Fifty years after the 1967 Six-Day War, a photograph of three awestruck Israeli paratroopers at the freshly captured Western Wall remains a potent symbol of Israel’s lightning conquest of east Jerusalem.
Zion Karasenti, Yitzhak Yifat and Haim Oshri, all 22 in 1967, were captured on film by a news photographer as they stared at the ancient stones, the holiest site where Jews are allowed to pray.
Now retired, they are often asked to restage the iconic shot but Karasenti says that each time old emotions are rekindled.
“I’ve come here 20 times a year for 50 years — do the math — and I still have shivers when I remember that moment,” he told AFP.
The picture, by Israeli photographer David Rubinger, was published around the world and adopted at home as encapsulating the euphoria of the Jewish state’s victory over the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan.
When the three soldiers arrived with their comrades at the shrine, in the walled Old City of Jerusalem, they had been battling Jordanian soldiers for two days, Karasenti recalled.
“We had been fighting for 48 hours without sleeping or eating and almost without drinking,” he said.
They did not at first realise they had arrived at the site, the remains of the retaining walls of biblical King Herod’s Jewish temple, destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD.
Jews had been denied access to the shrine, adjacent to Islamic holy sites at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound, since Jordan seized east Jerusalem in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
“We continued to fight until we reached the Al-Aqsa mosque… where we waited for our commander,” Karasenti said.
When the officer arrived, he told them to fight on and they descended an iron staircase to find themselves next to the Jewish shrine which they had never before seen.
– ‘While we were crying’ –
“It’s impossible to describe what we felt when we realised we were at the foot of the wall,” Karasenti said.
“It was at that moment that David Rubinger took a picture while we were crying.”
Rubinger, who died in March aged 92, said in a 2006 interview with the London Jewish Chronicle that he followed the army’s advance into a narrow passageway in front of the wall.
“I was lying down to get more of the wall in,” he said. “These three soldiers walked by in awe. I just took a couple of frames of them, never thinking it was a great picture.”
About 20 minutes later the army’s chief rabbi arrived, carried on soldiers’ shoulders and bringing with him a Torah scroll and a shofar — a ram’s horn blown in Jewish ritual to symbolise freedom.
Rubinger told the Jewish Chronicle he had thought that the shot of the well-known rabbi among the troops at the wall was the image of the day.
“I was crying when I took it. I came back home, developed the film and showed the pictures to my wife, Annie. I said, ‘Look at this fantastic picture of Rabbi Goren.’ She said, ‘Yes, but the one with the three soldiers is better,'” he recalled.
“It turned out Annie was right.”
Rubinger, who had been covering Israeli news since the state was founded in 1948, had an agreement with the military that granted him access to the battle front. In exchange he gave them a negative of the paratroopers’ photo.
The army then started distributing low-cost prints through the Israeli government press office, he said in the interview.
“People all over the world pirated it,” he said. “I was very upset but, in retrospect, I have to be grateful to everybody who stole the picture. That’s what made it famous.”
In the wake of the success of that photo and others, Rubinger won a reputation as Israel’s national photographer.
His other work has included the return home of Israeli commandos from the 1976 Entebbe hostage rescue mission and studies of prime ministers David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir in moments of relaxation.
He is the only one to have a permanent exhibition in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.
Israel has continued to occupy east Jerusalem since the 1967 war and subsequently annexed the territory, although the move was not recognised by the international community.
Israel sees all of Jerusalem as its united capital, while the Palestinians see the eastern sector, including the Old City where the Western Wall is located, as the capital of their future state.
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