Headlines were quickly out of date in Los Angeles

“FIGHT FOR Victory, Pray for Victory” was the fervent banner headline I splashed across the front page of Heritage, a small Jewish weekly in Los Angeles.

It was Monday, June 5, 1967 and the time was 8pm in the Middle East, but only 10am in LA. As I was driving to the paper’s printing plant, the car radio blasted news of Arab boasts that their forces were about to take Tel Aviv and throw the Zionists into the sea.

Normally, I would have been at my regular work as a science writer at UCLA, but Herb Brin, editor, circulation manager, advertising director and everything else at Heritage, was on an overseas trip and had asked me to read the page proofs of the week’s edition, his regular chore on Monday mornings.

I threw out whatever Bar Mitzvah extravaganza was gracing the front page and wrote about the catastrophe again facing the Jewish people, a scant 22 years after the end of the Holocaust.

The paper was delivered to its readers on Friday, June 9. By that time, of course, the world knew that Israeli forces had won a stunning victory. So fast had events moved that my stirring headline of four days earlier already had the feel of ancient history.

Fortunately, there was one prescient reporter whose reaction time was considerably faster. He was Michael Elkins, at various times a Hollywood script writer, Office of Strategic Services operator during the Second World War, and labour union organiser.

I met Mike in 1948, when I was attending the University of California in Berkeley and looking for some way to get to the newly established State of Israel and join the fighting.

Someone advised me to contact Elkins, then a business agent for the butchers’ union in San Francisco. I walked into his office unannounced and told him I wanted him to get me to Israel to participate in the War of Independence.

Elkins blanched, told me he had set up an elaborate vetting and security system to keep American authorities from discovering his then highly illegal activity, and I had just walked in.

In any case, he found it prudent to leave the United States for Israel later in 1948 and after a year on a kibbutz found a job as a stringer for the BBC.

On June 5 1967, Elkins went to the Knesset and ran into a knot of excited politicians, from whom he gathered that Israeli fighter planes had aleady wiped out the air forces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. He immediately phoned his BBC editor in London and announced, “Israel has won the war.”

The editor thought Elkins had lost his mind. Cairo, Damascus and Amman were transmitting a string of bulletins previewing the utter defeat of the Zionist entity.

Elkins, however, stuck to his guns. and the editor finally gave in but warned Elkins that if he were proven wrong, this would be his last day as a BBC correspondent.

Elkins kept his job and died in Jerusalem at 84 in 2001.