Warriors for Jerusalem : the six days that changed the Middle East by Donald Neff

Author:Donald Neff [Neff, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 978-0671454852
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

_______XVII_______

JUNE 7: THE CAPTURE OF JERUSALEM

It was 4 a.m. Wednesday in Washington when the age-old dream of Jews was realized. At that hour the Old City of Jerusalem was captured by Israeli troops. For the first time since 135 a.d., Jerusalem, ancient, golden Jerusalem, the City of David, the city of peace, the city that Jews for centuries had expressed their longing to return to “next year,” was at last in the hands of the Jews.

The end had come suddenly and, in terms of the profligate slaughter of past battles, almost bloodlessly. The Old City with its forty thousand Arab residents had been completely surrounded since the previous evening. Only a few stragglers remained from the small contingent of Jordanian soldiers who had been there; the rest had slipped away during the night undetected by the Israeli forces. The Moslem notables of the Old City had already decided that they would not, could not, resist an Israeli attack. They were prepared to surrender the fabled city to spare its civilian population and its precious shrines.

Shortly before 10 a.m. local time, on the third day of the war, the halftrack vehicle of Colonel Mordechai (“Motta”) Gur, commander of the Fifty-fifth Paratrooper Brigade, burst through the shattered heavy doors of St. Stephen’s Gate, also known as Lion’s Gate, in the crenellated eastern wall of the Old City and entered the Via Dolorosa. The Temple Mount was only a short distance away.

Gur and his group sped toward it, the tracks of their vehicle skidding and setting off sparks on the ancient stone streets. Except for minor sniper fire, they reached without incident the Temple Mount with its magnificent Dome of the Rock, the golden octagonal mosque built by the Ommayad Caliph Abdel Malek between 687 and 691. For more than a thousand years it had served as a holy place of Islam. Briefly, during the Crusades, it was converted into a Christian church, Templum Domini. Now the blue-and-white Star of David, Israel’s flag, the banner of the modern Jewish state, was about to flutter from it.

At 10 a.m., Motta Gur exultantly radioed the Israeli Central Command and announced: “Temple Mount is in our hands. Temple Mount is ours. Temple Mount is ours!”

It was an awesome moment of rapturous emotion for the Israeli troopers. They quickly descended to the Western Wall, the Wailing Wall where no Jew had been permitted to pray for the past nineteen years, and kissed and caressed the great Herodian slabs of golden Jerusalem limestone that made up its base. Here in these huge ashlars was the last remnant of the Second Temple, the last temple of the Jewish people. It had been constructed millennia earlier, destroyed in 70 a.d. and then the site was briefly recaptured in 134 a.d. by the Jewish warrior Bar Kochba. Since then it had been controlled by Rome, Christians and, mainly, Moslems. Now for the first time in 1,833 years it was back in Jewish hands.

Within minutes the small area in front of the

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