The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(33)

And of course everyone was in the army, even the professors, and so it was impossible even for the most rarefied intellectual to insulate himself from the risks facing the entire society. All were exposed equally to the whims of dictators. That truth was hammered home to Barbara six months after she arrived, on May 22, 1967, when Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser announced that he was closing the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships. Most Israeli trade passed through the straits, and the announcement was taken as an act of war. “Amos came home one day and said, The army is going to come for me.” He rooted around and found a trunk that held his old paratrooper’s uniform. It still fit him. At ten o’clock that night the army came for him.

It had been five years since Amos last jumped from an airplane; he was given an infantry unit to command. The entire country prepared for war—and at the same time tried to judge what kind of war it would be. In Jerusalem, those who remembered the war of independence feared another siege and emptied the stores of canned goods. People found it hard to assign probabilities to the potential outcomes: A war with Egypt alone would probably be ugly but survivable; a war with the combined Arab states might mean total annihilation. The Israeli government arranged quietly for the public parks to be consecrated, to allow them to be used as mass graves. The entire country mobilized. Private cars took over the bus routes—as all the buses had been taken by the army. Schoolchildren delivered the milk and the mail. Israeli Arabs, who weren’t allowed to serve in the army, volunteered for the jobs left by Jewish conscripts. All the while an apocalyptic wind blew in from the desert. The sensation was like nothing Barbara had ever experienced. No matter how much you drank you felt thirsty; no matter how wet the laundry, it was dry inside of thirty minutes. It was 95 degrees, but standing in the desert gale you hardly noticed it was hot. She went to a kibbutz on the border just outside Jerusalem to help dig trenches. The man in his forties in charge of the volunteers had lost his leg in the war of independence and wore a prosthetic. He was a poet. He hobbled about, and worked on a poem.

Before the fighting began, Amos came home twice. Barbara was struck by how casually her new husband tossed his Uzi on the bed before taking a shower. No big deal! The country was in a state of panic, but Amos seemed unconcerned. “He told me, ‘There is no reason to worry. It will depend upon airpower, and we have it. Our Air Force will destroy their planes.’” On the morning of June 5, with Egypt’s army massed along the Israeli border, the Israeli Air Force launched a surprise attack. In a few hours Israeli pilots destroyed four hundred or so planes—virtually the entire Egyptian Air Force. Then the Israeli army rolled into the Sinai. By June 7 Israel was at war on three fronts against the armies of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. Barbara went to a bomb shelter in Jerusalem and passed the time sewing sandbags.

It was later reported that, before the war, President Nasser had spoken with Ahmad Shukairy, the founder of the recently formed Palestine Liberation Organization. Nasser had proposed that Jews who survived the war be returned to their home countries; Shukairy had replied that there was no need to worry about it, as there wouldn’t be any Jewish survivors. The war started on a Monday. The following Saturday the radio announced that it was over. Israel had won such a one-sided victory that it felt to many Jews less like a modern-day war than a miracle from the Bible. The country was suddenly more than twice as big as it had been a few days earlier, and controlled the Old City of Jerusalem, along with all the holy places. Just a week before, it had been the size of New Jersey; now it was bigger than Texas, with far more defensible borders. The radio stopped airing battle reports and played joyous Hebrew songs about Jerusalem. Here was another way Israel was different from the United States: Its wars were short, and someone always won.

On Thursday Barbara got a message from a soldier in Amos’s unit; he let her know that Amos was alive. On Friday Amos drove up to their desert-beige apartment building in an army jeep and told her to hop in. Together they drove around the newly conquered West Bank. Along the way were strange and wonderful sights: warm reunions in the Old City of Jerusalem between Arab and Jewish shopkeepers, separated since 1948. A line of Arab men walking arm in arm up Ruppin Boulevard, in the Jewish Quarter, and pausing at the stoplights to clap . . . for the stoplights. The West Bank they found littered with burned-out Jordanian tanks and jeeps and empty tuna fish cans left by Israelis who had already come to picnic. They ended up in East Jerusalem, at the half-built summer palace of Jordan’s King Hussein, where Amos was now stationed, along with a couple of hundred other Israeli soldiers. “That villa was really a shock,” Barbara wrote to her family in Michigan that night, “combining the worst of Arabic taste with the worst of Miami Beach.”

Later came the funerals. “This morning the figures were published in the newspaper—679 dead, 2563 wounded,” Barbara wrote in a letter home. “Though the numbers are small, so is the country, so everyone can count the dead among his friends.” Amos had lost one of his men in an attack that he had led on a monastery on top of a hill in Bethlehem. Elsewhere on the battlefield, one of his best friends from childhood had been killed by a sniper, and several Hebrew University professors had been killed or wounded. “I grew up in the Vietnam War and I hadn’t known anyone who had gone to Vietnam, much less died there,” said Barbara. “I knew four people who were killed in the Six-Day War—and I’d only been there six months.”