Six Days (47 page)

Another cock-a-hoop general was Ezer Weizman, who created the air force that won the war. He had always been open about his belief that Israel had the right to ‘Hebron and Nablus and all of Jerusalem', even though his views were politically incorrect for most of his colleagues who, unlike Weizman, were from the Israeli left. When he was air force commander the straight-talking Weizman used to lecture his subordinates that the Arabs living on the hills of the West Bank saw Israel as a tantalizing stripper of a country, ‘green, flourishing, prosperous, twinkling at night with a mass of lights … And you know what happens to a healthy man when he watches a rousing striptease act? Right, that's exactly what happens to him! Therefore there won't be any choice. The Arab will have to be moved away from Israel's naked borders. It's the only way of knocking these exciting ideas of a masculine conquest of Israel out of his head!'

Jerusalem

Just after the war the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel wrote a story of redemption set around Israel's victory called ‘A Beggar in Jerusalem'. It ends with the beggar, a symbol of exile, standing at the Wailing Wall preaching that victory came from the Jews' own tragedy. The lost communities of Eastern Europe ‘emptied of their Jews, these names severed from their life source, had joined forces and built a safety curtain – an
Amud Esh,
a pillar of fire – around the city which had given them a home. Sighet and Lodz, Vilna and Warsaw, Riga and Bialystock, Drancy and Bratzlav: Jerusalem had once again become the memory of an entire people.

‘“And the dead”, the preacher was saying in a vibrant voice. “The messenger who is alive today, the victor of today, would be wrong to forget the dead. Israel defeated its enemies – do you know why? I'll tell you. Israel won because its army, its people, could deploy six million more names in battle.”'

The novelist Amos Oz, who fought as a paratrooper in the Sinai, was one of the few Israelis who questioned Israel's right to all of Jerusalem. Oz saw the mother of a soldier from his kibbutz who was killed in the fighting for Jerusalem weeping for her dead son. The young man's name was Micha Hyman. One of her neighbours, trying to comfort her, said, ‘Look, after all, we've liberated Jerusalem, he didn't die for nothing.' Mrs Hyman burst out, ‘The whole of the Wailing Wall isn't worth Micha's little finger as far as I'm concerned…' Oz concluded: ‘If what you're telling me is that we fought for our existence, then I'd say it was worth Micha Hyman's little finger. But if you tell me it was the Wall we fought for, then it wasn't worth his little finger. Say what you like – I do have a feeling for those stones – but they're only stones. And Micha was a person. A man. If dynamiting the Wall today would bring Micha back to life, then I'd say blow it up!'

But Oz was in a small minority. Israel's possession of the stones of the Wailing Wall sent shivers up and down the whole country, among the religious, the secular, even the atheists. They all believed the sacrifices of the men who had died fighting for Jerusalem were well worth it. Israel seemed more complete. The historic capital of the Jewish people was in Jewish hands and they planned to keep it that way. ‘Jerusalem is beyond discussion' was the way Yael Dayan and her friends at General Sharon's headquarters put it in the desert, and their view was shared by almost every Israeli. Some suggestions emerged that the holy places in the Old City might be in some sort of international framework, but always under overall Israeli control.

Standing at the Wall, close to its stones, minutes after it was captured, Yoel Herzl felt an emotional connection with Israel for the first time in his life. Until then, he had always felt like an outsider, though he idolised Uzi Narkiss, who was standing not far from him, the general who had given him his chance and made him his adjutant. Herzl was born in Romania, where the Nazis killed his father. In 1947, Herzl and his family decided to escape the new communist regime to get to Palestine. On the first leg of the journey Soviet soldiers opened fire at them as they tried to cross into Hungary. In a confused few minutes in a dark forest the young boy, barely a teenager, was separated from his mother and brothers. The Russians put him in an orphanage. Four years later, the local communist party boss, a Jew who had known his father, took pity on Herzl. He let him join his family who had made it to what had become Israel.

As soon as he could, Herzl joined the IDF. ‘It's hard to understand, a small Jewish boy, always being hit and in the corner, coming to be an officer in your own land.' Herzl decided that no one was going to hit him again. But it was not easy. He never felt accepted by the native-born kibbutzniks who dominated the army. ‘It all came so easily to them. They didn't understand what it was like outside, with no rights and no self-esteem … People like me weren't accepted. They used to laugh at me when I studied at night. I finished high school after I became an officer. Even when I was an officer, I was never accepted in the group. But I didn't care what they said.' But it all changed at the Wall. Herzl felt a rush of emotion. Israel – Jerusalem – felt like a part of him for the first time. ‘People had no heartfelt connection with Jerusalem until they arrived and saw the Wall. From that second Jerusalem took a big part of my heart. I will always be ready to fight for it, not because it was our ancient capital, but because of the way the Jordanians treated it. They tried to destroy our Jewish holy places.'

Many religious Jews believed that the victory was a miracle that had been given to them by God. Hanan Porat, the devout paratrooper who fought at Ammunition Hill with Battalion 66, never forgot the sight of his secular comrades weeping at the Wall a few minutes after they captured it: ‘I had the sense that here in Jerusalem the inner truth of the Jewish nation was revealed. It was a miracle because the truth of the Bible was combined with the truth of life. An electric current ran right through the people of Israel. I'm talking about soldiers in Sinai who jumped off their tanks and danced when they heard or the Jews in Russia or the United States who also felt it. No one imagined how strong it could be. The connection between the pain of losing friends who were killed and the happiness of the return created a critical mass of feelings that had never existed before.' For Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, Porat's teacher and mentor, the Israeli army was doing God's work. ‘The IDF is total sanctity. It represents the rule of the people of the Lord over his land.'

Some Jews looked at their scriptures and deduced that the time of the Messiah was upon them. One rabbi wrote that the war was ‘an astounding divine miracle … through conquest the whole of Israel has been redeemed from oppression, from Satan's camp. It has entered the realm of sanctity.' The gift had strings: ‘If, God forbid, we should return even a tiny strip of land we would thereby give control to the evil forces, to the camp of Satan.' Not all religious Jews agreed. Some believed that the best theological response to the victory would be to make enemies into friends. Gershom Scholem, one of the greatest Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century who pioneered the study of
kabbalah,
Jewish mysticism, warned against the abuse of scripture for political reasons. The upsurge in messianism, he feared, would lead to catastrophe.

But the warnings were ignored. The ‘electric current' that Hanan Porat and his friends felt as they captured the Old City powered the movement of Jewish settlers into occupied land, especially the West Bank. Religious fervour combined with a Zionist imperative to settle new land created one of the most dynamic and powerful political movements in Israel, that opposes the return of even a grain of sand.

Israel's occupation of East Jerusalem matters because it has deepened its conflict with the Palestinians and the wider Islamic world. Once again, there were warnings. Bob Anderson, President Johnson's trusted adviser on Arab attitudes and his go-between with Nasser, told him on 6 July 1967 that Jerusalem had a special significance for Arabs: ‘The Old City of Jerusalem is capable of stirring mobs in the streets to the point where the fate of our most moderate friends in the Middle East will be in jeopardy and the basis laid for a later holy war.' But Israel insisted it had the only legitimate claim to Jerusalem. It came from the ancient Jewish kingdom which had its capital in Jerusalem 2,000 years before and the prayers and dreams of generations of Jews that one day they would return from an exile that started when the Romans destroyed their Temple in
AD
70. But history does not stop. Muslim and Christian claims to Jerusalem had developed in the 1,897 years between the destruction of the Jewish Temple and the Israeli Paratroop Brigade's return to the Temple Mount in 1967, which General Narkiss calculated was the thirty-seventh time that the Old City had been overrun.

Amos Oz felt the strength of the Palestinian link with Jerusalem the day after the war ended, when he arrived there from Al-Arish in his paratrooper's uniform, still carrying his submachine gun. He wrote immediately afterwards that ‘with all my soul, I desired to feel in Jerusalem as a man who has dispossessed his enemies and returned to the patrimony of his ancestors'. But then he saw that for the Arabs it was home. ‘I passed through the streets of East Jerusalem like a man breaking into some forbidden place. Depression filled my soul. City of my birth. City of my dreams. City of my ancestors' and my people's yearnings. And I was condemned to walk through its streets armed with a sub-machine gun like one of the characters from my childhood nightmares.'

After the war the common wisdom in Israel was that the war had been forced on them and they had not sought territory. For some people that became a good enough reason to keep what had been captured. As a soldier called Asher explained: ‘Jerusalem is ours, it's got to be ours and it'll remain ours … Because I conquered it, and because I had every right to do so, because I didn't start the war. Everyone knows Israel didn't want territorial gains. It's a good thing we had the chance, and a good thing that we took Jerusalem and other places. There's every justification for hanging on to it all.'

On 28 June Israel annexed the Jordanian side of Jerusalem, around 6 square kilometres, and 65 square kilometres of the West Bank that had never been part of the city. The extra land belonged to twenty-eight Palestinian villages. Israel euphemistically called the annexation ‘municipal fusion'. The new areas were added to Jerusalem's boundary. They were mainly intended for Jewish settlement. By the end of the century, most of them were built on. Palestinian community leaders who led fierce local protests were banished from Jerusalem. In Washington the State Department disapproved: ‘The over hasty administrative action taken today cannot be regarded as determining the future of the holy places or status of Jerusalem in relation to them. The United States has never recognised such unilateral action by any state in the area as governing the status of Jerusalem.' George Brown, the British foreign secretary, had already warned Remez, the Israeli ambassador in London, that ‘the annexation of the Old City by Israel could never be acceptable to the Arabs and would be likely to block any general settlement … [It] would be both unwise and unjust.' Most countries in the world, including the United States and the countries of the European Union, still do not recognise Israel's claim to East Jerusalem.

Land

When I was reporting on the thirtieth anniversary of the war in Jerusalem in 1997, an Israeli friend sat me down and explained how all the territory captured in the war, except Jerusalem, would have been handed back immediately if the Arabs had accepted Israel's offers of peace. Lots of Israelis share his view. But it is only partly true.

Israel's first breezy assumption was that all it had to do was sit tight and wait for the Arabs to sue for peace. Israelis wanted to believe that their enemies had been taught such a painful lesson that they had no choice other than to accept Israel on its terms. A few voices called for international help to hurry the process along. But no one on either side tried in a serious way to make peace. Shlomo Gazit, who became co-ordinator of Israeli government operations in the territories, believes Israel should have done more. It missed an opportunity ‘as it waited for the Arabs to come begging'.

After only a few weeks, Israelis had a rude awakening. The UN convened an emergency session of the General Assembly on 19 June. Israelis had been overwhelmed by the huge support they had received from the West during the war. But at the UN, according to Michael Hadow, Britain's man in Tel Aviv, they saw that the Arabs ‘seemed capable of getting their second wind: that it was not generally accepted that the vanquished must sue for peace: and that the victors had merely been put on a par with the vanquished in a squabble which the world found dangerous and embarrassing'. Israel responded ‘with a self-righteous stubbornness and a nation-wide hardening of opinion against friend and foe alike'. By August Gideon Rafael, the Israeli ambassador at the UN, was talking about ‘digging in for peace'. Speaking privately to diplomats, he gave the impression ‘that the Israelis seemed to be ready to sit tight for years'. By November the cabinet secretary Ya'acov Herzog told the White House that ‘Israeli leaders are deeply divided over whether they should risk a political settlement, if the right terms can be negotiated, or sit tight on their expanded boundaries and rely for survival on the added military security that they provide.' By the end of the year, according to Hadow, ‘there is virtually unanimous feeling now, not about peace, but about the need to attain maximum security'. The
New York Times
agreed: ‘The overwhelming sentiment of Israeli public favours Israel keeping all the territory acquired during the war … a peace treaty with the Arab countries would not be worth the sacrifice of land and security.' Moshe Dayan said he was waiting for the Arabs to phone him. But as early as 11 June he told the American TV network CBS that Gaza would not be returning to Egypt, nor the West Bank to Jordan.