The Battle for Jerusalem

Résumé du livre

THE BATTLE FOR JERUSALEM: An Unintended ConquestThe battle for Jerusalem in June, 1967 was a milestone in the turbulent history of the modern Middle East and in Jewish history. Abraham Rabinovich arrived in Jerusalem five days before the war as an American reporter. He witnessed the beginning of the battle from Mayor Teddy Kollek's office window. Two days later he was on the Temple Mount with the paratroopers who captured it.The book he subsequently wrote, The Battle for Jerusalem, was based on interviews with 300 soldiers and civilians. The revised eBook edition adds a broad political context and an expanded examination of the Arab side of the story, civilian and military. This definitive account reveals the chance nature of events that led to the Israeli capture of Arab Jerusalem, something Israel had not planned and which many ministers opposed. Although the Israel Defense Forces had contingency plans for battle in many corners of the Middle East it had none for ancient Jerusalem on Israel's border, the object of Jewish prayers for thousands of years. Only as the tide of battle carried Israeli forces to the walls of the Old City did the political leadership come to view its capture as an historical dictate that the Jewish state could not avoid embracing. Its capture would be improvised on the run.