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the go-ahead. Still, he was convinced that if we could demonstrate a toughness, commitment and competence which offered an obvious addition to Israel’s intelligence capability, even they would recognize the folly of not using it.

He made every one of us feel a part of making this possible. I was one of ten new recruits, bringing the size of the sayeret to twenty. We were almost all teenagers. In fact, the oldest of our officers was 21. Most of the men were Sephardi Jews. For a unit like ours, with the aim of undertaking secret missions in Arab countries, Avraham believed that a background in Arabic culture and language was an important asset. I was the sayeret’s only lock-picker. But all of us had been recruited in the much same way that I was. It was how the top Palmach units had been formed, and the way Sharon assembled Unit 101: friends recommending friends, in my case, my old yeled chutz schoolmate from the kibbutz.

We trained in the whole range of commando skills. We used not only Uzis, but Soviet-made Kalashnikovs and Gurionov machine guns. We worked with detonators and explosives. We staged raids on Israeli airfields. We conducted exercises using rubber dinghies to practice attacking from the sea. But mostly we walked. For hundreds of miles, almost always at night the length and breadth of the country. We would study a map of each area, committing every town or village, hilltop or dry creek bed, to memory before we set off. I can still remember what Meir Har-Zion told us: to be truly prepared, you needed to spend “an hour for an hour” – an equal time mastering the lay of the land to the amount you’d need to carry out an operation. It was a gruelling regime – designed to push us to the very limits of endurance. On one series of exercises, we were limited to a single canteen of water as we trekked deep into the Negev Desert. It was gruelling, designed to push us to the very limits of endurance. I remember the first time Errol set eyes on me after I joined the unit. He turned to Avraham, laughed, and said: “Are we taking high school kids now?” But before long, I was a “high school kid” no longer.

Meir Har-Zion rarely took a direct part in our exercises. On his final Company A mission, a month before the 1956 war, he had been shot in his throat and arm. A medic saved his life by performing a tracheotomy. But his speech was affected, and he still had almost no use of his right arm. Errol, Micha Kapusta and Yitzhak Gibli were more actively involved with us. They were there not only to help train us, but to instill a commando attitude, a spirit of confidence bordering on bravado.

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