ROLE MODEL
Flora Lewis: Reporter
The date was June 4, 1967, the eve of the Six Day War between between Israel and her Arab neighbors. It took no special genius to know that war was looming. Egypt’s Nasser had closed the vital straits of Tiran, choking off Israel’s access to the Red Sea, and ordered United Nations observers out of the Gaza Strip. The stage was set for the war that would re-draw the map of the Middle East. But none of us stationed in the area on that hot, dry Sunday knew that it would begin the next morning.
Flora Lewis, who was writing a syndicated column then for Newsday, was on a reporting trip in Amman, Jordan. Instinctively, she knew that Israel was going to be the center of action. The only way to get from Amman to Jerusalem in those days was a hazardous road trip down a winding road to the Allenby Bridge, across the River Jordan, and up the treeless Judean Hills to the Mandelbaum gate, which straddled the no-man’s-land between the Jordanian eastern part of the city and the Israeli western portion. Technically, the two nations had been in a state of war since 1948.
The gate — a ramshackle affair of corrugated tin checkpoints separated on each side by a wide, cobblestone expanse of street — was used by U.N. personnel and diplomats. They would drive through one checkpoint, get out and change their license plates, and continue through the other. No one else was permitted to drive through, but journalists and others with valid visas were allowed to make the trip one-way, either way, under their own steam.
I had recently arrived in Jerusalem as a correspondent for The New York Times. Through Mayor Teddy Kollek’s office, I got word that Flora was trying to transit the gate Sunday evening, shortly before its scheduled 8 p.m. closing. I decided to go meet her.
Flora had set out alone by taxi from Amman and, with just minutes to go before the gate would close for the night, got her papers cleared at the Jordanian checkpoint. The taxi could go no further, so Flora picked up her two heavy bags and set off across the exposed no-man’s land.
Pulling up in my car on the Israeli side, I could see this determined figure trudging across the pavement. No one else was in sight, except the heavily armed guards on each side, all of whom were on special alert because of the tension between the two countries. All of us were watching Flora. Halfway across the open space, she set her bags down, turned around and picked them up again, the weight re-distributed on fresh arms.
Finally, Flora stepped inside the Israeli checkpoint, looked at the startled guard, and said “Shalom, Shalom.”
After Flora was processed, the Mandelbaum gate, the symbol of divided Jerusalem, shut down for the night. It never reopened.
At dawn the next day, Israel launched a preemptive strike against Egypt and by mid-morning, King Hussein of Jordan made his fateful decision to join the fight. In less than forty-eight hours, Israeli forces swept through the Mandelbaum gate and across the no-man’s land into eastern Jerusalem. They had control of the city by June 7. One of their first acts to commemorate the unification of the city was to bring up bulldozers and obliterate the Mandelbaum gate. Nothing of it remains in place, although a plaque and a small museum nearby recalls the period when the city was divided. Flora Lewis’s status as the last person ever to cross through the gate was ensured.
Great reporters have an instinct for the news, a sixth sense that often puts them in the right place at the right time. Flora, who died June 2 at the age of seventy-nine, was one of them.
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