Even more astonishing was the Israeli decision, at the moment of victory, to concede sovereignty over the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site.

In the weeks leading up to war, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser had expelled UN peacekeeping forces from Sinai, initiated a massive troop buildup on the border with Israel, promised the imminent destruction of Israel and blockaded the Straits of Tiran, Israel’s southern shipping route. Finally, on June 5, Israeli planes launched a preemptive strike, destroying most of the Egyptian air force on the ground. That same morning, Jordan’s King Hussein, who had signed a military pact with Egypt, launched a bombardment against Jewish neighborhoods in West Jerusalem. Israel’s Prime Minister Levi Eshkol sent a message to Hussein: Cease firing and we won’t attack. Hussein, convinced by Nasser that victorious Egyptian forces were on their way to Tel Aviv, ignored the appeal.

Paratrooper Brigade 55 had been formed a year before. Though some of its men were veterans of Israel’s commando raids against terrorist bases in the 1950s, most were young reservists in their 20s without combat experience. Most damaging of all, Brigade 55 had prepared for the wrong war. In the weeks leading up to Israel’s preemptive strike in Sinai, Achmon and his team had prepared intelligence reports for the conquest of El Arish, a heavily fortified town on the Sinai coast. “I knew every Egyptian position there,” Achmon told me. “And I knew next to nothing about Jerusalem.”

But then, as Jordanian artillery hit hundreds of Israeli apartments in West Jerusalem, the paratroopers were dispatched to Jerusalem and given 12 hours to prepare for the attack. The mission was, at least initially, confined to stopping Jordanian shelling of Jewish neighborhoods and rescuing a besieged Israeli unit stationed on Mount Scopus, the sole Israeli enclave in East Jerusalem. The limited operation excluded the Old City and its sacred sites.

“Our assignment was impossible,” Achmon said. “You can’t plan an urban battle in 12 hours. You can’t attack fortified positions without adequate intelligence. But we were given the mission and we didn’t for a moment doubt that we would fulfill it. We knew there would be a very high price, but the mission was essential.”

At 2 a.m. on June 6, the paratroopers, commanded by Colonel Motta Gur, crossed no-man’s-land. One of Brigade 55’s three battalions attacked the Jordanian position known as Ammunition Hill, and fought one of the bloodiest battles of the war, hand-to-hand combat in trenches. Another battalion headed toward the Rockefeller Museum, a massive compound built by the Rockefeller family in the 1930s to house archeological artifacts. The Rockefeller was adjacent to the walled Old City and would be the staging point for attack if the government gave the order. But lacking street maps, some units got lost. One officer stopped an elderly Palestinian man on the street and asked him: Which way to the Rockefeller? Another officer missed the turn toward the Rockefeller and led his men directly into a line of Jordanian fortifications. The streets filled with the dead and wounded.