The JPost - Six Day War Special

"They were a different lot back then..."

Josh Wander interviews Jerusalem Post art editor and political cartoonist Meir Ronnen about his recollections from the Six Day War

1967 - I rushed back from an assignment in the United States to Jerusalem in order to join my unit of the Jerusalem Brigade. At the secret Camp Stone in the Katamon section of the city. I remember being stunned when we were issued with brand new uniforms, brand new mess tins and Uzi sub machine guns. I sensed then that war was imminent.

Sergeant Haim Barkai, who was a economics professor at Jerusalem's Hebrew University (and later became the dean of the department) asked my colonel to enlist three volunteers from his department and the colonel, Nechemia Oz, then asked me to train and integrate Barkai's fellow faculty members into the unit. I was told to train them how to use every weapon we had, including the .30 cal. Brownings. All of the trio were married with children.

A week or so later we heard the code word "sadin adom" or "red sheet" on our radios and knew the war had begun. We were bussed to Sanhedria, and after advancing through its cemetery, entered a trench system below Ammunition Hill, a heavily fortified Jordanian poisition. Before we could get settled, the Jordanians opened fire. Within the first half an hour of the war, two of my three trainees were killed.

The strange thing is that even today I cannot remember how either of them looked. It is as if, as they were killed, my memory of them was wiped out...

Early the next morning, near the end of the battle at Ammunition Hill I rose out of my trench to watch some paratroopers placing satchel charges on the last Jordanian bunker directly in front of me. The Jordanians at once fired at me, their tracers passing just above my head. I was impressed they were fighting us to the bitter end. Later that morning, we buried the Jordanians in one of their trenches. I took a black marker that I kept in my pocket for drawing cartoons and wrote on the cover of a Jordanian log book, "Defence Army of Israel - Here lie buried 17 brave Jordanian soldiers". I used a dead soldier's shoe laces to attach it to a rifle and planted it in the ground on top of the grave... King Hussein of Jordan was later to write about this grave marker as a acknowledgment of the bravery of his troops.

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Don't know much about history

The Golan capture

Happy (?) Jerusalem Day

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Six Day War
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Avihu Bin-Nun:
First Strike

A defender of Jerusalem

Ori Orr: Bloody
Gaza

Yossi Ronnen:
Live from the Western Wall