It was June of 1967, a few hours before the outbreak of the Six-Day War, when my father sent us to Jericho away from the battlefront to stay with my grandmother. Back then, we did not have a television, and I remember huddling in the “radio room,” as my grandmother called it; I would later refer to it as the “war room.”
This was where we’d spend most of our time during the war, away from the broken glass caused by Israeli fighter-jets racing through the sound barrier listening to the Egyptian broadcast “Sawt El Arab” or “Voice of the Arabs.”
“Report number 42,” the announcer would say, and through the crackling sound of my grandmother’s ancient shortwave radio, we would all strain to hear the war updates.
“The Egyptian forces have repelled the Zionist army… the Jordanian army advanced to Jabel el Mukaber.”
I believe that it was on the second or third day of the Six Day War, as we were listening to these victorious reports, that we felt a rumbling throughout the
