A Moment of Silence
Martin Brian & O’Keeffe, 1979

1965 (& after):

There were three of us in the Army Spokesman Film Unit: myself, as assistant cameraman and later cameraman, the Cuban bom civilian Joe, head of Unit, and Farid Sylwan, the driver. Joe, small, wiry, light haired, had started life as a newsreel assistant in pre-Castro Cuba. He had filmed Castro in the hills in the rebellion's early days, then, disillusioned with Castro's Communism, he joined the middle class exodus to Miami, thence to Israel, as any good Jew. Like many exiles, he was a sceptic, it was not patriotism but the lure of an interesting job that brought him to the Army Film Unit. Farid-tall, dark, twinkling eyes, gold tooth-was Tunisian born, from one of those large clannish families scattered all over Israeli development towns. His two aims in life so far were to screw as many women as possible and to evade the military police, the bane of all army drivers.
Above us the hierarchy ascended: Lieutenant-Colonel Avi Bar-Tal, head of Public Relations, big, surly, bulldog faced; Lieutenant-Colonel Yirmiyahu Zoef, head of Press Liaison, large and grey haired, desk bound since, as Intelligence Officer of the Northern Command, he failed to know of a minefield into which a raiding party to Syria had stumbled. Then there was Lieutenant-Colonel Daz, who had been blown up by a grenade in manoeuvers, but succeeded in making everyone assume his glass eye and scars were incurred in the Service of the Nation in the Sinai Campaign. Above him stretched the higher ups whom we seldom encountered-Colonel S., head of Security and Information, General Yariv, head of the Intelligence Corps.
We went forth, Joe, Farid and I, in an old battered civilian blue Wyllis station wagon, into the army world: Parades and manoeuvers, helicopter tours of the General Staff, receptions for visiting foreign Generals of note (such as Idi Amin Dada, then an Israeli protege). Along with the photographers and writers of the army magazines, we were members of the snob elite, Privates who could chat with Generals and overhear the gossip of Defence Ministers. It was, all told, the cushiest of cushy jobs. Until the first rumblings of border conflict shattered our complacent routine.

13 November 1966:
It looked like Armageddon. An endless line of military vehicles-Patton tanks, one after the other, their huge cannons punching into the sky; the rags which usually covered their muzzles had been removed. Command jeeps, full of officers laden with shoulder pips, mouthing into walkie-talkies. Armoured cars, tracks rattling on the asphalt road, steel helmeted soldiers packed in like sardines. Trucks by the score, some hauling artillery pieces behind them, others carrying unknown secrets covered by tarpaulins. More tanks, the smaller, compact French AMX's. The column stretched far into the horizon. As we passed, weaving in and out in the Wyllis, it truly appeared like the Day of Judgement.
`That's some screwing they're setting up,' Joe murmured. The raid was planned against Jordan. Constant infiltration by Fatah guerrillas had been capped three days before by a land-mine which killed four Israeli soldiers in a jeep. Little King Hussein, who ought to keep order on his borders, was to be shown the big stick.
The road led from Beersheva into the desert. It was the old Jerusalem to Beersheva highway, cut in two by the armistice lines of 1949 some six kilometers below the Arab village of Samua. The guerrillas were said to have come from this village, so Samua was the target of the armoured centipede crawling laboriously forward. As one of the soldiers remarked to us later: `It was like crushing a fly with a steam roller.'
The raid was our first taste of action, but we were ordered not to cross the border with the troops. Baby faced Yanke'le Miller, civilian photographer from the Prime Minister's office, was with us in the van, fretting at the orders and `all agog for battle.' He had visions of his scoops in a two page spread in `Life', but would settle perhaps for the front page of `Ma'ariv'. Joe, on the other hand, had had enough wars in the streets of Havana and was not impressed with this budding heroism. I was torn between desire for excitement and plain fear, so I sat there gazing sullenly at the passing machines.
The armoured column left the road somewhere beyond the first faded and bullet-pocked sign of `Frontier Ahead'. We pulled up by a little hill where several armoured trucks were drawn up on its flanks. From the back of each truck an enormous antenna protruded. A tight group of high ranking officers clustered round three large binocular telescopes set on thick tripods in the sand: Chief-of-Staff General Rabin, the Quiet Man; Chief-of-Operations General Ezer Weizman, the joker, tall, sunglassed, RAF moustache above thin lips; the Commander of the Paratroop Brigade 35, the legendary Colonel Raful (Rafael Eitan), small and wiry, a man permanently `agog for battle'; the Commanders of the Paratroop Corps, the Tank Corps, the Central Command. This was MAPAK-`Forward Operations Command.'
The telescopes pointed at the horizon. With the naked eye you could see nothing but sand dunes and desert scrub. The Paratroop officers left us, and already the first tanks could be seen moving out behind a hill to the left. The armoured trucks of Brigade 35 soon followed. Joe took position with the Arriflex camera and I trotted behind him with the camera battery. Yanke'le Miller had slunk off with his Nikkons and was nowhere to be seen. The Generals stood silent, looking ahead. The radio sets filled the air with a high monotonous crackle.
An hour passed. If this was a battle between two armies, then it was strangely unreal. The entire column had been swallowed up by the hills. We began to hear a distant leaden thump of cannon fire. One or two spurts of smoke appeared microscopically on the horizon. Voices were coming from the radio sets in the armoured cars behind us, but they too seemed unreal, distorted, as if coming from the moon. When we caught a brief stretch of more distinct words, they were virtually incomprehensible
`Centrepoint, this is Apple, I am north of the Scythe, I am north of the Scythe, there are hyenas over.'
The Generals nodded their heads and sprinted back to their telescopes, murmuring among themselves.
`Apple, this is Carrot, Apple, this is Carrot. I have storks. I have storks. Request five seven nine over.'
(Crackle, crackle) `Centrepoint, this is four delta eight. I have positioned grasshoppers at three nine seven but no word from Beetroot. Is Apple forty eight over?'
`Apple, this is Beetroot. I see carrier pigeons. I see carrier pigeons. Is seventy five operative, if not request twenty four for grasshopper over.'
An aide of the Chief-of-Staff strode up to where Joe and I were sitting on an ammunition case, eating the Forward Operations Command cheese sandwiches.
`You'd better move off down the hill,' he said, `We just received word that the whole Jordanian Air Force is in the air.' He turned and moved back, `We're all moving down,' he shouted over his shoulder.
`How far down?' we called out. `About one kilometer,'
We grabbed the cheese sandwiches and our equipment and scurried off down the hill. Joe carried the Arriflex. I had the battery and was connected to him by the battery cable as if by an umbilical cord. Thus ridiculously joined together we scampered on in the sand. Five minutes later we stopped and found ourselves alone in the middle of the desert. Some flaps and antennas of apparently deserted armoured cars peeped up over adjacent sand dunes.
`How many planes in the whole Jordanian Air Force?' I asked Joe.
`I don't know exactly,' he said. `I think they have about twelve Hawker Hunters.'
We stood there looking silly. None of the armoured cars had moved. The sky seemed empty. Eventually two, then three, then four dots appeared far off in the blue. A slight drone reached our ears. Joe raised the Arriflex into position, glued his eye to the eyepiece.
The dots didn't seem to move. `What do you see?' I asked dumbly. `I don't see anything,' he said. `Are they there?'
We stood there in readiness, the intrepid camera crew in the middle of nowhere. Then the dots faded away. Joe lowered the camera. We started plodding back up the hill to the Command post.
Thus we covered the Samua raid.
The tanks eventually meandered back, the troops haggard and sweaty, were subdued, their eyebrows caked with sand. Yanke'le Miller turned up, triumphant. He had played truant, joined the force and got himself his scoop. The photographs later developed chronicled the raid vividly: soldiers running into the village-stone-brick huts amid dirt roads and lanes; soldiers crouching behind a brick wall, one poised with rifle butt in front of a wooden door in a but wall, another standing warily at the side; two soldiers setting an explosive charge by a wall, a third unrolling a cable; a Communications Corporal speaking into his transmitter; O.C. Central Command General Gandhi posing astride an Arab's donkey; a cloud of smoke as one but goes up, two heads in netted steel helmets in foreground; another long shot of the village with more plumes of smoke and explosions.
The Tank Brigade and Paratroop Brigade had gone in, troops had burst into houses, evacuated the families therein. Then they had set explosives charges to forty houses and blown them up. This was to teach the people not to harbour guerrillas next time. The Operation had gone off smoothly until Jordanian army trucks began to appear off the periphery of the village. The tanks had then gone into action. One truck carrying about twenty Jordanian soldiers had suffered a direct hit and all the soldiers in it died. The others scattered and could not pass. A short running battle had been fought, but the enemy had no chance. It had been, as that soldier told us, like crushing a fly with a steam roller. `It wasn't very fair,' he added. Our side had sustained one fatal casualty, a Major shot in the head by a sniper as he peeked over the side of his armoured truck.
The Samua raid marked the beginning of a tense time along the borders. Fatah activity increased. They laid mines in pathways, blew up water installations, fired bazooka shells at settlements. We never thought of the motivation for such acts. Arab hostility seemed a natural force, like a rainstorm or a heatwave. Some countries have earthquakes. We had the Fatah. The hottest activity took place in the North, mainly along the Syrian border which became the film unit's new beat. At least once a week we found ourselves zooming up in the Wyllis to the line of the Jordan River and the Kinneret (Lake Tiberias). By then I had graduated from assistant to cameraman, sometimes going up alone with the driver Farid, without Joe. On those excursions I became an expert on filming broken window panes, shattered furniture, holes of all sorts in walls and dead cows in the cowshed. Apart from the guerrilla attacks, regular Syrian forces were increasingly involved and we became familiar with the unbroken mountain line then known as the Syrian Heights, which overlooked the row of settlements running down the Jordan River north of the lake. Thousands of Syrian troops were ensconsed up there within a rather lunatic super-Maginot line of bunkers and concrete pillboxes, protected by an estimated five million mines scattered all over the Heights.
The Israeli areas adjacent to the border, just below the Heights, were supposed to be de-militarised zones. This was a legacy of the musical chairs armistice following the 1948 war, when the border was fixed wherever the fighting happened to stop, with minor agreed adjustments such as here. Army personnel who entered this de-militarised zone on our side (illegally) had to masquerade as kibbutzniks, donning white shirts and bermuda shorts and pretending to check the alfalfa. The land on the border was parcelled out to various kibbutz and moshav settlements which would send out armoured tractors to cultivate plots right up to the armistice line. These plots were in traditional dispute between Syria and Israel. Their cultivation was considered by Syria a breach of the border pacts. So they would often shell the tractors, and the supposedly non-existent Israeli forces in the de-militarised zone would fire back at the hills. The level of this response would determine the seriousness of the subsequent incident, as guns and cannons fired at each other across the line for periods ranging from ten minutes to 36 hours. The most frequent incidents occurred over the two or three plots which formed a finger thrusting out of the general border line towards Syria. One of these was known as `The Nose of de Gaulle'.
Hostilities revolved therefore round peripheral areas and not over the main cultivated fields of the border settlements. There were even attempts to come to agreements. During the winter of 1966-67 a series of meetings were held by the hitherto defunct Israel-Syria Mixed Armistice Commission, under U.N. supervision. At that time the film unit's new 6oo and looomm lenses came into use as we recorded from about half a kilometer away a convoy of Volkswagens crammed full of fat bemedalled Syrian Colonels coming down from the mysterious Heights to meet with Israeli officers in a tent near the Kfar Hanassi airfield. Each side made ritual speeches at the other from prepared slips of paper and then the Syrian Colonels went home. Later Israeli officers were motored up into the Heights to meet the Syrians on their own territory, but nothing came of that meeting either.
Around March 1967 a serious escalation began on the Syrian front. Aircraft entered the game. One serious incident involved the shooting down of a Syrian Mig in to the Kinneret in a dogfight. The plane had fallen into the lake within Israeli territory, but only a few hundred yards from the east bank, controlled by the Syrians where the border ran ten meters from the east bank of the lake.
The salvaging of a Mig would be a boon to our side, not to mention our American backers. Suddenly the eastern side of the lake became crowded with little yachts and rubber dinghies filled with suntanned and muscular young men in bathing costume, apparently out to exploit the start of the tourist season. Much confusion was caused by the mingling in this way of Israeli Commandos, U.N. Observers and various foreign spies all thrashing about in the water.
In the cities the newspapers were curdling our blood with editorials of impending doom and disaster. Joe and I were sent up to cover the crisis. But when we arrived at the Tiberias H.Q. of the Israeli side of the Mixed Armistice Commission and demanded to be rushed to the front, Lieutenant-Colonel Gat, the indolent officer in charge, said `What front?' and turned over in his deckchair to resume his siesta. Crises in the North were ten a penny. We could not expect him to be impressed. Eventually we boated out to the scene of the crime and filmed lots of people splashing about in the lake. Through binoculars one could see in the thicket beyond the east bank the little eyes of Syrian soldiers impassively watching the proceedings.
The Commandos finally pulled out the wreckage of the Mig with the aid of frogmen and it stood for some time in some kibbutz as a symbol of something or other.
There was no indication yet that any of this was more than the normal sporadic burst of border conflict. We did not expect anything really serious, like a war. We speculated, as every new intake of soldiers had before us, that our period in uniform would see The Big One, but this was more soldiers' gossip than anyihing else.
The northern front continued to simmer, however, and in May '67 it came to the boil. Machine guns spat at each other across the border. Cannons boomed daily. Israeli and Syrian warplanes clashed again and again. Murmurs were heard in the corridors of Beit Sokolov that matters were coming to a head, that the dominating mountain heights would sooner or later have to be silenced.
On May 15 the annual Independence Day Parade was held Jerusalem. Troops marched past to the beat of patriotic brass and drums. Ministers and Generals saluted. The populace watched and cheered.
On the same day President Nasser of Egypt began sending troops and tanks into the Sinai desert, up against the Negev border. On May 22nd he announced the closing of the Southern straits of Tiran to Israel shipping, and ordered the United Nations units stationed on Israeli-Egyptian borders to leave forthwith.
`The Big One' was going to catch up with us after all.

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