by David Landau
On May 26, 2005, at a memorial event for the dead of his regiment, the Thirty-Second Regiment of the Alexandroni Brigade, Prime Minister Sharon reflected on that fateful night, fifty-seven years before:
An olive grove near ancient Hulda. My platoon and I lie sprawled in the afternoon heat under the shade of the trees. Thoughts before the battle. We blend into the scrubby soil, as though we were an integral part of it. Feelings of rootedness, of homeland, of belonging, of ownership.
Suddenly a line of trucks pulls up nearby. New recruits, foreign looking, pale, in sleeveless pullovers, gray trousers, striped shirts. A mélange of languages. Names like Herschel and Jazek are bandied about, Yanem, Jonzi, Peter. They so don’t blend with the olive trees, the rocks, the yellow earth. They came to us from the death camps of Europe…
They stripped off, white-skinned bodies, tried to find uniforms that fit, struggled with buckles and belts helped by young commanders they have only just met. All are quiet. Acquiescent. Not one of them shouts, Give us a chance at least to breathe a little air after the terrible years we have been through. As though they know this is another battle, the last battle, for Jewish survival.
The new recruits didn’t yet know, Sharon continued, of the draft dodgers in the Yishuv who failed to enlist or of “moneyed aristocracy who sent their sons abroad lest they be harmed in the war. No one sang of these new recruits, the ‘overseas draftees,’ as they were called … Numbers on their arms. The lone remnants of their families, of their entire communities, cinders salvaged from the flames … No one told stories around the bonfire about their exploits. They had no one waiting for them at home, with whom to share their experiences. They had no homes. Men from another world, young like us but a thousand years older.”
It was a subtly political speech, but for his peroration Sharon cast aside subtlety:
My comrades and my commanders are assembled here. With you I started on my life’s path. From you I learned. After the war, I thought I’d go back home to work and to study. But our need to stand firm in the battle lines did not end then, and it still has not ended. Looking back, I feel as though I’ve been at the front for sixty years. Now I have decided on a great effort designed to bring about different days, days of peace and quiet. It is a difficult and painful effort, and I am on the front line in a hard battle, perhaps the hardest I have ever fought. But I will persevere because I know it is both right and vital for our nation. And for that, too, I need your comradeship.
He carried the memory of that day with him all his life. It taught him tactical truths that he was later to employ in much larger engagements. It taught him lessons of leadership, basics of battlefield morale.
Arguably, it taught him, too, some basic truths about Israel’s place in Palestine and in the wider region. He needed a whole lifetime, though, to learn them. But in the end—before the end—they sank in.
He nearly died there that day, of thirst, of blood loss from a bullet that struck him in the thigh and exited through his stomach. His son Omri attested that whenever his father passed that place, for the next fifty years and more, he was assailed by an overwhelming thirst.15 His own platoon, much better kitted out than the newcomers, had nevertheless somehow not been provided with water canteens. The platoon was supposed to lead the attack on the hilltop Jordanian emplacements and the fortress and monastery below. Arik planned to cross the Jerusalem highway and come upon the defenders under cover of darkness. The rest of the force would follow.
But logistical delays—a critical unit of mortars failed to arrive; the buses ferrying the troops to the battlefield lost their way16—meant that the attack didn’t get going till nearly dawn. The rising sun caught the platoon in open country, still on the wrong side of the road, and drew down on them a relentless hail of mortar bombs and machine-gun bullets from the hilltop. Casualties quickly mounted; the radio set was hit. The soldiers tried to flatten themselves into a shallow gully, waiting with gradually flagging confidence for reinforcements.
The Jordanians and the Palestinian irregulars, meanwhile, sensing that Arik was effectively abandoned, advanced on foot toward the beleaguered Israeli platoon.
[They] came again and again … moving in, shouting “Etbach al Yahud,” “Kill the Jews,” firing. Each time we drove them back, choking as the stench of cordite mixed with the smoke billowing over us from the fires in the wheat field … Between the fighting, the sun, and the hot wind coming across the plain, we were dying of thirst.
Around noon, the Jordanians on the hill intensified their fire, the usual forerunner of another assault. Raising myself to see what was happening, I felt something thud into my belly, knocking me back. I heard my mouth say “ima”—mother, and the instant it was out I glanced around to see if anybody had heard. Already blood was seeping through my shirt and from my shorts, where another wound in my thigh had appeared as if by magic. I lay down, still lucid, but feeling my strength ebbing away.
By this time, almost half of the thirty-six-man platoon were dead and most of the others wounded. The Israeli field guns suddenly fell silent, and Arik, looking around gingerly, saw Arab soldiers on a hill to the rear where another Israeli unit had previously been deployed.
Now and then they stooped down over black shapes that were just barely distinguishable … Instantly I realized what the scene meant. Our people there were gone—dead or withdrawn. The black shapes on the hillside were their casualties; the Arabs stooping over them were looting and mutilating the bodies. Then I understood the silence. We were alone on the field. The other units had been ordered back. That was what the artillery fire had been for, to cover the retreat … They had not known that we were still here, and still alive … I gave the order and pointed out the direction—straight back through the smoke and over the terraces.
[T]he Arabs on the hillside were moving slowly, going from body to body, oblivious that we were down here … Simcha Pinchasi, a wonderful boy from Kfar Saba, had been hit badly in both legs and could not move. With a look and a quick nod he indicated that he would cover the withdrawal…“But Arik,” he said, “before you go, give me a grenade.” I gave it to him, knowing there was no hope whatsoever, not for him and most likely not for the rest of us either. There was no one whom I could ask to carry him, just as there was no one who could carry me.17
Arik crawled painfully on all fours toward the terraces that rose up out of the burning field. He knew he lacked the strength to climb along them. A young soldier from his platoon half dragged him along. “He was a new boy, just sixteen years old. He had joined us only two days earlier, and somehow I could not remember his name. I stared at him in horror. The bottom of his jaw had been shot up, leaving a mass of gore … He was unable to talk. I was too tired.”
“He kept saying, ‘Get away. Save yourself; run for it,’ ” the young savior recalled years later. “But I insisted. I wouldn’t obey him.”18 “Together we crawled over one rocky terrace, then another,” Sharon continued his account. Eventually, they were picked up by a jeep, driven, coincidentally, by Rifka and Shmuel Bogin, a brother and sister from Kfar Malal. “Then the name of the boy who saved my life came to me. It was Yaakov Bogin, a cousin of theirs. A moment later … I passed out.”
Half conscious on the long and much-interrupted ride to the hospital, he thought he overheard people remark that he had been hit “right in the genitals…[At Ekron] some of the village women came in carrying cans of milk and filling glasses for us. I was so thirsty; but looking down at my abdomen, they wouldn’t give me any. I couldn’t keep my eyes open … But when I was awake I couldn’t keep my mind off my wound.”19 At a field hospital in Rehovot, “my stretcher was placed on the ground, and a charming volunteer nurse asked me to urinate. I couldn’t. She asked for a catheter to be brought, and I said, ‘Wait, I’ll try again.’ This time I succeeded. She kissed me on the mouth, and then I realized that my wound was not where I had feared.”20
Lying in the hospital in Tel Aviv for several weeks, he reviewed the battle in hi
s mind over and over. Fifteen of his soldiers had been killed and eleven others wounded. He had known most of them well; they were from Kfar Malal and the surrounding settlements. He knew many of their families, whose lives would never be the same again. Some of the parents came to visit him in the hospital. He didn’t know what to say to them. He felt he could not claim with conviction that their loved ones’ deaths had been unavoidable.
He never, then or later, questioned the strategic decision by Ben-Gurion to hurl regiment after regiment, some barely trained to shoot a rifle, against the Latrun defenses, in three successive and failed assaults. In the event, the army found an alternative route up to Jerusalem, dubbed the Burma road, which it was able to roughly pave and use to send in supplies to the city. Military historians argued subsequently over whether the dogged and costly harassment of the Arab Legion forces at Latrun served at least to reduce their numbers and their effectiveness in the fight for Jerusalem itself (which ended with both sides exhausted and the city divided by concrete walls, barbed wire, and pillboxes for the next nineteen years). Arik’s criticisms were on the tactical level, and they were bitter and devastating. He faulted the more senior commanders for failing to plan the operation in greater detail, failing to ensure that it was launched on time, and above all failing to command the forces in person and from the front—so that they could change plans and improvise as the battle ebbed and flowed. “There wasn’t a single senior officer on the ground, and that was what was lacking at the critical moment,” Sharon told his longtime friend and amanuensis, Uri Dan, years later.21
Arik was troubled, too, by the almost blithe stoicism with which both officers and other ranks in the fledgling Israel Defense Forces (IDF) seemed resigned to leaving the injured as well as the dead on the battlefield. He found himself wondering what the proper code of conduct ought to be, especially given that he had seen with his own eyes acts of cold-blooded barbarism perpetrated on abandoned soldiers, both living and dead.
“The decision to withdraw and to leave wounded men in the field was mine, and I had to live with it,” said Brigadier General (res.) Asher Levy, Arik’s company commander at Latrun. “If I hadn’t taken that decision, they’d have all been killed. As it was, some were killed, and some were taken into captivity by the Jordanians. Of course the battle was a deep trauma both for Arik and for me. The realization that you’ve left your comrades wounded or dead on the battlefield, justifiedly or not, is a most terrible experience.”
Sharon was later to claim that as a result of his experience at Latrun he instituted in the forces he commanded—and this later percolated throughout the army—a strict, almost hallowed code that forbade leaving anyone, alive or dead, on the field of battle. In fact, Asher Levy explained, that principle was rehearsed, and was supposed to apply, in the pre-state Haganah and in the IDF from its very first day. The question was how determinedly the principle was put into practice.22
Despite the repeated defeats at Latrun, the IDF held its ground elsewhere until a truce brokered by the UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte went into effect on June 11. It was to last for just one month, but Ben-Gurion made good use of every moment of it, dramatically bolstering the firepower of his army with weapons that his emissaries had purchased around the world and that were now flowing freely into the country. The size of Israel’s armed forces also increased significantly as the inflow of immigrants swelled the available pool of manpower. In early June, 40,000 men (and women: about 10 percent of those mobilized were women) were under arms; by mid-July, the figure had risen to 63,500. By the end of the year, it stood at more than 100,000. The invading Arab states—Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Transjordan, and Saudi Arabia—were vastly larger than Israel, but they failed to bring to bear their manpower potential on the Palestine front.
Ben-Gurion used the brief respite, too, to organize and consolidate the IDF. He insisted that the Etzel, and the Palmach, too, merge into the general army and not retain a separate command structure or separate units. The standoff with the Etzel climaxed with the arrival of an arms ship, the Altalena, which Ben-Gurion ordered shelled rather than allow its cargo to be distributed in large part to Etzel units, as the Etzel leader, Menachem Begin, was demanding. Historians give credit to Begin for avoiding a civil war in the midst of the War of Independence by ordering his men not to fight back.
On July 9 the fighting resumed. The IDF quickly conquered the Arab towns of Ramle and Lydda in the center of the country. They were both to have been included in the Arab state under the Partition Resolution of the previous year. Their fifty thousand inhabitants fled east, actively impelled to do so by the victorious Israeli forces. Arik had recovered sufficiently to rejoin his battalion by this time, and he took part in operations in the Lydda area. In his memoirs he wrote of a Transjordanian counterattack, “overrunning a unit, then massacring the wounded. Twenty-eight bodies had been found, many with their ears missing, some with their genitals cut off and stuffed into their mouths. For days we scoured the area looking for missing pieces, and scattered around the hills we found them: fingers, ears, penises caked into the dusty earth … I caught myself thinking about having been left behind on the field.”23
After ten days of intense fighting a second truce was called. Arik spent this one, too, in the hospital. Driving his jeep with his company commander alongside him, “somehow I managed to roll it over on us, breaking some ribs and injuring my spine in the process.”24 In mid-October, the fighting resumed for a third and last time. Israel strove mightily to drive the Egyptians out of the Negev, the south of the country, and the Syrians, the Iraqis, and the Lebanese out of the Galilee, the north. It was largely but not entirely successful. The main Negev town of Beersheba was taken on October 21, and IDF units swept across the northern border into Lebanon later that month. But an Egyptian brigade of some four thousand men was dug in around the area of Faluja in the northern Negev and refused to give ground.
Arik, on his feet again and now serving as reconnaissance officer of his battalion, tasted bloody defeat once again. “This Taha Bey [the Egyptian brigadier] was a true hero. Without any real hope of breaking out or being rescued, his brigade was … repelling every attack … Finally a major effort was planned for the night of December 27. Our battalion would keep the village of Faluja busy while a second battalion would carry out the main assault on Iraq Manshiyeh [a British-built fortress held by the Egyptians]. It was a disaster. By the time we were able to disengage we had lost ninety-eight men out of a total of six hundred.”
The war ended with armistice agreements, signed during the first half of 1949, with Egypt, Lebanon, Transjordan, and Syria (Iraq refused to sign). Israel had expanded from the 55 percent of Palestine allocated to it under the UN Partition Resolution to 78 percent. Most Palestinian inhabitants of this expanded Jewish state had gone or been expelled. Of the remaining land, the West Bank was annexed by Trans-jordan (henceforth known as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan), and the Gaza Strip was taken over by Egypt.
Despite the very steep price in blood—5,682 dead, almost 1 percent of the population—the IDF had emerged victorious.
With demobilization, the IDF lost not only its wartime bulk but also many of its best young officers. The Palmach, which had been the Haganah’s only professional fighting force before the state, did not take kindly to being disbanded and merged without trace into the regular army at Ben-Gurion’s insistence. Many of its men preferred to return to their kibbutzim rather than pursue military careers.
Arik was appointed commander of the reconnaissance company of the Golani Brigade. “The end of the war had left many frontier areas disputed or unclear, and skirmishes with the Egyptians, Jordanians, and Lebanese were a regular fact of life. It was a time for establishing borders and training new recruits in patrolling, intelligence gathering, and night fighting. The job was just down my alley.” His commanding officer, Colonel Avraham Yoffe, promoted him to captain in 1950 and recommended him for a battalion commander’s course.
It wa
s run by Yitzhak Rabin, a former top Palmach commander who had distinguished himself in the war and had decided to swallow the forcible disbandment of the Palmach and make his career in the IDF. On completing the course, Arik was appointed intelligence officer of Central Command, an unexpectedly steep step up on the ladder of promotion and an opportunity to make his mark on the top brass. His first contact with Moshe Dayan, then commanding officer (CO) of Southern Command, came in a large-scale training exercise. Arik was intrigued to find that the already-famous general scored his successes by not playing by the rules. Dayan launched his attack on Central Command before the war game had officially begun, gaining a strategic advantage but eventually running out of fuel. Arik led a counterattack that salvaged some at least of Central’s honor. Later he was carpeted on the grounds that intelligence officers do not lead field operations—and resolved there and then to quit the intelligence corps.
His activities during this year were repeatedly stymied by bouts of malaria, for which the antidote was increasingly large doses of quinine. In the end the army doctors recommended a complete break and change of climate as a way of ridding his system of the bug, and he set out to see the world. But first, “My father and I went to a clothing store in Tel Aviv, where I bought my first sport jacket and a pair of what were then known in Israel as ‘half shoes,’ to distinguish them from the high-top boots that everyone always wore on the farm. When I arrived at Orly airport in Paris, my uncle took one look at my outfit and blanched.”25 Duly kitted out by his uncle Joseph’s bespoke tailor, Arik spent a fortnight taking in the culture and living the high life in Paris. Then it was on to London, where he had three friends from the war: Yitzhak Modai and Dov Sion, both young Israeli officers, and Cyril Kern, an English Jew who had volunteered for the IDF in 1948 and was now back in the U.K. making money in the rag trade.
