Excerpts from
Sabra
The Story of the Men and Women
behind the guns of Israel

The First Day

Shortly before dawn on Monday, June 5, 1967, Egyptian shells hurtled out of the Gaza Strip into the Negev kibbutz of Nahal Oz, setting wheat fields on fire. Border settlements near the Strip, like those huddled beneath the Syrian mountain fortresses, had been under constant harassment for nineteen years.

But this Monday was different. An Israeli fighter pilot named Major Avihu, sleeping somewhat restlessly in his modest stone cottage at an air base south of Tel Aviv, was awakened by a pounding on the door.

Avihu, a sturdily-built sabra of twenty-eight, had been expecting the summons: "The closing of the Tiran Strait meant we'd have war. As an Arab, Nasser couldn't possibly back down; and he had left himself no loophole. We for our part couldn't accept being choked; and no one else was prepared to be killed for us."

...

His target was Fayid, an Egyptian MIG and bomber base on the Suez Canal. He had been flying due south over the desert for about two minutes when he found himself hemmed in by a sudden thick bank of clouds. An effective bombing run required a climb to the neighborhood of five thousand feet, followed by a steep dive.

Then, like the Red Sea 180 miles away, the clouds parted. Avihu, followed by two other Mystères, shot up rapidly to six thousand feet. At 7:45 a.m., he was over the target, dead on course. "We saw a number of MIG-21's taxiing to the runway to take off, but not a single enemy plane got into the air."

After three more passes, Major Avihu and his formation broke off smartly eastward. Behind them lay useless, crater-strewn runways and eighteen shattered Egyptian planes. Ghostly-swift MIG-21's sprawled gracelessly on their sides, smoke spiraling up from their shredded wings. Giant, bulbous-nosed Tupolev bombers were pinned to the ground like squashed insects.

...

Huddled over the incoming messages at Air Force Headquarters in Tel Aviv were the man who created the nation's air arm, Brigadier General Ezer Weizmann, and his protegé-successor, Brigadier Hod. The two airmen had insisted that effective protection of Israel lay in the skies "over Cairo, not over Tel Aviv." An all-out smash would be over before the enemy discovered what it was all about. It would take the Egyptians an hour to figure out the scope of the strike; the Syrians and Jordanians would need two hours. In this detail they were wrong. It was fully four hours before the Arabs could organize a response, and by that time the back of their air power had been broken.

Weizmann's unique training ritrual had paid off, "We send up every trainee one night between nine and ten o'clock, tell him not to look down until he's at forty thousand feet."

"Then what does he see? The whole of Israel a pearly blaze, humming with life, and around it the Arab states in glum darkness, with only here and there the barest glimmer of a light. When he sees that, he becomes a Jewish pilot."

The Second Day

Eleven months of the year, Noah stands like a young oak in the flat fields of the Jordan Basin. Deeply burned by countless hours under the Galilee sun, he has a thick powerful neck, horny farmer's hands, and sapphire-blue eyes of a Technicolor brilliance. An inch or so under six feet, he seems bigger, filling the space around him. Some of this impression may come from his massive shoulders; but the aura of strength that flows from him is more than a matter of physical dimensions. In tattered sneakers, faded blue dungarees and half-open work shirt, he manages to convey a serene, almost majestic presence. As an officer, Captain Noah could be a colonel in anybody's army.

At the core of Noah's world are land and family. For nearly all Israelis, love of land means a personal affection for every struggling pine, every barren sun-stabbed mountaintop; for the ceaseless thrust of white-capped waves at Tel Aviv, and the shimmering fairy-tale towers of Old Jerusalem. Above all, it means Jerusalem.

Ammunition Hill, topmost in a series of Jordanian strongholds ringing Jerusalem from the north, was the key to the capital. Below the hill, Noah and his men crouched by a low wall while a demolition crew slashed with wire-cutters and probed the ground for mines. Finally a flashlight signaled that an opening path to the enemy trenches had been cut. Noah streaked forward with a long line of paratroopers strung out behind him.

Noah shouted a curt warning, "Watch out, comrades, this is no training exercise!", and jumped down into the eastern end of the first trench. He emptied his Uzzi along the length of the dug-out corridor, then flattened himself against the wall to reload.

A Jordanian emerged, rifle blazing. Uzzis spat back at close range. Within seconds the narrow trench was clogged with dead and wounded.

Soon they were on the lower slopes of Ammunition Hill, in a labyrinth of zigzagging trenches and thickly-shielded concrete bunkers, flowing upward to artillery emplacements and an underground headquarters at the top. The enemy was revealed only in flashes of fire from the squarish pillboxes above them.

Noah decided the biggest bunker could be silenced only by close-range demolition. He turned to Shalom David, a wiry twenty-five-year-old electrician. Shalom clambered up and sprinted toward the bunker, flinging himself across the roof. Three sacks of TNT sailed up from the paratroopers in the trench. Shalom blasted the entire casement from its moorings.

...

Dawn broke at 4:37 a.m., crisp and eucalyptus-scented. But on the stubbly, bullet-shattered hill there was only mopping up. A force of some 200 Jordanians, the pick of Hussein's army, had been destroyed; many of their 67 dead were buried where they had fallen, under a crudely lettered marker bearing tribute from the victors to a courageous foe.

Israel had paid heavily; 36 dead, hundreds wounded.

The Third Day

On medieval maps the Old City of Jerusalem glows red, center of the world. For Jews, it has never relinquished that status. Jerusalem is so old that its very name is lost in antiquity; so rich in mystic overtones that it has nourished the legends of three great religions. It is pre-eminently a mood, an atmosphere compounded of memories, dreams and aspirations. Something in the rare, dry air, the tawny golden stones, the inverted-custard hills with their ancient terraces carved out by farmers long, long dead, pushes judgment aside in favor of feeling; slows the pulse and quickens the senses.

The heart of Jerusalem is the Old City, seized by Jordan in 1948. Less than a mile square in area, it is enclosed by a jagged rectangle of Turkish battlements thirty-eight feet high and ten feet thick. Inside is an incredible jumble of mosques and monasteries, long cool tunnels lined with medieval shops, squat iron doors with Crusader markings. Donkeys, lineal descendants of the biblical originals, still crowd the narrow alleys.

Below Damascus Gate, coppersmiths beat out shining platters, leather craftsmen cut sandals to patterns first laid down in the Roman forum. Everything is for sale here, from sheep to nuts.

Yet it is the religious image that still dominates Jerusalem, notably the steep, twisting Via Dolorosa. Of rival significance is the Temple Mount in the southeast corner, where Solomon built his temple. Here, from the same rock where Abraham prepared to slay Isaac, Moslem tradition says Mohammed was borne to heaven on a winged mare.

Jerusalem reverberates to holy sounds. But in the spring of 1967, the Jewish voices had for nineteen years been stilled. Nowhere on the horizon was there anything to suggest that history had a dramatic reversal up her sleeve,or the kind of commander who could carry it out.

On June 7 Mota Gur, existentialist philosopher, spinner of children's tales and legendary paratroop commander, battered his way through St. Stephen's Gate and led his three battalions to the Wailing Wall.

The Sixth Day

Three days later, overriding the concerns of Moshe Dayan, Israeli riflemen stormed the gargantuan Syrian strongholds on the Golan Heights, a feat appraised the American military authority General S.L.A. Marshall as "transcending technical explanation and mortal understanding."

As the Syrian front collapsed, Mota Gur's paratroopers, wide gaps in their ranks for the hundreds fallen at Jerusalem, gathered at the Temple Mount for a ceremonial parade; in a tiny country where every loss is deeply felt, a parade, as Gur's female aide Karni Bilu put it, "of the living and the dead."

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