The Battle for Jerusalem: Ammunition Hill

Unpacking Israeli History - Unpacked

This episode explores the 1967 Battle of Ammunition Hill during the Six-Day War, examining its historical significance, human cost, and lasting impact on Israelis, Jordanians, and Palestinians. It reflects on memory, identity, and the complexities of war through personal stories and historical analysis.

Key takeaways

• Ammunition Hill was a pivotal, bloody battle in Jerusalem's reunification.
• The victory brought Jewish access to holy sites but deepened Palestinian displacement.
• The battle symbolized national triumph for Israelis but loss and trauma for Jordanians and Palestinians.

Transcript preview

Hey I'm Nome Weisman and this is unpacking Israeli history, the podcast that takes a deep dive into some of the most intense historically fascinating and often misunderstood events and stories linked to Israeli history. This episode is generously sponsored in honor of Dr Andrew and Marcy Spitzer. I've known the Spitzers for so long, there's just such incredible people, such great communal leaders and figures and just the best parents also. So thank you so much for sponsoring this in honor of Andrew and Marcy. And it's also. in partnership with Jewish National Fund USA. For 125 years, J&F USA, Jewish National Fund USA, has helped preserve Israel's heritage sites so their stories can continue to be shared for generations. And to make sure that when you visit, if you want to visit one of these historic sites, you got to go to J&F.org slash travel or check out the links in the show notes. It's all there, but check it out, J&F.org, slash travel. episode of unpacking his early history. First of all, that's so nice of you, like thank you. Or if you just want to say hey, also love that. Be in touch at noam at unpacked. media. It's so incredibly meaningful and kind when we have people like you reach out people are part of the community and say hey I want to be part of this also so definitely reach out noam at unpacked media. Before we start as always check us out on the gram, no one says that. Instagram, No one has ever said that on YouTube you know the you tubes all the places just search unpacking Israeli history and smash that follow or subscribe button. Okay Yala. Let's do this of our neighbors without any preconditions. There are people in Israel elsewhere. Say it's impossible to make peace within the Arabs in Israel or the Turkish people. I think they're home. 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 in 1967 sounds like a bob 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 shout out to the mache alumni in the crowd by the way bus five what is up and to all my Baltimore boys who are with me love you anyway on this particular blisteringly hot June day we were standing in the trenches carved into ammunition hill listening to our guides described this fateful battle for Jerusalem or more to the point not listening what I'm about to tell you is a little embarrassing but I already gave a shout out to my bus five buddies It's not like embarrassing 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. So 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. By the way, this is not true, even though I just said it, they started throwing rocks, and I engaged back and forth with them. And fine, they were more pebbles than boulders, but we were pretending to be soldiers. But still, but still, but still, 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 of the fada 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 tone deaf. I tell you this story almost 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 for 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, so many people who have been killed in the Israeli Palestinian conflict, the soldiers, the Israeli soldiers who are just kids, they're young, fighting and dying since October the 7th, the story just hits different. It's very 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. That country was Jordan. But now I'm going to say a very clunky sentence, so basically, but now I'm going to say a very clunky sentence, soononononononononon. with me once Israel took over East Jerusalem after Jordan attacked Israel. What happened was Jordan then said to the Palestinians who were living under their Dominion were now under Israeli Dominion and Jordan decided that the Palestinians living in East Jerusalem were no longer going to be Jordanian citizens. So these Palestinians became something else. Most refused to apply for for for Israeli citizenship, they said no we're not Israeli, leaving them with this 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 like 2,000 years. But as the Palestinian intellectual Sainu Saibha 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. Nusib 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 Nusib, 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 has faded 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 Tiliology meant and you just skipped that. My God you thought I wasn't going to explain what that means of course I am. Nerd Corner Alert if your ancient Greek is rusty, Tiliology comes from Tiloz 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 and goal. If you believe as so many do in a divine plan it's hard not to see the six day war, evidence of this redemptive arc of history and specifically Jewish history as something that was faded, destined 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 very careful with these ideas because they make it very, very, very, very, very easy to dismiss or even justify the suffering of the people of the people of the people on. the losing sight. Holding this teleological view of history is only satisfying when you're on the winning team. Okay that might have been the longest nerd corner alert ever and I am now off my very nerdy soapbox. Okay so the broader story of the Six Day War you gotta listen to our three part series on the Six Day War that'll give you a heck of a lot of content and it'll give you the broader social historical context you need and of the link is in the show notes it's in the description but as epic as it is if I do say so myself our mini series does not delve into the battle for Ammunition Hill so consider this a companion piece to that series in this episode here's what we're doing we're going through the moments that led to this battle getting into the battle itself and try to understand its legacy you'll meet soldiers and statesmen poets and pacifists and we will unpack what this whole story means for everyone who was affected Israeli's jorjanians the diaspora Jewish community. Like all good six day war stories, this one doesn't begin in 1967, but in 1948, which means that we are going back in time to the moment Jerusalem officially became a divided city. Chapter 1, a city in pieces. Abdullah Alteel was proud of his victories. As the commander of the 6th Regiment of the Arab Legion, he was responsible for routing the four Jewish communities of the Aetion block, freeing the four Jewish community of the Aetion block, freeing up the road. between Hebron and Bethlehem. And it was his men who forced the Hagana near Goon out of the old city of Jerusalem. So when the time came to a point of military governor of Jerusalem, El-Tel seemed the natural choice. But he ruled a divided city because on November 30th, 1948, El-Tel met with a commander of the IDF's 89th commando battalion, a one-eyed dynamo named Moshedayan to hammer out the armistis lines that would separate Jordanian from Israeli. I'm sure they both knew the gravity of the date, just one year and one day prior. 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 Abraham faith's. meanwhile, so-called Jewish Jerusalem, included the new city with its ultra-Orthodox enclaves of Meeshireim and Gueula and the treeline streets of fancy neighborhoods like Recavia and Kataman. 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, Saryu Saibba would stare at the tiny slice of Jewish Jerusalem visible from his backyard and wonder about the 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-rittled cement structure, a UN observation and border crossing station, and scattered rocks and thistles growing among the odd landmine. There was also a grape vine 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 enclave? I didn't before this episode, but I got to tell you. In short, an enclave is a territory completely surrounded by another another 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 country separated from the of the Jewish state by someone else's land. Okay, 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 saint? For decades, Mount Scopus had been home to some of the Yeshove's most impressive institutions, including the National Jewish Library, Hadassa Hospital, founded entirely by women by the way, including the legend wait for it. Dairy. University as well by the way and yes I did go there for a semester and it was a great experience. Anyway the IDF invested considerable resources in protecting these institutions particularly after the massacre of 78 Jewish medical professionals underway to the hospital in April of 1948. By the time Diane and El-tell met to hammer out the armistice lines in the final days of 1948 the UN True supervision organization had gotten involved pledging to protect Mountscopus as well as a small UN convoy that supplied it every other week. Armed Israeli policemen supplemented these UN forces, but otherwise the area was a de-militaryized zone. An 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, Mount Scopus remained more or less quiet. But more or less quiet doesn't mean the same thing in the Middle East as it does and 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