“Annexation has an ugly sound, owing to an unhappy past. The term describes, among other tragedies, Saddam Hussein’s attempt, in 1990, to swallow Kuwait whole, as the nineteenth province of Iraq; Indonesia’s invasion, in 1975, of East Timor; Morocco’s absorption, the same year, of Western Sahara; and Israel’s declaration after the 1967 war, of East Jerusalem as part of a united capital. The German word for it is Anschluss.”

* * *

That’s how the New Yorker magazine begins its otherwise anodyne comment in respect of Russia’s seizure of the Crimea. It brought a phone call from one of our readers, asking whether we’d seen it. A child of Holocaust survivors and a person who has devoted his life to the cause of Zion, he was pained by the use of the term that denotes the Nazi conquest of Austria to describe Israel’s liberation of its capital.

His call sent us to fetch a copy of the July 1, 1967, number of the New Yorker to see what the magazine had said at the time. It turns out to have featured a crackerjack cable from none other than Flora Lewis. She related how shortly before Israeli soldiers had been told to seal the Holy Places to, as Lewis wrote, “insure their safety,” she met a Jew “who, entering the Old City for the first time, had just visited the Wailing Wall.”

“Though he was not pious, he was moved to perform the old custom of writing the name of his son on a slip of paper to push between the crevices of the ancient stones, because, he told me, ‘It was what my father wished to do for me, and my grandfather for him, and all the generations of my ancestors for two thousand years, and I am the one who has come.’” She wrote that at the Dome of the Rock, “he took off his shoes, saying, ‘This, too, is a Holy Place, to be respected in its own way.’”

It was a long dispatch, hard to do justice in the space of an editorial. It had its moments of myopia, such as when it called the future Nobel laureate in peace, Menachem Begin, a “shrill nationalist”; Lewis reassured her readers that he had no specific authority as minister without portfolio in the national unity government that had come together in the war. But she seemed to be everywhere, and to have gained a ringside seat as the war engulfed the capital.

That was when Lewis ran into the Chicago Tribune’s famed London bureau chief, Arthur Veysey, who’d reached Jerusalem from Jordan. He had, being a Tribune man, staked out what Lewis characterized as the “royal box for the night battle,” namely a “large balcony, complete with lounge chairs, on the fourth floor of the King David Hotel, facing the Old City wall.” From there she watched at least part of the battle unfold.

Her dispatch was a classic of foreign corresponding, full of grit and glory and realism without rancor. She seems to have been everywhere, but if the Israelis were behaving like Nazis, she missed that angle. As did the New York Times, whose James Feron sent in a detailed sense of the mood of the city two days after the Knesset, on June 27, adopted a law “enabling Israel to absorb the Old City.” The deed was done on the 28th, and on the 29th Feron described the result.

The Times ran it out on page one, under the headline “Arabs and Israelis Mingle Gaily in United Jerusalem.” A subhed read: “Thousands of Residents Move Between Sectors as 19-Year Barriers Go Down — Streets Jammed, Trade Active.” In the lede paragraph, Feron used the words “freely and joyously” to describe the way “thousands of Arabs and Israelis” came together as the barriers disappeared.

There is no doubt that things turned contentious as the Western governments, including, among others, President Johnson’s administration, scrambled to put a damper on this joyful mingling and begin the long rewrite that led to the New Yorker using jargon for the Nazi annexation of Austria to describe what in all the Jewish millennia was one of the moments most filled with hope.