The woman I stopped to ask directions of in front of the King David Hotel froze when she heard me speak English.
IDF forces in Sinai during the Six Day War.
Photo: Courtesy
"Haven't you left the country yet?" she asked.
When I told her I had arrived only the day before, she relaxed and pointed the way.
It was June 1, 1967, four days before the outbreak of the Six Day War. Foreigners had been streaming out of the country since Egypt began moving its army into Sinai two weeks before, giving Israelis the sense that they were being abandoned to a grim fate. This sense of existential peril would recur again in the decades ahead, but that first encounter would somewhat inure me.
The plane from New York had been half empty. One of the passengers was Mandy Rice-Davies, who had had a role four years before in the Profumo Affair, a sex scandal which brought down Britain's secretary of state for war. She had subsequently married an Israeli nightclub owner and was returning now to her Tel Aviv home. She agreed to talk to a reporter. When I asked whether she was aware that war might be imminent, she said that was the reason she was coming back now. "This is where I should be."
On Sunday, June 4, I called on Reb Amram Blau, the notorious head of the anti-Zionist Natorei Karta, in Jerusalem. He had a beatific face - rosy-cheeked, white-bearded, the expression of an innocent who had reached a venerable age with his strong views uneroded by doubt or earthly calculations. Behind him sat his wife, a formidable French convert to Judaism whose marriage two years before to Reb Amram - 22 years her senior - had rocked the haredi world as much as the Profumo Affair had rocked London. If war broke out, I asked Reb Amram, which side would he want to win, Israel or the Arabs? The rebbetzin leaned forward and whispered into his ear in Yiddish a sensible suggestion of caution. "Whichever side God chooses," he responded.
Little more than 100 meters from his spartan apartment, in the "Hungarian Houses," no-man's-land between Israeli and Jordanian Jerusalem lay somnolent, awaiting the script being written for the morrow.
The sirens that sounded the next morning at eight were followed a few minutes later by six beeps on the radio and an announcer cutting into the regular broadcast. Egyptian armor and aircraft had begun moving toward the border and bitter fighting had broken out, he said. No mention was made of the Israel Air Force, which was at that hour carrying out a devastating preemptive strike on Egyptian air bases.
The Jordanian front was still silent. Salesgirls downtown stood barefoot in display windows fixing tape to the plate glass to prevent shattering. Men slapped blue paint over car headlights, leaving a tiny gap in the center as blackout lights.
Outside Bikur Holim Hospital, a column of high school boys and girls arrived, breathing hard after a forced march from their school. Assigned to fill sandbags and carry stretchers, they sat down on the steps inside the main entrance and waited to be called. A short doctor was directing workers setting up cots in the corridor on the ground floor. His urgent demands for speed seemed excessive to someone stepping in from the tranquil streets. (Twenty-four hours later, the students would be back on the steps, slumped over from exhaustion, their blue school uniforms stained red with the blood of wounded.)
With the outbreak of war with Egypt, prime minister Levi Eshkol sent a message to Jordan's King Hussein via the commander of the UN Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) in Jerusalem saying that Israel had no intention of attacking Jordan. If, however, Jordan intervened, said the message, Israel would fight it with all the means at its disposal.
Hussein feared the war's outcome but was in no position to resist the pressure to join the battle coming from the Arab world and from his own army and largely Palestinian population. The week before he had signed a defense pact with Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and placed his armed forces under the command of an Egyptian general.
About 10 a.m., the sound of distant rifle fire could be heard downtown. Soon after, machine gun fire joined in. The Israeli command still hoped not to be diverted from the battle with Egypt by the opening of another major front. It ordered the Jerusalem Brigade, the home guard defending the capital, to respond in kind to the Jordanian attack - automatic weapon fire for automatic fire, artillery fire for artillery - but not to escalate. The arrival of a handful of Sherman tanks in the Russian Compound off Jaffa Road appeared to be final confirmation that war had come to Jerusalem.
In the old commercial center outside Jaffa Gate, gunfire echoed off the buildings, making it impossible to know from which direction it was coming. The proprietor of a shoe store, the only premises there which had opened this morning despite the siren, beckoned me inside. He seemed at ease and said he was waiting for the shooting to ease off a bit before making his way home to his wife and 11 children. Asked where he had been during World War II, he said "Dachau." As he spoke the name, his eyes reddened and he became agitated. "We've got to stop them now," he said. "The people want this war. We will fight to the last child."
SHORTLY AFTER 11 a.m., the first artillery shells hit. The entranceway I ducked into turned out to be that of City Hall. The mayor, a little-known figure named Teddy Kollek, agreed to see me in his top-floor office. He wore the resigned look of someone who knew that events were out of his hands. The army had just informed him of an intercepted telephone conversation between Nasser and Hussein in which the king was asked to attack Israel in order to ease the pressure on Egypt. "We didn't know if he would do it," said Kollek.
