Israel excels at a lot of things. Its number-one most niche accomplishment, though? War songs that feature… accordions. Yup, despite the jaunty, klezmer-y tune, you’re listening to a war song – or, more accurately, an eyewitness account of one of the bloodiest battles of the Six Day War. Sounds like a bop, reads like a bummer.
But back in the summer of 2001, I had no idea what the words meant. I was turning 16 soon, goofing off with my friends, all of us thrilled to be away from home and exploring Israel for five weeks. (Shoutout to the Mach Hach alumni in the crowd!) On this particular blisteringly hot June day, we were standing in the trenches carved into Ammunition Hill, listening to our guides describe this fateful battle for Jerusalem.
Or, more to the point, not listening.
What I’m about to tell you is a little embarrassing. And not in like, a fun, cute way, but in the “oh my god, my parents would be SO embarrassed if they could see me now” kind of way.
Instead of listening, my undeveloped-prefrontal-cortex teenage brain thought it would be a grand idea to throw rocks at my friends, who began throwing them right back, pretending to be soldiers. They were more pebbles than boulders, but still – throwing rocks is never a good look, and especially not while standing on ground that kids not much older than we were had given their lives to defend. To make this whole story even more embarrassing, we were still in the thick of the Second Intifada, and just a few miles away, Palestinian kids our age were being arrested or shot for throwing rocks at IDF soldiers.
So, yeah. Very, very tonedeaf. I’m cringing as I tell you this story 25 years later.
But I also try to give my 15-year-old self a little more grace. Honestly, what a privilege to be so innocent and uninformed, so light, so unburdened by all the contradictory feelings and knowledge I have about Ammunition Hill today. Because I gotta warn you – as my team and I prepared this episode, we all found ourselves pretty choked up. Because we’re all old enough, informed enough, to understand exactly why this battle was so important and so devastating. Today, as an adult, as someone who has spent the past three years grieving the far-too-many, far-too-young Israeli soldiers killed since October 7th – this story just hits different.
On the one hand, the battle at Ammunition Hill was an unquestionable triumph that enabled Jews and Israelis to freely explore their holiest religious sites for the first time in decades. On the other hand, it was traumatic and bloody and cost more than 100 lives: 36 Israelis, 71 Jordanians, and countless others who survived with both physical and mental scars.
And then there was the aftermath. Before June of 1967, the Palestinian Arabs living in East Jerusalem were citizens of a sovereign country: Jordan. But once Israel took over East Jerusalem, and Jordan stripped them of their citizenship, these Palestinians became… something else. Most refused to apply for Israeli citizenship, leaving them with a major identity crisis and no recognized nationality.
Then there was the effect on Israeli society. The reunification of Jerusalem was a miracle, marking the moment that the entirety of Jerusalem came under Israeli control for the first time in 2,000 years. But, as the Palestinian intellectual Sari Nusseibeh writes in his excellent book Once Upon a Country, quote:
“It’s remarkable how sacred sites that can arouse in us a sense of the ineffable mystery of life can also spawn a bare-knuckle brawl. This is a mystery only a metaphysician or a psychotherapist can make any sense of. I won’t try.” End quote.
In other words: while the reunification of Jerusalem is absolutely worth celebrating, it also tends to attract some of the most extreme and sometimes violent fringes of Israeli society.
Nusseibeh was raised in East Jerusalem. But the observations from the other side of the barriers and barbed wire were no less profound. The Israeli writer Amos Oz, a decade older than Nusseibeh, expressed the same idea with greater specificity. After the Six Day War, he wrote, quote:
“If from now on the current which has flowed within Zionism almost from the beginning, the current of nationalistic romanticism and mythological delusions of greatness and renewal — if that trend prevails among us, then the Middle East is fated to be the battleground of two people, both fighting a fundamentally just war, both fighting essentially for their life and liberty, and both fighting to the death.” End quote.
In other words: history can’t be allowed to be teleology. Not when two nations are competing – and dying – for the same parcel of land.
So yeah, the story of Ammunition Hill is way more complicated than I realized back in 2001, as a teenager throwing rocks, who had no idea what the word teleology meant. (Nerd corner alert: If your Ancient Greek is rusty, teleology comes from telos, which means “an end,” or “a goal.” So a teleological view of history means you see history as a series of events leading to the fulfillment of some specific, final end or goal. If you believe, as so many do, in a divine plan, it’s hard not to see the Six Day War as evidence of the redemptive arc of history, and specifically Jewish history. As something that was fated to happen, as something that history had been preparing for for a long, long time. There’s nothing wrong with believing that, by the way. In believing in fate, or destiny, or miracles, or the idea that the world is a well-oiled machine running according to plan. But you have to be careful with these ideas. Because they make it very, very easy to dismiss or even justify the suffering of the losing side. Holding a teleological view of history is only satisfying when you’re on the winning team. But Jewish history warns us repeatedly against the hubris that comes with seeing yourself as the Main Character in the narrative arc of human history – a warning that too many Jews began to ignore in the wake of the miracle of the Six Day War. Whew. Okay. Off my very nerdy soapbox.)
So as Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day, approaches, there’s no better time to talk about the legacy of this battle, Unpacking Israeli History-style.
If you haven’t already, you might want to listen to our three-part series on the Six Day War, which will give you the broader social and historical context you need. DUH, link is in the description. But as epic as it is (if I do say so myself), our miniseries doesn’t delve into the battle for Ammunition Hill. So consider this a companion piece to that series.
In this episode, we’ll be going through the moments that led to this battle, get into the battle itself, and then try to understand its legacy. You’ll meet soldiers and statesmen, poets and pacifists. And we’ll unpack what this whole story means for everyone who was affected: Israelis, Jordanians, Palestinians, and Diaspora Jews.
Like all good Six Day War stories, this one doesn’t begin in 1967, but in 1948, which means that we’re going back in time, to the moment Jerusalem officially became a divided city…
Chapter One: A City In Pieces
Abdullah El Tel was proud of his victories.
As the commander of the Sixth Regiment of the Arab Legion, he was responsible for routing the four Jewish communities of the Etzion bloc, freeing up the road between Hebron and Bethlehem. And it was his men who forced the Haganah and Irgun out of the Old City of Jerusalem. So when the time came to appoint a Military Governor of Jerusalem, El Tel seemed the natural choice.
But he ruled a divided city.
Because on November 30, 1948, El Tel met with the commander of the IDF’s 89th Commando Battalion, a one-eyed dynamo named Moshe Dayan, to hammer out the armistice lines that would separate Jordanian territory from Israeli. I’m sure they both knew the gravity of the date: just one year and one day before, the UN had voted to partition Palestine in two, resulting in civil war. Now, two opposing sides were meeting to divide the territory according not to logic or history, but to the simple facts on the ground.
Together, they determined that the Jordanians would remain in control of East Jerusalem, home to the Old City and the holy sites sacred to all three Abrahamic faiths. Meanwhile, so-called “Jewish Jerusalem” included the New City, with its ultra-Orthodox enclaves of Meah Shearim and Geula, and the tree-lined streets of luxe neighborhoods like Rehavia and Katamon.
Dividing the two was a skinny demilitarized zone that snaked north-to-south across the city, bristling with minefields, barbed wire, and concrete barricades. As a kid, Sari Nusseibeh would stare at the tiny slice of Jewish Jerusalem visible from his backyard and wonder about the mysterious enemy on the other side. Quote:
“Between the back of our garden wall and the State of Israel were: one lonesome, semi-destroyed and bullet riddled cement structure; a UN observation and border-crossing station; and scattered rocks and thistles growing among the odd land mine. There was also a grapevine that had managed to survive all the fighting. In springtime I used to stare for hours at the vine’s new leaves, and in the fall I watched the juicy grapes grow big. The wall at the end of the garden defined for me the beginning of a forbidden territory…”
But there was an exception to this strict divide.
Drifting like a lonely island in the northeast corner of the city was the Jewish exclave of Mount Scopus: Jewish territory surrounded on all sides by an enemy state. (Nerd corner alert: did you know the difference between an exclave and an enclave? I didn’t before this episode, but I need to tell you. In short, an enclave is a territory completely surrounded by another state – like Lesotho, which is surrounded on all sides by South Africa, or Vatican City, which is totally surrounded by Italy. An exclave is a part of a country separated from the “mainland” by someone else’s territory – like Alaska, separated from the US by Canada. So from 1949 to 1967, Mt. Scopus was both an enclave, because it was surrounded by Jordanian territory, and an exclave, because it was separated from the rest of the Jewish state by someone else’s land. OK. Thanks for joining me on that journey.)
How did a tiny little exclave end up separated from the rest of so-called Jewish Jerusalem, surrounded on all sides by an enemy state?
For decades, Mt. Scopus had been home to some of the Yishuv’s most impressive institutions, including the National Jewish Library; Hadassah hospital – founded entirely by women, by the way, including the legendary Henrietta Szold – and Hebrew University. The IDF invested considerable resources in protecting these institutions – particularly after the massacre of 78 Jewish medical professionals on their way to the hospital in April of 1948.
By the time Dayan and El Tel met to hammer out the armistice lines in the final days of 1948, the UN Truce Supervision Organization had gotten involved, pledging to protect Mt. Scopus, as well as the small UN convoy that supplied it every other week. Armed Israeli policemen supplemented these UN forces, but otherwise, the area was a demilitarized zone. In a recurring theme on this podcast, neither the Jordanians nor the Israelis were thrilled with this arrangement, or with the UN’s ability to enforce the ceasefire, but – like the rest of the city – Mt. Scopus remained more or less quiet.
But more or less quiet doesn’t mean the same thing in the Middle East as it does in, say, suburban New Jersey. The city was tense, especially as you grew closer to the seam. The quiet was often pierced by an occasional, illicit gunshot. And the city itself was divided, pocked with the rubble-filled dead-zones of “no man’s land” and seeded with landmines.
But, you know. For the Middle East, that’s more or less quiet.
So tourists still came to Jerusalem, which must have been a baffling experience. Each side provided tourists with vastly different maps that more or less erased whatever was on the other side, as though ignoring the enemy would make them go away. The only way to get a complete picture of the city was to look at Jordanian and Israeli maps side-by-side – check out the show notes to compare the ways that Israel and Jordan chose to map the exact same territory.
But by the spring of 1967, most of the tourists flocking to Jerusalem were Diaspora Jews eager to help their Israeli brothers and sisters get through the war that everyone knew was coming. Which brings us to…
Chapter Two: The Cork in the Bottle
Israel’s neighbors had never forgiven the Jewish state for existing, and by May of 1967, the ordinary hostilities were at an all-time high. True, the constant stream of violent infiltrators from all directions wasn’t new. Neither were the graphic threats streaming out of Cairo and Damascus, or Egypt’s troop buildup in the Sinai, or the Arab world’s coziness with the USSR.
But then Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser expelled the UN Emergency Force from the Sinai Peninsula – the massive stretch of desert that separates Egypt from Israel – and installed 80,000 Egyptian troops in their place.
He didn’t need to convince the Syrians to join in his war plans. They were all in from the start. But he did rope Jordan into a mutual defense pact, blowing up hopes of the Hashemite Kingdom staying out of the coming showdown.
Only then did he pull out the big guns. Yup, everything else, that was just par for the course from Nasser. But closing the Straits of Tiran, the narrow sea passage that served as Israel’s single trade route to East Africa and all of Asia? Isolating Israel from the rest of the world and strangling its economy?
That wasn’t mere posturing. That was an act of war.
So after weeks of frayed nerves and constant dread, of black jokes about a second Holocaust and rage at Prime Minister Levi Eshkol’s inexplicable non-response to this aggression, after Israeli citizens mobilized in the tens of thousands to donate blood and dig graves for the apocalypse ahead – the waiting period ended. On June 4, 1967, the Israeli cabinet voted on the IDF’s bold but risky plan to strike. 12 in favor, 2 against: it was time to put an end to the hamtana, the waiting period.
Within a matter of hours, Egypt’s entire airforce had been reduced to scrap metal, and the Six Day War had officially begun. But this is not an overview of the entire war. Again, we have a three-part series for that. This is about a specific battle: an important battle, a tragic battle, a triumphant battle. A battle for the future of the most contested city on earth.
This episode is about the battle for Jerusalem.
It was obvious to everyone that if war ever broke out, Mount Scopus would become a critical strategic outpost. So as the Israelis were busy demolishing Egypt’s air force, Jordanian King Hussein Bin Talal (bin tah-LAHL) was already planning for the future of East Jerusalem. And his plan boiled down to: Do Not Let The Israelis Reach East Jerusalem Through Mount Scopus.
So as Jerusalemites on both sides of the barbed-wire divide hunkered down and prayed, the Second King Hussein Battalion was massing forces to defend Jerusalem’s City Line.
If East Jerusalem was a bottle, the Jordanians needed a cork – a way to stop Israeli forces from pushing their way into Jordanian territory. Their “cork” was the three outposts along the path to Mount Scopus: Givat HaMivtar, French Hill, and Ammunition Hill. (By the way, the word “Giva,” as in “Givat HaMivtar,” also means “hill.” Jerusalem: the hilly holy city!)
Ammunition Hill, located right next to Mount Scopus, was exactly what it sounded like: an ammunition depot built by the British in the days of the mandate. By 1967, though, it was a Jordanian defensive stronghold, complete with a police academy. Just south of the hill was a parking lot belonging to a nearby UNRWA compound next door. The parking lot will become important later, I promise.
When Jordan took over the site from the British in 1948, they gave it a major upgrade, building an extensive network of trenches and bunkers winding up and down the hill. The bunkers, spread out about every 100 meters (or nearly 330 feet), contained slits in the rocks that soldiers could use to gun down their enemies.
It was mazelike, claustrophobic, confusing. Hardly the kind of complex you want to attack without extensive preparation. Especially because the Second King Hussein Battalion hunkered down in the trenches was an elite force: 120 highly-trained fighters who knew every nook and cranny of East Jerusalem – and of the defensive labyrinth they built on Ammunition Hill.
The Six Day War is often painted as a miraculous victory, and when you zoom out, sure: I’m sympathetic to that view. But not every operation was as smooth as the opening salvo of the war. Not every miracle comes easy. And the Israeli victory at Ammunition Hill would exact a particularly steep price.
But in the wee hours of the morning on June 6th, 1967, as the 66th Battalion of the 55th Paratrooper Brigade prepared their attack, they had no idea what challenges they were about to face.
On paper, Captain David “Dodik” (DOUGH-deek) Rotenberg’s orders were simple. He and his company would breach the gates surrounding Ammunition Hill, while Captain Captain David “Dedi” (DEH-dee) Steiner and his men would actually capture the outpost.
Easy-peasy. Except for two things.
One: Captain Dedi Steiner had literally never seen combat.
And two: the planning for this battle was less a “plan” and more “Okay, on the count of three… CHARGE!” Israelis are famously informal about planning ahead – it’s honestly hilarious to watch a Type-A American try to schedule anything with a typical Israeli – but during a war, disorganization comes with a bodycount. And the multiple tactical and intelligence errors made that night could have cost the Israelis the battle.
To start with, the paratroopers were all reservists – soldiers who had finished their service and were now being called back from their ordinary lives to fight a war. Initially, they had been called up to train for a parachute mission in the Sinai Peninsula, before being redirected to Jerusalem at the last minute.
A day into the war, they arrived at army HQ for a comprehensive briefing.
Just kidding. There was no HQ, unless you count “a random lawyer’s apartment.” Chill. Casual. Just one of the most important battles in one of the most important wars in Israeli history being planned at some dude’s house.
And that comprehensive briefing I mentioned? Yeah, it basically put the brief in briefing. They were given a tiny aerial photograph showing some tunnels, trenches, and small-ish structures.
They had no idea how wide or deep the trenches were.
They had no idea the hill was riddled with bunkers.
They had no idea that 120 highly-trained soldiers were waiting for them; they had been told there would be half as many.
In short: they had no idea that they were going in blind.
Meanwhile, Captain Dodik – the guy in charge of breaching the walls – had just one directive for his soldiers: keep moving. That meant no stopping for the wounded or the dead. A single pause was a bottleneck. And a bottleneck could torpedo the entire assault.
Dodik did instruct his deputy company commander, Nir Nitzan, to study the trench pattern on Ammunition Hill so he would understand the layout of the Jordanian defenses. But in the rush to battle, Nitzan had mere hours to absorb the complexity of a defense system that was built over years.
Meanwhile, Dedi – that’s the guy who had never seen combat but was for some reason in charge of capturing the entire complex, and yes, it IS confusing that the two commanders in this story have the same name and similarly funny nicknames – gathered his officers beside the buses that would take them to the front. In faint light, he showed them the grainy photo of Ammunition Hill. That blurry picture was all they had. That, and Dedi’s instructions. “Fellows,” he said, “we have to take this.” Several hours behind schedule, the soldiers finally boarded the buses, speeding through the darkness with headlights off, toward one of the most heavily fortified positions in Jerusalem, with only the vaguest idea of what awaited them.
Chapter Three: “A Massacre in a Maze”
For a city at war, Jerusalem was deceptively calm. Jordanians and Israelis had exchanged fire the day before, but by the wee hours of June 6th, the eastern half of the city had gone quiet, and Arab leaders were beginning to believe the worst was over. The Egyptian reports from the front falsely boasted of victory, so the Old City’s Arab civilian resistance committee staff decided to leave their HQ and return home for the night. Even the leaders decided to sleep outside the city walls.
That was a mistake.
At 2:20am, the Israelis arrived at Ammunition Hill.
Their opening move: breach the outer fences of the no-man’s-land surrounding the hill with Bangalore torpedoes — long, explosive-filled tubes that are very effective at clearing wire.
That is, if you know where the wire is and which wire to break.
But the first barbed wire fence the paratroopers approached was a surprise. It hadn’t been in the briefing or shown in the grainy photo they’d studied. Losing precious minutes, the Israelis destroyed the fence, knowing that every wasted second meant danger.
With the fence finally cleared, the men of the 66th brigade raced behind Nir Nitzan toward the enemy trench, illuminated only by the distant glow of flares. But as Nir scrambled up the short, steep slope, he found a second unexpected barbed wire fence in his way. With the entire battalion strung out in the open behind him, Nir bellowed for a soldier to destroy this fence before the Jordanians strafed them all with machine gun fire.
Too late.
The Jordanian legionnaires had heard the commotion. From the high ground, they could see the entire brigade running towards the trenches through the parking lot, with only a handful of civilian vehicles for cover.
The Jordanians aimed their guns and readied their mortars. And then, they unleashed a rain of fire, killing several Israelis on the spot.
It was a grim beginning to a difficult battle. And it was about to get worse.
Because when the paratroopers finally breached the perimeter, they found themselves pinned to the hulking concrete wall of the police academy. They needed to get into the narrow trenches that led up to Ammunition Hill. But the rain of bullets had only grown thicker.
Dodik motioned for his men to get behind him in a single-file line. As quickly as they could, they made their way into the snaking network of trenches.
I want you to imagine this: the trenches were carved into the white Jerusalem limestone, so narrow that the men had to walk single-file. If a soldier had to move up in the line for any reason, every guy in front of him had to lie down to give him room to pass. In some places, the trenches were so deep that grown men couldn’t see over the wall. In other places, the trenches abruptly shallowed to a few feet, leaving soldiers completely exposed to enemy snipers.
To make matters worse, the trenches had been dug in a jagged zigzag designed to prevent attackers from getting a clear shot. The brigade had walked into a labyrinth with no idea how close – or far – they were to the minotaur at the center. But in this case, the minotaur wasn’t a mythical monster – just a bunker filled with elite Jordanian combat soldiers with orders to fight to the death.
Veteran Yoel Herzl later described it as, quote, “a battle of shadows. You didn’t see the enemy until you were on top of him. It was grenades, bayonets, and teeth… I remember thinking, ‘If I stop for a second to breathe, I’m dead.'” End quote.
With the Israelis stuck in the maze of trenches, communication began to fail. In the chaos, the central command believed the assault had stalled. Dodik and Dedi were told to alter the plan mid-stride. Now, Dedi would hold the position, while Dodik would launch the main attack.
But there was no way to attack. Not while the soldiers in the trenches were taking heavy fire. Every time they tried to poke a head up or move an inch forward, the Jordanians in the central bunker would loose a devastating burst of machine-gun fire.
The brigade was stuck. Unless someone climbed out of the trench to provide cover fire.
It was a suicide mission. But without cover fire, the squad would remain stuck in the claustrophobic hell of the trenches, unable to move forward or back as the Jordanians unleashed volley after volley of bullets.
Commander Nir Nitzan had no time to ask for a volunteer, and there was no space for one to come forward, anyway. So he turned to the guy behind him. Eitan Naveh had just turned 23, and he had a baby at home. But whatever grief or guilt Nir felt at that moment, condemning Naveh to an almost certain death, he knew the battle depended on it. So he ordered Eitan to climb out of the trench and return fire.
Without hesitation, Eitan leaped from the trench. He even managed to make a joke about how he wouldn’t embarrass the rest of them. Completely exposed, he ran the edge, firing madly to keep the Jordanians’ heads down.
But he was just one soldier, shooting up at a target he could barely see. He took a bullet, then another.
Eventually, his gun went quiet. Eitan Naveh was dead.
But the rest of his company was on the move. His cover fire had worked as intended.
Eventually, 23-year-old Eitan Naveh would be awarded Israel’s highest military honor, the Medal of Valor, for his bravery and sacrifice. His mother would say that the most noteworthy part of the award was her son’s rank: Private.
Meanwhile, as Dodik attempted to move a fresh platoon to the front of the line to keep the momentum going, he realized that most of his company was gone. A soldier had been wounded in the open ground of no-man’s-land and the man behind him stopped to help, forgetting the brutal orders to leave the wounded and keep moving. One by one, the soldiers behind him piled up, creating a literal human traffic jam in the dark. But even as the bottleneck cleared, the soldiers realized they had no idea which branch of the trench would take them towards the target. With his men lost in the guts of the hill, Dodik was suddenly a commander without a command, with only a handful of men to carry out an assault meant for an entire company.
This left Dedi Steiner’s force to carry the battle largely on its own. The Jordanian legionnaires were trained to stay at their firing slits until the very last moment, regardless of the chaos unfolding around them. This meant that even when the Israelis managed to clear a trench, they would often find Jordanians still fighting from the rooms and bunkers they had just bypassed. As Captain Suleiman al-Safi (SOO-lee-mahn al-SAH-fee), Commander of the Jordanian 2nd Company later put it, “We had orders not to retreat, and we stayed. We fought until the last bullet and the last man.”
The Israelis’ situation was dire. Out of the 18 men in one of Dedi’s platoons, only seven remained unwounded. Every officer and NCO had been hit, leaving the uninjured privates in charge of their own fate. Without leadership, they did the only thing they could: they sat with their wounded and waited for death or dawn, whichever came first.
Ammunition Hill was now the battle of the footsoldier.
Yaakov Heimovich was a twenty-one year old engineering student at the Technion – Israel’s equivalent to MIT. He had just watched several men die in front of him – including his own commander – and he was terrified. He had no idea which trench led where, or whether any of the other Israeli platoons had made it, or what their position was even supposed to be. But he knew that his company was stalled in close quarters. He knew the fire wasn’t stopping. And he knew that if he wanted to get out of this maze alive, he couldn’t lose the momentum of this battle.
So he did the only thing he could. He pressed forward.
Later, his friends would describe it: a defiant shout of ACHARAI! After me.
The sound of two bullets, firing into the air. The drumbeat of men’s boots as they followed Yaakov into the darkness of the trench.
Acharai!
So much leadership, so much bravery, contained in one word.
After me.
Heimovich wasn’t a general or a commander or a household name. There were no medals pinned to his uniform, no high rank to fall back on. He was no so-called “great man” of history, shaping the course of world events. Just a 21-year-old kid, demonstrating how to rise to the occasion. Reminding us all that bravery and leadership aren’t limited to rank, that valor can coexist with doubt and fear. Reminding us to keep moving, even when we’re trapped in the dark.
But the dark was lifting now, and as dawn rose over Jerusalem, the remaining paratroopers could see their situation clearly.
It wasn’t good. Most of the Israeli officers were now casualties. The central command had effectively collapsed. But the central bunker, the nerve center of the Jordanian defense, was just in sight. The objective was close… if they could break past its defenses.
The bunker was a reinforced concrete structure, partially buried in the earth, with narrow firing slits that allowed the Jordanian legionnaires to sweep the entire plateau with machine-gun fire. Conventional grenades barely dented its thick walls, and the Israeli forces were running low on ammunition.
If they couldn’t take the bunker, they’d have to destroy it instead. But bazooka shells did nothing to bring down the building. They needed serious fire. Eyeballing the structure, Yaakov asked for 30 kilos of explosives to finish the job. And because he had proven himself throughout the battle, everyone listened. I would have too.
Under relentless fire, the men scrounged for anything they could find. Once they had 21 kilos of explosives, it was time to detonate. But the first attempt to light the fuse failed, forcing the soldiers to remain exposed atop the bunker to reset the bombs.
Finally, they lit the fuse. The bunker collapsed, killing everyone inside. For the first time in four hours, the hill was silent.
The cork had been loosed from the bottle. Ammunition Hill was in Israeli hands. The path to the Old City was clear.
But in the eerie silence after the blast, the paratroopers weren’t pushing forward. They had taken the hill – and now, they had to identify the dead and tend to the dozens of wounded scattered across the limestone maze.
All together, 107 men died that day. 36 Israeli soldiers. 71 Jordanian legionnaires. Captain Suleiman al-Safi, Commander of the Jordanian Second Brigade, who had obeyed his orders to fight to the last man, later called it “a massacre in a maze.”
As the sun rose over what would soon be a unified Jerusalem, both sides took account of their dead. If they came across a fallen Jordanian soldier, the Israeli survivors took the time to bury him. When they were done, 17 Jordanian soldiers lay in freshly-dug graves, a Jordanian rifle buried in the ground to mark the spot. Pinned on top was a sign in English: Buried here, 17 brave Jordanian soldiers. IDF, 1967.
I’ve never seen combat. It’s impossible for me to put myself in the boots of a 21-year-old paratrooper. I keep trying to imagine it as though I were there, and coming up blank. How did these young soldiers manage to take the hill in the chaos and the dark, with bullets flying and their commanders dead? And when the guns went silent, and the adrenaline slowed, how did they tend to the wounded, collect the bodies, and bury the enemy without collapsing?
In the aftermath of the battle, did they understand what they had just done?
In fact, what had they just done?
Chapter Four: The Legacy of Ammunition Hill
With Ammunition Hill in Israeli hands, the Old City of Jerusalem was as good as conquered. In his excellent book The Lion’s Gate, Steven Pressfield quotes Yoram Zamosh, Commander of Company “A” in the 71st Paratroop Battalion, who was among the first to reach the Kotel – the Western Wall – which had been inaccessible to Jews for the past 19 years. I’ll quote it here:
“The Kotel. The Western Wall, as it is called in English. How did so much hope and passion come to be attached to a wall? Not even the wall of a temple, which the Kotel is not, but even humbler, a retaining wall for the mount upon which the razed temple had once stood. A ruin. How could this mean so much to me? How could it mean so much to our paratroopers who had never studied, who knew nothing of Torah, who did not even know how to pray? A wall is unlike any other holy site. A wall is a foundation. It is what remains when all that had once risen above it has been swept away.”
Exhausted from battle, overcome by their victory, the paratroop brigade made its way to the Western Wall. It didn’t matter if they were secular or religious, if they prayed three times a day or had never once darkened the door of a synagogue. Dazed, whispering prayers through tears, they approached to touch the stones.
Soon after, the poet Chaim Hefer (KHE-fehr – חפר) tried to capture the overwhelming mix of exhaustion, exhilaration, humility, pride, and import that now weighed on the young soldiers who had made this moment possible. His poem, HaTzanchanim Bochim – The Paratroopers are Crying – describes the encounter like this. I’m going to read it, in translation and in full:
This Kotel has heard many prayers,
This Kotel has seen many walls fall,
This Kotel has felt the hands of wailing women and notes pressed between its stones,
This Kotel has seen Rabbi Yehuda Halevi trampled in front of it.
This Kotel has seen emperors rise and fall,
But this Kotel has never seen paratroopers cry.
This Kotel has seen them weary and exhausted,
This Kotel has seen them wounded and scraped,
Running towards it with beating hearts, with shouts and with silence, Pouncing like lunatics in the alleyways of the Old City.
And covered in dust and with parched lips, they whisper:
If I forget thee, if I forget thee, O Jerusalem.
And they are as light as an eagle and as mighty as a lion
And their tanks – the fiery chariots of Elijah the Prophet.
And they pass by like thunder, and they pass by in fury,
And they remember all the awful years
When we didn’t even have a Kotel where we could shed our tears.
And here they are, standing in front of it and breathing deeply,
And here they are, looking at it with the sweet pain,
Tears fall, and they look at each other bewildered,
How can it be, how can it be that paratroopers are crying?
How can it be that they’re touching the wall and are so moved?
How can it be that from crying they switch to singing?
Perhaps it’s because 19-year-old boys, who were born together with the establishment of the State, are carrying 2,000 years on their backs.
This wasn’t merely a reunification of a city divided for 19 years.These were the tears of Jews in charge of their holiest sites, of their ancient capital, of their own destiny, for the first time since the Romans rolled into Judea in 63 BCE. Again, if you’ve got that teleological view of history, this was the coda to 2,000 years of exile.
I’ll quote again from Pressfield, quoting Uri Zamosh:
“Stempel held my arm in a grip of iron. Twice he tried to speak and twice his voice failed. He pulled me so close that the brows of our helmets were touching. “Zamosh!” Stempel said, with such emotion that I can hear the words still, though he spoke them almost fifty years ago. “Zamosh, if my grandfather, if my great-grandfather, if any of my family who have been murdered in pogroms and in the death camps . . . if they could know, somehow, even for one second, that I, their grandson, would be standing here at this hour, in this place, wearing the red boots of an Israeli paratrooper . . . if they could know this, Zamosh, for just one instant, they would suffer death a thousand times and count it as nothing.” Stempel gripped my arm as if he would never let go. “We shall never, never leave this place,” he said. “Never will we give this up. Never.”
But not everyone shared this conviction. Clouding the wonder and awe of this moment was the knowledge of what it had taken to get here. And no one understood that sacrifice like the soldiers who had fought their way in.
The song on everyone’s lips was Jerusalem of Gold, written just a few months before by Israeli icon Naomi Shemer and performed for the first time just weeks before the city’s reunification. It’s gorgeous – a classic of the Israeli canon. In our previous Six Day War series, I described it like this:
[insert clip from previous series]
[back to Noam in 2026]
Ariel was among the first to name the price of Jerusalem’s reunification.
Blood. Tears. Pain.
Where Shemer wrote of longing and triumph, Ariel wrote of grief. Here’s one translated stanza:
The strafed battalion broke forwards,
all of him in blood and smoke,
and a mother came, and another mother,
in the congregation of bereavement.
Biting his lips, not without toil,
the battalion continued fighting,
till, at the end, the flag flapped
above the house of bitterness.
Jerusalem of iron,
of lead, of darkness,
haven’t we set your wall free?
Oof. It hurts to read.
Meir Ariel wasn’t an anti-Zionist. He didn’t hate Israel. He had served, fought, and sacrificed for his country in 1967, and he would do so again in just six short years, during the Yom Kippur War.
But I’d argue that it’s often the people who actually fight the wars who hate war most. Ariel had been in the trenches. He had seen his friends die. He knew that the reunification of Jerusalem wasn’t solely some divine miracle, handed to the State of Israel without exacting anything in return. Jerusalem had been bought in blood. To pretend otherwise was a lie. An insult to the men who had fallen to unite it.
Despite the losses, Israel was in no mood to mourn. Just days before, Israelis had been digging graves and cracking black jokes. But now, Israelis celebrated the kind of reversal of fortune they hadn’t felt since the days of Queen Esther. The Scroll of Esther tells the story of an averted genocide of the Jews roughly 2,500 years ago. The Jews go from wearing sackcloth and ashes to rejoicing, and the megillah tells us:
ליהודים היתה אורה, ושמחה, וששון, ויקר.
The Jews had light and joy and gladness and honor.
That’s a pretty good description of Jerusalem in the heady days after the Six Day War.
But not everyone was celebrating. I’ll quote again from Pressfield, quoting Yoram Zamosh:
“Arab prisoners were being rounded up then, not just soldiers but local officials and dignitaries. They understood now the magnitude of their calamity. I saw more than one brave man sobbing, his face buried in his hands.”
These prisoners were quickly let go, but the shock and disbelief lingered. For the Jordanians, the loss of Jerusalem was a critical blow. King Hussein hadn’t particularly wanted this war, and now Nasser’s maneuvering had cost him both the West Bank and the third-holiest site in Islam: the al-Aqsa Mosque. The shame was crippling. Just weeks after the end of the war, King Hussein vowed in front of the UN General Assembly that “Jordan will survive. Ground down by sorrow for the moment, we will rise again. And with us will arise the Arab nations.”
But if the Jordanians were embarrassed and devastated, the Palestinians of East Jerusalem were apprehensive. Yesterday, they had been citizens of Jordan. But with the city under Israel’s control, what were they now?
Israel did not formally annex East Jerusalem until 1981, but it was clear from the get-go that the entire city would remain under Israeli control. The Palestinians of East Jerusalem rebuffed the initial Israeli offer to apply for Israeli citizenship, believing that this was only a naksa. A setback. A temporary, if humiliating, state of affairs.
Nearly 60 years after the Six Day War, the majority of East Jerusalem’s Palestinians are officially stateless. As “permanent residents,” they carry Israeli ID cards, pay Israeli taxes, vote in municipal elections, and use Israeli services, like healthcare.
But it is a precarious existence. Their residency can be revoked if they leave the city for too long or fail to renew the correct papers. Every aspect of their lives – from obtaining building permits to getting travel documents – is governed by a frustrating, labyrinthine bureaucracy that offers none of the protections of traditional citizenship. And though many East Jerusalemites are beginning to apply for Israeli citizenship in record numbers, only a fraction have actually been approved. They identify mostly as Palestinians, but have no country; they live on their native soil but often feel like unwelcome guests. Especially when crowds of revelers pass by their homes every Jerusalem Day, celebrating what to Jews is a victory and to Palestinians is yet another crushing loss.
And yet, those early days glimmered with something like hope. I’ve quoted a lot from Sari Nusseibeh in this episode, but I’m going to do it one more time. Here he’s describing his first trip back to Jerusalem in the summer of 1967, quote:
“Crossing over what had been No Man’s Land was the highlight of the trip. It was miraculous to see how the barbed wire and shoot-to-kill zones, things I had lived with since childhood, were gone. It was only then that it dawned on me how the war had ended the division of my country. Defeat had given me back my homeland.”
Of course, that optimism didn’t last. In the heady summer of 1967, few Israelis or Palestinians could have predicted what the next 80 years would bring. They were too busy celebrating, flocking to holy sites they hadn’t been able to access for 19 years, rediscovering a city no longer split by barbed wire. And for those who had lost husbands, fathers, brothers, sons, friends, comrades: they were busy mourning, too. What a strange, suspended feeling: a bubble of grief in a sea of joy.
…
Nine years after the “massacre in the maze,” the “battle of shadows,” Ammunition Hill reopened. Not as a battleground, but as a memorial site and museum, complete with 182 olive trees – one for every Israeli soldier who died to reunify Jerusalem.
But well before the museum and the memorial, before the ceremonies and the olive trees – before all that, Ammunition Hill was already a symbol, widely recognized as the defining battle of the Six Day War. The story of the paratroopers who fought at Ammunition Hill entered Israeli cultural life through books, films, and songs. Each year on Jerusalem Day, Israelis commemorate and celebrate the fighters of Ammunition Hill, with the “Dance of the Flags” parade, public concerts, prayers of gratitude, and pilgrimages to the Western Wall.
Today, it serves as the main induction site for IDF paratroopers.
And in the summer of 2012, it served as an unexpected site of reconciliation. And you know me, I live for these moments of unexpected beauty and hope, so this one means a lot to me.
45 years after the battle that cost 36 Israeli and 71 Jordanian lives, survivors from both sides of the trenches gathered at Ammunition Hill for a joint memorial ceremony. Men who had once shot at each other in the darkness now walked those same narrow passageways together, sharing memories of the night battle and honoring the dead on both sides.
As one veteran put it:
“We once looked at each other through the barrels of guns. Now we shook hands and exchanged war stories.”
I’m not sure which side he was on, and it doesn’t matter. Both sides had fought the same horrible battle. Both sides were made up of ordinary men.
Decades later, these veterans traded plaudits, former enemies now calling each other “brave.” For many, it was the first time they had ever met the people who had been on the other side of their rifles. As one veteran, Yossi Langotsky, put it, quote: “The whole event was deeply moving. It highlighted the absurdity of war. Humanity hasn’t yet found the way to avoid war, but when you meet the soldier who fought against you, you realize he’s just a person and you ask yourself, ‘What were we doing killing each other?’
A retired Jordanian general said he had come to the ceremony to convey a message of peace to the Israelis. Technically, the two countries had been at peace since 1994. But it’s one thing for a government to ink a peace deal, for leaders to shake hands. It’s another for veterans to extend such compassion to men that killed their friends.
In 2021, the Israelis got another chance to pay their respects. When a Jordanian soldier’s remains were discovered during the construction of Israel’s light rail, the state facilitated his burial with full Jordanian military honors in East Jerusalem. Jordanian military officers and government officials and Palestinian representatives lined up to pay their respects.
I wish more people knew these stories, but honestly, I’m just glad they happened at all. Even in death, there is dignity. Even in war, there is humanity.
Back in the summer of 2001, teenage Noam could not have imagined the bravery and ferocity of any of these young soldiers. The trenches were right in front of me, but in the daylight, they looked clean and manicured, a far cry from the claustrophobic canals of fire that once trapped the 55th Paratroop Brigade as they struggled forward blindly, lungs burning, unsure what lay around the next corner, but trusting the cry of that young private, Yaakov Haimovich: Aharai!
So that’s the story of the battle of Ammunition Hill and here are your five fast facts:
1. After the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Jerusalem was split between Israel and Jordan, except for Mount Scopus, an Israeli enclave surrounded by Jordanian territory.
2. After weeks of escalation, and fearing a second Holocaust, Israel launched a preemptive strike on Egypt on June 5, 1967, beginning the Six Day War.
3. The Israeli battalion sent to capture Ammunition Hill – the key to the Old City of Jerusalem – found themselves in one of the best-defended positions in Jerusalem with no idea of what they were walking into, and the battle quickly devolved into chaos.
4. After four bloody hours, the paratroopers finally destroyed the central bunker, ending the fighting and paving the way for the Israelis to take the Old City of Jerusalem. Dozens of Israelis and Jordanians were killed. Despite the pain, moments of humanity glimmered through the chaos.
5. For many Israelis, Ammunition Hill became a symbol of the reunification of Jerusalem. For Jordanians, the loss of Jerusalem was humiliating, while for Palestinians, it was the start of an 80-year identity crisis as an occupied people.
Those are your five fast facts, but here’s one enduring lesson as I see it:
As we record this episode, the United States and Israel are in a tentative ceasefire with Iran. The reactions to the recent war from outside have been intense and deeply divided. Some people see it as reckless escalation, a step toward a wider and more dangerous conflict. Others see it as a necessary attempt to prevent a nuclear threat and to secure a safer future. The arguments can be dizzying.
They’re not so different from the arguments that divided the world in the wake of the Six Day War. For some – particularly for Jews and Israelis – the war was an unquestionable victory, even a miracle. To others, though – particularly Palestinians – it marks the beginning of a long and painful political reality that has shaped their lives ever since.
Now, to be clear, I’m not comparing what’s happening today to Ammunition Hill. The context, the actors, and the stakes are completely different. But the way we talk about war, the hopes we attach to it, the fears we project onto it, the certainty we claim from a distance – all those follow a familiar patterns.
Because it’s easy to talk about war when you’re not in it, to speak in hypothetical, to assume easy moral postures. It’s a lot harder to see things that way when you’re the one in the trenches or under fire.
The soldiers battling their way through the trenches of Ammunition Hill weren’t hypotheticals in a historical debate. They were young men, trying to stay alive. They were students like Yaakov Heimovitch, who was terrified but moved forward anyway. They were commanders like Nir Nitzan trying to keep their units together in the confusion of a night battle, grappling with the guilt of sending young men to certain death. They were Jordanian legionnaires who were trying to defend their country.
It’s so easy to turn any of these soldiers into heroes or villains, depending on the story we want to tell. So easy to forget that they were just people – and YOUNG people at that – who didn’t have the luxury of knowing how their story would end.
Ammunition Hill is sometimes called a “Privates’ War,” and for good reason. In the chaos of that battle, victory came down to individuals, sometimes a twenty-one-year-old with a rifle and a split-second decision.
We love to call that bravery. And sometimes it certainly was.
But even then, the truth is probably more complicated. We don’t know exactly what pushed Eitan Naveh to move when he did. We don’t know what motivated Yaakov Heimovitch to step forward to lead. Maybe it was courage. Maybe it was instinct. Maybe it was the simple, overwhelming realization that standing still meant death.
Maybe it doesn’t matter.
Bravery can coexist with fear.
Faith can coexist with doubt.
Sometimes valor just means taking the next step, uncertain of what awaits you.
So whether we’re talking about the trenches of 1967 or the headlines of today, it’s worth remembering something simple: nobody actually wants war. People want safety. They want dignity. They want the best possible future for their families and their country. Failing that, they just want to survive.
And no matter what side they’re on, the soldiers pressed into these wars are human beings carrying those same hopes into impossible situations.
This battle – like so many others – isn’t just a heroic war story. An easy tale, an open-and-shut example of courage and conviction. It’s a constellation of human stories, lived in fear and uncertainty, of people who didn’t realize they would change the course of history. Of people who weren’t trying to change the world – just to see the next dawn.
Of people just like us.