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even, which the country we were building could not afford. In the early years of the state, the model Israel mother or father were those who stood silent and strong as a soldier’s coffin was lowered into the ground.

Nechemia’s death hurt, of course. I was friends not just with him, but his older brother, Eliezer. Known by his army nickname, Cheetah, he was in charge of the air force’s main helicopter squadron. He had flown both me and Nechemia on sayeret missions into the Sinai. Several days after the war was over, before returning to university, I drove up to Jerusalem to see his family. Cheetah was at the door when I arrived. Neither of us spoke. But as we embraced, I could feel my eyes dampen, and there were tears in his eyes as well.

“Our squadron was the one that got the call to bring out the casualties,” he said. “They ordered the pilot who brought out Nechemia not to tell me he was dead… until the war was over.”

“He was a wonderful man,” I said. “There was no one better.”

* * *

When I returned to Hebrew University, the country felt completely different. It was not just the sudden realization that, in military terms, Israel had eliminated any realistic threat to its existence, important though that was. The more profound change was physical. The country in which I’d grown up was a place which felt not just small, but pinched, especially in its “narrow waist” near Mishmar Hasharon. Pre-1967 Israel was about three-quarters the size of the state of New Hampshire. Now, within the space of less than a week, the territory Israel controlled had more than tripled. It included the whole Sinai Desert, up to the edge of the Suez Canal. The entire Golan. The ancient lands of Judaea and Samaria: the West Bank. And the reunited capital city of Jerusalem.

Suddenly, we had a sense that we could breathe. Wander, explore. Few of my classmates were religiously observant. But none of us could help feel the sense of connection as we walked through the Old City of Jerusalem, or parts of the West Bank whose place-names resonated from the Bible. I felt especially moved when I first visited the Old City with my friends, stopping and chatting and buying things at the colorful market stalls. And, religious or not, when I stood in front of the surviving Western Wall of the ancient Jewish temple.

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