JERUSALEM DAY

A Letter to the World from a reporter in Jerusalem, June 1967

by Eliezer Ben Yisrael, also known as Eliezer Whartman, the Westinghouse
Radio correspondent in Israel in 1967 – the first foreign correspondent to report
Israel’s capture of the Temple Mount during the 1967 war, when he was stationed
on the roof of the Histadrut building on Strauss Street in Jerusalem, peering
through his binoculars and reporting the greatest story of his long journalist
career. Whartman recently suffered a stroke and now resides in a nursing home a
few blocks from where he made that report.

DSB

I am not a creature from another planet, as you seem to believe. I am a
Jerusalemite – like yourselves, a man of flesh and blood. I am a citizen of my
city, an integral part of my people.

I have a few things to get off my chest. Because I am not a diplomat, I do
not have to mince words. I do not have to please you, or even persuade you. I owe
you nothing. You did not build this city; you did not live in it; you did not
defend it when they came to destroy it. And we will be damned if we will let you
take it away.

There was a Jerusalem before there was a New York. When Berlin, Moscow,
London, and Paris were miasmal forest and swamp, there was a thriving Jewish
community here. It gave something to the world which you nations have rejected
ever since you established yourselves-a humane moral code.

Here the prophets walked, their words flashing like forked lightning. Here a
people who wanted nothing more than to be left alone, fought off waves of heathen
would-be conquerors, bled and died on the battlements, hurled themselves into the
flames of their burning Temple rather than surrender, and when finally
overwhelmed by sheer numbers and led away into captivity, swore that before they
forgot Jerusalem, they would see their tongues cleave to their palates, their
right arms wither.

For two pain-filled millennia, while we were your unwelcome guests, we prayed
daily to return to this city. Three times a day we petitioned the Almighty:
Gather us from the four corners of the world, bring us upright to our land;
return in mercy to Jerusalem, Thy city, and dwell in it as Thou promised.” On
every Yom Kippur and Passover, we fervently voiced the hope that next year would
find us in Jerusalem.

Your inquisitions, pogroms, expulsions, the ghettos into which you jammed us,
your forced baptisms, your quota systems, your genteel anti-Semitism, and the
final unspeakable horror, the holocaust (and worse, your terrifying disinterest
in it)- all these have not broken us. They may have sapped what little moral
strength you still possessed, but they forged us into steel. Do you think that
you can break us now after all we have been through? Do you really believe that
after Dachau and Auschwitz we are frightened by your threats of blockades and
sanctions? We have been to Hell and back- a Hell of your making. What more could
you possibly have in your arsenal that could scare us? I have watched this city
bombarded twice by nations calling themselves civilized. In 1948, while you
looked on apathetically, I saw women and children blown to smithereens, after we
agreed to your request to inter- nationalize the city. It was a deadly
combination that did the job. British officers, Arab gunners, and American made
cannons. And then the savage sacking of the Old City the willful slaughter, the
wanton destruction of every synagogue and religious school; the desecration of
Jewish cemeteries; the sale by a ghoulish government of tombstones for building
materials, for poultry runs, army camps- even latrines. And you never said a
word.

You never breathed the slightest protest when the Jordanians shut off the
holiest of our places, the Western Wall, in violation of the pledges they had
made after the war- a war they waged, incidentally, against the decision of the
UN. Not a murmur came from you whenever the legionnaires in their spiked helmets
casually opened fire upon our citizens from behind the walls.

Your hearts bled when Berlin came under siege. You rushed your airlift “to
save the gallant Berliners”. But you did not send one ounce of food when Jews
starved in besieged Jerusalem. You thundered against the wall which the East
Germans ran through the middle of the German capital- but not one peep out of you
about that other wall, the one that tore through the heart of Jerusalem.

And when that same thing happened 20 years later, and the Arabs unleashed a
savage, unprovoked bombardment of the Holy City again, did any of you do
anything? The only time you came to life was when the city was at last reunited.
Then you wrung your hands and spoke loftily of “justice” and need for the
“Christian” quality of turning the other cheek.

The truth is-and you know it deep inside your gut- you would prefer the city
to be destroyed rather than have it governed by Jews. No matter how
diplomatically you phrase it, the age old prejudices seep out of every word.

If our return to the city has tied your theology in knots, perhaps you had
better reexamine your catechisms. After what we have been through, we are not
passively going to accommodate ourselves to the twisted idea that we are to
suffer eternal homelessness until we accept your savior.

For the first time since the year 70 there is now complete religious freedom
for all in Jerusalem. For the first time since the Romans put a torch to the
Temple everyone has equal rights. (You prefer to have some more equal than
others.) We loathe the sword – but it was you who forced us to take it up. We
crave peace – but we are not going back to the peace of 1948 as you would like us
to.

We are home. It has a lovely sound for a nation you have willed to wander
over the face of the globe. We are not leaving. We are redeeming the pledge made
by our forefathers: Jerusalem is being rebuilt. “Next year” and the year after,
and after, and after, until the end of time- “in Jerusalem!”