The defin­i­tive account of Israel’s cap­ture of Jerusalem’s Old City in the Six Day War. The author cov­ered the bat­tle as a reporter and sub­se­quent­ly inter­viewed 300 par­tic­i­pants. This eBook is a revised and expand­ed ver­sion of a hard­cov­er edi­tion orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished by the Jew­ish Pub­li­ca­tion Soci­ety. With the bulk of its army com­mit­ted to the Egypt­ian front, Israel ini­tial­ly sought to avoid bat­tle with Jor­dan. While autho­riz­ing a lim­it­ed response to Jor­dan­ian shelling, most min­is­ters opposed tak­ing the Old City in the belief that the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty would not tol­er­ate Jerusalem’s Chris­t­ian and Moslem holy places com­ing under Jew­ish rule. Only when the tide of bat­tle car­ried Israeli forces to the walls of the ancient city did the Cab­i­net come to view its cap­ture as an his­tor­i­cal dic­tate that a Jew­ish state could not avoid embrac­ing. The unplanned con­quest was a major event in Jew­ish his­to­ry and the his­to­ry of the mod­ern Mid­dle East.

“Extra­or­di­nar­i­ly dra­mat­ic” — Prof. Edward Luttwak.
​“Prose as graph­ic as it is lucid. A clas­sic of its genre” — Prof. Howard Sachar.