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Among the precautions they took was to base several hundred reservists from the Alexandroni Brigade in a defensive position near the Mediterranean: the eucalyptus grove at the top end of our kibbutz, where the cover was so dense they were all but invisible from the air.

We kids seized on the chance to talk to the reservists. I can’t remember whether it was Ido or Moshe who noticed an area at the back of their encampment, on the other side of the kibbutz cemetery, where neatly stacked boxes of munitions were being kept. But we spent the next several afternoons on reconnaissance. A soldier was always on guard. But there were times the area was unwatched, either when one guard handed over to the next, or on their cigarette breaks.

We struck the following Friday. Nowadays, the cemetery consists of a half-dozen rows of headstones. Walking through it, as I still do at least once each year, is like revisiting my past. Almost all the grown-ups I remember from my childhood now rest there, including my parents. My father died in 2002, at the age of 92. My mother passed away only a few years ago, a few weeks after her 100th birthday. But in 1956, the cemetery was tiny. The chances of anyone being there at midnight on a Friday were close to zero. Crouching in the shadow of the headstones, we could see the guard. We waited until he left for his break. Each of us took a wooden box and one of the slightly larger metal boxes. Inside, we found a treasure trove: thousands of bullets for all kinds of weapons. The metal cases held heavier firepower: grenades and mortars. We returned those. We were mischievous, but not crazy. Yet each of us now had a crate full of ammunition, even including belts for machine guns.

* * *

My experience at school began to change in my early teenage years as well. Shortly before my fourteen birthday, our age group was sent to a school outside Mishmar Hasharon. The kibbutz had decided that since there were only a dozen-or-so children in each class, it wasn’t economically viable to provide a quality education. They sent us to the regional high school.

It was several hundred yards down the road in the direction of Tel Aviv. It was far more rigorous. I was no longer the only kid in my class who liked to read or could do math problems in his head. It was there I first got truly

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