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Chapter Two

The 1948 war and the decade that followed remain vivid in my mind not just for the obvious reason: they secured the survival of the infant state of Israel and saw it into a more assured and independent young adulthood. It was also the time when I grew from a young child –introspective and contemplative, aware of how quickly my mind seemed to grasp numbers and geometric shapes and musical notes, but also small for my age and awkward at the sports we’d play on the dusty field at the far edge of the kibbutz – into a sense of my own place in the family and community and the country around me. I did, along the way, become arguably the most effective left defensive back on our kibbutz soccer team. But that was not because I suddenly discovered a buried talent for the game. Physically, I was like my father. I had natural hand coordination which made delicate tasks come easily – one reason I would soon discover a pastime that lent itself to acts of kibbutz mischief bordering on juvenile delinquency. But when it came to larger muscles, I was hapless, if not hopeless. My prowess as a soccer defenseman was because no opposing player in his right mind, once I’d inadvertently cut his knees from under him when aiming for the ball, felt it was worth coming anywhere close to me.

But when the war broke out in earnest in the spring of 1948, my focus, like that of all Israelis, was on the fighting, which even the youngest of us knew would determine whether the state would survive at all. Day after day, my father helped me to chart each major advance and setback on a little map. Dozens of kibbutzim around the country were in the line of fire. Some had soon fallen, while others were barely managing to hang on. Just five miles inland from us, an Israeli settlement came under attack by an Iraqi force in the nearby Arab village of Qaqun.

But inside Mishmar Hasharon, I had the almost surreal feeling that this great historical drama was something happening everywhere else but on our kibbutz. If it hadn’t been for the radio, or the newsreels which we saw in weekly movie nights in the dining hall, and the little map on which I traced its course with my father, I would barely have known a war was going on. One Arab army did get near to us: the Iraqis, in Qaqun. If they had advanced a few miles further, they could have overrun Mishmar Hasharon, reached the coast and cut the new Jewish state in half. I can still remember the rumble of what sounded like thunder one morning in June 1948, as the Alexandronis, one of the twelve brigades in the new Israeli army, launched their decisive attack on the Iraqis.

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