Dayan joined Narkiss on Mount Scopus overlooking the Old City: ‘What a divine view!’ said Dayan, but he refused to allow any attack. However, at dawn on 7 June, the UN Security Council prepared to order a ceasefire. Menachem Begin called Eshkol to encourage an urgent assault on the Old City. Dayan was suddenly in danger of running out of time. In the War Room, he ordered Rabin to take ‘the most difficult and coveted target of the war’.
First the Israelis bombarded the Augusta Victoria ridge, using napalm; the Jordanians fled. Then Israeli paratroopers took the Mount of Olives and moved down towards the Garden of Gethsemane. ‘We occupy the heights overlooking the Old City,’ the paratroop commander Colonel Motta Gur told his men. ‘In a little while we will enter it. The ancient city of Jerusalem which for generations we have dreamed of and striven for – we’ll be the first to enter it. The Jewish nation is awaiting our victory. Be proud. Good luck!’
At 9.45 a.m., the Israeli Sherman tanks fired at the Lions’ Gate, smashing the bus that was blocking it, and blew open the doors. Under raking Jordanian fire, the Israelis charged the gate.28 The paratroopers broke into the Via Dolorosa, and Colonel Gur led a group on to the Temple Mount. ‘There you are on a half-track after 2 days of fighting with shots still filling the air, and suddenly you enter this wide open space that everyone has seen before in pictures,’ wrote intelligence officer Arik Akhmon, ‘and though I’m not religious, I don’t think there was a man who wasn’t overwhelmed with emotion. Something special had happened.’ There was a skirmish with Jordanian troops before Gur announced over the radio: ‘The Temple Mount is in our hands!’
Meanwhile on Mount Zion, a company of the Jerusalem Brigade burst through a portal in the Zion Gate into the Armenian Quarter, hurtling down the steep hill into the Jewish Quarter, just as soldiers of the same unit broke through the Dung Gate. All headed for the Wall. Back on the Temple Mount, Gur and his paratroopers did not know how to reach it, but an old Arab showed them the Maghrebi Gate and all three companies converged simultaneously on the holy place. Holding his shofar and a Torah, the bearded Rabbi Shlomo Goren, chief chaplain of the Israeli Army, strode to the Wall and began to recite the Kaddish mourning prayer as the soldiers prayed, wept, applauded, danced and some sang the city’s new anthem ‘Jerusalem of Gold’.
At 2.30 p.m., Dayan, flanked by Rabin and Narkiss, entered the city, passing ‘smouldering tanks’, and walking through ‘alleys totally deserted, an eerie silence broken by sniper fire. I remembered my childhood,’ said Rabin, and reported feeling ‘sheer excitement as we got closer’ to the Kotel. As they proceeded across the Temple Mount, Dayan saw an Israeli flag atop the Dome of the Rock and ‘I ordered it removed immediately.’ Rabin was ‘breathless’ as he watched the ‘tangle of rugged battle-weary men, eyes moist with tears’, but ‘it was no time for weeping – a moment of redemption, of hope’.
Rabbi Goren wanted to accelerate the messianic era by dynamiting the mosques on the Temple Mount, but General Narkiss replied: ‘Stop it!’
‘You’ll enter the history books,’ said Rabbi Goren.
‘I’ve already recorded my name in the history of Jerusalem,’ answered Narkiss.
‘This was the peak of my life,’ recalled Rabin. ‘For years I had secretly harboured the dream that I might play a role in restoring the Western Wall to the Jewish people. Now that dream had come true and suddenly I wondered why I of all men should be privileged.’ Rabin was granted the honour of naming the war: always modest and dignified, gruff and laconic, he chose the simplest name: the Six Day War. Nasser had another name for it – al-Naksa, the Reversal.
Dayan wrote a note on a piece of the paper – it read ‘May peace descend on the whole house of Israel’ – which he placed between Herod’s ashlars. He then declared, ‘We’ve reunited the city, the capital of Israel, never to part it again.’ But Dayan – always the Israeli who most respected, and was most respected by, the Arabs, who called him Abu Musa (son of Moses) – continued, ‘To our Arab neighbours, Israel extends the hand of peace and to all peoples of all faiths, we guarantee full freedom of worship. We’ve not come to conquer the holy places of others but to live with others in harmony.’ As he left he plucked ‘some wild cyclamen of a delicate pink mauve sprouting between the Wall and the Maghrebi Gate’ to give to his long-suffering wife.
Dayan thought hard about Jerusalem and created his own policy. Ten days later, he returned to al-Aqsa where, sitting in his socks with the sheikh of the Haram and the ulema, he explained that Jerusalem now belonged to Israel but the Waqf would control the Temple Mount. Even though, after 2,000 years, Jews could now finally visit the Har ha-Bayit, he ruled that they were forbidden to pray there. Dayan’s statesmanlike decision stands today.
President Nasser resigned temporarily but never relinquished power and even forgave his friend Field Marshal Amer. But the latter planned a coup d’état and, after his arrest, died mysteriously in prison. Nasser insisted that ‘Al-Quds can never be relinquished,’ but he never recovered from the defeat, dying of a heart attack three years later. King Hussein later admitted that 5–10 June ‘were the worst days of my life’. He had lost half his territory – and the prize of Jerusalem. Privately, he wept for al-Quds: ‘I cannot accept that Jerusalem is lost in my time.’29
EPILOGUE
Everybody has two cities, his own and Jerusalem.
Teddy Kollek, interview
Through a historical catastrophe, the destruction of Jerusalem by the emperor of Rome – I was born in one of the cities of the Diaspora. But I always deemed myself a child of Jerusalem.
S. Y. Agnon, Nobel Prize acceptance speech 1966
The Jerusalem I was raised to love was the terrestrial gateway to the divine world where Jewish, Christian and Muslim prophets, men of vision and a sense of humanity, met – if only in the imagination.
Sari Nusseibeh, Once Upon a Country
O Jerusalem, fragrant with prophets
The shortest path between heaven and earth …
A beautiful child with burned fingers and downcast eyes …
O Jerusalem, city of sorrow,
A tear lingering in your eye …
Who will wash your bloody walls?
O Jerusalem, my beloved
Tomorrow the lemon-trees will blossom; the olive-trees rejoice; your eyes will dance; and the doves fly back to your sacred towers.
Nizar Qabbani, Jerusalem
The Jewish people were buildingin Jerusalem 3,000 years ago and the Jewish people are buildingin Jerusalem today. Jerusalem’s not a settlement. It is our capital.
Binyamin Netanyahu, speech, 2010
Once again the centre of international storms. Neither Athens nor Rome aroused so many passions. When a Jew visits Jerusalem for the first time, it’s not the first time, it’s a homecoming.
Elie Wiesel, open letter to Barack Obama, 2010
MORNING IN JERUSALEM: FROM THEN UNTIL NOW
The conquest transformed, elevated and complicated Jerusalem in a flash of revelation that was simultaneously messianic and apocalyptic, strategic and nationalistic. And this new vision itself altered Israel, the Palestinians and the Middle East. A decision that had been taken in panic, a conquest that was never planned, a military victory stolen from the edge of catastrophe, changed those who believed, those who believed nothing and those who craved to believe in something.