“Go ahead, the place is yours.”
“Thanks. You don’t by chance know anything about Kishote?”
“His brigade has been smashing up the Egyptian armor in Sinai. He’s a big hero, he dashed clear to El Arish on Monday afternoon with one battalion. He may be at the Canal by now.”
Yael is slumped over the coffee cup. She sits up straight at this. “So! Well, that’s Yossi’s business, battle. It’s always been.”
“He’ll be a general, Yael. If he lasts and steadies down, he could be on the short list for Ramatkhal. Sure you want to divorce him?”
“He doesn’t love me, Sam. But my God, I hope he’s all right.”
“So do I. They’ve had hard fighting and taken heavy casualties, so I don’t know.” Pasternak bends and kisses her. “Here’s a key. This is like the old days. Sort of.”
“Sort of.” She caresses his cheek lightly, her face weary and worried.
***
Pasternak’s driver speeds him through blacked-out empty streets to a hotel near the Kirya. Eshkol is in shirt sleeves, eating a chicken leg and drinking tea in a fog of pipe smoke. A plate of cold meats lies on the table beside a heavily marked up aerial photo-map of Jerusalem. Yigal Yadin is smoking the pipe, and Yigal Allon is beside him, both studying the map.
The two eminent Yigals are in eclipse. A short week ago Allon and Dayan were neck and neck for Defense Minister, after Yadin declined the post. Eshkol wanted Allon, a favorite of his from Palmakh days. Murky backroom Labor Party politics, and the sudden public clamor for Dayan, tipped the balance. Now Allon and Yadin—and for that matter, Eshkol and Rabin—are all lost in the effulgence of Moshe Dayan, who has unmistakably sparked the country into a blaze of confident fighting spirit.
“Eat something,” Eshkol says to Pasternak.
“No, thank you, Prime Minister.”
“You’re making a mistake. Food keeps you going. What’s the word from the UN? How much time have we got left?”
“The Security Council is still talking and talking. They’ll stay in session until Abba Eban gets there.”
“When is his plane due in New York? Midnight, their time?”
“Maybe before. Gideon Rafael says they could vote on the cease-fire right after he talks. But Zev Barak thinks Washington will stall while President Johnson weighs the reaction to Eban’s speech. A UN session has never had such a huge TV audience. All over the world, Zev says! So if Rafael is right we may have no more than twelve hours. If Barak is right, another day, maybe two.”
“Assuming Nasser accepts the cease-fire,” says Allon, “once it’s voted.”
“If he really believes what Radio Cairo is broadcasting,” says Yadin, “why should he accept, when he’s trouncing us? It may be his generals don’t dare tell him what’s happening in the field.”
“How much longer can that go on?” Pasternak says.
“Rabotai [Gentlemen], I want to decide one thing here and now.” Eshkol lays aside the leg bone and takes a bite of a chicken breast. “I meet with the cabinet at five this morning to discuss this one issue. Do we or don’t we order Motta’s paratroops into the Old City?”
Allon raps a forefinger on the map. “What’s the question? He’ll relieve Mount Scopus at first light. That’s laid on. After that there’s no stopping him.”
“Dayan is against it,” says the Prime Minister. “He argues that house-to-house fighting will be costly, and if we damage the holy places the whole world will turn against us, and right now we have some sympathy for once.”
“That is a point,” says Yadin.
Eshkol continues. “And Moshe claims going in is unnecessary, anyway. We’ll have the Old City surrounded. White flags will be hanging out of every house. Bloodless surrender.” Eshkol turns on Allon. “Is he right?”
“Right about what? About surrounding the Old City? Yes. The Jordanian armor on the West Bank is smashed. The air force will interdict any reenforcements from across the river. Just snipers and isolated units are left.” Allon speaks with crisp martial authority. “Ben Ari and Amitai will close the ring north and south, Motta will take the Scopus ridge, and the white flags will be coming out, no question. About sending Motta inside to the Temple Mount, to the Wall—well, that’s a question of high policy, of diplomacy, maybe of religion. Maybe even of archaeology! Militarily it can be done. Beyond that, I defer to our archaeologist.”
Yadin wryly laughs. He has left the army after serving as Ramatkhal, to pursue his academic career. Except as a senior adviser to Prime Ministers, he has played no military role since.
“Prime Minister, Motta made a night attack that left the air force out of the equation,” he says, “just to spare the holy places. That was well done, but we paid a very steep price. Ammunition Hill was a terrible fight, but our boys were lions and now it’s ours. If the Jordanians were still there at the cease-fire, the UN would surely rule that Jerusalem remains divided on the grounds that Ammunition Hill commands the Old City. But I say the city will remain divided, Prime Minister, even with our tanks on Ammunition Hill and white flags flying on every house inside those walls, so long as Jewish feet are not on the Temple Mount.”
“And what will be the losses? The cost of going in?”
Yadin glances at Allon, and puffs at his pipe.
“Light losses,” says Allon. “If not for the problem of the holy places, we could call for air support and smash in with almost no losses.”
“I foresee a world outcry if we go in,” says Yadin, “even if every stone of the holy places is untouched. The Pope for one can’t tolerate Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem. Not until the Second Coming, when—as that previous Pope told Herzl—he’ll be glad to baptize us all and welcome us back to Zion. Moshe may be right about the house-to-house fighting. Securing that maze of narrow streets could be bloody.”
“Shapira says”—Eshkol is referring to the head of the Religious Party—“that it might be better not to capture the Old City. Just go on praying for it. The Messiah isn’t here to lead us in, but once we’ve taken the Temple Mount we can never give it up.”
“Shapira and the Pope aren’t all that far apart,” observes Allon. “Interesting.”
“But speaking now as an archaeologist,” says Yadin, “I find it inconceivable that a Jewish army should stand at the gates of Jerusalem, capable of marching in and restoring it to the Jewish nation after two thousand years, and should hold back. For any reason whatever!”
Eshkol looks at Pasternak. Behind the Prime Minister’s head, the window is turning indigo with the first hint of dawn. “Sam?”
“Akh’shav, oh l’olam lo!” (“Now or never!”) Sam Pasternak bites out the Hebrew words like gunshots. “Akh’shav, oh l’olam lo! In the next twelve hours, Prime Minister, or maybe not for another two thousand years.”
Eshkol stands up, wiping his hands and mouth with a napkin. “I will overrule Moshe Dayan.”
41
The Day of the Lord
Colonel Motta Gur, drinking hot tea on the roof of the Rockefeller Museum in the red rays of sunrise, is startled to see coming up through the trapdoor the head of nobody but his old friend Yossi Nitzan, pale and bloodily bandaged.
“Kishote, to all the devils!” Gur leaps to help him off the steep iron ladder, while his staff officers stare. “Last I heard you were down in Sinai, seizing El Arish single-handed.”
Panting and dizzy from the fast climb up the winding stairs of the tower, Yossi adopts Gur’s joshing tone. “Well, Motta, I have this stupid driver, he took a wrong turn, and here I am.”
“I see. Happens to me all the time.” Gur indicates the bandages. “Bad, Yossi?”
“Nothing much. I’m not about to lie in a bed in Tel Hashomer, my friend, while you capture the Old City single-handed.”
Gur’s tough moon face sobers. “If they’ll give me the order.”
“Is there a question? Thank you.” A girl soldier, round-eyed, hands Kishote a steaming cup. “Good God, what a panorama!” I
t is his first glimpse of this all-around view of Old Jerusalem and its hills, bounded to the east by the high ridge from Mount Scopus to the Mount of Olives under a dazzling low sun, and on this side by the amazingly close Old City wall, which until now he has viewed only across the broad valley of no-man’s-land.
“You’ve never been up here?”
“Motta, I came off the boat in 1948, straight to Latrun.”
“Of course. Well, during the Mandate, they would bring us Jerusalem schoolkids up here. Also to the Mount of Olives. Now that’s a view, and that’s my mission this morning, to advance to the Mount of Olives, clear the ridge, and close the ring.”
An aide, holding out a microphone: “Colonel! Central Command, about the air strike.”
“Stick with my command group, Yossi, we’re about to move to a better spot. And stand back from that side. Jordanian snipers are thick along the wall.”
“B’seder.”
More lightheaded than he wants to admit, Kishote steadies himself on the parapet. Sporadic gunfire crackles below. Half a dozen officers in webbed helmets and battle harness are on the roof, some scanning the scene with binoculars, others chattering on walkie-talkies. Like Gorodish, Gur is bareheaded; a mark, or affectation, of brigade command. Big, broad-shouldered, ambitious, Motta is a guy to liberate Jerusalem, Yossi thinks, watching him talk calmly to Central Command, his curly hair stirring in the breeze. Luck goes with Motta. What a difference between the wide-ranging desert fighting in Sinai, and combat in this hilly little bowl of a battlefield! At staff and command college he once played out the recapture of Jerusalem with Motta Gur and other officers, a war game in hundreds of meters, where the Sinai simulations were in hundreds of kilometers.
Yossi has observed evidence of the price paid for Old Jerusalem so far, as he was driving in the dawn through no-man’s-land past sappers clearing mines under sniper fire, and then into eerily quiet East Jerusalem streets he has never seen before, barred as they have been to Jews since 1948. Burned-out tanks, overturned vehicles, many dead Jordanians in khaki; many Zahal boys must have died, too, but their bodies were removed immediately, an iron rule. The smells of burning and death everywhere all tell of fierce struggle.
Here, however, there is no trace of the giant sullen Russian backer of the Arabs. The ruined Jordan tanks are Shermans and Pattons. The broken vehicles are Land Rovers, Mack trucks, and jeeps. And here are no wide wastes of sand, stretching to the horizon. Here around the museum roof all is close, green, built-up, beautiful, the Arab villages snugged against the hills nearby, and Jewish New Jerusalem gleaming off to the west. Directly below, the Old City is open to the eye, but of the Temple Mount just a glint of the golden Omar dome shows above the houses and trees of the Moslem Quarter. Eagerly he takes in the scene, a bit giddy from the wound, and perhaps from happiness.
In the hospital Kishote had awakened to despairing anger at his removal from the Sinai, from Gorodish, Tal, and the tank fighters. But according to the radio that battle is now nearly over. The Sinai is a graveyard of a thousand and more destroyed Egyptian tanks and vehicles. The Egyptians are abandoning their remaining equipment and streaming back across the sands by the thousands toward the Canal, barefoot and fainting from hunger and thirst. Now the crux of the war is here, in the Return to Jerusalem, and if he can’t fight, he can at least see it with his own eyes.
Gur approaches. “Kishote, seriously, are you okay?”
“I’m a hundred percent. Or say ninety. Why?”
“Yaffe’s up at Mount Scopus with my Sixty-sixth Battalion. Communication is rotten, I’m not sure why.” Gur pulls out a pad, and sketches rapidly with a ballpoint pen as he talks. “Now this is very important, Yossi. Look here. The eastern ridge is lined with trenches and heavily mined. The Augusta Victoria Hospital—here—is the pivot—”
“It always has been.”
“Right. Now then.” Gur and Yossi talk in quick jargon, using few words. An air strike, Gur says, will precede the attack on the ridge by two battalions, one coming from Mount Scopus, the other from the valley below the Old City. Unless movements are coordinated and timing exact, planes or artillery may hit Jewish forces, or the tank units may end up shooting at each other, so constricted is the battle zone. Gur does not want to send one of his staff to Mount Scopus, he needs them all. Kishote as liaison with the Scopus battalion can be a help.
“I’ll do it, Motta.”
“Good.” Gur hands him the sketch, a cabalism of arrows, circles, and times. “Show this to Yaffe and explain it. Call me on the command net if there’s confusion. We can’t afford avoidable losses, the breakthrough was enough, it was very hard. Kidding aside, do you have a driver?”
“Yes. The guy who left the hospital with me. A Yerushalmi.”
“Excellent, he’ll know his way around. Guns?”
“Of course.”
“There’ll be sniping all along the road to Scopus. But Dayan went up there yesterday, so it’s passable.”
“I’m going now.”
Gur grips his shoulder. “See you on the Mount of Olives. Ah, there’s a view, Kishote! Keep your head down.”
“Yes, that’s what I forgot in Sinai.” That brings a wry laugh from Gur.
Past silent shut-up Arab houses and markets, the jeep dips into the valley and winds up the steep Scopus road amid cheery birdsong. The sergeant drives one-armed. Yossi sits with his Uzi at the ready. Moshe Dayan has a peculiar tolerance, or even liking, for the whistle of bullets near his head which Don Kishote does not share; and this is the road on which Arabs once ambushed and massacred an entire convoy of doctors and nurses bound for Hadassah Hospital. Sure enough, halfway up, CRACK! A nasty whine far too close, a figure shooting from a graveyard gate. Yossi blasts at it with the Uzi and stone chips fly from the gate. Then silence, and birdsong again.
***
“It can’t be done.” Major Yaffe, the battalion commander on Mount Scopus, slaps at Gur’s sketch in his palm. “Motta must postpone the air strike.”
“For how long?” Kishote inquires.
“Look around you.” Yaffe sweeps an arm at a huge jam of half-tracks, tanks, jeeps, and supply vehicles parked higgledy-piggledy among the high weeds. Most of the soldiers are asleep on the ground or in the machines. “D’you know what these guys have been through? Heard about Ammunition Hill? Tell Motta I can move by ten o’clock, if the rest of Uri’s tanks get here.”
“I will.”
Soon the so-called King of Mount Scopus appears, a hard-bitten little major with a bushy mustache and a gravel voice, who has been up here for years. Long ago Yossi was his platoon commander, and Major Sharfman proudly shows him around his domain, a melancholy enclave of abandoned run-down university and hospital buildings. “Historians will be asking for a thousand years, Kishote, why the Jordanians didn’t try to overrun me and take Mount Scopus. The news would have shaken the world! Shattered Israel’s morale! Maybe decided the war!”
“Menakhem, you’ve been up here too long.”
“I’m serious! Three miserable square kilometers, a hundred guys, the Jordanians surrounding me with tanks, artillery, whole brigades! But you know what? They had intelligence. I’m sure of it. I’ve smuggled an arsenal up here that the UN doesn’t dream of. Ha! We’d have given them a bloody fight. Say, here’s the Magnes Tower. Want to climb it? Best view in the land.”
“This view’s not bad.” Below them the Judean hills slope away steeply eastward, and through a gap in the ridges the Dead Sea glitters blue.
“No comparison.”
Kishote peers up at the tower, named for the first president of Hebrew University. “Judah Magnes. The guy who thought we and the Arabs could coexist in one peaceful Palestine.”
“He was crazy. Not for a thousand years.”
“No, he was right, they just have to be convinced once for all that we’re here to stay. Freeing Jerusalem may do it.”
“Nothing will convince them, not for a thousand years.”
“How abou
t nine hundred seventy years, Menakhem?”
The major looks taken aback, then laughs. “Well, okay. The Arab doves could prevail by then. You see, I’m flexible.”
His walkie-talkie comes to life with a message for Kishote. The air strike will be postponed, but only until nine. Menakhem starts to climb up in the tower. “Best spotter post,” he calls to Yossi as he leaves him, “when the shooting starts.”
***
At a huge blowup of the Jerusalem area Benny Luria is briefing his Bat Squadron, an unshaven tired-looking lot, about the strike. “Now pay attention, pilots. The General Staff is giving me a very hard time. I’ve denied that this squadron has ever bombed or strafed our own forces, but we all know the close call we had at Jebel Libni. Let’s have no such balagan today! This target area is tiny. The opposing forces are meters apart. It’s an exercise in pinpoint attack.”
A hand goes up, and a freckle-faced boyish pilot says in a peevish tone, “Pinpoint with napalm? That’s a contradiction.”
“No, the napalm is limited to the strongpoints in this outlying sector.” Benny traces red outlines on the photograph. “The strafing of the trenches here—in this pine grove along the ridge—is our main job. Now listen carefully.” The pointer sweeps around and over the Old City. “This is a totally forbidden area. Understand? If even one holy place is destroyed or damaged, get ready for a world scandal, also a public general court-martial.”
Luria lays the pointer down, sits on the desk top, and crookedly grins at his airmen.
“Sorry, hevra [comrades], that’s the drill today. Day before yesterday we decided this whole damn war in three hours. Yesterday we smashed the Jordanian tank brigades coming from Jericho, and that made the freeing of Old Jerusalem possible. But memories are short at the General Staff. Today we’re just those crazy aviators who can’t tell Arabs from Jews. So let’s be nice and careful on this sortie, b’seder?”
Innumerable times Benny Luria has overflown the diminutive diamond-shaped Old City, a maze of crooked streets, low houses, and patchy greenery enclosed by thick walls and usually looking almost deserted, except for the Temple Mount, where tiny figures drift in and out of the two grand mosques. But today as he circles before descending, it is a wild scene down there. Israeli mechanized forces crawl on all the approaches, smoke rises from the walls, artillery blinks yellow and red all along the parapets, and there is much running about in the narrow streets and on the wide plaza of the Mount. So much he sees before he dives through a dark veil of smoke billowing from the napalm attack, and commences firing.