling from north to south but there
was no plane visible. I would later be told that it was a
new type of mortar shell being used to support the Jerusalem
Brigade as it prepared to move south to conquer the Hebron
hills.
With the adrenalin pumping once more, I stopped in at the
Post where I found Charlie Weiss, the chief copy editor, alone
in the newsroom. He said that Israeli troops were reported
to have captured the Old City. I suggested we try to get over.
We walked to the Mandelbaum Gate crossing point, used by diplomats
and pilgrims, hoping to talk our way through the border guards.
To our astonishment, the border checkpost was empty.
We walked into a door on the Israeli side and emerged at
the other end into no-man's-land. Crossing through the Jordanian
checkpost opposite, likewise empty, we began walking south
towards the Old City. It was eerie to find ourselves in the
streets of the Jordanian city but periodic encounters with
members of the paratroop brigade were reassuring. Near Damascus
Gate was a burned-out Jordanian army vehicle with a helmeted
corpse sitting in it upright.
Approaching Lions' Gate, we passed a smoldering bus and then
stepped over the wooden gate itself, which had been felled
by paratroop commander Motta Gur's halftrack only four hours
before when he smashed into the walled city. When we reached
the Temple Mount, Weiss continued on to the Western Wall but
I decided to linger on the mount.
The scene was monumental. Long lines of Arabs, hands raised,
were silhouetted against the sky as they moved across the
platform of the Dome of the Rock guarded by helmeted paratroopers
cradling Uzis. The prisoners, all in civilian clothing, were
ordered to kneel in a line facing a stone wall. They were
told to keep hands on their heads until they were called for
interrogation. Some were older men, but young men with military
bearing could be seen stiff-backed among the rest. The Jordanian
soldiers who had remained in the Old City the night before
had swapped their uniforms for civilian clothing. Several
of the prisoners were identified as soldiers by dog-tags or
compass straps which they had retained.
When one prisoner put his hands down, a paratrooper barked
at him to get them back up and motioned with his Uzi. A swarthy
sergeant-major commanding the guard detail cautioned his men.
'They're prisoners but they're also human beings.' The Arabs
seemed stunned by the display of might casually bristling
about them. Most Jordanians had believed that the Jordanian
army would be in Tel Aviv within two days. The debacle was
as incomprehensible to them as it was humiliating.
One of the prisoners slumped against a tree with his eyes
closed as if hoping the scene would disappear when he opened
them. As a plane roared overhead, tears began to flow through
his closed lids and his hands trembled. 'They're afraid,'
a young soldier watching alongside me said, 'but we won't
harm them.'
The paratroopers were bronzed and unshaven and many wore
captured Arab keffiyehs on their heads or around their necks.
A group of officers surrounded by the antennae of their radio
men watched planes circling beyond the Mount of Olives and
darting down above the Jericho road. The compound was filling
with supply vehicles, including a mobilized Tnuva milk truck
laden with military equipment. Some soldiers climbed into
the cabs of the vehicles to sleep. Across the mount a cheer
went up from soldiers gathered around an officer who had just
finished addressing them.
AT THE northern edge of the mount I came on a dozen soldiers
poking through Jordanian army storerooms filled with crates
of weapons and ammunition. They finally found what they wanted,
boxes of soda pop. As they sat drinking on the terrace outside,
they fell into easy conversation.
'They can have all the rest back,' said one when I asked
what he expected to happen now, 'but not our holy city.'
Despite the bewildering speed of events, the soldiers had
obviously given thought to the political implications of the
battle. Some said Israel must keep all or part of the territory
captured on other fronts. Only one advocated returning everything,
including Jerusalem. In this offhand discussion on the Temple
Mount before the last shots were fired, all the major positions
that would occupy the Israeli political scene in the ensuing
three decades were outlined.
The sun was already low when I left the emotion- drenched
alleys in front of the Western Wall and headed out of the
Old City through Dung Gate, attaching myself to a platoon
of Jerusalem Brigade snipers. The village of Silwan across
the valley had not yet been combed and the platoon commander
ordered his men to keep their eyes on its windows.
The stone houses, all of them flying white flags, seemed
to meld into the hillside in the incredibly golden light.
Beyond was the great purple cleft of the Jordan Valley. As
we climbed the rear slope of Mount Zion we passed groups of
soldiers crowded around transistor radios. Cheers marked announcements
of the war's progress.
Soldiers of the Southern Command were already at the Suez
Canal and armored unit had reached the Jordan River at Jericho.
One company sat in a circle singing Hassidic songs. At the
top of the hill the Israeli side of the city came into view.
It was almost dark now and for the first time since the war
began the lights were on in Jerusalem.
Friday, June 6, 1997
---------------------------------------------------------
« JPost Front Page
| Other
JPost publications »
|
