A Different Sort of Pilgrimage

Today I took a trip up to Ammunition Hill. It was a long trek, physically and emotionally.

I was looking for military museums to go see, because I really don't think you can experience this land while ignoring the spectres of conflict that saturate the land.

With some help from the @israelconsulate on twitter, I figured out that Ammunition Hill isn't just, well, a hill that has something to do with materiel, but just such a military museum. Specifically, it focuses on the 6 Day War in June, 1967.

During that war, Ammunition Hill was a Jordanian emplacement, heavily fortified. It housed a great deal of fuel and ammunition for use by the Jordanian forces (who, at the start of the war, held that area of Jerusalem).

I'm fairly certain, but not positive, that this is the first time I've been to or seen a musem/memorial that is built on and in the battlefield it's commemorating. I've been to the fields at Lexington and Concord, where the American Revolution started, but there wasn't much actually-there other than the fields themselves, and that battle was so long ago the memory isn't as fresh as it was here.

After paying admission, I walked through an open lobby. On the other side of it was the hill itself, outside. There were pine trees and olive trees growing (more on that later). There were also the trenches from the battle (I don't know if they were as original or restored- I'd assume the latter), and a big old Sherman M4 tank, of the kind that the Israeli forces used in the battle, parked on the hillside (more on that later too). Further up the hill were several bunkers, and a large bunker-esque building that housed the museum. It was a very striking scene.

Before writing anything more, let me disclaim myself: I'm not any sort of expert on Middle East conflicts, nor on anything relating to Israeli military engagements. What I'm writing is entirely based on what little background knowledge I have, and what the exhibits in the museum said. If I get anything glaringly wrong, please pipe up and let me know.

The Conflict:
The 1967 Six Day War (wikipedia article) was fought between Israel on one side, and Egypt, Jordan, and Syria on the other (roughly in that order of involvement/strength, I think). Before this war, administration of the city of Jerusalem, including parts of the Old City, was split between Israel and Jordan. Significantly, the Israeli controlled section of Jerusalem was a peninsular border, with Jordanian controlled territory on the north and south sides. Geopolitically, this made Israel nervous for obvious reasons. The start of the war itself didn't have anything, officially, to do with Syria or Jordan, although tensions had been high between both of those states and Israel for a few years before 1967 (summary: water rights and state-sponsored terrorism, see wiki article for more). Egypt kicked all the UN PKFs out of the Sinai area, where they'd been since 1957 (because of the Suez Canal crisis). Egypt then amassed fighters and forces on the Egypt-Israel border, and, seeing the threat of immediate attack, Israel struck first.There's a whole Just War Theory debate on pre-emptive attacks, of which that part of the Six Day War is a textbook example. I'll not get into that here, for the sake of brevity.

I'm going through the wikipedia article (what, are there more reputable sources I should consult?) as I write this, and it's interesting to see what was and wasn't mentioned in the museum at Ammunition Hill.
For example, there was a short film in part of the museum. It discussed the battles in and around the Jerusalem area, primarily. The way the film put it, Jordanian tanks just started shelling the Israeli part of Jerusalem for funsies. The way wikipedia puts it, the IDF had staged an attack on a West Bank town called Es Samu, in retaliation for a landmine-incident (a mine thought to have been placed by Jordanian militants (non-state) killed a number of IDF troops on a border-patrol) which, due to a diplomatic screwup, hadn't been officially apologized for (I know it sounds weird, but, in matters of national pride, an official apology can go a long way).
I shan't bore you all with the (incredibly interesting) details of what else may or may not have differed. Long story short: the general tone was akin to that of an American monument about the Revolutionary War, especially the more memorial-style plaques in the 'battlefield' area of Ammunition Hill. The big differences were that there was a more religious tone to the battles for Jerusalem, and, obviously, a much more recent-memory feel to all of it.

It was very strange, almost surreal, to walk around the battlefield and see the trenches, the bunkers still riddled with bullet craters. I went inside one of them, and looked around others. On another corner of the hill, there were the rusted remains of a recoilless gun.

Inside the museum (which I sort of went through backwards, which made things occasionally surreal), there were a great deal of exhibits, ranging from a memorial-area with a large wall of names in Hebrew and an eternal flame, to biographies and letters of some of the fallen soldiers (some very personal, and all strikingly, painfully human), to an exhibit on some of the armaments used, to a guestbook where people could sign their names or, more often than not, leave a note of thanks or blessing.

I took a ton of pictures, which I'll post with notes when I take them off the camera and put them up on Flickr.

Two interesting bits of trivia that I thought were interesting in a conflict-studies sort of way:
1 - Although the IDF brought a few tanks to the battle, they weren't particularly useful in a kinetic sense. They couldn't navigate the difficult terrain well, nor could they lower their barrels sufficiently to fire on the Jordanian forces on the hill. They were, however, gigantic tanks, and served to intimidate the Jordanian forces quite a bit. The way the plaque put it, this was an important factor. I hadn't thought about tanks as a psych-warfare weapon in that sense.

2: One of the difficulties with the partitioning of Jerusalem were large 'No-Man's Land' areas between the Israeli and Jordanian sides of the city. These had been drawn up on a 1:20,000 scale map during the initial agreement, with a wax pencil.
The wax pencil left marks 2-3mm wide, which, at that scale, became something like 40-60 meters on the ground. To make matters worse, the wax marks expanded over time, because, well, it's hot in the Middle East and wax melts.
So No-Man's Land grew slightly over time.
Because the areas were under no country's control, nobody was allowed into these areas. 40-60 meters, along an entire border, is a LOT of space. Just one more tension-point leading up to the conflict.