ELDER OF ZIYON: Yossi Klein HaLevi's Like Dreamers

The New York Times' Ethan Bronner reviews Yossi Klein HaLevi's Like Dreamers. This is from the first link.

Mr. Halevi, an American immigrant who has worked as a journalist and analyst in Jerusalem for 30 years, has created a textured, beautifully written narrative by focusing on seven men — and they are all men — Mr. Porat among them, who served in the paratroop brigade that conquered the Old City of Jerusalem in the 1967 war. The seven took distinct paths, a few becoming settler leaders, others active on the left, and in the arts and music. One sought common cause with Palestinian revolutionaries and, after a trip to Damascus, ended up in an Israeli prison for 12 years. By accompanying these men across the decades we gain a close understanding of many of the country’s internal debates. 

...

[T]he men Mr. Halevi has chosen are compelling. One isArik Achmon, a secular liberal from a kibbutz who helped transform Israel’s failing statist economy into a thriving capitalist one. Mr. Achmon helped found the first private domestic airline in Israel. The story of how he stood down the once-powerful Histadrut trade union federation to keep his company alive illustrates the enormous changes that Israeli society has undergone in the past three decades. A second character, Avital Geva, one of the country’s leading conceptual artists who represented Israel in the 1993 Venice Biennale with a fully functioning kibbutz greenhouse, also illustrates a crucial sector of a dynamic society.

But the story’s real strength derives from Mr. Halevi’s portraits of three settler leaders: Mr. Porat, Yoel Bin-Nun and Yisrael Harel. Their movement has been central to contemporary Israel, yet little understood abroad. Settlers are mostly portrayed as two-dimensional caricatures. Their actions violate the world’s hope for a Palestinian state on the land they are taking, and their ideology does not lend itself easily to rational discourse. It is hard to know how to negotiate with someone like Mr. Bin-Nun who, as described in the book, believed that the “Torah was a blueprint for God’s relationship with a holy nation living in a holy land,” or with Mr. Porat, who saw “no contradiction between conquering the land and creating peace, because the return of the holy people to the holy land was a precondition for world peace.”

Yet Mr. Halevi, a religiously observant Jew with centrist politics by the standards of today’s Israel, brings us into these men’s lives and thoughts, taking us along on their journeys and making of them fully realized characters. We are with them not only for their internal meetings and personal struggles but also for their interactions with Israeli officials, who often claimed to reject settlements while legitimizing them. It is clear that if the government had wanted to stop them — if officials had seen the settlement project as an existential danger rather than as a way to expand narrow borders, send defiant messages and win close elections — it could have.

I would read this one.

Have We Lost the Temple Mount and the Western Wall, Too?

Israel Harel thinks and writes so.


Through a lack of vision and assertiveness, Israel's governments have relinquished the Temple Mount and the Western Wall and weakened the state's claim to other parts of the Jewish homeland.
   
And explains that in 1967


From Lions' Gate, the fighters broke through to the Gate of Tribes and, after a short battle, liberated the Temple Mount. Following a short pause of amazement at the site, they rushed in unstoppable yearning toward the Western Wall. There they let loose an uncontrollable flood of tears. At the wall, not on the mount. They were soon followed, also through Lions' Gate and the Gate of Tribes, by national leaders and commanders from the 1948 War of Independence. They too did not stop on the mount. Even Rabbi Shlomo Goren, the Israel Defense Forces Chief Rabbi, blew the shofar at the wall and not on the mount, a historic blast that has reverberated since.

In these moments, the attitude was set regarding Gen. Motta Gur's famous words, “The Temple Mount is in our hands.” Israel's government at the time and those that have followed it, have turned his words into a fiction. The poet Uri Zvi Greenberg referenced this legacy, saying, “You have betrayed your mountain, the highest in the world/your support in this world/without which Israel is not Israel.”

The transferring of control of the mount to the Waqf and the folding of the flag symbolize a lack of vision as well as the confusion that accompanied the shock of that victory. The result has been the missing of myriad opportunities to establish irreversible facts on the ground.

...Jewish hesitancy, Jewish diffidence and Jewish ambiguity were picked up by Arab seismographs, as well as by other opponents of Jewish rule over our capital and other parts of our homeland.

ירושלים העיר שחוברה לה יחדיו 1967 -ארכיון צה"ל ומעהב"ט

Im Eshkachech - Scenes of the Six Day War and liberation of Jerusalem

The IDF Liberates Jerusalem: A Look Back

Six Day War vet: I saw significance during battle By MELANIE LIDMAN05/19/2012 22:31Ahead of Jerusalem Day, Shimon "Katcha" Cahaner reflects on the war that changed history 45 years ago.

At 2 a.m. on June 6, 1967, Shimon “Katcha” Cahaner was advancing with his paratroop unit toward the Rockefeller Museum on Sultan Suleiman Street in east Jerusalem, north of the Old City. The street was the scene of fierce fighting and many casualties; soldiers had dubbed it “The Path of Death.”

Almost immediately, their battalion commander was wounded, and Cahaner was thrust into the leadership. As the men crept forward and casualties mounted, he concentrated on the task at hand: advancing toward the museum. But he wasn’t only focused on the present.



“I knew in my head that this was something historic,” Cahaner recalled on Friday, 45 years later. Even in the midst of the heavy fighting, he said, “I knew it was a very important event, and a really important war for the Jewish people.”

On Sunday, as the nation celebrates Jerusalem Day and the anniversary of the reunification of the capital during the Six Day War, the 77-year-old Cahaner, who now lives in Kibbutz Neveh Eitan near Beit She’an, will join dozens of his fellow soldiers along the same road that they fought so hard to capture 45 years ago. At points where they fought with Jordanian forces, the veterans will lay wreaths and honor their fallen comrades.

Cahaner said that even today he gets chills when he drives though east Jerusalem or sees the city from afar, knowing he played a part in its history.

“Every day, I feel the honor that I had to be responsible for Jerusalem,” he said.

“Jerusalem is not the same as any other place.”

Fifteen years ago, on the 30th anniversary of the war, Cahaner took part in a mission that united Israeli commanders who fought in Jerusalem with their Jordanian counterparts.

“It was a really emotional meeting,” Cahaner remembered.

“We were ready to kill each other 30 years ago... But the Jordanians told us, ‘We fought like lions. But you, you fought like people who are ready to give your lives for Jerusalem. Every time we saw people who were wounded, we thought we had stopped you. But it was impossible to stop you.’” That’s the message that Cahaner wants to make sure the younger generation doesn’t forget.

“If we don’t educate about our right to Jerusalem, we could lose Jerusalem,” he said. Without our history, he added, we are nothing.

Veterans from the Six Day War drove that point home symbolically on February 20 of this year, when they removed the giant Israeli flag that flies over Ammunition Hill and locked the doors to protest the government’s lack of funding for the site that memorialized the Battle of Ammunition Hill of June 6, 1967. As they marched with the flag to the Prime Minister’s Residence, Binyamin Netanyahu convened an emergency meeting and, at the last minute, promised a yearly budget of NIS 2 million.

Ammunition Hill, which hosts 150,000 visitors and dozens of army ceremonies each year, reopened the next day, but only after a public outcry forced the government to act.

But Cahaner believes that the government understands the importance of the site, pointing to the fact that Netanyahu will hold the weekly cabinet meeting at Ammunition Hill on Sunday.

Cahaner was the director of Ammunition Hill for 18 years and, after retiring, has been a volunteer for the past decade.

Last year on Jerusalem Day, the annual Dance of Flags march degenerated into violence.

Thousands of participants thronged through the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, chanting “Death to Arabs” while some threw rocks and got into physical altercations. This year, in an effort to reduce tensions, the parade was moved back to the route through west Jerusalem.

What is it like for someone so caught up in this history to watch the celebration deteriorate into violence and arrests? Cahaner is fiercely proud of his role in the capital’s history, but he acknowledged that there are times when the Jerusalem of today is not the Jerusalem he envisioned as he fought in the trenches.

“Today there are clouds over the city – violence and struggle between religious and secular,” he said. Extremism is the biggest threat that the city faces, he said, both haredi extremism and Muslim extremism.

“We need to be realistic and give an opportunity to others, including Arabs, to live and enjoy the importance of this city on a world stage,” he said. “If we can attain peace, this could be the most important city in the world.”

Jerusalem Day March in the Footsteps of the Liberators A dramatic nighttime march followed in the footsteps of the paratroopers who liberated Jerusalem in 1967.

About 100 Israelis took part in a special nighttime march on Jerusalem Day, following in the footsteps of the heroic Israeli paratroopers who liberated the city during the 1967 Six Day War.

The march left at 11:00 p.m. local time from the Lions’ Gate, one of the gatesentering the Old City of Jerusalem and the one where the waiting troops stood in June 1967 when the order "Ben Tzur, move on!" came from COS Mota Gur - ordering them to advance into the narrow streetsdespite fears that the entrance was mined and the possibility of hand to hand fighting. It ended, as the paratroopers' advance did, at the Western Wall.

The march was sponsored by the One Jerusalem organization, in memory of the late Fima Falic, one of Israel's greatest supporters in the U.S. Falic’s wife, Nili, chairs the Friends of the IDF organization in the U.S. and Panama. Falic himself had a special love for Israel and IDF soldiers, and his family continues to support organizations in Israel and abroad.

“This is an historic moment,” one march participant said. “We are so lucky. We are so honored to be here tonight. We’re going to do the same route as the soldiers did 45 years ago. This is amazing.”



He added that the march will become an annual tradition and expressed hope that the march will grow include thousands of people every year.
The march was created last year after several years in which official groups were not given permission to march through the Lions’ Gate.
“Last year, together with the Falic family, we at One Jerusalem rekindled and recreated this important tradition,” said one participant. “Last year we had a very small number of people – maybe ten to 15 people and this year we have a hundred.”

45 years later, Company A retraces its stepsThe first Israeli soldiers to enter the Old City in 1967 returned on Sunday to the place where they made history

The group of gray-haired men in sneakers, sunglasses and baseball hats did not stand out among the throngs of tourists and Israeli-flag-waving teenagers in Jerusalem’s Old City on Sunday.

Of the many thousands of people who filled the walled city for the celebration of Jerusalem’s reunification in 1967, only the men themselves knew that everyone else was there because of them.

Forty-five years ago, on the third day of the Six Day War, the paratroopers of Company A, 70^th Battalion — tired and frightened young men in camouflage — were the first Israeli soldiers in the Old City, breaking through the Lions Gate under fire, seizing the Temple Mount and securing the Western Wall, an event now remembered as perhaps the pivotal moment of Israel’s history.

On Sunday, as on that Wednesday long ago, Yoram Zamosh was in charge. Zamosh, a lanky 69-year-old, was wearing a button-down shirt with stripes. The soldiers he commanded were now retirees, some with their children and grandchildren in tow. In 1967 Zamosh carried an Uzi. In 2012, he carried a plastic cup of orange juice.

The plan was to retrace the route of the company’s advance that day 45 years ago – from Lions Gate westward through the Old City to Jaffa Gate. But this slower and less heroic version of Company A decided to do it backwards, starting from Jaffa Gate, because it is much easier to find parking there.

Perhaps 30 of the company’s veterans crowded around Zamosh outside the Tower of David, where they arrived late in the day on June 7, 1967, after capturing the Western Wall. This was the final stage of the Jerusalem fighting.

“We came out of the alley,” Zamosh remembered, “and saw the Tower. There were Legionnaires, and a God-awful ruckus.”

Two of the company’s men were buried under rubble when a booby-trapped door blew up. The soldiers fired a bazooka at a guard post. One Legionnaire was killed. A second came out with his hands up.

Other veterans, giddy at the reunion, began shouting out corrections and additions to the story. The memories started coming out in a jumbled, confused chorus:

A hand grenade lobbed at the troops from a window in an Old City alleyway. “Yossi, you almost wet your pants, don’t play the hero.” The hand grenade? That wasn’t in the Old City, but in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood the day before. A soldier opening a Jordanian military refrigerator and finding Coca Cola, a rarity in Israel in those years. An Arab woman and her child killed by a rocket propelled grenade. Another soldier beating a drum left behind by a Jordanian marching band atop the Old City wall to show the people in the neighborhoods opposite the wall that there were Israelis inside and it was safe to come out.

From the Tower of David, the veterans of Company A made their way into the Old City in the direction of the Western Wall. A group of ecstatic yeshiva students in knitted kipot came past singing a song — “The redeemer has come to Zion” — at the top of their lungs, their messianic fervor directly linked to Company A’s actions that day in 1967. Avraham  Shechter, 65, Zamosh’s dispatch runner, remembered a mortar shell that landed amid the men, broke apart and didn’t explode. It was an Israeli shell. He was spared that time, but would be badly wounded in a MiG attack when Company A was sent back in action along the Suez Canal in 1973.

On the morning of June 7, 1967, the hills around the Old City were rocked by Israeli artillery bombardments and napalm strikes.

“The ancient city of Jerusalem, which for generations we have dreamt and striven for – we will be the first to enter it,” the brigade commander, Motta Gur, told his troops over the radio as they prepared for the breakthrough. “The Jewish nation is awaiting our victory. Israel awaits this historic hour. Be proud. Good luck.”

At 9:45 a.m., Sherman tank shells ripped apart the 650-year-old Lions Gate. Zamosh’s half-track tore inside the walls.

The soldiers burst onto the Temple Mount, then tried to find their way to the Western Wall. An Arab man in a robe unlocked a low green door that led to a stairway leading down to a narrow alleyway adjacent to the Herodian stones.

Some of the men use lofty language to describe that moment.

“I’m not a religious man, but I felt I was borne on the wings of the Holy Spirit,” said Rafi Malka, the company’s number two officer.

“When we ran,” Zamosh said, “we felt the entire Jewish people pushing us from behind.”

When some of the others speak, though, it is still possible to see the soldiers they were 45 years ago.

“When we came down the stairs and reached the wall, we didn’t say anything. We didn’t know how to speak about feelings, and it was too big for us,” said Yossi Ofner, 65.

From afar, he remembered hearing Rabbi Shlomo Goren blowing his shofar as he approached – the first ecstatic sounds of the outburst of religious sentiment that would permanently change Israel. But in those first minutes no one cried and no one said a word.

“We were just kids,” he said.

Three Faces: The Story of Jerusalem’s Reunification

It was the picture seen around the world.

In June 1967, David Rubinger, a press photographer in Israel, followed IDF forces that were fighting to liberate the Old City of Jerusalem. At the Western Wall, three IDF soldiers posed for a photograph. They were Zion Karasanti, Yitzhak Yifat and Haim Oshri. While their names are not famous, their faces have become a symbol of the reunification of Jerusalem.

David Rubinger's famous photo: Paratroopers at the Western Wall

To mark the 45th anniversary of that day — the 28th of Iyar on the Hebrew calendar — we found the three men from the photograph and asked them to share a few memories from the special day.

Zion Karasanti is 69 years old. He fought in the Battle of Ammunition Hill in Jerusalem. Today he lives in Afula and is a director and choreographer.

“I had finally been mobilized, and almost all of the reservists in my unit were already in combat,” Karasanti said. “I remember my mother’s fear — and her tears. I knew our country had no choice, and I had to do my duty to defend it. ”

On Ammunition Hill, the soldiers come under fire from Jordanian forces.

“There was a passage covered with barbed wire,” Karasanti recalled. “I jumped on it and helped others to cross. I felt no pain. We went into the trenches. They were not very deep, but they were quite narrow. When someone was hurt, we had to lift his body over our heads. The Jordanian army fought hard to the last man. ”

Karasanti, then 24 years old, was the first paratrooper to reach the Western Wall. He did not immediately recognize where he was standing.

“I saw an Israeli soldier in the area– I had no idea where she came from. I asked her, ‘Where am I?’ She said, ‘This is the Western Wall.’ Then, before disappearing, she gave me a postcard and told me to write to my parents. I thought I had dreamed it. But years later, I met this woman. She was a soldier in the IDF Postal Corps.”

Rabbi Shmuel Goren blowing the Shofar near the Western Wall in June 1967. Photo by David Rubinger

Yitzhak Yifat, 69, is a gynecologist and obstetrician. In 1967, he was 24 years old and living in Tel Aviv.

“I had a toothache when we arrived in Jerusalem,” he said. “I fought while my mouth was still numb from local anesthesia. There was hand-to-hand combat in the trenches on Ammunition Hill. My best friend was hit in the back, and a Jordanian was about to shoot him again. I shot first.”

Yifat lost many friends in that battle. Their names are now etched in stone at the memorial at the site.

Not long after the Battle of Ammunition Hill ended, Yifat prepared to enter the Old City. “The entry into the Old City was a chaotic,” he said. We entered through a small gate and winded our way to the Western Wall. I was very moved by what we accomplished that day. I am not religious, but I realized how important it was for Jews worldwide.”

Born in Yemen in 1944, Haim Oshri immigrated to Israel in 1949 and completed his military service in 1965. He was called up for reserve duty in the days leading up to the Six-Day War.

“The battle for Ammunition Hill was the worst time of war,” he said. “As a religious Jew, it was very special for me to participate in the battle for the liberation of Jerusalem. We pray three times a day while facing Jerusalem. I could not imagine how magical it would be to see the Western Wall for the first time. That was my dream! ”

In front of the wall, a press photographer, David Rubinger, approached the three soldiers and pointed his lens at them.

“He told us to look up and was lying on the ground to take the photo,” Oshri said. “It’s just incredibly lucky for us to have been present at this historic moment and to appear in this photograph. It is a great honor.”

IDF soldiers pray at the Western Wall on Jerusalem Day 2012.

Images from Jerusalem right after the war in 1967. The kotel, Western Wall, being reopened to the Jewish people. Make sure to see the section from minute 1:00 to the end. Listen carefully and you will hear the troops saying the Shehecheyanu blessing.

1967 Jerusalem

In 1967, the Western Wall became part of Israel, enabling Jews to freely pray at their holiest site without the need for official permission or the fear of being shot by snipers. One of the most famous images of that time is that of the soldiers standing by the Western Wall and looking up in awe. In honor of the 40 year anniversary of the reunification of Jerusalem, those soldiers came together for a reunion photo:  The men in the picture from left to right are:  Zion Karasenti, Yitzak Yifat, and Haim Oshri. The original picture was taken by David Rubinger, and the update by Amit Shabi.

Liberator of Western Wall returns to visit on Jerusalem Day

Wednesday is Jerusalem Day, marking the 44th anniversary of the liberation of Jerusalem's Old City.

In honor of the occasion, Yehuda Hartman, who as a 22-year old paratrooper was one of the liberators, returns to the Western Wall to retell his story.

Let's go to the videotape.



More here.

Rabbi Chanan Porat: 1967 Was a War of Redemption

On Wednesday, Israel will mark Yom Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Day), the 44^th anniversary of Israel’s liberation of the Holy City during the 1967 Six Day War.

During a special interview with Arutz Sheva’s Hebrew website on Sunday, Rabbi and former MK Chanan Porat, who participated in the liberation of Jerusalem, recalled the time period and explained why he joyfully celebrates Yom Yerushalayim.

How do you celebrate this day?

“First and foremost, I celebrate! I don’t listen to those who say that maybe it was some kind of temporary episode. The redemption of Jerusalem is a complete redemption, even if it has its ups and downs.

“Weaknesses could lead to things being unrecognized by us, but the truth is that Jerusalem is eternal. Anyone with eyes in his head should be unbelievably joyful. And if there are Jews who think this truth has had its day – it has not  – and  Jerusalem is eternal.”

What do you remember from the 1967 period of Jerusalem’s liberation?

“We did not know that Jerusalem is about to be facing salvation and is about to redeem herself. It was a war of survival against the arrogant Egyptian President, who spoke about a war of annihilation and Jihad.”

Rabbi Porat recalled that his unit was actually headed towards the Sinai Peninsula. “The same morning that we were supposed to land on the outskirts of El-Arish to prevent the Egyptian army from carrying out its plan to reach Tel Aviv, it was announced that [Jordanian King] Hussein had joined the war and began to bomb Jerusalem. It was decided to change all the plans and go up to Jerusalem. It was no longer a war to defend our existence but a war over Jerusalem, a war of redemption.

“We rode in the dusty buses in roundabout ways to avoid meeting with the enemy. Suddenly we felt as if we’re going back to Jerusalem and in hoarse voices we started singing ‘Jerusalem of Gold.’ This feeling, this recognition that there is a switch happening, that the struggle for existence is becoming a war of redemption, gave us renewed strength.

“We went up to Mount Scopus and then to the Mount of Olives, with the intent of reaching the Temple Mount. On the way to Mount Scopus the company commander Giora Ashkenazi, who was near me, took a bullet in the head and fell bleeding. At first I was stunned, and then the deputy company commander shouted at me: ‘Chanan, you cannot stop! We must continue!’ I continued to run. So we continued with one eye crying and one eye laughing. We went to the Temple Mount and felt as though a light shone upon us; it was redemption uplifting us alongside the terrible pain over the loss of Giora and loved ones like him who were dear to us.

“This was the great message of the Six Day War - the redemption of Jerusalem, for which we prayed while we were at the Western Wall.”

What was the feeling when you entered the Temple Mount?

“Truthfully, on the one hand we had the great privilege of getting to the Temple Mount, but on the other hand we were not yet ready to understand the significance of regaining the Temple Mount.

“At one time, [noted Israeli independence fighter and philosopher] Israel Eldad told me: ‘I have some criticism of you. You stood on the Temple Mount and asked where the Western Wall was. You made a historic shortcut. Instead of staying on the Temple Mount where our Temple stood, you asked where the Western Wall was [the remnant of the wall around the Temple Mount, ed].

“It was a very fair question and very difficult test,” admitted Rabbi Porat, “I told him: ‘You're right, but in fact this was not a shortcut, we were simply not prepared for the spiritual level of the Temple Mount, for the possibilities that had opened up, we did not yet recognize that we need to stand on the Temple Mount and take steps to rebuilding the Temple.

Rabbi Porat concluded by saying: “Although we have not yet reached the inside of the holy mountain, we’re on the right track. We must educate about the city’s holiness and this is not simple, but I am happy that there is a precious public with a strong desire and love for Jerusalem, even if they cannot build it in practice.

“Our hearts are filled with joy and may we have the privilege to see the Levites standing in the Temple hall and singing a special song for Yom Yerushalayim.”

Rabbi Chanan Porat is the beloved ideological icon of the Gush Emunim settlement movement, whose faith led a generation of young lovers of the Land of Israel to settle Judea and Samaria after the Six Day War.

He is also a popular lecturer, teacher, and prolific writer of Torah insights which appeared weekly in a flier called “M’at Mind Ha’or” (a bit of light, ed.), and have since been published in book form.