Remembrance And Reunification: Realizing A Generation's Dream
By UZI NARKISS
At 9:00 came Motta's message
that Augusta Victoria had been
captured and everyone at Binyanei
Ha'ooma was seized with its impact.
The time had come. We were upon
the walls.
"Shall we move?" I murmured
impatiently.
We moved.
The forward H.Q. group — two
half-tracks and two jeeps — were
waiting and in we climbed, with Didi
Menussi and Raffi Amir, a Kol-Israel
man, whom Didi had graciously
invited for "the experience of your
life."
We passed the east Jerusalem
Y.M.C.A., whose smashed windows
and besmirched walls gave bleak
evidence of battle. The American
Consulate on the right was also
battle-scarred; a destroyed gas
station stood next to the temporary
memorial erected by the
paratroopers to their fallen
comrades. We sped by passing an
undamaged mosque and the bullet-
riddled buildings in an alley, called
"the Alley of Death" by the
paratroopers, for the fallen who had
attempted to rescue their comrades.
Suddenly the wall rose before
us, and the battlements of Nablus
Gate. The Gate was not yet ours;
Legionnaires guarded the parapet
and we turned back to Salah e-Din
Street, where broken windows,
burned automobiles, and derelict
electric wires spoke of war. Opposite
the Rivoli Hotel was a damaged
Egged bus and several
paratroopers. I asked what they
were doing.
"Wounded evacuation point,"
one replied.
Another group of paratroopers
halted our advance, warning about
shooting at the end of the road,
where Salah e-Din Street meets
Herod's Gate and the Old City
walls. We could travel on it no
farther and turned around, Haim
Bar-Lev taking the wheel. Back on
Nablus Road, we encountered all
the terrible and pathetic remnants of
war: death and destruction and
chaos. Nothing stirred.
By 09.45 we were on Mt.
Scopus, gazing at the town below,
which seemed idle and empty. All at
once I saw smoke rising inside the
Old City, behind the walls, and
contacted Arik: "Are the
paratroopers shelling the Old City?"
When he said that they were, I
ordered him to stop immediately,
and at the same moment, I heard
the paratroop G. Branch officer
commanding his mortar units to
stop shooting. "We're going in," he
cried.
62
FRIDAY, MAY 1, 1992
Thousands of religious youth march through the Old City to mark Jerusalem Day.
"Where are you?" I called.
"At the Lion's Gate," and before
the last word had been uttered we
were back in our vehicles, racing
down the mountain, our hearts as
loud as the motors. We were going
into the Old City!
Nineteen years earlier we had
broken through the Zion Gate and
entered the Jewish Quarter, only to
leave it again in despair and bitter
disappointment.
"Let us not go in if it's just to
go out another time," I breathed.
"We shall never leave again,"
said Haim Bar-Lev.
Our convoy was on the slope of
the hill below Rockefeller, where the
road branches toward
Gethsemane. From the corner
position on the wall opposite, shots
were still coming, and beneath, on
the traffic island, was a silent
Sherman tank and the sunshade of
the policeman who was not on duty
to use it.
The intermittent shots of the
snipers could be heard from the
walls. I threw a smoke-grenade,
under cover of which we crossed to
the abandoned tank, which had
been hit the night before during the
"Battle on the Bridge."
Snipers fired on a column of
paratroopers, who marched on
without changing pace, like men
fatigued to the point of trance. One
fell, and then another, but forward
tramped the rest.
Next to the damaged tank,
completely exposed, a paratrooper
with a bazooka stood, legs apart,
fighting a private duel with the
snipers on the walls. He silenced
the corner position.
We went back to the cars,
abandoning the slow-moving half-
Nineteen years earlier we
had broken through the
Zion Gate and entered
the Jewish Quarter, only
to leave it again in
despair and bitter
disappointment . . . "We
shall never leave again."
tracks, and sped off in the jeeps.
Ahead, on the road from the valley
to the Lion's Gate, was a column of
paratroopers, led by General Rabbi
Shlomo Goren, Chief Army
Chaplain, a sefer Torah under his
arm, a shofar in his left hand, his
beard bristling like the point of a
spear, and his face bathed in
perspiration. He was panting.
"Rabbi," I called out, "come
aboard. We're going to the same
place."
"No," he replied, "to the
Temple Mount one goes on foot."
"Then we'll meet there." The
jeep sprang forward. On the move I
contacted Motta to find out where
he was.
"The Temple Mount is ours!"
I couldn't believe it.
"I repeat," said Motta. "The
Temple Mount is ours. I'm standing
near the Mosque el-Omar right now.
The Wailing Wall is a minute away."
Now was the time for the jeep
to sprout wings, but at the moment
it lacked not just wings but one of
its wheels. Bang, and the jeep
veered so sharply that only with all
my strength could I stop it before it
tumbled off the road. The tire was
in shreds. We had no time or
inclination to change. We crowded
into the second jeep. But more
important, we drove up the narrow
road toward the Lion's Gate.
We drove through, along the
road to the Gate of the Tribes and
the Temple Mount, and down the
Via Dolorosa to the second arch. It
was blocked by the lead tank of the
paratroops. We climbed over it and
continued on foot.
Yoel, behind us, picked off a
sniper shooting at us from one of
the houses. Except for that, the Via
Dolorosa was cool and silent, the
windows shuttered, the streets
empty.