Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 15: Jerusalem Day, a modern redemption story

Episode Date: May 26, 2025

Jerusalem Day falls on May 25th this year. It is the day of Jerusalem's unification in the 1967 Six Day War, and so a symbol of both Jewish rescue from the genocidal plans of its enemies, a palpable experience of strength and redemption just two decades after Auschwitz, and also a symbol of the perils and moral problems of Jewish power, the day Israel found itself ruling another people.It is the day of the Jews' homecoming to their sacred places, but also of political grandstanding and ideological narrative-making.Yet at its heart, Jerusalem Day is also about, well, Jerusalem, the real living city, the people who belong to it, and the grandeur of ordinary life in the shadow of great and ancient abstractions.This episode is sponsored by Julie and Frank Cohen, who believe that this podcast is a way to teach our story, because understanding our past and present is key to building a better future.And as has become a podcast tradition, it is dedicated to Kinneret Gat, teacher, mother, grandmother, who was killed by Hamas terrorists on October 7.Please join me on Patreon to support this project: ⁠ www.patreon.com/AskHavivAnything⁠ If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at ⁠[e-mail]⁠.A podcast by Haviv Rettig Gur

Hi, everybody. Welcome to a special bonus episode of Ask Haviv Anything. I want to talk to you about Jerusalem Day. It comes up this year on May 25th in the evening. It is a day that carries a lot of political weight. It marks a historical event with tremendous political consequences. The Israeli capture of the old city of Jerusalem and of East Jerusalem and, more largely the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan, Sinai in the 67 War. It is the day of Jerusalem's unification. It is a day that, for some, is the beginning of a messianic era, and for others is the beginning of the occupation. It's a complicated day.

And there's an essay that I once wrote that captures my own feelings, and I want to share it with you. I come back to it every year. I love this day. But it has to be reclaimed, and it has to be clarified. This episode is sponsored by Julian Frank Cohen. Thank you to Julie, thank you to Frank, who believe that this podcast is a way to teach our story

because understanding our past and present is key to building a better future. Those are beautiful words, and I really appreciate it. And as is traditional, this episode is dedicated to Kinaret Gat, the mother of daughter Karmel Gat and daughter-in-law Yardin-Roman Gat who were both taken hostage on October 7.

Kineret was seen in videos that surfaced in the days after the October 7 attack with their hands tied walking alongside other elderly members of Kibbutz Be'eri as they were led by Hamas fighters through the kibbutz before they were shot and killed. Her death was confirmed shortly after. Kinirit was a teacher. Kinirate was a wife, a mother, a grandmother.

And Kinirate famously was filmed by Hamas fighters sticking her tongue out at them in defiance shortly before she was killed. A hero, a courageous woman, a caring woman, and she is missed. Jerusalem Day was first observed in 1968, a year after the 67 war. It was a holiday of liberation. It was observed by most of the Jews, almost all of the Jews, and schools and all the different political movements. It was a day of gratitude, and it was a state.

by a people that believed that it had been rescued from the jaws of death in that war. Hindsight is 2020. It's easy to look back on the 67 war and say, well, of course the Israelis were powerful. Of course the Arabs were going to be defeated at the scale and at the speed at which they were. But in May 1967, I think it was May 18, when Egypt's dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser imposed the naval blockade on Israeli shipping through the Straits of Tehran, which was the choke point through which most of Israel's oil and fuel shipments actually had had to pass. Nasir then kicked out the UN emergency force in the Sinai, which of course ran away immediately, prompting the joke that among Israelis that the UN is an

umbrella that doesn't work in the rain. And he mobilized the Egyptian army to the Israeli border. Most of the Arab governments at the time talked about Israel's coming destruction. Egypt's official radio was blasting out constant threats of imminent destruction. Egypt wasn't alone. Many Arab nations were discussing joining the attack, and Arab propaganda was popularizing the idea. There were cartoons, there were pamphlets, there were newspapers, there were poems read out in public about the destruction of Israel. Jordan, for example, placed its military under direct Egyptian command ahead of the war. Iraqi tank columns moved west to support any potential Jordanian offensive.

Everybody understood that Syria would join the Egyptian Declaration of War. Now, the IDF at the time, in the run-up to the war, actually knew that it was powerful, knew that it had capabilities, that it had built out capabilities under Chief of Staff Itzhak Rabin that outclassed any Arab opponent and actually told Prime Minister Ashko that with good planning, with good execution,

they could probably defeat all the enemies all at once. You don't rely on a military bombastically saying it can handle anything. And also, Israelis didn't hear those secret planning meetings between the army and the prime minister. That assessment that the IDF was capable of meeting that moment was not known to ordinary Israelis. What did ordinary Israelis see and hear in the run-up to the war? They saw Israeli officials digging 14,000 graves in Yelkoan Park in Tel Aviv, the single biggest

municipal park in the city, an expectation of massive casualties from the coming war. They heard the endless stream of bombast about their coming collapse and demise broadcast from across every border. They knew their country was just nine miles wide at its middle, and they knew that Iraqi tank columns were in the West Bank, preparing to help cut the country in half. They knew UN forces fled at the first sign of trouble, and they knew that no help would be coming from the Americans or any other major power. so they entered the war in what can only be characterized as a state of existential dread. The first Jerusalem day

was therefore this astonishing moment of success and relief. The unbelievable successes of the IDF destroying the Egyptian Air Force before it could even take off basically defeating the Syrian forces

on day two or three. and by day six, almost haphazardly taking the West Bank without even a clear military plan for doing so. The Army had plans for how to push the Syrian artillery back on the Golan Heights, for what to do in case of an Egyptian invasion. But there was no plan to take the West Bank, and in fact the Israelis had asked the Jordanians not to enter the war. And when the Jordanians did, Central Command Chief Uzin al-Kis, Major General Uzinil Kis, recalled in later interviews that it was just haphazard. A brigade would become available.

It would be assigned some part of the West Bank. Another brigade became available. It would go to some other part of the West Bank. And that's how the Jordanians were pushed back to the Jordan River. And that sudden flip of expectation of potentially horrific consequences of who knows how far the catastrophe could go into this astonishing success was. it was experienced as an emergence from a dark tunnel, a glimpse at what strength and safety look like.

The first Jerusalem Day meant different things to different people, but at its core some treated it more religiously, some thought of it more in strictly safety terms. But at its core, for most Jewish Israelis, it was a celebration of a sudden lifting of a great burden, a burden of fear. It was the discovery of a strong, strength that had not yet been sullied or made questionable by the use of that strength.

It was power that had saved and not yet had any moral problems attached to it. It was a shorthand, in other words, for this terrible, wonderful age, this good and this best of times and worst of times age in which Jews had found themselves. 1967 was not all that long after of 1945. This was a time of bottomless cruelty, unprecedented suffering, mass death, the destruction of civilizations, but also of a resurrection, of independence, of rebirth, beyond the wildest dreams of previous generations of Jews. Jerusalem Day was a shorthand for all of those things wrapped up together for a sense of redemption that even very secular Israelis could take part in and deeply felt and experienced.

The paratroopers who captured the old city's winding alleyways were moving through the old city without tank and artillery cover because they didn't want to damage the city's holy places. So they had to win their way through the demolished Jewish quarter, for example, which was destroyed by the Jordanians during their 19-year occupation of the city, when the Jordanians systematically demolished medieval synagogues, anything they could find that was Jewish. To this day, the Jewish quarter of the old city is beautiful,

more beautiful than all the other quarters. It has broad plazas. It has beautiful archaeological digs that are available, accessible to tourists. it's not a function of the Israelis treating it better, it's a function of it having been demolished by the Jordanians, and so the Israelis got to rebuild it. Every other part of the old city, the Jordanians didn't demolish, and so the old alleyways still remain.

And so the paratroopers, they make their way through this city right up to the wailing wall, and they bring the Jews home at last, after 19 years in which the Jordanians did not allow Jews to go to their holiest sights. Chaim Chaffer, the great poet, would go on to write, The wall has heard many prayers. This wall has seen many fortifications crumble.

This wall has felt the hands of grieving women and the notes pushed between its stones. This wall saw Rabbi Judah-Halevi collapse before it, the great poet of Muslim Spain. This wall has seen emperors arise, and be forgotten, but this wall has not yet seen paratroopers weeping. The paratroopers, First Brigade 55 of the Reservist Paratroopers, arrived at the wall, then many soldiers, many secular soldiers,

Ashkenazi Jews, Mizrahi Jews, they touched the stones of the wall, and they wept. And they wept for the success, but they wept for the relief and the return, and the sense that this world that had shattered for Jews, this cataclysm that Jews had gone through, had found its answer in the strength of Israelis. The paratroopers had captured the old city would be remembered. Books would be written about them. It was a defining moment.

It was a moment that to this day, Israelis, to some degree, in some ways still live in. It made sense to Jews, to anyone who's steeped in the Jewish tradition, to be living through a moment of both the best and the worst that Jewish history has to offer. The prophets of the Bible are unanimous in their belief in an ultimate redemption that comes only after great suffering and great tribulation. It's hard to imagine a more perfect rendering of that duality then those 22 years that separate Auschwitz

from the paratroopers at the wall the return to the heavy stones of this mother of Jewishness Jerusalem to the beating heart of Jewish history and geography but time as it does I moved on the memory of that pre-war fear

faded so the unifying recollection of that relief faded with it the successes of nineteen sixty seven didn't just liberate the jews from their enemies from the power and threat of their enemies they created new problems enormous problems that would come to define israeli politics and public debates for generations to come within israeli society the war sparked a new religious political movement urgent new questions about the use of power questions unresolved to this day the original unifying idea of relief and safety and return as a mechanism for that safety and relief. Shrank and fractured into these smaller sectoral commemorations. The religious Zionists do one thing, the secular do another, the ultra-Orthodox do a third thing.

Everybody from left to right, every different kind of Jew does a different kind of commemorations. Some of them more critical, more complex, others with radical aspirations. Jerusalem has always been a mirror. Each observer who comes to it finds in Jerusalem what they bring to Jerusalem, their God or gods, their anxieties, their vulnerabilities. Modern Israel was until very recently,

too powerful to remember vulnerability. It was too comfortably at home to remember the astonishing experience of return. And so Jerusalem Day lost some of its power, lost its capacity to unify. All of that should make Jerusalem Day more than a political platform that I dialogue's an activist trying to make of it. Jerusalem Day should be a reminder that real people live in Jerusalem, that the Jewish return to Jerusalem was a Jewish return to a special kind of safety. the Jerusalem Day was the end of a particular kind of campaign to destroy us. Maybe it then sparked other kinds of campaigns, but that one, the one with tank armies in the desert invading to kill us, was defeated.

Yudah Mikai, the greatest modern poet of Hebrew-speaking Jerusalem, my personal favorite Hebrew poet, rebelled against those who look at Jerusalem and only see abstractions and ideologies. He always insisted that Jerusalem was a human place, a place of pain, a place of passion, a place of the small redemptions of ordinary life. If Jerusalem makes you think of the numinous, of the great, of the grand, focus that sense of the grande, on to the ordinary things, onto the ordinary people of Jerusalem because ordinary lives

Yudah Mikhail taught us are grand in one of his most famous poems which he called tourists he addressed this criticism to the millions of curious foreigners and tourists who trek through the city every year

eager to find, eager to experience the sacred abstractions that the city offers, this sort of holy playground to look at its stones, to kind of look past its people with bored expressions as though they're signposts or passengers. Yewada Mikhail wrote, They visit us to offer condolences. They sit at Yad Vashem.

They look serious at the wailing wall. They laugh behind heavy curtains in hotel rooms. They have their pictures taken with our important dead at Rhehrushem. rachel's tomb and herzels grave and on ammunition hill they weep for the beauty of our courageous boys and lust for the toughness of our girls and hang their underwear to dry quickly in a cool blue bathtub once i sat on steps by a gate at david's tower i placed the two heavy baskets by my side a group of tourists was standing there around their guide and i became their point of reference you see that man with a basket a bit right of his head. There's an arch from the Roman period. Just a bit right of his head.

But he's moving. He's moving, I said to myself. Redemption will come, only if they are told, you see there the arch from the Roman period? It's not important. But next to it, a bit left and down, sits a man who bought fruit and vegetables for his family.

Jerusalem is made of its people. Maybe that's the end. answer. Maybe that's the way out of all the political traps. Jerusalem Day tells a vital story that was once the lived experience of more than half of the people who live in it, of a whole nation rescued from an attempt to destroy it. On the day the old city was taken by Israeli paratroopers from Jordanian hands, defense minister Mosheed Dayan, the man who would preserve Jordanian and Muslim control of the shrines on the Temple Mount. issued this call for unity this morning the israel defense forces liberated jerusalem we have united jerusalem the divided capital of israel we have returned to the holiest of our holy places never to part from them again to our arab neighbors we extend also at this hour and with added emphasis at this hour our hand in peace and to our christian and moslem fellow-citizens we solemnly promise full religious freedom and rights, we did not come to Jerusalem for the sake of other

people's holy places and not to interfere with the adherence of other faiths, but in order to safeguard its entirety and to live there together with others in unity. The Jews have returned to Jerusalem. They found their salvation from the cruelties and the vicissitudes of homelessness. Three generations later, Jerusalem Day should be about more than remembrance, more than the relief that nobody really remembers. It has to be an expression of love. Love not only for the abstract Jerusalem of our imaginations. I teach my kids the story of Jerusalem, ancient and modern.

But that's not the totality of Jerusalem. It isn't just the stones. It is the people who tread on those stones. There has to be a love on Jerusalem Day. For the people, the real people who surround us, it's a day in which we have to turn our gaze back to our own time and place, to our neighbors, to the real living city that has to find a way to thrive,

despite and amid this whirlpool of sacred abstractions that surround us. Jerusalem Day.