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early 1953. Nearly all ended with the soldiers failing to reach their target or taking casualties. Sometimes both.

By mid-1953, the army decided to set up Israel’s first dedicated commando force. It was called Unit 101. It was led by a 25-year-old named Ariel Sharon, who had been a platoon commander in 1948. With Ben-Gurion and especially his army chief-of-staff, Moshe Dayan, determined to hit back hard at the fedayeen attacks, Sharon took a few dozen hand-picked soldiers and began mounting a different kind of retaliatory attacks. The largest, in October 1953, was in response to the murder of a woman and her two children in their home in central Israel. It was against the West Bank village of Qibya. Sharon and his commandos surrounded and attacked the village, destroying homes and other buildings – and killing at least 40 villagers sheltering inside them. Israel immediately came under international condemnation, accused of allowing its troops to unleash a massacre. Unit 101 was disbanded. It lasted just half a year. But that was not because of Qibya. While realizing the importance of avoiding civilian casualties, Dayan remained convinced that only units like 101 offered any realistic hope of taking the fight to the fedayeen. He made Unit 101 the core of a larger commando force merged into Battalion 890 of the paratroopers’ brigade, and he put Sharon in overall command.

It was this force that Yigal Garber joined. He became part of its elite commando team, Company A and took part in a series of attacks on the West Bank and in Gaza. While avoiding a repeat of Qibya, they inflicted heavy casualties on Jordanian and Egyptian army and police units, and also suffered casualties of their own. Battalion 890 was based just a couple of miles from Mishmar Hasharon and Yigal returned to the kibbutz every few weeks. He never talked about the commando operations. But every time there was a report of Israelis killed in a fedayeen attack, I knew there would be a retaliation raid, with my Yigal almost certainly involved and, I hoped, returning unscathed.

He did. And in 1956, two years into his military service, he was part of Israel’s second full-scale war. For a while, the reprisal attacks seemed to be working. The fedayeen attacks decreased. But that didn’t last, especially in the south along the border with Gaza. Egypt’s pro-Western monarchy had been toppled in a coup organized by a group of army officers led by a stridently pan-Arabist – and anti-Israeli – lieutenant colonel named Gamal Abdel Nasser. Egypt began providing not just tacit support for the fedayeen in Gaza, but arming and training them and helping organize cross-border attacks. Then, in

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