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Report 

The Jerusalem 

R 

JUNE 12, 2017 

COVERING ISRAEL, THE MIDDLE EAST & THE JEWISH WORLD 

SPECIAL EDITION 

A look back at the Six Day War 

and its ongoing impact 

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The Jerusalem 

ReportR 

COURTESY DAN SHILOAH ARCHIVE 

22 Back to Ammunition Hill Paul Alster joins the paratroopers of 

Battalion 66, who took part in one of the bloodiest battles of the Six 

Day War, and hears how the decision to take the Old City was made 

38 Out of focus 

Israeli photography 

has turned its lens 

away from the 

realities of life in 

the Palestinian 

territories by 

Michal Levertov 

COMMENTARY 

6 Israel’s inelegant options 

The conflict should be managed until conditions 

arise for an agreed-upon solution 

by Yaakov Amidror 

8 The blessings and curses of victory 

Five decades into the occupation, the world refuses to accept 

Israel’s presence beyond the 1967 lines, which continues to 

erode Israeli society and threaten its democracy 

by Yossi Beilin 

ISRAEL 

10 A messianic hangover 

The worst may be over for the Six Day War’s most 

improbable casualty – the Israeli consensus 

by Amotz Asa-El 

16 Project Senator 

How Israel managed to overcome its misreading of Syrian 

and Egyptian intentions and score a lightning victory over 

the combined Arab armies in the Six Day War 

by Yossi Melman 

28 The proverbial couple 

The Six Day War made identification with Israel intrinsic 

to Diaspora Jewish identity. Fifty years on, are differences 

over the West Bank changing the relationship? 

by Elliot Jager 

MARKETPLACE 

34 Looking back, and forward 

Shlomo Maital recalls five decades of living in Israel since 

making aliya right after the Six Day War and looks ahead 

to what’s in store for the country over the next 50 years 

NECESSARY STORIES 

44 One flesh 

by Haim Watzman 

THE PEOPLE & THE BOOK 

47 The ‘mixed multitude’ 

by Rabbi Sylvia Rothschild 

COURTESY MIKI KRATSMAN 

DEPARTMENTS 

2 From the Editor 

3 14 Days 

4 Opening shot 

48 From the Sketchbook Avi Katz 

Cover photo by David Rubinger of 

paratroopers at the Western Wall 

minutes after its liberation in June 1967 

JUNE 12, 2017 SIVAN 18, 5777 VOLUME XXVIII NO. 5

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Weitzman, Shlomo Maital, Yossi Melman, 

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FROM THE EDITOR 

50 years, and a farewell 

Dear readers, 

Exactly 50 years ago, on June 5, 1967, 

the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launched a 

preemptive strike against the combined Arab 

armies massing on its borders and threatening 

to throw the Jews into the sea. Within six 

days the IDF had scored a lightning victory, 

capturing the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan 

Heights and the Sinai Peninsula, and had 

tripled its size. 

But the military triumph would turn out 

to be a mixed blessing. While Israel gained 

strategic depth and proved that it is here to 

stay, it also found itself taking control of the 

lives of millions of Palestinians. Israel was 

able to trade the Sinai for a peace deal with 

Egypt, and to build on the Oslo Accords to 

sign a treaty with Jordan, but the Palestinian 

question remains a thorn in the country’s 

side. 

In this special anniversary issue, we look 

not just back at the events of June 1967, but 

at the war’s ongoing legacy and impact on 

Israeli society, and on its relations with Diaspora 

Jewry. 

Five decades on, Israel faces stark choices 

as it looks into the future. 

Do the conditions even exist for a peace 

deal with the Palestinians that would allow 

the establishment of an independent state 

alongside Israel? If not, should it, facing the 

possible erosion of its democracy, take unilateral 

action and establish its own borders; 

should it annex the West Bank and risk becoming 

a binational state; or should it just 

manage the conflict until more favorable 

conditions arise? 

Is Israeli society inexorably split over the 

Palestinian question between those who 

believe in land for peace and those who believe 

in a Greater Israel? Or has it in fact 

reached a new pragmatic consensus born 

out of disillusionment, on the one hand, with 

messianic maximalism, and with a naïve belief 

in the possibilities of a New Middle East, 

on the other – a consensus that is willing to 

make concessions for peace when faced with 

peacemakers, but to fight when faced with 

enemies. 

With parts of American Jewry growing 

alienated from Israel over an “occupation” 

it sees as antithetical to fundamental Jewish 

values, what will be the effect on relations 

with Diaspora Jewry should Israel hold on to 

the West Bank? 

We will be looking at these issues and 

more in this special edition. 

On a personal note, after close to five 

years as Editor-in-Chief of The Jerusalem 

Report, I will be moving on to new 

ventures. 

I would like to thank you, the readers, and 

hope that, along with The Report’s talented 

team of writers and editors, I have managed 

to present a diverse and in-depth perspective 

of Israel and the issues faced by this wonderfully 

challenging, complex and creative 

country, as well as of events in the wider 

Middle East and Jewish World. 

In parting, let us hope that as we look forward 

to Israel’s next 50 years we will be able 

to create an even brighter future with a prosperous 

country living in peace and security 

– its hand outstretched to neighbors and fulfilling 

its destiny as a light unto the nations. 

Yours, 

Ilan Evyatar 

Send letters by email to: jrepletters@jreport.co.il Please include your full postal address. The editor reserves 

the right to edit letters as appropriate. Priority will be given to brief letters that relate to articles in the magazine. 

2 

THE JERUSALEM REPORT JUNE 12, 2017

14 

Compiled by 

Susan Lerner 

RONEN ZVULUN / REUTERS 

TRUMP’S VISIT US President Donald Trump arrived in Israel on May 22 for a 28-hour 

visit during which he met with President Reuven Rivlin and Prime Minister Benjamin 

Netanyahu in Jerusalem, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in 

Bethlehem. On his first day in the capital Trump visited the Western Wall, the first sitting 

US president to do so, and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. On May 23, he visited Yad 

Vashem and the Israel Museum before departing the country. 

TOUGH DEAL US President Donald 

Trump on May 22 praised Prime 

Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “for his 

commitment to pursuing the peace 

process.” In statements at the Prime 

Minister’s Residence before the two 

leaders dined with their wives, Trump 

said, “I’ve heard it’s one of the toughest 

deals of all, but I have a feeling that we’re 

going to get there eventually, I hope.” 

COMMITTED TO PEACE Speaking 

alongside Palestinian Authority President 

Mahmoud Abbas in Bethlehem May 23, 

US President Donald Trump reiterated 

his commitment to achieving peace 

between the Israelis and Palestinians. 

“I intend to do everything I can to help 

achieve that goal,” he said. According 

to a White House statement published 

May 24, Abbas told Trump he is ready to 

“begin negotiating immediately.” 

INTELLIGENCE LEAK Defense Minister 

Avigdor Liberman said May 24 Israel has 

made a “small change” to its intelligencesharing 

apparatus after US President 

Donald Trump disclosed classified 

information to Russian officials. Speaking 

on Army Radio, Liberman said that while 

“this is not an issue we should discuss 

on the radio, there are some things that 

are discussed in closed rooms.” Trump is 

reported to have leaked Israeli intelligence 

on the activities of Islamic State in Syria to 

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and 

Ambassador Sergei Kislyak during a May 

10 meeting at the White House. 

JERUSALEM DAY The Temple Mount 

and Western Wall will remain part of 

Israel forever, Prime Minister Benjamin 

Netanyahu said, on May 24, in an address 

to the Knesset marking Jerusalem 

Day and the 50th anniversary of the 

reunification of the city. “The correction of 

a historical injustice that was achieved by 

the heroism of our fighters 50 years ago 

will stand forever,” he said. 

NETANYA STABBING A Palestinian assailant 

was shot and wounded by authorities 

on May 23, after stabbing a policeman in 

Netanya. The 26-year-old officer was treated 

at Laniado Medical Center for a moderate 

stab wound in the neck. 

POLLARD APPEAL A US federal appeals 

court on May 24 rejected a bid by 

Jonathan Pollard, the former US Navy 

intelligence officer who served 30 years in 

prison after being convicted of spying for 

Israel, to relax his parole conditions. 

HUNGER STRIKE A 40-day hunger strike 

by Palestinian security prisoners ended 

THE JERUSALEM REPORT JUNE 12, 2017 

May 27, after an agreement between 

the Palestinian Authority and Red Cross 

was reached to reinstate a second family 

visitation to prisoners per month, the 

Israel Prisons Service said. Palestinian 

officials said the strike was “suspended” 

and the outlines of the agreement would 

be announced later. 

HAMAS EXECUTIONS The Hamascontrolled 

Interior Ministry in Gaza said 

May 25 it executed the suspected killer 

of Mazen Fuqaha, a senior member of 

Hamas’s military wing, and his two alleged 

accomplices. According to the ministry, 

the suspected killer and one of the alleged 

accomplices were hanged and the second 

alleged accomplice was shot to death. 

GOLDEN GIRL Culture and Sport 

Minister Miri Regev drew lots of 

attention May 17, when she attended 

the Cannes Film Festival wearing 

a ‘Jerusalem of Gold’ dress that 

displayed the capital’s skyline along 

the bottom. 

3 

ELI SABTI

Opening shot 

‘Sinai, the Six Day War, June 1967’ from the 

exhibition ‘Micha Bar-Am 1967‘ at the Israel 

Museum, marking 50 years since the Six Day War 

MICHA BAR-AM

Commentary Yaakov Amidror 

Israel’s inelegant 

options 

The conflict should be managed until conditions 

arise for an agreed-upon solution 

WITH THE 50th anniversary of the Six 

Day War upon us, it’s time to take a broad 

look at Israel’s options in Judea and Samaria, 

and chart a path forward that will 

secure Israel while leaving the door open 

to peace. 

That is exactly what I’ve done in a new 

50-page study entitled, “Israel’s Inelegant 

Options in Judea and Samaria: Withdrawal, 

Annexation, and Conflict Management” 

(published by the Begin-Sadat Center for 

Strategic Studies, and available online in 

English, Hebrew and Arabic at www.besacenter.org). 

I review in depth the two well-known, 

divergent approaches to the resolution of 

the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the establishment 

of a Palestinian state alongside 

Israel, and the application of Israeli sovereignty 

over Judea and Samaria (the West 

Bank). 

Alas, both approaches are problematic. 

Each poses a significant challenge to Israel’s 

future. Therefore, it is important to 

embark on a diplomatic approach that can 

gain as broad a consensus as possible within 

Israeli-Jewish society. In fact, the extent 

of societal consensus is more important 

than the specifics of any approach or agreement 

reached. It is critical to maintain the 

resilience of Israeli-Jewish society to resist 

pressures in the future. The supreme danger 

is the creation of a rift within Israel. It 

is therefore critical that a significant majority 

of Israelis – as large a consensus as 

possible – unite behind whatever approach 

is opted for by Israel’s leadership, in order 

to prevent a schism in the country. 

Unilateral moves would 

entail a very high 

domestic price for 

Israel, while earning 

the country very few 

gains in diplomatic 

and defense terms 

Here is the nub of the problem: No good 

solutions exist. The political Right has no 

sound response to the demographic argument 

against annexation, since annexation 

will lead to the creation of a binational 

state (in practice). The Left has no serious 

response to the security threat stemming 

from Palestinian statehood, given the real 

possibility of a security meltdown in Jordan 

or the Palestinian entity. 

Therefore, Israel’s choices are not a matter 

of right or wrong, but of electing to assume 

one set of risks over the other. Israel 

must choose the lesser evil. 

But before deciding what the lesser evil 

is, it must be recognized that the conditions 

pertaining in the Middle East today 

militate against dramatic Israeli moves. 

The Arab world is in a state of violent chaos 

which requires effective and complete 

Israeli control of the West Bank for what 

may be a very long time. So no withdrawals 

are in the offing. 

At the same time, any move toward formal 

annexation will wreck the ability of 

Israel to enhance relations with the important 

Sunni countries, and might even lead to 

another bloody intifada and very problematic 

reactions in the international arena. 

Nevertheless, the principled question of 

how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ought 

to be resolved should be discussed to 

shape today’s policies in accordance with 

the preferred solution of the future. 

6 


REUTERS 

Therefore, Palestinian statehood is not 

the real question currently before the Israeli 

public or Israeli decision-makers. 

Rather, the question is whether Israel aspires 

to leave open the possibility of future 

negotiations toward a two-state solution or 

will it act to close this option by expanding 

isolated settlements and practically entering 

into an unstoppable process toward a 

binational state situation. 

THE PRO-SETTLER Right, and the hard 

Left, which denies Jewish rights in the 

Land of Israel, are two outlier factions 

within Israeli society, on opposite sides 

of the spectrum. In between, at the center 

of Jewish society in Israel, there is a large 

majority which desires a solution, and is 

quite ready to compromise on its rights 

over areas of the Land of Israel. 

But it will do so only in return for an 

agreement that will ensure the security 

and peace of the country; and in a situation 

where the Palestinian minority does 

not grow beyond its current share of the 

population. 

The only politically feasible way to act 

on this readiness in the future – which I 

repeat is unrealistic at present, despite the 

breezy optimism in some quarters following 

the visit of US President Donald Trump 

to the Mideast – is to limit Israeli building 

to the settlement blocs (or to the existing 

boundaries of settlements, as was recently 

agreed between Israel and the Trump administration). 

This reserves the remaining area for discussion 

at a time when there might be a 

different Palestinian leadership and a readiness 

on both sides to compromise. 

At present, Palestinian leader Mahmoud 

Abbas is unwilling to bear the responsibility 

of establishing a state, since 

once it is established he loses the excuse 

of the “brutal occupation” that allows the 

avoidance of the hard, mundane work related 

to the establishment and management 

of a state. Without the “occupation,” 

which allegedly prevents him from 

putting matters in order, he will have to 

face the many accusations of corruption 

that surround him, with this corruption 

being a major obstacle to the development 

of Palestinian society and state. It 

is convenient for Abbas to continue with 

the current situation as a ruler with no 

real responsibilities. 

Israel for its part must not jeopardize its 

existence by embarking on rash unilateral 

initiatives that would radically worsen its 

security situation – just to please proponents 

of “forward progress” at any cost. 

This risk is not worth taking. 

Therefore, I reject the suggestions that 

Israel undertake unilateral initiatives – 

whether unilateral annexation of all or part 

of the West Bank, or unilateral withdrawals 

from all or parts of the West Bank. 

Unilateral moves would entail a very 

high domestic price for Israel, while earning 

the country very few gains in diplomatic 

and defense terms. 

Israel should instead manage the conflict 

until conditions improve for a renewed 

negotiating effort at an agreedupon 

solution. When on the edge of the 

cliff, standing still is preferable to leaping 

forward. 

 

Maj.-Gen. (res.) Amidror is the Anne and 

Greg Rosshandler Senior Fellow at the 

Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. 

He was national security advisor to Prime 

Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, head of the 

Intelligence Analysis Division in IDF Military 

Intelligence, and commander of the 

IDF Military Colleges 

THE JERUSALEM REPORT JUNE 12, 2017 7

Commentary Yossi Beilin 

The blessings and 

curses of victory 

Five decades into the occupation, the world refuses to accept 

Israel’s presence beyond the 1967 lines, which continues to erode 

Israeli society and threaten its democracy 

FROM MY perspective, it would be a mistake 

to attribute the occupation of the West 

Bank to the Six Day War. Israel should have 

handed the territories over to the Palestinians 

in the framework of a peace agreement long 

ago. If we had left the territories immediately, 

we would have benefited from the fruits 

of victory rather than paying the price of war. 

There is, of course, an ongoing argument 

as to the necessity of superfluous provocations 

and the fact that some moves before 

the war resulted from the misunderstanding 

of our neighbors’ intentions. The bottom 

line, however, is that it was a defensive war 

that is not difficult to justify. 

To a great extent, the war shaped the perceptions 

of generations of Israelis, Jews in 

the Diaspora, our neighbors and of people 

worldwide who were in awe of the IDF’s 

lightning victory. The war changed the 

mood in Israel from one of dark foreboding 

to one of (inflated) national pride. 

For the Jewish world, the war was a seminal 

event that shaped its identity even more 

than the War of Independence. The IDF’s 

incredible victory meant Israel was no longer 

the poor relative that world Jewry needed 

to support and maintain, but a country 

that stood on its own two feet. 

Identification with a threatened and beleaguered 

country metamorphosed into 

pride in a strong Israel and a deeper sense 

of belonging to the Jewish people. Many 

Jews from the West came to visit, study and 

live in Israel, while behind the Iron Curtain, 

Jews learned about the victory from clandestine 

media and word of mouth, creating 

an even stronger desire to make aliya. 

The question of the 

territories dominates 

our agenda and has 

pushed aside crucial 

issues that were on the 

table before 1967 

Israel’s economic situation quickly improved; 

depression and high unemployment 

gave way to rapid growth. The Arab world 

understood that Israel was here to stay and 

many other nations that had yet to be convinced 

of the validity of the Zionist experiment 

– even if they were among its supporters 

– realized in 1967 that it was indeed a 

valid state. 

In the wake of our victory, we should have 

attempted to reach a diplomatic arrangement 

in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the spirit 

of proposals made by David Ben-Gurion to 

withdraw from all the occupied territories 

except east Jerusalem. King Hussein of Jordan 

was willing to make a deal, and we could 

have held on to the Sinai Peninsula and the 

Golan Heights as no more than bargaining 

chips. If we had responded positively to the 

proposals put forward in 1971 by UN envoy 

Gunnar Jarring for an Egyptian-Israeli peace 

treaty (proposals that Anwar Sadat accepted 

and Golda Meir rejected), things would have 

worked out differently. 

BUT NONE of that happened. We relinquished 

control over Sinai only after receiving 

a terrible blow in the Yom Kippur 

War, and in the West Bank and Gaza we 

set up a regime of occupation the world 

enabled through United Nations Security 

Council Resolution 242 of November 1967, 

which rejected the acquisition of territories 

through force, but spoke of withdrawal only 

in the framework of a diplomatic agreement. 

Because no peace treaty with the Palestinians 

has been forthcoming for the past 

50 years, we remain the occupiers of the 

territories and a benign occupation has yet 

to be invented – not even ours. 

It is true that there never was a Palestinian 

state, and that under Jordanian rule the 

Palestinians did not exercise their right to 

self-determination. But under Israeli rule, 

and even following the establishment of 

the Palestinian Authority, which resulted 

from the Oslo Accords, the Palestinians 

feel that a foreign entity rules over their 

lives. We, the Israelis, pay a heavy price: 

The world is less and less willing to accept 

the occupation and our decades-long presence 

in the territories has done nothing to 

change that. 

The question of the territories dominates 

8 


ILAN BRUMER / GPO 

our agenda and has pushed aside crucial 

issues that were on the table before 1967 

such as a constitution for Israel, the separation 

of religion and state and issues of social 

justice. 

We have become obsessed with hasbara, 

public diplomacy, in a pathetic attempt to 

prove to the world that our presence in the 

West Bank is legitimate because it had no 

legal owners prior to us. We relate our narrative 

to the world, but fail to understand 

that our image as a Goliath facing a David 

will not change as long as we remain 

occupiers. We sent our emissaries out to 

show the world how extreme the Palestinian 

National Covenant is, and the world 

replied by equating Zionism with racism. 

For 50 years, we have been trying to explain 

ourselves, yet all the embassies have 

left Jerusalem and in the United States the 

tradition continues that presidential candidates 

promise to move the US Embassy to 

Jerusalem, yet when they are elected forget 

their promises. 

Military service has been extended, relations 

between Jews and Arabs within Israel 

have become ever more tense, Israel’s economy 

came to a halt and contracted following 

the Yom Kippur War and only in recent 

years have we started to make up ground. 

The State of Emergency declared in 1948 

has yet to be lifted, and under the guise of 

emergency, laws pass in the Knesset that are 

contrary to the basic values of democracy. 

The demographic situation raises questions 

as to Israel’s ability to remain Jewish and 

democratic and we may find ourselves in 

not so many years – in the name of fanatical 

Zionism – losing the Jewish majority. 

In the early 1980s, I conducted a study 

of Israeli leaders from the Right and Left, 

all of whom believed that a solution for 

the West Bank and Gaza could be reached 

in a five-year period. Recently uncovered 

state archives of cabinet meetings from 

the period immediately after the Six Day 

War revealed further that both “doves” and 

“hawks” were totally clueless about the future 

of the West Bank. The Gaza Strip was 

much more important to them. 

HAD THEY agreed to hand back the West 

Bank to Jordan’s King Hussein, who in 

December 1967 was ready for a land swap 

under which Israel would annex a small part 

of the West Bank and he would get Gaza in 

exchange, Israel could have saved a whole 

generation from dealing with the future of 

the territories. 

The unity government formed in 1967 

took upon itself a crazy responsibility without 

understanding it. In contrast to the huge 

risk taken by the provisional government 

under David Ben-Gurion when it decided 

to declare an independent state in 1948, the 

government of Levi Eshkol exercised the 

option of a non-decision when a decision 

should have been made. 

Israel is a unique success story that could 

play a very different role in the world if 

only it could solve the Palestinian problem, 

which is really an Israeli problem. We don’t 

deserve to carry this baggage forever. We 

don’t deserve to be a pariah state. We don’t 

deserve to play the role of concubine in the 

international arena. 

The Six Day War gave us the opportunity 

to get out of this situation, but we were too 

blind to exploit it. 

One of the rare voices of sanity in the Labor 

party, Yitzhak Ben-Aharon, said in the 

early 1970s that the occupied territories, 

which we had intended to keep as bargaining 

chips, had become hot potatoes. More 

than four decades later, they are still burning 

our hands. 

For those who lost their lives in the episodes 

of violence between Israel and the 

Palestinians in the 50 years since 1967 and 

in the Yom Kippur War, it is too late. For 

the generations that spent months and years 

guarding settlements and in hasbara efforts 

to justify their existence, that time cannot 

be returned. But it is not too late to reach a 

diplomatic agreement that will enable us to 

withdraw from the West Bank. Perhaps an 

eccentric American president who has made 

an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal one of his 

top priorities can help us out. 

Yossi Beilin is a former minister of justice 

and Israeli statesman who has served in 

multiple positions in the Israeli government 

and was an architect of the Oslo process 

and the Geneva Initiative 


A messianic 

hangover 

The worst may be over for the Six Day War’s most 

improbable casualty – the Israeli consensus 

By Amotz Asa-El 

MOSHE MILNER / GPO 

10 


“DON’T FIGHT,” said a patronizing 

Charles de Gaulle even before shaking 

Abba Eban’s extended hand in May 

1967, as the Israeli foreign minister entered 

the presidential chambers at the 

Elysée Palace. 

It took less than two weeks for Israel to 

ignore de Gaulle’s unsolicited order and 

launch the preemptive strike for which 

he would never forgive the Jewish state. 

It was a show of mutual audacity: the 

Frenchman refused to accept his country’s 

diminishing clout, but minuscule 

Israel was not this imperial decline’s 

natural announcer to the self-styled successor 

of Napoleon, the Bourbons and 

Charlemagne. 

Yet, in 1967, Israel could be this daring 

because it wielded a weapon that its 

victory would devour: consensus. 

The prewar consensus was multitiered. 

Emotionally, no Israeli Jew doubted 

Israel’s justice and its enemies’ evil. 

Every child knew that Arab enmity was 

unequivocal, that enemy armies had 

assembled along Israel’s borders and that 

at stake was Israel’s very survival. In addition, 

the enlistment of the public to dig 

trenches, fill sandbags and tape windows 

Activists celebrate the 1975 agreement 

allowing settlement near Sebastia; 

the agreement is considered a turning 

point in the history of the settlement 

movement 


and storefronts did wonders to drive home 

danger’s imminence and intensity. 

Diplomatically, de Gaulle’s behavior 

fomented a sense of betrayal. 

France had been Israel’s main arms supplier, 

and, ironically, its elegant fighter 

jet, the Mirage, would spearhead Israel’s 

military campaign. Israelis expected 

France to take a moral stand in the face 

of Egypt’s naval blockade of Eilat and its 

eviction of UN peacekeepers from Gaza. 

Instead, they were embargoed and asked 

not to fight. 

Had any fleet blockaded, say, the Port of 

Marseilles, de Gaulle would surely have 

lost no time bombing it no matter what the 

cost, went the consensus. His demand from 

Israel to hold its fire was, therefore, seen as 

a show of hypocrisy, cynicism and betrayal. 

The Jews, it followed, were yet again on 

their own and, therefore, had better do what 

they think is right, regardless of the outer 

world’s misgivings. 

In the aftermath of 

the failed Camp David 

conference in 2000 

and the violence that 

followed, the Israeli 

consensus has been 

restored 

Lastly, on the political plane, Israel’s 

leaders took a page from wartime Britain, 

creating what had previously been unthinkable 

– a left-right government. 

The appointment of eternal opposition 

leader Menachem Begin as a minister in 

Levi Eshkol’s government both reflected 

and cemented a consensus that underpinned 

the soldiers’ motivation in the battlefield. 

The coalition’s expansion was brought 

to the Knesset for approval the night of the 

war’s outbreak, with artillery shells raining 

on Jerusalem’s houses and machine-gun 

staccatos unsettling its empty streets. It was 

in that setting that Begin and his historic 

archrival, David Ben-Gurion, were seen 

MAHFOUZ ABU TURK / REUTERS 

walking arm in arm through the Knesset 

corridors, chatting discretely like a pair of 

old friends. 

It had been 19 years since the former and 

future prime ministers emerged on opposite 

ends of the cannon with which Ben-Gurion’s 

troops sank Begin’s arms ship, the Altalena. 

What back in 1948 seemed like an 

imminent civil war now became a national 

lovefest. 

That idyll would not last long. 

NEWS OF the conquest of Jerusalem’s Old 

City swept Israelis off their feet, regardless 

of political stripe and religious observance, 

but the victory’s magnitude and improbability 

would now debilitate the consensus that 

largely made it happen. 

Overwhelmed by the sudden transition 

from prewar anxiety to postwar euphoria, 

Israel had no idea what to do with the vast 

territories it conquered in the war its neighbors 

had provoked. 

“We should tell the inhabitants of the 

occupied territories these simple and 

clear things,” Amos Oz, then a promising, 

27-year-old novelist, wrote that summer. 

“We do not want your land… We will sit 

and rule here until the signing of a peace 

agreement.… The choice will be yours.” 

Oz was soon joined by other literati and 

much of the academic elite, most notably 

philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz. Others, 

led by Nobel Laureate S.Y. Agnon, 

poet Natan Alterman and novelist Moshe 

Shamir, took the opposite view. 

“This victory isn’t only about restoring to 

the Jews their most ancient and exalted national 

sanctuaries, the ones that are etched 

more than anything else in its memory and 

in the depths of its history,” wrote Alterman. 

“This victory is about the erasure of 

the difference between the State of Israel 

and the Land of Israel.” 

Two opposing schools of thought, Land for 

Peace and Greater Israel, were thus born and 

would come to dominate Israel’s political 

discourse and split Israeli society down the 

middle for the better part of half a century. 

Initially, the politicians seemed to be 

treading a middle road between the two 

schools. On the one hand, Israel annexed 

nothing besides east Jerusalem, and was 

also a party to the UN’s Resolution 242, 

12 


(Opposite page) IDF soldiers patrol the 

streets of Jenin in 2002; the high number 

of reserve paratroopers who took part in 

the operation demonstrated Israeli resolve 

in meeting suicide bombers and other 

threats head on 

(Left) Peace Now activists in 1999 stand by 

a large ice mound in Jerusalem calling for 

a settlement ‘freeze’ 

which turned the abstract idea of land for 

peace into diplomatic currency. 

At the same time, Israel allowed the return 

of Jewish refugees to and restoration 

of the Etzion Bloc, a cluster of settlements 

south of Bethlehem that were conquered 

and erased by the Jordanian Legion in 1948. 

JEWISH SETTLEMENTS also began 

sprouting on the Golan Heights and in the 

Jordan Valley. The Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem’s 

Old City was repopulated and new 

Jewish neighborhoods began rising in east 

Jerusalem. 

Still, in those early years, the settlement 

project on the whole was consensual because 

it avoided the densely populated parts 

of the newly conquered lands. 

That is why the Labor government sent 

settlers to the mostly empty Sinai where 

it established the resort towns Di-Zahav 

(Dahab), Neviot and Ofira opposite Saudi 

Arabia; the oil-producing community Shalhevet, 

opposite Africa; and the fishermen’s 

village Nahal Yam off the Mediterranean. 

The exceptions of the Etzion Bloc and 

Hebron notwithstanding, the general understanding 

during the first decade after ’67 

was that Israel avoids building settlements 

in densely inhabited Palestinian areas, and 

that even from where it does settle it may 

ultimately retreat for peace. 

Even so, in 1977, the debate between 

Land for Peace and Greater Israel proceeded 

from theory to practice ‒ twice: first, 

when Labor lost power to Likud and then 

when Anwar Sadat landed in Israel. 

Paradoxically, the faith 

in the Oslo vision after 

its collapse suddenly 

seemed as messianic as 

the theology that fueled 

many Greater Israelites 

The land-for-peace deal with Egypt in 

1979 and the West Bank’s massive settlement 

since 1981 split Israeli politics between 

two starkly contrasting utopias. The 

REUTERS 

clash between the two schools was so intense 

that many thought it would tear Israeli 

society apart, especially after the 1982 Lebanon 

War when Israelis, for the first time in 

their country’s history, were staring at fallen 

soldiers’ fresh graves while pointing fingers 

in each other’s faces. 

Many, therefore, feared that Israeli society 

would not endure the fissure that the war 

of ’67 had carved. 

They were wrong. 

Israeli voters eventually gave both 

schools of thought a chance to execute their 

platforms. 

Greater Israel got its opportunity in the 

1980s when Begin and Ariel Sharon – as his 

defense minister – launched their settlement 

drive. Land for Peace got its chance the following 

decade when a Labor-led government 

signed the Oslo Accords. 

Both experiments were followed by the 

massive Palestinian violence of the first 

and second intifadas. Ironically, that is how 

the Israeli consensus was restored. First, a 

critical mass concluded that Greater Israel 

had ignored the intensity of Palestinian nationalism. 

Then, as they braved some 150 

suicide bombers and hundreds of shooting, 

bombing and stabbing attacks, the same 

critical mass concluded that Land for Peace 

had ignored Palestinian disinterest in peace 

and endemic hostility to the Jewish state. 

A new Israeli consensus emerged, for the 

first time since 1967, whereby the average 

Israeli understood both post-’67 schools as 

inverted utopias. Paradoxically, the faith in 

the Oslo vision after its collapse suddenly 

seemed as messianic as the theology that 

fueled many Greater Israelites. 

Now, as noted by Hartman Institute scholar 

Micah Goodman in a new book titled “Catch 

67,” both schools have toned down their 


messianic argumentation. The Greater Israelites 

now speak less about God’s vows to 

the Jews and more about rational concerns 

like missile ranges and topographical superiority. 

The rival school, for its part, speaks 

less about peace in our times and more about 

what it portrays as an Arab demographic 

threat to the Jewish state’s Jewishness. 

Two opposing schools of 

thought, Land for Peace 

and Greater Israel, were 

thus born and would 

come to dominate 

Israel’s political discourse 

and split Israeli society 

down the middle for 

the better part of half a 

century 

Israelis emerged from the territorial debate 

as pragmatists disillusioned with utopias. 

They will make concessions for peace 

when faced with peacemakers, but when 

faced with enemies they will fight. This became 

particularly apparent during the Battle 

of Jenin in spring 2002 when more reserve 

paratroopers turned out for the planned 

showdown with the suicide bombers than 

the number of troops that the IDF enlisted 

for that clash. 

At its root, this consensus has always been 

there. That is why even a super-hawk like 

Begin, when faced with a man of peace like 

Sadat, struck the ultimate land-for-peace 

deal. And that is why, in 1967, when faced 

with a man of war like Gamal Abdel Nasser, 

even a grandfatherly peace lover like thenprime 

minister Levi Eshkol went to war. 

Similarly, the pragmatic mainstream demanded 

last decade an anti-terrorism fence, 

despite opposition from both Shimon Peres 

and Sharon – the former, then foreign minister, 

because he feared the fence would 

compromise his Peace Now vision, and 

the latter, then prime minister, because he 

thought the fence would compromise the 

swaths of Greater Israel that sprawled to its 

east. 

Most notably, the disengagement from 

Gaza in 2005 was backed by the mainstream 

public despite a massive and well-organized 

anti-retreat campaign that was aimed to win 

the hearts of average Israelis for what had 

been perceived as a sectarian, messianic 

cause. The campaign failed colossally. Israelis 

sympathized with the evacuees’ pain 

but they did not join their cause, and certainly 

did not help prevent the retreat. 

The common impression abroad that Israel 

remains deeply split between the two 

schools is, in short, unfounded. 

Yes, the current coalition is led by Greater 

Israelites. However, four of its parties – 

Shas, Kulanu, Yisrael Beytenu and United 

Torah Judaism – are not committed to the 

Greater Israel idea. Moreover, Likud’s ministers 

know that the day a sincere Palestinian 

peacemaker emerges most Israelis will 

demand a deal, and they know that the retreat 

from Gaza made the idea of evacuation 

a realistic option. Bruised and wrinkled, 

Greater Israel in 2017 is not the immaculate 

idea it was in 1967. 

THE RESTORATION of the Israeli consensus 

is particularly unique considering the 

steady erosion of the consensus elsewhere 

in the West. 

While Donald Trump hammers at pillars of 

the American consensus ‒ from the media’s 

legitimacy to the judiciary’s authority ‒ and 

with immigrants pressuring the European 

Union’s cohesion while nationalists defy its 

ideals, Israelis haven’t demonstrated much 

since 2011, and when they did it was not about 

the territorial issue, but about economics. 

The economic side of the Israeli consensus 

is a case in point. 

In 1967, Israel was a socialist economy 

with extensive governmental planning and a 

dominant public sector that comprised more 

than two-thirds of the economy. At the time, 

it was part of the consensus. 

However, after having reached the brink 

of bankruptcy while inflation soared to 

415%, Israel became split economically 

between socialists and capitalists. Israel 

seemed unable to produce a new economic 

consensus, even in the face of impending 

economic doom. 

Then, however, much like the dynamics 

of 1967, Israel’s politicians united at the 

brink of catastrophe – in this case the near 

extinction of foreign-currency reserves – 

and delivered the stabilization plan that 

saved the economy by steering it away from 

socialism to capitalism. The transition was 

so sharp that eventually even most kibbutzim 

were privatized. 

Israel’s economic reformers stopped short 

of fully dismantling its social safety net and 

health care system. Even so, by 2011, as 

thousands took to the streets and demanded 

cheaper housing, tuition and food, the economic 

consensus seemed shattered. 

It wasn’t. 

Like the debate over the future of the territories, 

in this realm, too, the utopian opposites 

are there, represented roughly by 

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Thatcherite, and 

the neo-socialists in Labor and Meretz. In 

between, however, sprawls a broad consensus 

that wants private enterprise to thrive, 

but also to foster justice for the underprivileged 

and opportunity for the poor. 

This consensus has been so powerful that 

it has kept a succession of disparate finance 

ministers ‒ from Labor’s Avraham (Baiga) 

Shochat to Likud’s Yuval Steinitz through 

Kulanu’s Moshe Kahlon ‒ from journeying 

too far away from the mainstream’s quest 

for capitalism with a human face. 

Israel’s economic success would not have 

happened without this new consensus. Then 

again, it pales when compared with the third 

dimension of the steadily emerging Israeli 

consensus: religion. 

The eruption of messianic fervor at the 

sight of Jewish troops climbing the Temple 

Mount in 1967 spelled a great threat to the 

Israeli consensus. 

The victory that made many assume the 

Messiah was around the corner implied 

potential impatience with secularism. At 

the same time, many in the secularist elite 

would grow impatient with, and fearful of, 

the newly energized messianic avant-garde 

that later took over the settlement cause. 

All this was besides the fact that the Israeli 

consensus already had been challenged 

14 


prior to 1967 by a modern Orthodoxy that 

imposed on the secular majority religious 

matrimony laws, kosher kitchens in the military 

and various Sabbath restrictions. 

Understandably, then, many wondered 

whether Israel’s young society could ever 

produce any kind of religious consensus. 

Well this may surprise many, but the fact is 

that distances have narrowed dramatically 

on this front, as well. 

POLLS INDICATE that some 90% of Israeli 

Jews observe the Passover Seder; 60% 

fast on Yom Kippur; 70% keep kosher; 94% 

circumcise their boys; and 66% hold a Sabbath 

meal and say its special prayer, the 

Kiddush, every Friday night. 

That means Israelis are overwhelmingly 

traditional. Moreover, there is a new spirit 

of religious experimentation that is slowly 

but steadily narrowing gaps between Israeli 

Jews. 

The holiday of Shavuot, when Jews historically 

stayed up all night studying Judaic 

texts, was once celebrated markedly differently 

by observant and secular Israelis: the 

former upheld tradition, celebrating in synagogues 

the giving of the Torah on Mount 

Sinai, while the latter celebrated spring, 

fertility and harvest. 

In recent decades, however, secular Israelis 

flock on Shavuot night to lectures, symposia 

and study forums where Judaic texts 

are studied in novel ways. At the same time, 

modern-Orthodox Israelis are embracing a 

new feminism that in 1967 was unthinkable 

in Israeli synagogues. With dozens of communities 

already welcoming women’s sermons, 

adopting egalitarian liturgy and even 

ordaining women rabbis, the phenomenon 

is clearly set to grow. 

Even more improbably, the ultra-Orthodox 

population that once opposed Zionism 

and shunned the secular workplace now 

produces 2,500 soldiers annually and also 

sends thousands of its young men and women 

to learn secular professions in newly 

opened colleges. In doing so, they, too, are 

joining the transforming Israeli consensus. 

This month, as historians, diplomats and 

journalists mark the Six Day War’s 50th 

anniversary, many will lament it as the moment 

the Israeli consensus died. That was 

true last century. This century, in the aftermath 

of the failed Camp David conference 

in 2000 and the violence that followed it, 

the Israeli consensus has been restored. 

That is an accomplishment by any yardstick, 

but all the more so when compared 

with the crises of national identity and social 

solidarity plaguing European countries 

from Ukraine to Belgium, not to mention 

the multiple civil wars across the Arab 

world. 

 

(Top) Right-wing activists cover their 

mouths with orange ribbons, part of a 

well-organized 2005 campaign to sway 

Israelis against uprooting settlements 

from Gaza 

(Above) A settler (left) and a peace 

activist engage in a staredown during 

a 2015 protest near the Gush Etzion 

settlement bloc 

GIL COHEN MAGEN / REUTERS 

MUSSA QAWASMA / REUTERS 


PROJECT 

SENATOR 

How Israel managed to overcome 

its misreading of Syrian and 

Egyptian intentions and score 

a lightning victory over the 

combined Arab armies in the 

Six Day War By Yossi Melman 

FIFTY YEARS ago, Israel embarked on what would be called the 

“waiting period” – three weeks of nerves on edge that led to the Six 

Day War in June 1967. During that period, Egypt concentrated its 

army along the Israeli border, closed navigation lanes to the Red Sea 

port of Eilat and threatened to destroy the Jewish state. 

It was a war neither side had wanted and it resulted in the capture 

by Israeli troops of the West Bank of Jordan, the Golan Heights in 

Syria and the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip of Egypt. 

Israeli intelligence was initially caught by surprise. 

On May 8, 1967, the chief of military intelligence Maj.-Gen. Aaron 

(Ahrale) Yariv briefed the general staff and said, “We can ascertain 

that Egypt is not ready to be entangled in anything because of the 

Syrians… We have reliable and solid information that proves both 

Egypt and Russia are trying to restrain the Syrians.” 

Until then, the prevailing estimate was that Egypt might send its 

planes to bomb the nuclear reactor in Dimona where, according to 

foreign reports, Israel already had developed its first nuclear bomb. 

How wrong Yariv was. One month later, Israel preempted and 

launched a war precisely because Egypt, led by president Gamal 

Abdul Nasser, rushed to support Syria and neither Nasser nor Russia 

tried to restrain the Syrians. 

Yariv would be haunted for years by his errant analysis, but in the 

end Israel’s military victory in the war was achieved thanks to strong 

intelligence gathering and analysis, as well as deception operations 

With the help of double agents, Israel tricked the Egyptians into 

expecting an assault from the ground. When Israel began with a 

massive air attack instead, Egyptian planes were sitting ducks 

16 


THE JERUSALEM REPORT JUNE 12, 2017 17 

REUTERS

y Military Intelligence under his command 

over the three years prior to the war. 

The mistaken estimate was shaped by 

events that had taken place in Syria over 

the previous year. Internal power struggles 

within the military and the ruling Ba’ath 

party led Syrian leaders to take a more 

aggressive approach toward Israel and to 

encourage Palestinian groups to intensify 

their “popular liberation war.” Syrian intelligence 

organized Palestinian units to 

cross via Jordan into Israel on sabotage 

missions. 

Israeli intelligence was 

blind regarding the 

Soviet intentions, having 

no analysts who could 

understand and explain 

the Kremlin’s moves 

Israeli intelligence was puzzled and wondered 

why the Syrians were doing this. 

According to a book published in Hebrew 

in 2013 by Maj.-Gen. (Res.) Amos Gilboa, 

“Mr. Intelligence – Ahrale Yariv,” Israel’s 

intelligence analysts didn’t have an answer 

as to why Syria was encouraging “a war of 

liberation” on the one hand, but showing 

great restraint on its own border with Israel, 

on the other. They possessed good information 

about the capabilities of the Syrian 

army and its tactics on the border but lacked 

understanding of Syrian intentions. The 

main reason they didn’t understand Syria’s 

inner politics was that Israel’s best spy and 

intelligence asset – Eli Cohen – had been 

arrested and hanged in Damascus two years 

earlier, in 1965. 

The inability of Israel to define a clear 

policy led the government of prime minister 

Levi Eshkol to rely heavily on the 

advice of Yariv and chief of staff Lt.-Gen. 

Yitzhak Rabin. They formulated a responsive 

approach based on a set of tactical decisions 

around the notion defined by Yariv 

as “we can’t stand still” to the Syrian-sponsored 

Palestinian infiltrations and acts of 

sabotage. 

Rabin and Yariv advocated that Israel 

“has to embark on a frontal collision” with 

the Syrian regime to confront it with the ultimatum 

to either stop supporting the “popular 

liberation struggle” or face the risk of 

an overall war with Israel. 

Hoping to deter the regime, Israeli leaders 

and military commanders amplified the 

volume of their threats against Syria, but 

this achieved the opposite result and only 

agitated Syria’s patron – the Soviet Union. 

Its leaders adopted a series of steps that 

included warnings to Israel not to attack 

Syria, and at the same time mobilized 

Nasser to support Damascus. 

In short, the Soviet Union not only didn’t 

try to restrain Syria, but actually contributed 

to the escalation. Some experts believe 

Moscow did it on purpose to improve its 

global position by taking advantage of US 

involvement in Vietnam. 

Israeli intelligence was also blind regarding 

the Soviet intentions, having no analysts 

who could understand and explain the 

Kremlin’s moves. 

A week after the estimate by Yariv and 

Rabin that the Egyptians would not dare 

to entangle themselves in a war with Israel, 

reality slapped them in the face: Nasser, 

on May 14, ordered Egypt’s army to march 

into Sinai. It was the eve of Israel’s 19th Independence 

Day. By doing so, he violated 

the demilitarization agreement signed in 

1957 that ended the Sinai Campaign. 

However, for the next three weeks until 

war broke out, Israeli intelligence would 

prove that, in contrast to its lack of understanding 

of Egyptian intentions, it had superb 

coverage of the Egyptian army’s capabilities. 

The information was obtained from 

a special project code-named “Senator.” 

IT WAS a secret signal intelligence 

(“Sigint”) program to obtain information 

about the Egyptian army by bugging and 

listening to its communication lines with 

special emphasis on the conversations 

of the Egyptian air force pilots and their 

commanders. 

Another intelligence contribution that 

would help the IDF achieve its victory were 

the “field files” that were prepared over the 

previous years for the eventuality of war 

based on aerial reconnaissance, which contained 

information about the topography, 

paths, roads and fortifications of the Egyptian 

positions on the peninsula. 

No less important were the deception 

plans and psychological warfare conducted 

by intelligence to mislead the Egyptians. 

These programs used double agents, and a 

central figure among them was an Egyptian 

agent code-named “Stake.” 

His real name was Jamal al-Rifaat. He 

had been recruited by Egyptian intelligence 

and sent via Brazil as a Jewish immigrant to 

Israel in 1955 but was soon exposed by the 

18 


Once enemy planes and airfields were 

destroyed, Israeli ground forces moved 

in. Within five days they defeated the 

Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian armies 

and moved to Germany to live with his German 

wife. In the early 80s he returned to his 

Egyptian homeland, where he died. 

To this day, Egyptian authorities hail him 

as a hero, as one of their best spies ever, 

refusing to accept the truth that he had betrayed 

them and was a double agent. 

counterintelligence unit of Israel’s domestic 

security agency, the Shin Bet. Rifaat was 

threatened with life imprisonment unless he 

confessed and agreed to cooperate. He did 

and became a double agent. 

“Stake” was cultivated by his Israeli 

handlers to develop his cover story as a top 

spy who had managed to befriend and penetrate 

the Israeli defense system. To empower 

this image, he was introduced to and photographed 

in the company of Israeli leaders 

including Gen. Moshe Dayan, the future defense 

minister, creating the impression that 

he was a quality asset. 

For the next 12 years, he fed his Egyptian 

“operators” false and deceptive information 

provided by his Israeli handlers. The jewel in 

the crown was in 1965 when he sent Egypt 

the “true Israel war plans,” which claimed 

that if and when there was a war between the 

two nations, the Israeli assault would begin 

with a massive ground attack. According to 

this false plan, the role of the air force would 

be defensive, to provide air support to the 

ground forces and repel enemy air attacks. 

It was a huge lie. The real Israeli war plan, 

code-named “Moked” (Focus), was based on 

surprise air strikes aiming to destroy Egypt’s 

air force and airfields. 

Following the victory there was no need 

for his services, and two years after the war, 

“Stake” ended his relationship with Israeli 

intelligence. He was paid handsomely, rehabilitated 

as a businessman in the oil sector 

REUTERS 

TRUSTING THEIR “quality” agent, the 

Egyptians were off guard. On the morning 

of June 5, when Israel launched its preemptive 

strike, hundreds of its fighter planes 

and bombers were unleashed and within 

80 minutes destroyed most of the Egyptian 

air force, whose planes were sitting ducks 

unconcealed on their tarmacs. The airfields, 

air radars and air bases also were either 

completely destroyed or damaged. The Six 

Day War was practically over. Only then did 

the Israeli ground forces move in, and within 

six days they defeated the Egyptian army, 

conquering the entire Sinai and Gaza Strip. 

At the same time, after the Jordanian army 

opened fire, Israel Defense Forces overran 

the West Bank, including Jerusalem. On the 

last day of the war, Israel also captured the 

Golan Heights from Syria. 

In due course, Israel withdrew from Sinai, 

returning it to Egypt in exchange for a peace 

treaty, and from Gaza, disengaging unilaterally 

from the Strip. 

Fifty years after the war, Israel is still in 

full control of the West Bank and Golan 

Heights with no serious intention of giving 

either territory back, not even in return for 

peace treaties with the Palestinian Authority 

and whatever is left of the country formerly 

known as Syria. 

Israeli society, meanwhile, continues 

to debate whether the Six Day War was a 

blessing or a curse. 

 

Yossi Melman is an Israeli security commentator 

and co-author of ‘Spies Against 

Armageddon.’ He blogs at www.israelspy. 

com and tweets @yossi_melman 


THIS ARTICLE WAS PRODUCED IN COOPERATION WITH MOBILEYE 

SIGHT 

FOR SORE EYES 

Fresh from the huge news of its sale to 

Intel for $15 billion, Mobileye and its 

founders Amnon Shashua and Ziv Aviram 

set their sights on OrCam, designed to 

help people with vision and reading 

disabilities connect by communicating 

text and other visual information and 

reading it back in a clear voice 

• By SHARON UDASIN 

Dyslexic children and university 

students once frustrated 

by printed or digital 

texts may now have the 

chance to excel in the classroom 

alongside their peers – with the help 

of a tiny camera that whispers in 

their ears. 

Through a wearable device mounted 

on virtually any eyeglass frame, the 

Jerusalem-based company OrCam 

aims to drastically improve the lives 

of people with visual impairment, 

blind individuals, and people with 

reading disabilities. Founded by the 

same entrepreneurs behind collision 

avoidance system and autonomous 

driving technology firm Mobileye – 

which is being sold for $15.3 billion 

to Intel – OrCam enables users to 

hear the text they want to read, identify 

products on supermarket shelves 

and recognize the faces they want 

to see. 

“All of a sudden we provide kids 

with the technical skill of reading 

– OrCam relays text from any surface 

in real time,” Yonatan Wexler, 

OrCam’s executive vice president for 

research and development, told The 

Jerusalem Post in an April interview. 

While by age 18 months most children 

can understand spoken language, 

the much more complicated 

task of reading requires many years 

of learning. OrCam’s MyEye device 

simplifies this process for those children 

struggling with disabilities and 

for the visually impaired of all ages, 

by “translating the reading, a complex 

visual task, into hearing, which 

is something we were born with,” 

Wexler explained. 

“It’s like a sensory substitution, but 

at a much higher level,” he said. “We 

created a device that communicates 

visual information.” 

OrCam was founded in 2010 by 

CTO Professor Amnon Shashua and 

CEO Ziv Aviram – who serve the 

same roles at Mobileye – and began 

distributing its devices in limited 

quantities in October 2013, ultimately 

expanding to a wider customer 

base in the US in 2015. As the company’s 

technology continues to reach 

DR. YONATAN WEXLER, EVP of 

research and development, holds the 

next generation of the breakthrough 

OrCam MyEye assistive technology 

device. (Courtesy) 

more users, the firm is aiming to 

issue an initial public offering (IPO) 

in about two years, according to 

Wexler. 

Valued at about $600 million after 

completing a $41 million investment 

funding round in February, OrCam 

will likely issue the IPO on Nasdaq or 

the New York Stock Exchange, Shashua 

recently told Reuters. Like Mobileye, 

OrCam also has a long history of 

partnership with Intel – receiving a 

$6m. investment in March 2014. 

OrCam’s $3,500 MyEye and the 

$2,500 MyReader version – which 

has only the reading function – are 

now being sold in a variety of countries 

around the world and operate 

in English, Spanish, French, German, 

Italian and Hebrew. Soon, the 

devices will also be able to read Arabic, 

Russian, Norwegian, Swedish, 

Dutch, Portuguese, Danish and cer- 

20 


tain Asian languages. 

Using artificial intelligence technology 

to read any printed text, recognize 

faces and identify products, 

OrCam’s assistive devices include 

a lightweight and inconspicuous 

smart camera mounted on the frame 

of a user’s eyeglasses, connected by 

a thin cable to a base unit about the 

size of a smartphone. The units can 

dictate any printed text or discreetly 

relay information to the wearer 

through a personal speaker when he 

or she points at an item. 

“It’s critical to be able to provide 

that information in an effective, 

quick manner,” Wexler said, noting 

that the process must also be efficient, 

in order to ensure lengthy battery 

life. 

As far as facial recognition is concerned, 

MyEye works by detecting 

people’s presence and announcing 

the individual’s name with a voice 

memo pre-recorded by the user. The 

user completes a brief, one-time entry 

of the person in question, who must 

stand in front of the camera while 

the user clicks a button to memorize 

the face, Wexler explained. 

“The signature of the face is stored 

in the device,” he said. “For people 

who are blind or visually impaired, 

it’s critical in social and business 

interactions.” 

That being said, Wexler emphasized 

that MyEye also promises to 

maintain the privacy of both the 

user and the people it recognizes. 

Lacking any external connectivity, 

the device has does not share any 

information outside, and does not 

store anything pertaining to the documents 

that the user “reads,” he said. 

“We want a device that will help 

you and not be a hindrance, ,” Wexler 

added. 

About twice a year, users receive 

software updates to improve the 

functionalities of their devices, 

which are today running OrCam’s 

AMNON SHASHUA and ZIV AVIRAM (Courtesy) 

seventh version and will in the coming 

months move to the eighth rendition, 

according to Wexler. Some 

enhancements in that update will 

include barcode and color recognition, 

while other future improvements 

involve navigation guidance, 

translation, higher levels of text 

understanding and speech recognition 

– such as the ability to ask the 

device to go back and spell a word. 

In addition to constantly improving 

the existing MyEye and MyReader 

devices, OrCam’s engineers are 

currently working on a new technology 

called MyMe – a tiny device that 

can be clipped onto a shirt and provide 

and catalogue useful information 

about the user’s daily activities, 

including facial recognition. MyMe 

will work by transmitting data to the 

user’s phone or smartwatch, Wexler 

explained. 

“We are essentially revolutionizing 

the vision impaired community, 

just like hearing aids revolutionized 

the hearing impaired community 50 

years ago,” Wexler told the Post. 

As OrCam’s devices gradually 

become more popular, the community 

is also working with institutions 

in Israel and the United States to 

ensure that some coverage can be 

provided to subsidize the costs for 

patients. In Israel, the company has 

teamed up with the Education Ministry 

and Bituach Leumi (the National 

Insurance Institute of Israel) to 

help more people gain access to the 

machines, Wexler explained. 

While the mission to boost nationwide 

coverage in the US is slightly 

more challenging due to the private 

insurance framework, Wexler said 

that OrCam has made significant 

process with offices in individual 

states, such as the California Department 

of Rehabilitation’s Vocational 

Rehabilitation Division. 

“We had to work hard to get it, but 

it’s covered,” he said. 

Similar departments in about 10 

states are also beginning to provide 

OrCam’s systems to students 

and workers in need, as is the US 

Department of Veterans Affairs on 

a federal level, he added. Although 

the process of integrating the units 

into health systems in Israel, the US 

and around the world may be slow, 

Wexler expressed confidence that 

governments will continue to adapt 

to a rapidly changing technological 

reality. 

“It’s obvious that this is the right 

system for people,” he said. “If you’re 

losing your sight or you can’t read for 

whatever reason, OrCam has a lot of 

impact on your life and on society as 

well.” 

■ 


Back to 

Ammunition 

Hill 

Paul Alster joins the paratroopers of Battalion 

66, who took part in one of the bloodiest 

battles of the Six Day War, and hears how 

the decision to take the Old City was made 

22 

IN EARLY May, a few weeks prior to the 

50th anniversary of the Six Day War, surviving 

members of Battalion 66, of the 

55th Paratroopers Brigade that famously 

captured the strategically crucial Ammunition 

Hill ‒ a battle that has gone down in 

history as the most bloody and brutal of the 

campaign that liberated Jerusalem ‒ were 

reunited. 

The assumption at such a gathering would 

be that these men ‒ the youngest now in 

their early 70s, the oldest approaching their 

mid-80s ‒ would return to the site of the battle 

at which 36 of their comrades fell, along 

with 71 of the Jordanian defenders. It was 

not to Ammunition Hill that they physically 

returned, however, though it was the main 

subject of conversation throughout the day. 

Instead, the veteran paratroopers toured a 

series of key sites at which their predecessors, 

the Palmach fighters of the 1948 War 

of Independence, prevailed against all the 

odds. It was very important for them, close 

to Independence Day, to show their respect 

and admiration for the previous generation’s 

remarkable achievements. 

Such a gesture says a great deal about the 

collective nature of the men whose achievements 

on June 6, 1967 helped pave the way 

for a military victory that stunned the world. 

Without exception, those who agreed to 

share their memories related their stories 

with modesty, sometimes with reluctance, 

and without a hint of bravado. Famous 

battles might excite those reading of such 

Soldiers of the 55th Paratrooper Brigade 

pause from training for a photo at Beit 

Guvrin in 1965 



COURTESY DAN SHILOAH ARCHIVE

exploits, but those I met repeatedly highlighted 

the one critical ingredient that is so 

often the difference between life and death 

in the unimaginable carnage of battle and 

the dizzying fog of war ‒ luck. 

The paratroopers had not expected to be 

sent to Jerusalem. Instead, the 55th Brigade, 

highly trained reservists who had completed 

their statutory military service a few years 

earlier, had been preparing for a parachute 

mission on June 5th, the opening day of the 

Six Day War, in El-Arish in the Sinai Peninsula. 

At the last minute, though, they were 

diverted to Jerusalem knowing little of what 

awaited them and unaware of their specific 

objective. 

I felt that King David 

and the fighters of 

’67, together, were 

handing Jerusalem 

back to the Jewish 

people after a gap of 

3,000 years 

Ammunition Hill proved to be their target. 

Historians have robustly debated the 

strategic necessity of capturing the Jordanian-held 

position, drawing conclusions 

for and against the decisions taken that day. 

They have questioned the motives behind 

the decisions made by Mordechai (Motta) 

Gur, the 55th Paratrooper Brigade commander, 

and others, as well as the chaos that 

ensued during the ferocious battle prompted 

by poor intelligence reports that meant the 

paratroopers encountered far more resistance 

than anticipated from the Jordanians 

(who occupied the high ground and had prepared 

a series of fortified trenches). 

Those were decisions made on high, but 

what has never been questioned is the way 

in which Battalion 66 took the fight to the 

Jordanians. 

In their everyday lives, many hailed from 

kibbutzim (both secular and religious), had 

normal day jobs and professions, some 

were full-time students, some were married 

with children. Once called up for duty, 

though, they would meld into a well-trained 

elite force, something few other armies in 

the world to this day can achieve at such 

short notice. 

The Battle of Ammunition Hill began at 

2:30 a.m. in complete darkness. The welldocumented 

tales of the battle included a 

paratrooper throwing himself onto a live 

grenade to save his comrades, junior officers 

picking up the baton and leading the 

charge after their senior officers had fallen, 

and other notable incidents of valor above 

and beyond the call of duty. 

But after spending a day with these men 

‒ some impressively defying the aging process 

and still appearing physically strong, 

others beginning to show the inevitable ravages 

of time ‒ the one thing that puts their 

achievements into true perspective is not 

that they were extraordinary men doing extraordinary 

things that June night 50 years 

ago. It is, more remarkably, that they were 

ordinary men who did extraordinary things 

in the most challenging of circumstances. 

Dan Shiloah, who organized the day out 

and regularly organizes other such events, 

was persuaded to tell his remarkable story 

of surviving the Six Day War against all 

the odds. It is breathtaking in the simple, 

matter-of-fact way he calmly recalls what 

happened. 

“I WAS wounded in my head [during the 

battle at Ammunition Hill]. I told the medic 

to just put a bandage on and that I wanted 

to leave [to return to my unit]. He told me, 

“You need to have stitches.” I told him to 

just put the bandage on, then took my helmet 

‒ which had holes in it ‒ and I went 

back. 

“A day later I was wounded again in my 

chest at Augusta Victoria, hit by both bullets 

and shrapnel. This is my story. I never tried 

to be famous or anything like that. I don’t 

like stories of war.” 

Shiloah’s huge stroke of luck stemmed 

from the fact that his helmet was too small 

for him and sat an inch or two above the 

top of his head. After being felled by the 

impact of the bullet, he saw the enemy signaling 

that he was dead, but the bullet had 

skimmed the top of his head, going through 

the gap between the inside of the helmet and 

his scalp. 

You couldn’t make it up. He still has that 

perforated helmet as a souvenir of the battle 

and the good fortune that came his way. 

Dan Eyal, who trained alongside Shiloah 

at the paratrooper training center throughout 

the previous two years, was 24 years old 

24 


my side. On the other side of Gideon was 

Avinoam Kantorovich. There was heavy 

machine-gun fire right above us, high above 

us, but nothing that we were too worried 

about. Gideon said to me, ‘Have you loaded 

your Uzi?’ and I said, ‘Yes.’ 

“The thing was that no one had told us 

to load our guns. At that time, there were 

strict orders not to load your gun unless you 

were told to. They were shooting all around 

us, and I thought it seemed obvious that we 

should be prepared for anything. Suddenly, 

there was an explosion that hit the building 

next to us. Then Gideon began saying, ‘I’m 

dead. I’m dead.’ 

“Both Avinoam and I looked at him and 

he seemed OK, as though nothing had happened. 

I said to him, ‘Gideon, there’s nothing 

wrong with you. You’re fine.’ 

at the time of the battle and father to a threeyear-old 

son. Part of the mortar unit, he has 

rarely spoken of his experience at Ammunition 

Hill but after a little persuasion agreed 

to share his story. 

“I never went into the details of the battle 

with other people,” Eyal tells The Jerusalem 

Report. “We tried to shell the [police] 

school and were told that [our field commanders] 

could not see our hits. This was 

explained later on because the shells had 

fallen in the middle of the building, which 

had a courtyard surrounded by walls, so 

the courtyard itself couldn’t be seen. They 

Veterans of the Battalion 66 paratroopers 

reunite in 2017 ahead of the 50th 

anniversary of the battle at Ammunition Hill 

told us to come down from the small open 

plot where we were. It was in a built-up 

area and had a street slightly below it that 

led down to the middle of the [residential] 

neighborhood. 

“On our way down, I saw that many soldiers 

were gathered between a building and 

a small fence, so I went further along the 

street. Gideon (Gingy) Rosenfeld was by 

HADAS PARUSH / FLASH 90 

“THEN WE saw he had been hit on his right 

side and there was a big hole. We tried to 

take care of him with some sort of bandage. 

As far as I can remember, an ambulance 

showed up near us soon after and we left 

him with them. At exactly the same time, in 

a vehicle next to the ambulance, I saw the 

bodies of a number of our friends. 

“They took Gideon off to the hospital. 

Despite his wound, we had expected him 

to survive. I never thought he would die, 

but it seems he was so badly hurt that they 

couldn’t save him. We were lying down so 

close to each other when the explosion happened 

that his shoulder was literally touching 

mine. It was pure luck that I survived 

and that, sadly, he didn’t.” 

Unknown to Eyal (because his paratrooper 

brigade moved a few days later to fight 

in the north against the Syrians), Rosenfeld, 

from Kibbutz Eyal, near Kfar Saba, fought 

for his life for eight days in the hospital in 

Jerusalem until eventually succumbing to 

his wounds on June 14, 1967. He was 21 

years old. 

One of the most senior officers at Ammunition 

Hill was the deputy commander 

of Battalion 66, Doron Mor. Judging by the 

respect in which he is still held to this day 

by his men, Mor, who went on to become an 


acclaimed geologist and was influential in 

a number of major cross-cultural education 

projects, was a soldier’s soldier. 

He stepped away from the gathering for a 

few minutes to share his personal memories 

of the battle. 

“My personal experience is of absolute 

terror ‒ that lasted one second,” Mor told 

The Report. “It has stayed with me all my 

life. There was a fierce battle and we didn’t 

know exactly what the situation was.” 

Mor told battalion commander Yossi 

Yaffe that he wanted to help sort out the 

confusion between two tanks that, judging 

by radio communications, hadn’t managed 

to locate each other’s position. 

“Just then, two other tanks that had been 

clearing mines came up [the hill] so I asked 

for them and got them. I thought that if there 

was any more resistance, I could use the 

tanks and clear the area. 

“My radio operator and I went on the first 

tank, sitting [outside] on the back. The operations 

sergeant, who later was killed in 

the Yom Kippur War, went onto the second 

tank. While we were going up the hill, 

there was terrible fighting all around us and 

there we were on top of the tank like sitting 

ducks! 

“I WAS leaning on the turret and suddenly 

heard a burst of fire. I turned and saw a 

Jordanian soldier 10 meters from me holding 

a carbine rifle. He fired all his bullets, 

then the magazine fell and he started to load 

another. I had my Uzi hanging on my right 

side and the Jordanian was standing to my 

left. Moving the Uzi to the left, loading, 

aiming and firing took two or three seconds. 

It should have taken only a second for him 

[to reload and fire]. I bent over expecting to 

be hit, then heard gunfire and the Jordanian 

fell. The shots came from the tank following 

me. They shot and killed him. 

“That moment, the moment that I thought, 

‘I’m going to get it in the back,’ is my most 

vivid memory of Ammunition Hill.” 

I asked Mor about the confused intelligence 

reports on the day of the battle. He accepted 

that, for a variety of reasons, the situation 

on the ground was not as anticipated. 

The Jordanians had moved from the police 

school ‒ where intelligence reports had 

suggested they would be found – to Ammunition 

Hill itself. Mor suggests it is difficult 

to know whether that was a planned strategic 

move or simply happened spontaneously 

as the battle began, but he conceded there 

were some three times more defenders present 

than had been expected. 

After a brief pause, the 82-year-old asked 

if I’d like to hear another story. I told him 

I would ‒ and am very glad I did. This is 

a remarkable account, rarely heard, of a 

key moment in Israeli military history witnessed 

by Mor, told in his own words, in its 

entirety: 

“I bore witness to a moment that even 

now makes me feel very emotional. On the 

morning after [Ammunition Hill], I was 

at Sheikh Jarrah, which is on the route to 

Mount Scopus, which we hadn’t yet received 

orders to ascend. Suddenly, an open 

jeep arrived driven by Uzi Narkis, the chief 

of staff. Next to him sat Moshe Dayan, the 

defense minister, and in the back seat was 

Ezer Weizman, chief of military operations. 

We’d met previously. 

“Narkis said to me, ‘Listen, we need to 

get quickly to Mount Scopus. Drive in front 

of us and secure the way.’ 

“I said to him, ‘Sir, the way has not yet 

been cleared. We haven’t connected.’ 

“So he said, ‘Then go in front and clear 

the way.’ 

“I didn’t have any manpower. Everyone 

was scattered all over. I took a few spare 

hand grenades and a few Uzi bullet magazines 

and said to the driver, ‘Just drive as 

fast as you can. If we need to fight, I’ll do 

the fighting.’ 

“He really put his foot on the gas. How 

on earth could I have fought! I had to hold 

on with all my strength so as not to fly out 

26 


COURTESY DAN SHILOAH ARCHIVE 

of the jeep! We got up to Mount Scopus and 

they greeted us with hugs and kisses. Then 

we went higher to what is now the National 

Library and walked up onto the roof. It was 

so quiet. After that dreadful night [at Ammunition 

Hill], now seeing all of Jerusalem 

quiet, no fire, no smoke. You could just hear 

the tweeting of the birds. 

“Then I heard Moshe Dayan and Uzi 

Narkis talking about entering the Old City. 

There still was no permission, but Dayan 

said, ‘If permission is given, where will you 

go in?’ 

“Uzi Narkis began explaining to him 

where our forces were positioned ‒ at the 

Damascus Gate, Herod’s Gate, Zion Gate 

and Jaffa Gate. Then Moshe Dayan said 

to him, ‘Why don’t you go in through the 

Lions’ Gate?’ 

“It had never been considered before. 

There was silence, and then Uzi said, ‘You 

know what Moshe, since the time of King 

David, Jerusalem has never been conquered 

from the east.’ 

‘Then this will be the second and last 

time,’ said Dayan. And, with that, the conversation 

ended. 

“I felt that King David and the fighters of 

’67, together, were handing Jerusalem back 

to the Jewish people after a gap of 3,000 

years. I remember getting goosebumps. A 

man is indeed fortunate to witness a moment 

of history such as this. To this very day, this 

really is a very emotional memory for me.” 

The next day Israeli forces entered the 

Old City through the Lions’ Gate, confounding 

all predictions of where such an 

entry would take place. The rest, as they 

say, is history. 

After that stunning story, Mor took his 

leave of me and rejoined his men. With the 

deputy commander’s stunning recollection 

still ringing in my ears, the gathered old 

soldiers were recalling Ammunition Hill 

(Opposite page) Dan Shiloah inspects his 

bullet-ridden helmet; (left) paratroopers 

reach the Western Wall the day after the 

battle at Ammunition Hill; (above) deputy 

commander Doron Mor phones in the 

casualty figures from the hill on June 6, 1967 

to Yossi Yaffe, commander of Battalion 66 

and its place in Israeli history following 

on from the War of Independence 19 years 

earlier. 

“The fight for Jerusalem didn’t start in 

1967,” concluded one of the speakers standing 

in the shade of the trees alongside the 70 

or more former paratroopers, many accompanied 

by their wives. “It began in 1948 ‒ 

and it’s still going on today.” 

Paul Alster is an Israel-based journalist. 

His website is www.paulalster.com and he 

can be followed on Twitter @paul_alster 


The 

proverbial 

couple 

The Six Day War made identification with Israel intrinsic to 

Diaspora Jewish identity. Fifty years on, are differences over the 

West Bank changing the relationship? By Elliot Jager 

ON MONDAY afternoon, June 5, the first 

day of the 1967 Six Day War, and continuing 

for the remainder of the school week, 

ultra-Orthodox boys at the Yeshiva Chasen 

Sofer elementary school on New York’s 

Lower East Side assembled to recite psalms 

for Israel’s survival. Egypt’s president 

Gamal Nasser had declared: “Our basic 

objective will be the destruction of Israel.” 

The yeshiva was aloof from secular Zionism, 

yet 6,000 miles away a war erupted 

that put nearly 2.5 million Jewish lives on 

the line. 

That evening, CBS News with Walter 

Cronkite and NBC News with Chet Huntley 

and David Brinkley led their respective 

7 p.m. broadcasts with the Middle East war 

story. Technological advances in news coverage 

propelled the conflict into American 

living rooms. In 21st century parlance, the 

Israel story had gone viral. When a ceasefire 

came into effect on June 11, it was clear 

that not only had Israel survived but it had 

won an outright victory. 

Nasser lost the Sinai Peninsula and the 

Gaza Strip; Syria lost the strategic Golan 

Heights; and Jordan – which had been implored 

to stay out of the war but didn’t – lost 

the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and the 

parts of Jerusalem it had taken in the 1948 

War. 

For many American Jews, the triumph 

was a catharsis. To the spiritually inclined, 

the victory looked like a miracle. Ethnic 

pride was in vogue and for many the triumph 

raised Jewish esteem. The community 

was anyway feeling more secure and 

assertive than it had in the 1950s. Not all 

American Jews were elated, however. The 

ultra-Orthodox Natorei Karta sect didn’t 

budge in its animosity, which stemmed 

from the principle that only the messiah 

could herald the Jewish return to Palestine. 

The secular anti-Zionist American Council 

for Judaism looked askance at what it saw 

as unseemly Jewish chauvinism. But for 

most US Jews across the political and religious 

spectrum, Israel was now wired into 

their consciousness. 

American Zionist campaigners had been 

lobbying the White House since the leadup 

to the Balfour Declaration, which was 

issued in 1917. However, after the creation 

of the state in 1948, their efforts to cultivate 

US support for Israeli security positions 

proved an uphill battle. Harry S. Truman 

would have preferred Israel to pull back to 

the 1947 Partition Plan lines. And, in 1957, 

under withering pressure from Dwight 

Eisenhower’s administration, Israel was 

obliged to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula 

to the 1949 armistice lines – without, 

moreover, guarantees that attacks from 

Egyptian-controlled territory would stop 

or that Israeli shipping in the Suez Canal 

would be unimpeded. 

As if to acknowledge the new reality, in 

December 1967, the Union of Orthodox 

Congregations and the Young Israel movement 

held a joint celebratory conclave in 

Jerusalem. Their earlier parve backing for 

Torah-based Zionism was suddenly infused 

with a sense of visceral connection 

to the Jewish state that until then had been 

espoused mainly by the religious-Zionist 

Mizrachi movement. Progressive religious 

streams also drew closer. Conservative Judaism 

was Zionist from its inception; Reform 

was well along in a process that had 

brought it from anti-Zionist to non-Zionist 

to pro-Zionist. Both streams now had 

fresh incentive to develop a stronger presence 

in Israel. One American-Jewish civil 

rights group convened a meeting of public 

28 


CARLO ALLEGRI / REUTERS 

intellectuals from both countries to explore 

what the upsurge in nationalism might mean 

for Israel-US Jewish relations. 

The Johnson administration, which tried 

to be neutral at the outset of the fighting, 

immediately insisted that Israel withdraw 

from the just-captured territories as part 

of a land-for-peace scheme. Nine administrations 

and 50 years later, that – more or 

less – remains entrenched US policy. From 

the start, US policymakers felt they needed 

to convince pro-Israel Americans that 

the West Bank was not essential to Israeli 

security; that the Arabs were open to compromise; 

and that any threat to Israel’s existence 

had been permanently overcome. If 

American Jewish pro-Israelism was born in 

1967, so was the need by successive administrations 

to shape its contours with reassurances 

that support for Israel and support for 

a West Bank withdrawal were compatible. 

On August 29, 1967, the Arab League 

met in Khartoum and issued its notorious 

“Three No’s” declaration: No peace with 

Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations 

with Israel. By late 1967 and early 

1968, Jewish settlements in the strategic 

Etzion bloc, just south of Jerusalem – they’d 

been abandoned during the War of Independence 

– were reconstituted. Given unremitting 

Arab bellicosity, the notion that Israel 

could reasonably be expected to withdraw 

to the Green Line – or 1949 armistice line 

– seemed far-fetched. Yet, that was more 

or less what the international community 

demanded in UN Security Council Resolution 

242, dated November 22, 1967, which 

American diplomats had helped craft. 

THE JOHNSON State Department issued 

its first condemnation of Jewish settlement 

activity in January 1968. Reacting to housing 

construction on Mount Scopus, where 

the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and 

Hadassah Hospital had reopened at their 

original pre-state sites, and in the adjacent 

neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, State Department 

spokesman Robert McCloskey 

said, “We have repeatedly made it clear that 

we do not recognize any unilateral actions 

affecting the status of Jerusalem.” In 1969, 

the US backed two Security Council Resolutions 

(267 and 271) to hammer home 

the point that Washington did not recognize 

Jewish claims to Jerusalem. 

Israel had captured the American-Jewish 

Pro-Israel demonstrators chant slogans 

in New York City in 2015. One segment of 

American Jewry that has drawn closer to 

Israel these past 50 years is the 10% who 

are Orthodox 

imagination just when the US was churning 

with racial and cultural turmoil and the 

quagmire of Vietnam. In July and August 

1967, race riots left parts of Washington 

ablaze. Middle-class Jews joined in the 

white flight from inner city to suburb (leaving 

behind their elderly and poor). In Temples 

from Chappaqua, New York, to Hidden 

Hills, California, rabbis were delivering 

sermons urging their flock not to turn away 

from the civil-rights movement. Back in the 

Middle East, a war of attrition against Israel 

by Egypt and the Palestine Liberation Organization 

was underway, and by August 1970 

would cost the lives of 1,424 IDF soldiers. 

The new Nixon administration embraced 

Johnson’s land-for-peace formula. On December 

9, 1969, secretary of state William 

Rogers said, “We believe that while recognized 

political boundaries must be established 

and agreed upon by the parties, any 


changes in the pre-existing [1949 armistice] 

lines should not reflect the weight of conquest 

and should be confined to insubstantial 

alterations required for mutual security. 

We do not support expansionism.” In 1970, 

Israeli premier Golda Meir devoted many a 

fundraising speech before American-Jewish 

audiences to argue against Rogers Plan. The 

Milwaukee-raised Meir said Israel did not 

want territory for its own sake, it wanted secure 

defensible boundaries. Hadn’t the Arabs 

made their position clear at Khartoum? 

For many American 

Jews, the triumph was 

a catharsis. To the 

spiritually inclined, the 

victory looked like a 

miracle 

Susie Gelman, chairwoman of the Israel 

Policy Forum, recalls her first visit to Israel 

in the summer of 1970. “I remember vividly 

how everything felt possible, not only 

in terms of freely visiting the West Bank, 

but also the feeling that Israel could determine 

its own future as a result of vastly 

expanding its territory and demonstrating to 

its hostile Arab neighbors that it was truly a 

force with which to be reckoned.” 

Construction of strategically placed Jewish 

neighborhoods began on the formerly 

vacant hills ringing Jerusalem and its environs. 

Not all the building was motivated 

by mainly strategic concerns. In 1972, 

religious-nationalist followers of Rabbi 

Zvi Yehuda Kook and his Gush Emunim 

movement founded the Judean settlement 

of Kiryat Arba outside Hebron. 

If anything, the 1973 Yom Kippur War – a 

surprise attack by Egypt and Syria during 

the Jewish Day of Atonement – only intensified 

the American-Jewish community’s 

emotional attachment to Israel. Israel 

pushed back the offensive, but to punish 

America for rearming Israel – albeit belatedly 

– during the fighting, Saudi Arabia 

organized an Organization of Arab Petroleum 

Exporting Countries embargo that led 

to limited supplies and long lines at US gasoline 

pumps. US Jews feared an antisemitic 

backlash. Clearly, decisions taken in Jerusalem 

impacted on the Diaspora. 

Nahum Goldmann, president of the World 

Jewish Congress, declared in 1973 what 

amounted to a “no taxation without representation” 

argument. Dating back to their 

interactions with Israel’s first prime minister, 

David Ben-Gurion, Jewish machers 

resented Israeli leaders for being imperious 

toward the Diaspora, for not listening 

to them – nonetheless, most kept their 

sentiments away from the media spotlight. 

Now, with encouragement from Goldmann, 

a group of Reform and Conservative rabbis 

and academics associated with the anti-Vietnam 

war movement created Breira 

(Hebrew for choice or alternative). The 

name was a retort to Israeli leaders who 

argued that they had no choice but to battle 

on. Breira advocated the unconditional 

inclusion of the PLO in any diplomatic process 

toward establishing a Palestinian-Arab 

state in the West Bank and Gaza. Foremost, 

Breira shattered the barrier against Jewish 

public criticism of Israeli policies. At 

the same time, though, its dovish message 

failed to gain traction in the wake of Palestinian 

terrorism throughout 1973, including 

attacks in London, Washington and Rome. 

YITZHAK RABIN had taken over from 

Meir in 1974 (he would return for a second 

stint in 1992) and tensions with Washington 

were taut. Henry Kissinger was now secretary 

of state and Egypt’s new president Anwar 

Sadat had told him that he was willing 

to make a statement of non-belligerency if 

Israel handed over Sinai’s Abu Rudeis oil 

fields and the strategic Mitla and Gidi passes. 

Rabin didn’t see the point of giving up territory 

for a pledge that could be easily withdrawn. 

In 1975, with Gerald Ford having 

replaced Nixon, the US punished Rabin by 

declaring that Washington was reassessing 

its entire relationship with Israel. That same 

year, the settlement of Ofra was established 

in the northern West Bank by Gush Emunim. 

Infuriated that Rabin was not prepared to relinquish 

the West Bank to Jordan, Kissinger 

sent out feelers to Yasser Arafat’s PLO with 

whom the US had no diplomatic relations. 

Earlier, in July 1974, the PLO’s legislative 

body the Palestine National Council, seeking 

international legitimacy, had declared that it 

was willing to establish a Palestinian national 

authority in any piece of Palestine from 

which Israel withdrew. The unified Arab 

policy of no peace, no recognition and no 

negotiations remained in effect. Still, some 

US Jewish leaders read the PNC statement 

as implying a willingness to coexist alongside 

Israel. Critics, though, saw it as a gambit 

for the destruction of Israel in phases. In any 

event, the move eased the way for Arafat to 

30 


Many American Jews born after 1967 feel 

increasingly alienated from Israel because 

of its continued presence in the West Bank, 

and have thrown their support behind 

leftist organizations like Peace Now 

be welcomed at the UN General Assembly 

in New York on November 13, 1974. More 

than 100,000 people, most of them Jewish, 

demonstrated across from the United Nations 

against Arafat’s appearance. 

In November 1976, Jimmy Carter defeated 

Ford. Carter had little patience for Rabin 

but would soon find himself confronted by 

a very different Israeli personality: in June 

1977, Menachem Begin became Israel’s 

first non-Labor Party premier. More than 

his predecessors, Carter would emphasize 

the centrality of the Palestinian angle. Begin 

– while not downplaying the military 

value of strategic depth that Rabin championed 

– accentuated the Jews’ ancestral 

rights to Judea and Samaria. 

In the American-Jewish mind, Israel’s 

REUTERS 

ethos was associated with Labor politicians 

such as Ben-Gurion, Levi Eshkol, Meir and 

Rabin. Few of the community’s leaders 

knew Begin personally, though he had long 

headed the Knesset opposition. They’d supported 

the pre-state Hagana underground; 

Begin commanded the more militant Irgun. 

Even if his Jewish literacy was limited, 

Rabin epitomized the secular Israeli-born 

Sabra; Begin, though not Orthodox, not 

only invoked scripture but had disguised 

himself as a Hasidic rabbi to avoid capture 

by the British during the Mandate period. 

Carter and Begin appeared headed for 

a confrontation; US Jewish leaders were 

uneasy. In 1977, Rabbi Joachim Prinz, a 

former chairman of the Conference of Presidents 

of Major American Jewish Organizations, 

came out against Begin and supported 

Israeli demonstrations opposed to the new 

settlement at Kaddum, outside Nablus. Major 

media outlets eviscerated Begin as a 

former terrorist, maybe a fascist, with Time 

magazine telling readers his name rhymed 

with Fagin (Charles Dickens’s quintessential 

Jewish villain). Carter seemed to go out 

of his way to taunt Begin even before he 

officially assumed office. “The right of the 

Palestinians to have a homeland, to be compensated 

for losses that they have suffered” 

was American policy, the president-elect 

declared. He did not call on the Arabs to 

recognize Israel, but summarized US policy 

as calling for “the withdrawal of Israel from 

occupied territories from the 1967 war,” an 

end to belligerency and a “reestablishment” 

of “permanent and secure borders.” 

Going into his first White House meeting, 

Begin would have been aware that 66% 

of American Jews backed the president’s 

“overall performance” while, at best, he had 

only the perfunctory support of the organized 

Jewish leadership. 

Carter was caught off guard when, on November 

14, 1977, Sadat told Cronkite that 

he was indeed willing to accept Begin’s 

invitation to address Israel’s parliament. 

The history-making speech followed on 

November 20. The next month, Begin announced 

that Israel was prepared to yield 

Sinai to Egypt and grant complete civil autonomy 

to the Palestinian Arabs in the West 

Bank and Gaza. 

But Begin’s lawyerly efforts to nail down 

the details and his refusal to abandon Israel’s 

claims of sovereignty over the disputed 

area raised Carter’s ire. 

In March 1978, a group of reserve army 

officers calling itself “Peace Now” demanded 

that Begin be more forthcoming. The 

following month, on April 1, some 30,000 

Israelis attended a Peace Now rally in Tel 


Aviv urging that Begin agree to Sadat’s 

terms. Finance minister Simha Ehrlich said 

he smelled a “putsch.” On April 20, The 

New York Times reported in a page one story 

accompanied by a photo of author Saul 

Bellow that 37 prominent American Jews 

had messaged their support to Peace Now. 

Signatories included notables in the Reform 

movement, American Jewish Committee 

and academia, as well as Breira alumni. 

Dissent against Israel’s West Bank policies 

had been mainstreamed. 

Breira’s successor organization, the New 

Jewish Agenda, emerged in 1980. The NJA 

had the good fortune of operating against 

Begin, as opposed to a leader from the Labor 

Party, and at a time when criticism of 

Israeli security policies raised fewer eyebrows. 

When Ronald Reagan came into office in 

1981, he embraced Carter’s legacy, which 

sought to separate support for Israel from 

support for its retention of the West Bank. 

Repeated run-ins between Reagan and 

Begin – over AWACS to Saudi Arabia, 

US guarantees for Arafat’s safe passage 

through Israeli army lines in Beirut during 

the First Lebanon War (which saw New 

Jewish Agenda activists protesting outside 

the Israeli Consulate in New York), and Israel’s 

bombing of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear 

facility near Baghdad – characterized a 

testy relationship. 

UNBEKNOWNST TO Begin’s successor, 

Yitzhak Shamir, a coterie of American-Jewish 

notables led by attorney Rita Hauser, 

working with the support of the State Department, 

spearheaded an effort to finesse 

Arafat into stating publicly that he accepted 

the existence of Israel. On December 14 at a 

Geneva news conference, Arafat read aloud 

a statement in English affirming “the right 

of all parties concerned in the Middle East 

conflict to exist in peace and security, and, 

as I have mentioned, including the state of 

Palestine and Israel and other neighbors.” 

Later that day in Washington, secretary 

of state George Shultz announced that the 

United States was now ready to open faceto-face 

negotiations with the Palestine Liberation 

Organization. Scores of US Jews, 

with semi-official backing from Washington, 

had worked for years – sometimes operating 

solo and other times under the auspices 

of the International Center for Peace 

in the Middle East – to help engineer a redefinition 

of the nature of the conflict. Now, 

with the PLO purportedly no longer intent 

on Israel’s destruction, the security value of 

the West Bank diminished. 

The grinding 

occupation of the 

Palestinians is a source 

of increasing concern 

among Diaspora Jews 

By the time George H.W. Bush moved 

into the White House – his administration 

did not hesitate to support Security Council 

resolutions censuring Israeli activities 

in the “occupied territories” – increasing 

numbers of American Jews appear to have 

accepted that the key to finding a solution to 

the Arab-Israel conflict was to be found in 

a West Bank withdrawal. That is partly why 

US Jews adored Bill Clinton for having 

shepherded the 1993 Oslo Accords signed 

by Rabin and Arafat, which created the Palestinian 

Authority. Amid the second intifada, 

they likewise backed George W. Bush’s 

2003 road map for a Palestinian state. In 

2009, American-Jewish leaders with an entrée 

to Barack Obama’s White House raised 

no objection to his demand for a settlement 

freeze as a prerequisite to peace talks. 

Fifty years after the area was captured, no 

one can say with certainty that differences 

over West Bank settlements have undermined 

the US Jewish-Israeli relationship. 

The data is not straightforward; a multitude 

of factors are at play. According to a 2013 

Pew Research Center survey, we know that 

69% of US Jews feel “very” or “somewhat” 

attached to Israel. For 43%, caring about Israel 

is essential to their identity. Just 17% 

think settlements bolster Israel’s security. 

Notably, 60% have never set foot in Israel. 

The roughly 40% that have visited include 

over 500,000 young people brought 

by Birthright since 2000. It’s a safe bet that 

most visitors don’t know that the hills they 

see from Ben-Gurion Airport are in the 

West Bank. 

To the Right’s argument that those who 

invoke the two-state mantra have not given 

serious thought to the security implications, 

Gelman of the Israel Policy Forum points out 

that 270 retired IDF generals under the auspices 

of the Commanders for Israel’s Security 

espouse the two-state solution. “While it 

is not realistic to expect a return to the negotiating 

table in the near future given the politics 

and the current leadership on both sides, 

there are steps that can be taken immediately 

to improve conditions on the ground and 

preserve the possibility of achieving a final 

status agreement,” she says. 

“The grinding occupation of the Palestinians 

is a source of increasing concern 

among Diaspora Jews who view this occupation 

as antithetical to Israel’s future as a 

Jewish, democratic and secure state.” Gelman 

tells The Jerusalem Report that “many 

see the occupation and continued dominance 

over another people as antithetical to 

fundamental Jewish values. Many members 

of the next generation of American Jews – 

who were born long after 1967 ‒ see Israel’s 

continued presence in the West Bank as a 

reason to feel increasingly alienated from 

the Jewish state, to the extent that their Jewish 

identity is linked to Israel’s existence.” 

To complicate matters, how Israelis themselves 

regard settlements and a Palestinian 

state depends on who is doing the asking 

and how the questions are posed. A 2016 

Pew survey found that 42% of Israelis think 

settlements bolster security. A January 2017 

poll commissioned by J Street, philosophical 

heir to Breira and the New Jewish Agenda, 

found that 68% of Israelis support a Palestinian 

state. In contrast, a March 2017 poll 

by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 

a center-right think tank, found that even 

assuming strategic settlement blocs are incorporated 

into Israel and any prospective 

Palestinian state pledges demilitarization, 

32 


only 48% of Israelis would back the idea of 

a Palestinian state. 

If US Jews are less infatuated with Israel 

than they were 50 years ago, the reasons 

may extend beyond differences over the 

West Bank. 

It has become clear that Israelis are not 

Hebrew-speaking replicas of middle-class 

American Jews. They comprise every strata 

of society, from soccer hooligan to brain 

surgeon. The American-Jewish community 

sees itself as cosmopolitan and progressive 

and sees the Israelis as insular and intolerant. 

It does not help that Israel’s hyper-pluralist 

political system has empowered politicians 

who have gone out of their way to 

disrespect Reform and Conservative Judaism 

– the two dominant streams on the 

American scene. 

The rhythm of life also differs. In Israel, 

Sunday is a work and school day. Americans 

enjoy 15 bank holidays, Israel just 

one – Independence Day. All other national 

holidays are Jewish festivals when religious 

restrictions keep observant Jews close to 

home and when public transportation is 

suspended. Most American Jews easily earn 

more than $50,000 annually compared to 

the Israeli average of roughly $33,000. Most 

Israelis lean to the political center or right 

while just 20% of American Jews describe 

themselves that way. While their American 

cousins are in college, Israeli young people 

are likely to be doing their compulsory IDF 

service. For the Americans, being Jewish is 

a lifestyle choice and universalism trumps 

particularism. 

Yet, there is one segment of American 

Jewry that has drawn closer to Israel these 

past 50 years: the 10% who are Orthodox. 

Sixty-one percent of Orthodox Jews say 

they feel “very” attached to Israel (in contrast 

to 27% for non-Orthodox). Of course, 

“orthodox” is a catchall phrase encompassing 

the 62% who lead a more insular Haredi 

lifestyle and the 31% who are “modern” 

and thus open to the broader culture. Even 

those modern Orthodox who don’t think 

of themselves as Zionists nevertheless feel 

connected to Israel through daily prayer and 

Torah study. 

“This intellectual and spiritual engagement 

has been amplified in recent decades 

by personal and family connections,” Nathan 

Diamont of the (non-Haredi) Orthodox 

Union in New York tells The Report. 

SINCE THE early 1990s, many Orthodox 

young people have spent their gap years 

studying at yeshivot or seminaries in Israel. 

Not all these institutions inculcate Zionist 

values, though some do and others 

may be situated over the Green Line. “This 

has yielded a cohort of American Jews 

with deeper connections to the West Bank 

communities,” says Diamont. Some 70% 

of American-Jewish families who make 

aliya are Orthodox, according to Nefesh 

B’Nefesh spokeswoman Yael Katsman. On 

the other hand, 65% of single immigrants 

are non-Orthodox. 

Avi Shafran of the Agudath Israel of 

America tells The Report, “As far as the 

Agudah’s [Haredi] constituency is concerned, 

political engagement, at least in 

terms of lobbying on Israel’s behalf, has 

always been strong. There is a growing 

concern, though, about the non-Orthodox 

movements’ assaults on the status quo at the 

Western Wall, as well as on [Israel’s official] 

rabbinate, which we view as potentially 

leading to, in the first case, strife and, in 

the second, a breakdown, heaven forbid, in 

the demographic unity of Israel’s Jews like 

the breakdown that is already part of the 

American scene where there are multiple 

‘Jewish peoples.’” 

How Donald Trump’s presidency will 

impact on American-Jewish relations 

with Israel is a big unknown. The White 

House liaison with the organized community 

is still embryonic. Most likely, no one 

watched Trump’s whirlwind May 22-23 

visit to Israel more intently than those on 

the American-Jewish Right. GOP mega-donor 

Sheldon Adelson, who reluctantly embraced 

Trump on “anybody-but-Clinton” 

grounds, is reportedly losing patience with 

him for embracing the exact same land-forpeace 

policy first enunciated by the Johnson 

White House in 1967. On May 22, the 

tycoon’s Hebrew-language Israel Hayom 

tabloid ran a front-page story (in English) 

headlined “Welcome Mr. President,” stating: 

“The last thing we need is another 

failed peace process.” 

It is not just that Trump’s emblematic 

pledge to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem 

has been put on the back burner along 

with his promised “No. 1 priority” to “dismantle 

the disastrous [Obama nuclear] deal 

with Iran.” 

Nor can any friend of Israel – no matter 

how many times the Iran threat is invoked 

– be sanguine about his $100 billion-plus 

arms deal with Saudi Arabia. The Right 

expected Trump to be free of State Department 

Arabist influence. But ZOA President 

Mort Klein has been critical of National Security 

Adviser H.R. McMaster for retaining 

Kris Bauman on the NSC staff because he 

accepts that Hamas needs to be part of any 

deal involving the Palestinians. 

Trump appears to be raring to make the 

“ultimate deal” between Israelis and Palestinians. 

This might be partly because 

an old-style Jewish macher, World Jewish 

Congress president and fellow billionaire 

Ronald Lauder, has his ear. Lauder reportedly 

has fallen out with Prime Minister 

Benjamin Netanyahu and has been urging 

Trump to pursue a West Bank deal with the 

PLO. 

Intriguing questions abound: Will Trump 

enjoy the support of progressive Jews if he 

tries to arbitrate a deal between Israel and 

the PLO? Will Orthodox Jews who have 

found common ground with the president 

on domestic policy jeopardize their relationship 

to champion Israel’s hold on Judea 

and Samaria? 

Perhaps, after 50 years, the once hot romance 

between American Jews and Israel 

has simply evolved, changed and matured. 

Like the proverbial long-married couple 

bickering over who takes out the garbage, 

they argue about the West Bank – and, yet, 

it is their own transformation and that of 

their partner that is the true source of their 

discomfort with one another. 

Elliot Jager is a Jerusalem-based journalist. 

Twitter #Jagerfile 


AVI KATZ 

ON JUNE 6, 1967, the day after the outbreak 

of the Six Day War, my fiancée Sharona 

and I were in suburban Philadelphia 

at the high school graduation of Sharona’s 

sister Suri. 

With one ear, we listened to the moving 

address of Elie Wiesel, author and journalist. 

The other ear was glued to a transistor 

radio, tuned to station KYW, listening to 

Israel’s then-foreign minister Abba Eban’s 

eloquent address to the United Nations Security 

Council. 

As a reporter writing for the daily newspaper 

Haaretz, Wiesel had been sent to 

Russia to cover the struggle of three million 

Jews living there to leave. The result 

was his book “The Jews of Silence,” which 

claimed that while Russian Jews were silenced, 

American Jews were silent (about 

the plight of Russian Jews) by choice. 

Wiesel scrapped his prepared speech on 

this topic and instead blasted world leaders 

for their silence about Israel’s plight, noting 

“an Israel that stood alone” throughout May 

1967. The Six Day War followed a threeweek 

blockade of Israel during which Arab 

leaders and the Palestinian Liberation Organization 

promised repeatedly to exterminate 

the Jews of Israel, words that I recall terrified 

Jewry all over the world. 

34 


LOOKING BACK, 

AND FORWARD 

Shlomo Maital recalls five 

decades of living in Israel since 

making aliya right after the Six 

Day War and looks ahead to 

what’s in store for the country 

over the next 50 years 

Wiesel said Israel’s plight in May 1967 

reminded him of the days during and before 

World War II, when Jews stood alone, 

while his family was sent to the crematoria 

− and no one cared or spoke out. He asked, 

“Where was France, Israel’s only ally?” 

I recall that at the outbreak of the Six Day 

War, US State Department spokesman Robert 

McClosky announced: “Our position 

[on the war] is neutral in thought, word and 

deed.” Israel stood alone. 

French President Charles de Gaulle later 

embargoed arms shipments to Israel after 

becoming its main supplier. Ironically, this 

later fostered Israel’s hi-tech industry when 

entrepreneurs, starting with Uziah Galil (the 

founder of Elron and Elbit), discovered they 

could make things previously bought and 

imported themselves faster and better. 

While Wiesel spoke, we heard the silver-tongued 

Eban end his talk at the UN by 

saying, “I think that Israel has in recent days 

proved its steadfastness and vigor. It is now 

willing to demonstrate its instinct for peace. 

Let us build a new system of relationships 

from the wreckage of the old. Let us discern 

across the darkness the vision of a better 

and a brighter dawn.” 

I remember those words vividly and, today, 

long for the days when Israel had an 


MARKETPLACE 

eloquent foreign minister to plead our cause. 

The combination of Wiesel and Eban, their 

deep passion and eloquence, was etched 

forever in our minds. 

Sharona and I were married on June 25 in 

Atlantic City and left, as planned, the next 

day to make aliya, stopping in Europe to 

buy a car. On July 27, we disembarked from 

the ZIM car ferry “Nili” at the Haifa Port 

with our little Peugeot 204, part of the first 

wave of olim in the wake of post-Six Day 

War euphoria. 

AS A young lecturer at Tel Aviv University, 

I used my bad Hebrew almost at once to 

help returning soldiers catch up on missed 

economics courses. I had learned Hebrew 

first in an awful after-school heder (Hebrew 

school) in Saskatchewan, and then in college, 

and in preparation for Aliya by reading 

the weekly edition of Maariv, then printed 

on onion skin paper and mailed abroad. 

It has been almost 50 years since we 

made aliya. It is a good time to look back 

and reflect on our lives and on our beloved 

adopted country, its achievements and 

challenges. 

Immigration: Israel is unique among the 

nations of the world. It has an overriding 

purpose – to provide a safe, secure and 

welcoming home for Jews everywhere who 

find themselves in trouble or simply those 

who seek a full and meaningful life. And for 

50 years, it has fulfilled that vision, far from 

flawlessly but always steadfastly. I feel this 

basic fact is unduly neglected sometimes. 

In 1948, the world Jewish population was 

11 million, of whom 5.5% lived in the new 

State of Israel, after peaking at 16.7 million 

in pre-Holocaust 1939. In 1967, 2.4 million 

Jews out of a world total of 12.4 million 

lived in Israel, or about 20%. Today? Some 

44% of the world’s 14.4 million Jews live 

in Israel after the country absorbed several 

waves of immigrants. Some 83% of all 

Jews now live either in Israel or the US. By 

2050, a majority of Jews will live in Israel, 

according to the Pew Research Center. 

Wiesel’s three million Russian Jews? Israel 

welcomed one million of them, beginning 

in late 1989 when the United States 

redefined Russian Jews as “economic migrants” 

rather than “political migrants,” 

and, therefore, they were subject to a small 

quota of just 50,000 a year. 

Inequality in wealth and 

income in Israel has 

soared. In 50 years, we 

have fallen from nearly 

the lowest incidence 

of poverty among 

developed nations to 

nearly the highest 

Those immigrants provided Israel with 

immense high-quality human capital ‒ engineers, 

scientists, nurses, doctors – that, 

among other things, helped fuel the hi-tech 

boom of the 1990s. 

Nearly five million Syrians have fled their 

country due to the bloody civil war. Except 

for Jordan, which erected refugee camps on 

its Syrian border, Arab countries accept no 

obligation to absorb them. Contrast this with 

Israel – if they were Jews, they would have a 

country to which to flee, no questions asked. 

Social cohesion: In 1967, as a young lecturer 

at Tel Aviv University, I recall earning 

about 700 lirot (the lira was the Israeli 

pound, three to the dollar, not that different 

from today’s shekel), or about $233 a 

month. All workers made pretty much the 

same wage at that time. 

In her 1979 book “Socio-Economic Disparities 

in Israel,” economist Fanny Ginor 

noted that “for the poor, Israel of the 1960s 

was very much a country of equality.” Only 

8% of the population lived under the poverty 

line at that time. 

Inequality in wealth and income in Israel 

has soared. In 50 years, we have fallen 

from nearly the lowest incidence of poverty 

among developed nations to nearly the highest. 

Today, nearly one in five Israeli households 

are poor, the highest in the OECD. 

In 1967, I recall frequent amusing encounters 

at stoplights. Our little Peugeot 

had low-pressure Michelin tires. The driver 

next to me would motion for me to roll 

down the window. “Hey buddy!” he would 

say. “Put some air in your tires.” I doubt this 

would happen today. If it did, the response 

might be, “It’s none of your business!” 

A casualty of the high and rising economic 

inequality is that the core Jewish value 

“kol Yisrael arevim ze laze” (all of Israel 

is mutually responsible) no longer holds. 

Today, according to the World Competitiveness 

Yearbook, Israel ranks only 35th 

in “social cohesion,” largely, I believe, because 

of the huge disparities in wealth and 

income. It is hard to feel that we are all in 

the same boat, when some of those boats are 

yachts and others are leaky dinghies. 

IN 1966, recounts Sever Plotzker, in the 

daily Yedioth Ahronoth, a 13-year-old girl 

from Beit She’an was asked on a radio 

broadcast if she was hungry. She answered, 

“Yes!” That response shook up the entire 

country, Plotzker notes, and “nearly toppled 

the [Levi] Eshkol government.” 

It turned out the girl was not really suffering 

from hunger. But no matter – the 

thought that there was a hungry child greatly 

disturbed the whole nation. Today? It 

takes far far more than hungry children to 

prick our collective consciences. We have 

developed distressingly thick skins. 

Technology: Few countries can match Israelis’ 

genius at fast, creative solutions to 

pressing problems. Water shortage? Half 

of Israel’s water is now desalinated. Sewage? 

Some 86% of sewage is reclaimed for 

36 


irrigation, tops in the world. Rocket threat? 

A three-tier, anti-rocket missile-defense 

system is now operational. Non-invasive 

surgery? An Israeli invention zaps tumors 

with ultrasound, no scalpels required. 

Israelis discovered, explained or invented: 

Ubiquitin and quasi-crystals (which won 

their discoverers Nobel Prizes), quarks, Copaxone, 

Pillcams, memory sticks, instant 

messaging, drip irrigation, solar water heaters, 

Rummikub and an incredibly long list 

of things that enhance, enrich and prolong 

the lives of everyone, including those who 

want to boycott us. One day, Israeli scientists 

may cure cancer, help with dementia 

and help make self-driven cars safe and 

ubiquitous. With eight Nobel Prizes in physiology, 

medicine, chemistry, economics and 

physics, Israel ranks fifth in the world in per 

capita Nobel awards, tied with Britain. 

The next 50 years: What do the next 50 

years hold for Israel? There are many challenges, 

some predictable and some hard to 

foresee. 

Few countries can 

match Israelis’ genius 

at fast, creative 

solutions to pressing 

problems 

In May, Tel Aviv University Prof. Dan 

Ben-David and Ayal Kimhi circulated a 

terse document listing “policy areas requiring 

treatment.” Among them: low productivity, 

education, transportation infrastructure, 

housing, healthcare and the shadow 

economy. Here are some of their observations. 

Israel’s per capita gross domestic product 

more than quadrupled between 1967 and 

2017, from $8,000 to $35,000. The cause 

was rising output per hour of work (productivity). 

But, note the authors, in 1972, Israel’s 

total factor productivity, the “primary 

engine underlying the economic growth of 

all nations,” equaled that of the US. Since 

then, however, Israel has lagged far behind. 

One implication: the possible “exodus of 

educated and skilled people from Israel” as 

a result. 

ISRAEL HAS performed well in absorbing 

those who make aliya. Now, it must work 

hard to retain its own bright young people 

and keep them from seeking greener pastures 

abroad. There are many places in the 

world where launching start-ups is easy and 

fun. Global competition for talent is getting 

fiercer. 

Education has become problematic. International 

surveys show Israel now ranks second 

to last among developed nations in math, 

science and reading among 15-year-olds, and 

first in the degree of variation of education 

achievement across high- and low-achievers. 

In a nation that prospers because of its human 

capital, these figures are alarming. 

“Children who receive third-world education,” 

note Ben-David and Kimhi, “will 

only be capable of sustaining a third-world 

economy.” 

Our roads are clogged; the number of vehicles 

per kilometer of road is more than 

three times that of the smaller European nations. 

We need better public transportation 

and more and better roads. 

In housing, more than two-thirds of Israelis 

now own their own homes but the onethird 

who don’t are despairing as housing 

prices soar. The solution lies more on the 

supply side – building housing cheaper, 

faster and smarter – than in tinkering with 

demand. 

In health care, Israelis live long lives. Life 

expectancy has risen by a decade or so since 

1967 to 82.4 years, eighth in the world. But 

Israel remains near to last in hospital beds 

per 1,000 population (2.3, compared to 

more than 6 in Germany and Korea), and 

there is a chronic shortage of nurses, with 

half the number of nurses per 1,000 population 

than in the US. 

Israel’s shadow economy (unrecorded 

and untaxed business activity) is fully a 

fifth of the whole economy. This burdens 

those who pay taxes and work legally, and 

further damages social cohesion. Lower 

taxes might improve tax compliance. 

And, of course, looming above everything 

is the dark cloud of the Israel-Palestinian 

conflict, seemingly intractable. Will we 

have to live with this struggle for another 

50 years without an enduring peace agreement? 

Why does Israeli creativity reside 

solely in hi-tech and never appears in our 

dealings with the Palestinians? Will we ever 

see, in Abba Eban’s vision, “a new system 

of relationships from the wreckage of the 

old” and “discern across the darkness the 

vision of a better and a brighter dawn?” 

Meaning and purpose: For my wife and 

me, living and working in Israel has given 

true meaning to our lives simply because 

everything we do and have done, small and 

large, helps in some manner to make our 

country better and stronger. This is a priceless 

gift that is sometimes taken for granted, 

especially by those who may lack our 50- 

year perspective. 

Kierkegaard said we learn about life looking 

backward but live life looking forward. 

As we look backward, we cherish the deep 

meaning our adopted country has given to 

our lives. We are now both retirees, but remain 

very active, and can look back with 

satisfaction – my wife, a school psychologist, 

at the many children and families she 

has helped over the years, and me, at the 

generations of management students and 

entrepreneurs I have taught. 

It has been a great ride, for us and for Israel 

− and the best is yet to come. 

The writer is senior research fellow at the 

S. Neaman Institute, Technion and blogs at 

www.timnovate.wordpress.com 


Culture Report 

Film Sports Photography Art Food Music 

Out of focus 

Israeli photography has turned its lens away from the realities 

of life in the Palestinian territories By Michal Levertov 

Miki Kratsman’s photo ‘Abu Dis 2003’ shows a Palestinian woman 

walking along the separation barrier in east Jerusalem. Kratsman 

says his photographic work is ‘mostly for the archive – for 

38 researchers who will try to explore what has been THE JERUSALEM going on here’ REPORT JUNE 12, 2017


COURTESY MIKI KRATSMAN

When veteran photographer David 

Rubinger died in March at the age 

of 92, few of his many obituaries in 

Israel or abroad skipped mentioning the renowned 

documentarist’s most famous photo: 

a group of IDF paratroopers at the Western 

Wall minutes after its capture by the Israeli 

army on the third day of the Six Day War. 

The photo depicted a handsome, blond 

soldier surrounded by his fellow combatants 

pensively raising his eyes to the ultimate 

symbol of the past and future Jewish 

claim to the Land of Israel. 

This image became, perhaps, the icon of 

the country’s sweeping victory in ’67, and 

its cultural status has only gathered more 

weight throughout the years. It has been 

cited in Israeli art; revisited in interviews 

and restaged in photoshoots with its protagonists; 

and it was even used, despite Rubinger’s 

disapproval, in commercial and political 

advertising. 

Social media’s viral references to this 

photo, either by memes or tweets, are prevalent 

alongside references to other similarly 

triumphal images from the Six Day War. 

The image’s prominent presence in 

current-day Israeli aesthetics stands in stark 

contrast to the invisibility of Israel’s enduring 

military control over the Palestinians. 

Five decades after the victory with which 

Rubinger’s photo is so deeply identified in 

our collective memory, marginalization and 

even omission of any portrayal of the dayto-day 

realities of Israeli control over the 

Palestinians in the territories captured in 

1967 has become the norm. 

“The Israeli media has lost any interest 

whatsoever in reporting about the Palestinian 

side,” says photojournalist Ziv Koren, 

a staff photographer for the Yisrael Hayom 

daily and a regular contributor to international 

publications such as Time, Stern and 

LeFigaro. 

Koren attributes the declining Israeli interest 

to the construction of the West Bank security 

barrier after the second intifada, which 

he says effectively detached the majority of 

the Israeli public from the happenings behind 

it. For photojournalists like himself, it also 

raised additional obstacles, he adds. 

“Covering Palestinian areas became more 

dangerous,” he elaborates, pointing to Israel’s 

strict prohibition of Israeli citizens’ 

entry into the Gaza Strip. “The sad result,” 

he remarks, is that “we have lost both our 

interest and empathy.” 

Koren, a 25-year media veteran who covered 

both intifadas, says that in recent years 

it has become much harder to convince editors 

to publish reportage on the daily life 

of ordinary Palestinians. When it comes to 

coverage of Palestinian issues, he says, the 

trend, for the most part, is “to supply [the 

Israeli public] with the minimum required.” 

Ironically, when Israeli 

media does eventually 

refer to the Palestinians, 

it uses imagery that 

provides its audience 

with a Palestinian point 

of view 

Miki Kratsman, one of Israel’s most 

prominent photographers, and undoubtedly 

among the most persistent documenters 

of the realities of Palestinian life, tells The 

Jerusalem Report he gave up on trying to 

reach out to mainstream Israeli audiences. 

Photojournalists who cover Palestinian affairs 

(for instance protests or demonstrations), 

he explains, can no longer expect 

their work to enter the Israeli news cycle. 

“I’m disillusioned,” he says. 

Kratsman has exhibited his work in top 

museums and galleries in Israel and abroad. 

He has also served as head of the photography 

department for two consecutive terms 

at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, 

Israel’s top art school, and has won major 

prizes such as the 2011 EMET Prize. 

Yet, even with such a pedigree within 

the Israeli art scene’s establishment, he 

sees no path to make Palestinian-related 

imagery part of the national discourse. At 

the academy too, he says, his students are 

“very, very careful” with political topics. 

But, he remarks, “delegitimizing political 

art is a global trend.” 

His own photographic work, he says, now 

is aimed “mostly for the archive ‒ for researchers 

who will try to explore what has 

been going on here.” 

Kratsman, who is also the chairman of the 

controversial Breaking the Silence group, 

finds a direct link between Israeli imagery 

of the Six Day War and the country’s growing 

visual marginalization of the Palestinian 

presence. 

In particular, Kratsman notes the phenomenon 

of ’67 victory albums. These albums, 

published in Israel after the war, presented 

photographs glorifying the IDF and its generals; 

hailed Israel’s civilians for supporting 

40 


IDF Armored Corps soldiers question 

suspects during a raid in Nablus, in 2009 

(From Ziv Koren’s project on the IDF’s 

counterterrorism operations) 

the war effort; and ridiculed the country’s 

adversaries. “The albums practically giftwrapped 

the war’s images,” he says, “turning 

them into something much greater than 

mere photographs.” 

Eight years old at the time, Kratsman still 

remembers the book the family had at their 

home in Buenos Aires (they made aliya later 

in 1971): A Spanish edition of one of those 

numerous coffee-table books published in 

Israel to memorialize Israel’s surprising 

victory. He also remembers small souvenirs 

the family received from Israeli friends or 

relatives around that time ‒ key rings with 

portraits of Moshe Dayan, the former IDF 

chief of staff who was appointed defense 

minister shortly before the war and whose 

round face and black eyepatch became synonymous 

with Israel’s military triumph. 

Ten years ago, on the Six Day War’s 40th 

anniversary, the Petah Tikva Museum of 

Art put on an exhibition about the victory 

albums, titled “Six Days Plus Forty Years,” 

which detailed the scope and impact of the 

albums and other photography-based artifacts 

such as the Dayan key rings. 

The exhibition’s curator, Dr. Rona Sela 

of Tel Aviv University, noted in the exhibition’s 

catalogue that most of the victory 

albums were published by private publishers 

for commercial purposes. This demonstrates 

the extent to which institutional 

COURTESY ZIV KOREN 

strategies were adopted by the Israeli private 

sphere in the country’s first decades, 

she wrote. 

In another essay, about Rubinger’s and 

other iconic images, Sela stressed that the 

albums indicated “the way in which Israeli 

society internalized the nationalistic themes 

and myths, accepting them as an absolute 

truth.” 

With regard to Rubinger’s photo, Sela 

told The Report via email that the photo “reflected 

the euphoria and power intoxication 

in which Israeli society was immersed.” 

The camera’s angle, she added, captured 

the soldiers’ presence as “greater than life, 

proud, strong, robust and powerful.” 

That imaging “continued the pre-state’s 

tradition of propaganda photography that 

had built the image of ‘The New Jew’: the 

good-looking, rough ‘Sabra’ who vigorously 

takes matter into his own hands.” 

In addition to reflecting the momentary 

reality, she concluded, the photo “helped 

to construct consciousness and imbed belligerent 

and destructive nationalist motives 

into the Israeli existence.” 

RUBINGER SHOT his powerful portrayal 

of the paratroopers as he was lying on the 

ground, from an angle that gave the scene 

an epic feel though the reason for his choice 

was prosaic: the open area in front of the 

wall was so small that in order to include 

both the soldiers and the wall in his frame 

Rubinger had no alternative but to recline. 

The question of angle, let alone of one’s 

point of view, is, naturally, a pivotal topic 

in photography. Koren stresses that his 

point of view as an Israeli does not affect 

his work, which he describes as “objective.” 

As a professional photographer, he emphasizes, 

he’s free of any agenda. If anything, 

he says, as an Israeli photographer 

who wishes to document the Palestinian 

side, he is at a disadvantage because his access 

to the Palestinian territories is limited. 


Maintaining an objective point of view 

while being party to one side of a national 

conflict, he stresses, “goes both ways, and 

the emotional challenge of covering the terrorist 

attacks in Tel Aviv during the second 

intifada, “at least a dozen of them within 

walking distance from my home,” was no 

small obstacle. 

Even when he joins IDF troops during 

their operations, he says, his journalistic 

and artistic independence remains intact. 

Unlike the US ground forces in Iraq, who 

conditioned the presence of American photographers 

in the battles in a legally binding 

commitment not to publish imagery of 

American casualties, he says, “The IDF 

doesn’t give any instructions on how or 

what to film; censorship applies merely to 

security-related issues. I, therefore, photograph 

what I see, and it isn’t always compatible 

with the army’s PR perspective.” 

Photographer Oren Ziv, on the other hand, 

says he doesn’t believe photography can be 

objective. 

A member of Activestills, a collective of 

Israeli, Palestinian and international photographers, 

Ziv defines his work as “activist 

photography,” which means his photography 

aims not merely to reflect reality, “but 

also to generate change.” 

One of the main challenges of photoactivism, 

Ziv says, “is to visualize policy.” 

This is achieved, he says, by continuous and 

consistent documentation of different communities, 

their day-to-day struggles and recurring 

events, such as home demolitions or 

land takeovers and the weekly demonstrations 

against them. 

Like Koren, Ziv believes that the “separation 

policy created two parallel realities” – 

one for Israelis and another for Palestinians; 

a policy, he says, that began with the Oslo 

Accords and its division of the West Bank 

into three grades of Israeli and Palestinian 

administrative responsibility. 

But, unlike Koren, Ziv is not sure that 

safety considerations are a major factor in 

the Israeli media’s inclination to disengage 

from the West Bank. 

During the second intifada, he says, things 

were much more tense and dangerous than 

today, but the Israeli press nevertheless had 

a huge presence in the field. Budget and 

manpower cuts that have engulfed Israeli 

and international media in recent years, he 

suggests, may have contributed to this withdrawal 

process, as well. 

Israeli society’s lack of attentiveness to 

the people under its military control is far 

from solely the result of the degree of exposure 

to relevant imagery, however. 

When he and his colleagues established 

Activestills, Ziv says, “We thought that if 

we brought the views from the West Bank 

to the Israeli public, it would expose people 

to a picture they have previously preferred 

not to see or at least convince some of them 

to show an interest.” 

With the development 

of social networks 

and other sources of 

information, it is clear 

that the problem is not 

a lack of information, 

but that people don’t 

want to see it 

Ziv and his Activestills colleagues have 

gained respect and recognition, winning, 

for instance, numerous prizes in the acclaimed 

“Local Testimony” exhibition, an 

annual event devoted to documentary and 

press photos from Israel and the Palestinian 

territories that runs concurrently with the 

“World Press Photo” exhibit. 

But, Ziv admits, none of this generated 

real interest in the topic itself. 

“Today, with the development of social 

networks and other sources of information, 

it is clear that the problem is not a lack of information 

but that people don’t want to see 

it, don’t care about it or in some cases are 

even happy with what they see,” he says. 

In any event, a significant outcome of the 

Israeli media’s absence from the West Bank 

and Gaza is that, today, its main source of 

imagery from the territories is Palestinian 

activists who document Palestinian protests; 

Palestinian photojournalists who work 

for foreign news agencies; and members of 

the public who document their own lives. 

Ironically, when Israeli media does 

eventually refer to the Palestinians, it uses 

imagery that provides its audience with a 

Palestinian point of view. 

“PERHAPS IT is for the best,” Ziv remarks, 

“that today the visual representation of Palestinian 

reality is being produced by Palestinians 

themselves rather than by Israelis. 

“Perhaps the attempt by Israeli photography 

to represent the occupation was from 

the outset doomed to failure. Because if you 

don’t perceive [the occupation] as a wrong, 

if you don’t notice its daily acts of obstruction 

and violence, then there is no chance 

that you will be able to produce a representation 

of it,” he says. 

Such a failure, he adds, consists of representations 

of Palestinians as either terrorists 

or victims “but never as sovereign political 

personalities, individuals and communities 

demanding the right to decide over their 

own lives.” 

Probably the most conspicuous penetration 

of such imaging into the Israeli discourse 

was the Hebron video from March 

2016 of IDF soldier Elor Azaria fatally 

shooting a severely wounded Palestinian 

man who was shot 10 minutes earlier as he 

attempted to stab a soldier. B’Tselem volunteer 

Imad Abu Shamsiyeh’s video exposed 

the act and generated intense political turmoil 

in Israel that still has not subsided. 

In addition to capturing the events from 

the Palestinian perspective, these images, 

broadcast in Israeli media, are a rare chance 

for Israelis to see the camera directed back at 

them, this time by Palestinian photographers. 

Moreover, as the head of B’Tselem’s 

camera project, Rimma Issa, pointed 

out recently at an event at the Tel Aviv 

Cinémathèque marking the project’s 10th 

anniversary, the surroundings in which the 

project’s volunteers are filming is their domestic 

environment ‒ their villages, fields, 

neighborhoods, streets, or even in the privacy 

of their houses or apartments. 

It’s that very sense of politics entangled 

42 


enduringly with privacy that marks, according 

to Israel Museum photography curator 

Noam Gal, the 1967 photography of celebrated 

Israel Prize laureate Micha Bar-Am. 

Gal, who curated Bar-Am’s new exhibition 

at the museum, writes in an essay about 

the exhibition that Bar-Am told him history 

is not made “in rigid frames of round 

years, between one arbitrary date and another.” 

Thus, Gal writes, the continuity that 

Bar-Am’s oeuvre indicates “that 1967, that 

complicated year, is still with us, all of us, 

all the time.” 

The Israel Museum’s decision to commemorate 

the Six Day War anniversary 

with a photographic contemplation that 

focuses inward, into the Israeli experience, 

reflects a wider trend in Israeli art. 

Contrary to the 1970s when leading Israeli 

artists initiated big projects that directly 

tackled different perspectives on the 

Israeli-Palestinian conflict, contemporary 

Israeli art rarely confronts this topic, says 

artist Avi Ifergan. 

But when artists, today, do eventually touch 

this sensitive subject, “they tend to lean their 

works on photography,” says Ifergan. 

Photographed images can serve as a filtering 

strategy to protect political art from 

the pitfall of superficiality, he explains. 

And photography also may shield the artists 

from the overwhelming, thus sometimes 

paralyzing, power of that real-life subject. 

A prominent example is the work of the 

painter David Reeb, who bases a big share 

of his work on images from photographs 

taken in the West Bank. 

Ifergan – now the director and curator of 

the Bar-David Museum in Kibbutz Baram, a 

few years ago based a series of his own works 

on photojournalistic imagery from the heart 

of the conflict. He used a technique of burning 

glass with air pressure to depict images 

of “targeted killings” – the IDF’s attempts to 

kill Palestinian terrorists with drones. 

Ifergan says the photographic aspect of 

the work, as well as the neutral, colorless 

characteristics of the glass, were essential 

for him to approach such intensive content. 

Two recent exhibitions at the museum 

also have dealt with the evasive presence 

of Palestinians under Israeli control in the 

West Bank in Israeli discourse, introducing 

two very different perspectives. 

One, from last summer, displayed works 

by Arab Israeli Ashraf Fawakhry, under the 

title “Limon Kavush” ‒ a Hebrew pun on 

the word “pickle,” which also translates as 

“occupied.” The works included printed 

collages of cultural and historical iconography 

taken from both Israeli and Palestinian 

collective narratives. 

1967, that complicated, 

complicating year is 

still with us, all of us, all 

the time 

The other, titled “Nofim Tzruvim” 

(“Etched Landscapes”), from January this 

year, presented oil-on-wood landscape 

paintings based on smartphone photography. 

The artist, Tal Orot HaCohen, photographed 

the surroundings of her childhood 

home in the settlement of Otniel in 

the South Hebron Hills, a community that 

has seen deadly terrorist attacks. Her landscapes 

consist of high skies over broad, sandy 

lands that extend deep into the horizon 

void of any human presence. 

Palestinian Sabiha Abu Rahme cleans the 

memorial monument for her son, Bassem, 

who was killed when an IDF soldier fired 

a tear gas canister at him during a 2009 

protest in the village of Bil’in. The image on 

the memorial was taken by Oren Ziv prior 

to Bassem’s death and was later used by the 

community to create a memorial poster 

For Orot HaCohen, these paintings explore, 

as she noted in a text she wrote for the 

exhibition, the encounter between the safe 

feeling provided by the walls of her parents’ 

house and the “forbidden vastness” outside 

the settlement. 

In reality, Otniel’s neighboring Palestinian 

villages are located just a few hundred 

meters away, though the geographical setting 

of the settlement has, from the outset, 

been intended to create a territorial barrier 

between Palestinian communities in the 

area and dissect their lands. 

Orot HaCohen’s portrayal of man-empty 

vastness, therefore, also deliberately alludes 

to the invisible absence that the pictures 

hold. They offer a political and artistic commentary 

on a classic photographical theme: 

the ability to look without seeing. 

A theme that perhaps, in a nutshell, encapsulates 

the ingrained Israeli mainstream 

perception of the Palestinian story. 

COURTESY OREN ZIV / ACTIVESTILLS 


NECESSARY STORIES 

HAIM WATZMAN 

One flesh 

WE CIRCLE, weapons drawn, two as one, 

ready to kill. 

I raped the boy in April 1948, in a dark 

corner in the garden of a villa in Talbieh. A 

few minutes before he had leapt out from 

between some bushes, a butcher’s knife 

flashing. Boaz, a pace away from me, had 

his eye on the balcony above, fearing a 

sniper, so he never saw the kid who brought 

the knife down between his shoulder blades, 

with a shout of Allah akbar! or perhaps it 

was something else. The stars were just 

coming out, but I saw my friend murdered. I 

saw the blood spurt from his back and chest 

as he crumpled. 

I did not shoot. Our men had surrounded the 

house and I might have hit a friend. So I said 

afterward, but I was such a good shot that no 

one was in danger. It was that such a death 

would have been too merciful for Boaz’s killer. 

Instead, I took off after the boy. He sprinted 

toward a back corner of the garden, where a 

tall cypress stood among a wild undergrowth 

that might have once been a flowerbed. I was 

the faster. I caught him by the collar before he 

reached the wall he meant to climb. He tried 

to struggle free, but I was the stronger. I let go 

of my rifle and grabbed his chin and turned 

his face toward me. I wanted to see who I was 

about to strangle. 

To this day I wonder how, in the heat of 

battle, I could have been able to grasp that I 

was gazing at a face of godlike beauty. I had 

always assumed beforehand – and, indeed, 

all my experience since then has confirmed 

– that when your life is on the line, when 

you stand on the precipice between life and 

death, the mind focuses only on keeping 

you alive. Your eye takes in every detail of 

the terrain, every clue to where your enemy 

lies, but nothing of the harmony of the 

shape of the landscape. Color may be a sign 

of danger but never moves the heart. Yet, at 

this instant of vengeance I was nearly unnerved 

by the splendor that I saw. 

He was perhaps sixteen, with the down of 

his first beard on his cheeks, and tight curls 

44 

of hair. I could not make out their shade, it 

was dark. Perhaps the darkness softened his 

killer’s face, blinded me to the real nature 

written on his features. But I think I saw 

him as he really was. 

But one thing I learned as a soldier is that 

hatred and beauty are not exclusive, nor 

are love and revenge. For as I pulled at his 

belt and pushed down his pants and pressed 

him against the wall, as I undid my fly and 

covered his mouth to stifle his scream, I 

thought: This is worse than death for him. 

This is what he deserves. So ran my mind. 

But my heart, my heart was full, electrified, 

full of longing for unification with this 

other human being, and my climax was revenge 

but also an act of giving, of giving 

my friend’s murderer my love. 

When it was done I pushed him away and 

trained my rifle at him. I did not want him 

to go but I knew he must. I hoped that someone 

on the other side of the wall would kill 

him as he made his escape and I hoped he 

would survive. “Ruh!” I whispered fiercely, 

desperately. “Ruh!” He gazed at me, stonily, 

as he did up his pants. He did not weep. He 

probably thought I would shoot him as he 

clambered up the wall, twice as tall as he. 

There were iron rods sticking out of it here 

and there; he must have planned the route. 

He was up and gone. I heard no shots. 

For fifty years now we 

have died at each 

other’s hands and in 

each other’s arms 

A year later I married. With Ayala I felt 

the same electricity in my heart, the same 

mysterious wonder, that I felt during those 

moments under the cypress, pressing 

against the Arab boy. That’s how I knew 

it was love. Nineteen years later, when 

war again broke out, we were still in love. 

THE JERUSALEM REPORT JUNE 12, 2017 

Unlike some of my friends, I did not feel, 

as I approached the age of forty, any need 

to roam beyond our bedroom. We had three 

children. Yaron, the eldest, helped take the 

Golan Heights with his tank battalion. I was 

with my reserve unit in Jerusalem, where 

we have always lived. We were deployed at 

Mt. Herzl and then, on the evening of the 

first day of the war, we moved on foot toward 

Ramat Rachel, the kibbutz to the city’s 

south, on a spur that jutted into Jordanian 

territory. Our mission was to conquer the 

village Sur Baher, which lay on the same 

ridge as the kibbutz, and the Jordanian outpost, 

the Bell, that stood between them. The 

village offered almost no resistance. Most 

villagers holed up in their homes in fear, but 

a few men and boys stood outside, along the 

road, with stony expressions on their faces. 

He was not on the road itself, but stood a 

few paces behind, leaning against the wall 

of a house. He was older of course; his hair 

had flecks of gray, his face was lined and

AVI KATZ 

sunburned, and his beard was rough, not 

soft as I remembered. We had seen each 

other then only in the dark, but our eyes met 

and we were both certain. We knew. And I 

saw hatred in his eyes, but, yes, I was sure, I 

also saw his need to be one with me. 

Our detachment moved on, took the Jordanian 

outpost with ease, and left a small 

force to occupy it, which I arranged to be 

assigned to. For the remaining five days of 

the war I remained there; I wrote to Ayala 

each day, to comfort and reassure her and to 

ask for news of Yaron. 

On the night of the seventh day, when victory 

was complete and as the country rejoiced, 

I slipped away and went back to the village. I 

walked down the central street and found the 

house. Villagers looked fearfully, suspiciously, 

viciously from their windows. I had my 

rifle, and four grenades. I was not frightened. 

I circled the house. There was a low, unpainted 

concrete wall, set back from the 

road, with an opening that led into a garden. 

I entered. The scent was overpowering, a 

heady perfume of blooms and fruit. In the 

shadows I saw trees, and grape vines, and 

beds of herbs. I walked among them like a 

pilgrim in paradise, walked and walked, the 

garden seemed enormous. Then I saw him. 

He clipped a small branch from a tree with 

a large blade and gently parted its leaves to 

find the next place to prune. He raised his 

head, pivoted and held the knife out at me. I 

cocked and shouldered my rifle. We circled, 

our weapons drawn, two as one, ready to kill. 

I will not say what passed between us. 

What I can say is that we hated and loved, 

both at the same time. We took vengeance 

and we took comfort. We were silent but 

much passed between us. And all the while 

we circled, our weapons drawn, two as one, 

ready to kill. 

We have met again many times in the fifty 

years since. After each knifing, after each 

suicide bombing in the city, I seek him out. 

I find him in the village, or in a field, in a 

park or a shopping center. Here and there 

we have tried to talk, but it only made our 

passion unbearable. For fifty years now 

we have died at each other’s hands and in 

each other’s arms, hating each other as only 

those who are one flesh can. Fifty years that 

have been a single moment for me, and for 

him. For fifty years we have circled, our 

weapons drawn, two as one, killing each the 

other and each himself. 

 

Haim Watzman’s new book, ‘Necessary Stories,’ 

is a collection of 24 selected stories 

from among the more than 100 he has published 

here in The Jerusalem Report over 

the past nine years. Available in stores now. 

For purchase links and more information, 

see southJerusalem.com. ‘The Necessary 

Stories Show,’ a dramatic reading of three 

stories from this column, will be performed 

at Jerusalem’s legendary literary café, 

Tmol Shilshom, on Wednesday, June 7, at 

7:30 p.m. 


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46 


THE PEOPLE & THE BOOK RABBI SYLVIA ROTHSCHILD 

The Torah portion Beha’alotkha is read on Shabbat, June 10 

The ‘mixed multitude’ 

For those who are not halakhically Jewish, 

but feel a connection, we have sacred work to do 

“WHEN YOU came in just now, did a Jew 

enter the room?” 

It’s a question sometimes asked of candidates 

for conversion by the Beit Din of the 

British Reform Movement and it acknowledges 

the difference between Jewish identity 

and Jewish status. In thirty years of working 

in the congregational rabbinate, I have 

met many people whose halakhic status 

does not match their sense of who they are, 

and it is invariably a painful realization. For 

some the sense of rejection leads them away 

from Judaism; for others it strengthens their 

resolve to join us; always the discussion is 

raw and challenging. 

The experience is made more difficult by 

a failure in our tradition to define what a 

Jew actually is, and the fact that the only 

route to Jewish status is by having a Jewish 

mother or else converting in a religious 

court (beit din). Identity, culture, propinquity, 

commonality, faith and practice – none 

of these provide an entry into Jewish status. 

And many batei din keep the gateway deliberately 

narrow and hard to navigate. 

Here in Beha’alotkha, we see the roots of 

our difficulty with the phrase “veha’asafsuf 

asher bekirbo” – “the people who had gathered 

amongst them” (Num. 11:4) yearning 

for meat and causing the Israelites also to 

demand the food of Egypt – fish, cucumber, 

melons and onions – instead of the manna 

provided by God for their sustenance. 

Who are these asafsuf who are agitating? 

The word appears only once in the Torah, as 

does the phrase “erev rav” or “mixed multitude” 

(Ex. 12:38), and neither are explained in 

the text. The Bible is neutral about these people 

who are living and traveling alongside the 

Israelites, but rabbinic tradition is not. 

Midrash Exodus Rabbah tells us the 

mixed multitude were Egyptians who, believing 

in the redemption of the Israelites, 

threw in their lot with us as gerim, or strangers. 

Sifre suggests the asafsuf are strangers 

collected from all around, and thus while 

there are other opinions, a link is generally 

understood to have been made between 

them and the idea of a collection of people 

who are neither inside nor quite outside the 

Israelite community. 

Occupying liminal space, these people 

are ripe for definition. The Midrash obliges. 

The asafsuf incited rebellion and consequent 

destruction in their lust for meat 

– this negativity reflects back not only on 

the mixed multitude but also on strangers 

in general. The group quickly becomes responsible 

in the eyes of the classical commentators 

for many of the failures of the 

Israelites – in particular, they become responsible 

for making the golden calf. 

In several places in Midrash the story is 

told of Moses persuading a reluctant God 

that the mixed multitude should join the 

Israelites leaving Egypt. God even tells 

Moses that they will endanger the Israelites 

and Moses counters that they will show 

the world the compassion and openness of 

God, who receives those who repent their 

sin. Midrash Tanhuma Yelamdeinu (on Ex. 

32:7) comments on the verse “God said to 

Moses: Go, get down, for your people that 

you brought up from Egypt, have corrupted 

themselves”: “It does not say My people but 

your people … you caused me to accept the 

PEPE FAINBERG 

mixed multitude because it would be good 

to receive penitents, and I told you that in 

the future they would … cause the nation to 

sin with them.” 

Defining the people who live alongside 

the Israelites as Moses’ people rather than 

God’s, describing them as agitators who facilitate 

sin, merging the ‘mixed multitude’ 

with asafsufsim and then both into the category 

of ‘strangers’ is the rich soil in which 

negativity toward outsiders is planted. We 

lose the biblical neutrality toward those 

who throw in their lot with us; we lose the 

alternate understandings that the mixed 

multitude were supportive of our mission, 

that the asafsufim were our own leadership 

(as suggested in Sifre), and instead cast 

them into the category of neither one thing 

nor the other, ambiguous fellow travelers. 

When rabbis meet people who feel Jewish, 

but who have one (wrong) Jewish parent, 

or a grandparent, or a Jewish partner 

who has encouraged a love of Judaism, we 

have choices. When we meet those who 

cannot explain why their soul tells them 

they are Jewish and who have searched and 

learned and grown in certainty; or those 

who never knew there was a chasm between 

their status and their identity; when we meet 

descendants of anusim, people forced to 

convert from Judaism or those dislocated by 

the Holocaust, we have sacred work to do. 

We can return to the world where people 

can join us easily, acknowledging their Jewish 

identity, their sincere desire to become 

part of the peoplehood of Israel. Or we can 

find it unbelievable that anyone may want 

to join us, put obstacles in their way, and 

demand the highest standards of observance 

over a long period. The asafsuf are with us 

still. We can reject them or we can gather 

them in. 

 

Rabbi Sylvia Rothschild has been a community 

rabbi in the United Kingdom for 30 

years and blogs at rabbisylviarothschild.com 


48 THE JERUSALEM REPORT JUNE 12, 2017

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