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Ido was just a few inches over five feet, he was strong and athletic, a star even
on the basketball court. Moshe was taller, if a bit overweight. He was nowhere
near as strong as Ido, but still stronger than me, and had a streetwise intelligence
and a sardonic sense of humor. Both had tested the patience of our teachers to
breaking point. Ido had been sent off to a vocational school in Netanya. Moshe
was moved to Mikveh Israel, a school which focused mostly on agriculture. On
Friday evenings and Saturdays in the kibbutz, however, they filled their time
with a variety of minor misdeeds. My role – the cement in our budding
partnership – was as designated lock-picker.

Our first caper targeted the concrete security building near the dining hall. It
contained the kibbutz’s store of weapons, with a metal door secured by a
padlock. Late one Friday night, with Ido and Moshe as lookouts, I crouched in
front of the lock and took out my tools. In less than a minute, I had it open. We
darted into the storeroom. There were about 80 rifles, along with a few machine
guns, on racks along the walls. Ido took a rifle from the furthest end of the rack
and wrapped it in a blanket. Moshe pocketed a box of ammunition. As the
others hurried back to our dormitory, I closed the lock, making sure it was in the
same position I’d found it, and joined them. The next afternoon, we stole away
through the moshav of Kfar Hayim into a field on the far side. We test-fired the
rifle until sunset, when we returned to the kibbutz and replaced it in the armory.
It felt like the perfect crime: foolproof, since no one was likely to notice
anything. Essentially harmless. And repeatable, as we confirmed by returning
on Friday nights every month or two.

This modest pre-adolescent rebellion never extended to doubting the national
mission of Israel. Growing up on a kibbutz in a country younger even than we
were, we all felt a part of its brief history, and its future. That was especially
true after my kibbutz mentor, Yigal, left for his military service and joined one
of the Israeli army’s elite units.

The 1948 war had been won. But it had not brought peace. Palestinian
irregulars, fedayeen operating from Jordan and the Gaza Strip, mounted hit-and-
run raids. In armed ambushes or by planting mines, they killed dozens of Israeli
civilians and injured hundreds more. The country was in no mood for another
war. The newly created Israeli armed forces – known as Tzahal, a Hebrew
acronym for the Israeli Defense Force – also seemed to have lost the cutting
edge, or perhaps the desperate motivation, of the pre-state militias. At first, Ben-
Gurion relied on young recruits in the new army’s infantry brigades to counter
the fedayeen attacks. Nearly 90 reprisal operations were launched in 1952 and

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