Magic Moment

Some moments in one's life are so unique, so memorable, that they stick there forever. Here's one of mine; it occurred when I was travelling.
We had been working on a kibbutz for various reasons; some were travellers, some were not, some were Jewish, most were not, some were there to see a country in the news. We were staying at a youth hostel near the village of Beit Jalla, just outside Bethlehem.
We arrived in the evening, took to our beds (and some slept outside on the ground - we were like that then.) We were due to wake early for a hike in the Judean wilderness.
At first light were were awoken and called to the brow of the hill. We gathered, bleary-eyed and gritty, yawning and shivering in the chill of a desert morning.
We then stood motionless. For the sight that met our eyes was extraordinary.
The entire city of Jerusalem lay spread out before us, across its hills and valleys. We looked down on the city on a hill, from east to west. In the early dawn light, the street lights and windows were pale and silvery in the shades of grey, which eased to black in the deeper valleys.
To the east, the right, the sunrise was imminent. The sky there glowed with a palest lemon tint, shading to blue above and darkness still to the west. Stars there may have been, but I do not remember that. I remember the city.
It sprawled across the hills, the left broken into patches of new development but the right was concentrated to a focus, an area of darker shadow, which I knew to be the walled and crowded Old City. A patch of silver indicated the small dome of the Al-Aksa mosque, the southernmost point of the Temple Mount.
Why was this fascinating and rivetting? Did I guess then that I would later realise that this view of the city is one that pilgrims from three major faiths have longed for - the first glimpse of Jerusalem? This view has inspired the Moslem cavalrymen who rode out from the desert, the Crusaders who fought for their Holy Places, the Turks who came from the north, the Israeli paratroopers who fought across it in 1967.
It was three decades ago now. I wonder how many of us that day still remember that sight?