10
We mustn’t flinch from the hatred . . . of Arabs, who live around us and are waiting for the moment when their hands may claim our blood. We mustn’t avert our eyes, lest our hands be weakened. That is the decree of our generation . . . to be willing and armed, strong and unyielding, lest the sword be knocked from our fists, and our lives severed.
—Moshe Dayan, eulogy for Roi Rotberg, 1956
In the days of the Mandate, there had been numerous attacks on Jews, but British officials had been able (when they wished) to identify the attackers and administer punishment. In the postarmistice Middle East, however, it was increasingly difficult for Israel to identify the culprits in these attacks, especially because they often traversed the border from Jordan or Egypt. While during the Mandate, the British had had a stake in maintaining law and order in the region, with the British gone, the governments of Arab countries bordering on Israel had no such interest. Indeed, for them, the less settled Israel’s borders were, the better. When infiltrators would sneak into Israel to tend unmanned farmland (which they claimed was theirs), to loot border villages, or to carry out violent and often deadly attacks, they could then return across the border, where Arab officials were ambivalent at best about imposing any sort of punishment.
By 1953, the State of Israel was five years old. The War of Independence had ended more than four years earlier, but Israel’s citizens now faced regular attacks by these Palestinian infiltrators crossing the Jordanian and Egyptian borders. The attacks were relentless. In the three years following independence, there were thousands of such infiltrations and attacks each year.1
On October 13, 1953, Susan Kanias, aged thirty-two, and her three young children were sound asleep in their home in the small town of Yehud, just north of Lod (formerly Lydda), near the narrowest section of Israel. A mere nine miles separated the Mediterranean Sea on the west and the armistice line on the east; located almost equidistant between the sea and the border, Yehud was less than five miles from the armistice line, and like many villages, eminently vulnerable. In the dark of night, Palestinian infiltrators crossed the border, made their way to her home, and lobbed a grenade into her apartment, killing Susan and two of her children, and wounding the third.
The murder of the Kanias family was hardly a lone instance. Between 1951 and 1956, several hundred Israelis were killed by fedayeen (Arabic for “self-sacrificers”) infiltrators, and many more were wounded.2 When the Kanias family was attacked, the IDF—which at first had been uncertain how to respond to these attacks—was prepared. The “activist” camp in Israel—reminiscent of Jabotinsky’s argument in “The Iron Wall” in 1923 some thirty years earlier—had long felt that to induce the neighboring states to deal with the perpetrators seriously, Israel had to hit back and hit back hard. In early 1953, the IDF began to train a small elite force dedicated to the swift and ruthless punishment that these hard-liners deemed necessary to bring a modicum of quiet to Israel’s borders. It formed Unit 101, composed largely of choice volunteers, some of whom had served in the Haganah’s elite Palmach unit before independence. The unit was under the command of Ariel Sharon.
Training was intense, including “navigation exercises often taking them across the border; encounters with enemy patrols or village watchmen . . . forced marches . . . calisthenics, judo, and weapons and sabotage training.”3 Commanders apparently even provoked real firefights, which they considered the best practice for the missions that would follow.
The night after Susan Kanais and her children were murdered, Unit 101 got the green light to strike back. The soldiers made their way to the West Bank border village of Qibya, located just over the armistice line.
The main body of IDF troops . . . prepared some 700 kilograms of explosives for detonation. Working with pocket flashlights and unhindered by Jordanian interference, the sappers proceeded to demolish 45 houses. The destruction took some three hours, lasting from 00:30 to 03:20. The troops failed to search the houses for inhabitants, some of whom hid in cellars and attics. It is possible that, at that stage, the troops believed that there was no one (alive) in the houses. Altogether, some 50–60 of the inhabitants died, both during the takeover of the village and in the demolitions. . . . Two to three days after the event, after sifting through the rubble, the Jordanians announced that 69 (or 70) persons had been killed, most of them women and children.4
The creation of Unit 101 illustrated a challenge that Israel would face for many decades. Surviving in the Middle East, surrounded by often violent neighbors who did not recognize its right to exist and swore that they would never do so, meant that Israel had to invest tremendous amounts of money and share of mind in maintaining a militarily superior force. That is precisely what it did with Unit 101. The rigor of this round-the-clock regimen created a fighting force of a capacity unprecedented in the IDF. Israel now had its first world-class Special Forces unit.
The reprisal raids were intentionally brutal; they were meant to convey a clear message that Israel would not tolerate attacks on its innocent citizens, and as such, these reprisal raids were taking place over the border and were killing some innocent Arabs.
It was too much for even some of the hardened soldiers who had volunteered. Some were traumatized by what had transpired in Qibya. Still others, including even those who had been members of the Palmach and had carried out countless attacks during the War of Independence, refused to participate in these new raids. One member of the unit later recalled the questions that haunted him about these operations: “Is this screaming, whimpering multitude the enemy? How did these fellahin (‘farmers’ or ‘laborers’) sin against us? War is indeed cruel. The depression is general. No one tells stories. All are silent and self-absorbed.”5
Israel’s need to wage what would become an often painful and nearly century-long war* evoked a tradition of profound soul-searching among Israelis about how they could best balance the need to fight for their survival and at the same time maintain the moral standards that they believed were critical to becoming the society they sought to be.
That reflection had begun as early as the War of Independence. Shortly after the war, the Israeli author S. Yizhar (a pen name; his real name was Yizhar Smilansky) published Khirbet Khizeh, a work of historical fiction that sought to capture the moral complexity of some actions Israeli forces had taken against an Arab village toward the end of the war. Everything moves slowly in Khirbet Khizeh, as if the narrator sees the world through fog, or as in a dream. Slowly, though, he comes to realize the human toll being exacted from the Arabs who were being forced from their homes: “Something struck me like lightning. All at once everything seemed to mean something different, more precisely: exile. This was exile. This was what exile was like. This was what exile looked like.”6
Yizhar was by no means questioning the legitimacy of Israel’s establishment, or even Israelis’ need to fight their War of Independence. Like many Israeli men and women of letters who would follow him, though, he asked Israelis to take note of the cost not only to themselves, but on the other side of the fight, as well. (Israelis knew well, of course, that had their enemies engaged in similar soul-searching, the region might well have looked very different over the years.)
Toward the end of the book, Moishe, one of the soldiers, tells the narrator: “Immigrants of ours will come to this Khirbet [Arabic for “destroyed village”] what’s-its-name, you hear me, and they’ll take this land and work it and it’ll be beautiful here!” A. D. Gordon’s dreamy vision of Jews working the land and the very project that was so central to Ben-Gurion’s mamlachtiyut become the objects of the novel’s narrator’s derisive cynicism:
And hooray, we’d house and absorb—and how! We’d open a cooperative store, establish a school, maybe even a synagogue. There would be political parties here. They’d debate all sorts of things. They would plow fields, and sow, and reap and do great things. Long live Hebrew Khizeh! Who, then, would ever imagine that once there had been some Khirbet Khizeh that we emptied out and took for ourselves. We came, we shot, we burned; we blew up, expelled, drove out, and sent into exile.7
No less important than the potency of Yizhar’s critique is the fact that Israelis did not shy away from the book or turn its author into a pariah. Instead, Khirbet Khizeh became an Israeli bestseller and by 1964 was included in the Israeli high school curriculum.8 S. Yizhar was elected to the Knesset several times. Self-critique would remain one of the most defining characteristics of Israeli society.
Not everyone was equally conflicted by Unit 101 or the Qibya episode. Other soldiers acknowledged that the attacks were morally complex but insisted that they were necessary. Meir Har-Zion, an almost mythical member of Unit 101 whom Moshe Dayan called “our greatest warrior since Bar Kokhba,”9 insisted, “Our operations were not accompanied by hatred of the Arabs or any sort of hatred. In all that we were ordered to do we saw a necessity of safeguarding [Israel’s] existence.”10 Hundreds of innocent Israelis had been murdered until the IDF came up with an effective countermeasure. For people like Har-Zion, Ariel Sharon and Unit 101 were the embodiment of that new Jew that Nordau and Bialik had insisted the Jews needed to create. “No more Kishinevs,” people like Har-Zion essentially said. Having a Jewish state meant that Jews were no longer going to die simply because they were Jews.
THE RAID ON QIBYA also marked the beginning of the public—and controversial—career of Ariel Sharon, Israel’s daring and brilliant military commander. Sharon would prove difficult to label. Born in 1928 to Vera and Samuil Scheinerman, two Russian immigrants, Sharon (he later Hebraicized his name) was raised on Kfar Malal, a moshav (cooperative agricultural community) just outside of Tel Aviv. His parents, committed Zionists, did things their own way. They raised crops—like peanuts and sweet potatoes—that their moshav thought would not survive. Arik (as he was commonly called) and his sister both attended high school, then considered a superfluous luxury for the people of this collectivist and land-focused community.
From an early age, Arik’s parents also instilled in him the import of strength and military might. For his bar mitzvah, Samuil gave his son an ornate dagger, an unusual gift, to say the least, but one with an obvious message.11 The new Jews who had been born and who had come of age in the Yishuv spoke Hebrew, were physically strong, and were intent on taking their fates back into their own calloused hands. That was Arik’s world.
The raid on Qibya was the embodiment of that worldview. Sharon created Unit 101, led the raid on Qibya, and never apologized for it. “The orders were clear. Qibya was to be a lesson,” he wrote in his memoir many years later. “I was to inflict as many casualties as I could on the Arab home guard.”12 Sharon was a devout believer in the effectiveness—and legitimacy—of brute force when necessary.
Like the state to which he devoted his life, Sharon seemed to lack a coherent, consistent policy, and at times appeared internally contradictory. In his mind, however, his principles never varied: Israel’s survival depended on being both powerful and smart. Survival would require very different policies in different periods. Sometimes it would demand taking the fight to the enemy, wherever it might be; at other times, it would mean retrenching and withdrawing from territory Israel once held. Sharon did both, and more. Decades later, a government commission would censure Sharon for allowing Lebanese Christians to slaughter Muslims in the Lebanon War of 1982. But years after he was censured, Sharon was elected prime minister, and in 2005, he single-handedly initiated and masterminded Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza.
AFTER QIBYA, CONDEMNATIONS POURED in from across the globe, including from the American Jewish community.13 But Ben-Gurion was unmoved. When the prime minister called Sharon in to discuss the details of the notorious night, Sharon recalled Ben-Gurion’s reaction: “It doesn’t make any real difference what will be said about Qibya around the world. The important thing is how it will be looked at here in this region. This is going to give us the possibility of living here.”14 The IDF’s most prominent “activist,” Moshe Dayan, drew an additional conclusion from the vociferousness of the world’s reactions to Qibya, “What was allowed to Arabs—and to other peoples—would not be forgiven the Jews or Israel.”15
Dayan was a passionate advocate of the reprisals. He was appointed chief of staff of the IDF just months later, in December 1953, in what was a clear indication of the direction in which Israeli policy was heading. Dayan, who as the second child born on Israel’s first kibbutz was almost naturally emblematic of the new Jew, became a virtual icon when he lost an eye in 1941 while serving in a Palmach unit that was assisting a British invasion of French-controlled Syria. From then on, he wore his trademark eye patch.
Upon his appointment as the top general of Israel’s young army, Dayan set out to reorganize the IDF’s structure and rethink its strategies. Dayan ordered the most intelligent and best-educated men out of the headquarters and into fighting units. He required that officers stay in top physical condition and (in what is still a characteristic of the IDF) personally lead their men into battle. After the painful losses of the War of Independence and recognizing that the conflict with Israel’s neighbors was not nearly over, Dayan was determined to make the cost of killing Israelis prohibitive. He was determined to transform the Israel Defense Forces into the most fearsome military in the Middle East.
AS THE ISRAELIS SHIFTED their strategy, though, so, too did their enemies. The Arab infiltrations morphed from attacks by individual infiltrators to incursions by armed and well-trained squads of fedayeen who were supported and equipped by their host governments, particularly the Egyptian military.
One of the kibbutzim that was the target of repeated such incursions was Nachal Oz, on the Gaza border. On April 29, 1956, twenty-one-year-old Roi Rotberg was patrolling the fields of Nachal Oz, where he lived, on horseback. Accustomed to seeing Gazans illegally picking the kibbutz’s fields, when Rotberg saw a group of Arabs in the fields, he rode toward them to get them to leave. But it was a trap, and as Rotberg approached the “farmers,” a group of fedayeen suddenly appeared, shot and killed Rotberg, then dragged his body into Gaza, where it was horrifically mutilated.
Coincidentally, Dayan had met Rotberg a few days earlier. He attended the funeral and delivered a brief eulogy (merely 238 words in total) that became Dayan’s—and then, many Israelis’—classic statement about the inevitability of a long and costly conflict between Israel and its neighbors. Dayan reminded his listeners that there was nothing surprising about Arab resentment and violence. “Let us not hurl blame at the murderers,” he said. “Why should we complain of their hatred for us? Eight years have they sat in the refugee camps of Gaza, and seen, with their own eyes, how we have made a homeland of the soil and the villages where they and their forebears once dwelt.”16
Yet if mere Israeli survival was going to evoke Arab anger, Dayan then warned both his listeners and his entire newborn nation, Israelis had better be prepared to live by the sword. In language filled with biblical imagery, as if to remind his listeners that the battle to stay in the land was not new but was a story that had begun thousands of years earlier, Dayan continued, “We mustn’t flinch from the hatred that accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs, who live around us and are waiting for the moment when their hands may claim our blood. We mustn’t avert our eyes, lest our hands be weakened. That is the decree of our generation. That is the choice of our lives—to be willing and armed, strong and unyielding, lest the sword be knocked from our fists, and our lives severed.”17
It was a worldview that would guide not only Dayan, but the country he was helping to found, for decades to come.
AS ISRAEL WAS ADJUSTING to the inevitability of a long conflict, Egypt was undergoing a dramatic political transformation. In 1952, the Free Officers Movement, spearheaded by Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, staged a coup and ousted Egypt’s then monarch, King Farouk. Determined to rid Egypt of the last vestiges of colonialism, which Nasser believed had strangled the Arab world and prevented it from achieving its real potential, the new Egyptian leader was determined to usher in a new era for the Arab world, with himself at the helm.
Israel played a unique role in Nasser’s worldview and plan. In one sense, Nasser saw Israel and the Israelis as the region’s latest manifestation of colonialism. At the same time, though, Israel served a positive purpose, for it was the enemy around whose destruction the entire Arab world could unite. “Arab unity,” Nasser exhorted, was the “prerequisite to successful revenge.”18
The Arab world had sought that revenge, the “second round” that would destroy the Jewish state, from the moment it lost the War of Independence. Azmi Nashashibi, a senior Jordanian official, declared as early as April 1949 that “the war in Palestine will be renewed, sooner or later.” Arab leaders told Kenneth Bilby, an American journalist, that even if the struggle lasted for a hundred years, “the day of vengeance would come.”19 Nasser’s call for Arab unity and vengeance against the Jews thus fell on receptive ears. By 1956, Ben-Gurion was warning the Israeli public that war was drawing ever nearer: in a speech in April of that year, he hinted that Israel was about to be tested even more fiercely than it had been in 1948.
One key element of Nasser’s planned Arab renaissance was the construction of the Aswan High Dam on the Nile. To finance the extraordinarily ambitious project, which he hoped would restore Egypt’s glory, Nasser borrowed enormous sums from the Americans and the British. Yet Nasser was also well aware of the Cold War tensions between the Americans and the Soviets, and he cunningly played them off each other. Even as he was receiving financial support from the West, Nasser appealed to the Soviets for increased funding for the dam, and—in what the West saw as a conscious act of belligerence—he chose to recognize Communist China.
Egypt also began acquiring copious quantities of armaments, building an arsenal of the sort that it had never previously possessed. In August 1955, the Egyptians signed an arms deal of unprecedented scope with Czechoslovakia, which was essentially doing the bidding of the USSR. (The sale of arms to Egypt was painfully ironic given that in the War of Independence, Israeli soldiers had used arms from Czechoslovakia.) By enabling the Egyptians to purchase $320 million of Czech arms, which included tanks, bombers, and fighter planes, the Soviets had created a new military Goliath in the Middle East and had altered the region’s balance of power.
In retaliation for the arms deal and in response to recognition of China, the United States announced that it would no longer provide the Egyptians with support for the Aswan Dam, and the British soon followed suit. The Americans and British, though, had unwittingly played into Nasser’s hands, precisely as he had hoped. On July 26, 1956, Nasser addressed an enormous crowd in Alexandria and told the Americans to “go choke on your fury.”20 Then he played his trump card and announced that Egypt was nationalizing the Suez Canal (see Map 8), the revenues from which he would use to finance the construction of the Aswan Dam. Instantaneously, Nasser was the hero of the Arab world.
British prime minister Anthony Eden was infuriated. British ships used the waterway (which had opened in 1869) daily. Having the canal under Nasser’s control threatened critical interests of both France and England. British and French stockholders of the Suez Canal Company were also enraged at the “theft” of their asset. If Nasser had been hoping to dent the prestige of the colonialist power that had previously held Egypt, he had succeeded perfectly.
As summer progressed, Nasser’s confrontational stance continued, and his ambitions moved from the diplomatic—seizing the Suez Canal—to the militaristic. Israelis listened, and with concern. Nasser’s arms acquisitions meant that Egypt was now a formidable threat, and Israel’s security was very much in danger. The French, too, were growing alarmed. A new independence movement was gaining steam in Algeria, and the French worried that the Egyptians were going to use their increasing momentum in the Arab world to support it. Advanced Czech weapons in the hands of the Algerian “separatists” could spell disaster for the French.
As British and French concern over Nasser’s muscle flexing deepened, Israeli leaders were growing increasingly worried. Many doubted that Israel would be able to survive this new boost in Egyptian power. Nasser made no attempt to hide the reason for his acquiring the weaponry; the new Soviet weapons could quite possibly enable him to destroy the Jewish state.
With the Holocaust still fresh in Israelis’ minds, Israel was not about to take Egypt’s threats lightly. Tens of thousands of Israelis volunteered to dig trenches. People donated scarce money and treasured jewelry to a weapons fund.* Schoolchildren gave their lunch money to the cause.
Yet Israel’s international standing had changed dramatically since 1948. Now, after less than a decade, the French and the British (who, not long before, had prohibited Jewish immigration and hanged members of the Jewish underground) saw in Israel a potential military partner. Israeli prime minister Moshe Sharett, who had become prime minister when Ben-Gurion stepped down (Ben-Gurion became prime minister once again a few years later), visited Paris on October 25, 1955, as part of a series of Israeli-French meetings designed to solidify relations between the two nations. “I’ve always been a friend of Israel,” French prime minister Edgar Faure assured Sharett, “but now it is not a question of friendship. It is for reasons of political realism that France is called upon to help you.”21
A year later, in October 1956, the three countries came to a secret agreement known as the Protocols of Sèvres. According to the agreement, Israel was to launch a massive attack against Nasser’s forces and to try to reach the Suez Canal within a day. Then the French and British would call on both countries to cease hostilities and demand that Egypt open the canal to international shipping. Israel would be asked to withdraw its forces to a line several miles east of the canal, but the Protocols specifically stipulated that it was understood that Israel would not be obligated to acquiesce—the demand would be for public appearance only.
Though Israel would be the country to put boots on the ground, it had much to gain from the agreement. France’s partnership communicated a sense that the small state was no longer alone, not a mere pawn on the international chessboard. Israel was becoming a player. As part of the agreement, Israel would get air cover from the British and French in its campaign to eliminate Egypt as a threat, and the two European countries would provide international support as well. Furthermore, France provided Israel with arms, which began to arrive in early October.
Shimon Peres, then director-general of the Ministry of Defense, who had been instrumental in negotiating the deal, went to the Haifa port to witness the armaments’ clandestine arrival. He took with him Natan Alterman, who had written “The Silver Platter” years earlier. So moved was Alterman by what he was witnessing that he wrote a poem, “It Will One Day Be Told”22: “I dreamed last night of steel, much steel, new steel,” he wrote, and then described the stevedore, “the bearer of laden canisters, ringing on iron chains.” This was no ordinary stevedore, though, Alterman wrote, for “with the first touch of the land he becomes the expression of the power of the Jews.”
It was a dramatic transformation in Alterman’s tone. No longer was he writing about the “state-in-waiting”; now Alterman was writing about “the power of the Jews.”
Jewish power came not a moment too soon. Nasser began to send Egyptian troops into the Gaza Strip to support the fedayeen. Shimon Peres later recalled, “There was no doubt in Israel’s mind . . . that Nasser was about to invade at any moment.’”23
ON OCTOBER 29, 1956, JUST as Israel was preparing to launch the war that would become known as the Sinai Campaign, tragedy struck the home front. Arab Israelis had then been living under military rule for eight years, and levels of distrust still ran high. In preparation for the coming battle with Egypt, Israel issued a five P.M. curfew on all the Arab villages in the “Little Triangle” that abutted the Jordanian border, including a village by the name of Kafr Kassem.
News of the curfew was publicized just minutes shy of five o’clock, and most of the laborers did not receive the notice in time. Most workers who encountered army units after the curfew were allowed to pass without incident. But when one group of fifty laborers from Kafr Kassem, returning home after work beyond the five P.M. newly imposed curfew, encountered an IDF patrol, the Israeli soldiers shot and killed forty-seven people from the town—including many women and children. It was the largest massacre of Arabs since the founding of the state.
Though several officers were arrested and later convicted, all were released from jail shortly thereafter. Ben-Gurion called the incident a “dreadful atrocity,”24 and in years to come, numerous Israeli officials expressed profound remorse for the massacre. In October 2006, Israel’s minister of education, Yuli Tamir, instructed Israeli schools to commemorate the Kafr Kassem massacre and to reflect upon the need to disobey patently immoral orders. In December 2007, Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, attended a reception in Kafr Kassem during the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha, and asked for the community’s forgiveness. “A terrible event happened here in the past, and we are deeply sorry for it,” he said. In October 2014, Reuven Rivlin, Israel’s tenth president, became the first to attend the annual memorial ceremony at Kafr Kassem.
Yet the incident had long-term legal implications for Israeli society. The trial was the first time that the Israeli judiciary discussed whether and when Israeli security personnel were obliged to disobey even a direct order that was manifestly illegal. Judge Benjamin Halevy (who heard the case as a sole judge) wrote that “the distinguishing mark of a manifestly illegal order is that above such an order should fly, like a black flag, a warning saying: ‘Prohibited!’” In years to come, the phrase “a manifestly illegal order,” a direct quote from Halevy’s decision, would become ubiquitous in Israeli discussions of the morality of the conduct of war.
AT FIVE P.M. ON OCTOBER 29 (the very same hour as the curfew in Kfar Kassem), Israeli troops moved into the Sinai. Israel swiftly cut all communication between the Egyptian air force in the Sinai and the main bases of the Egyptian army. Soon thereafter, Israeli paratroopers, under the command of Ariel Sharon, made their way quietly toward the Mitla pass in Sinai, a crucial passageway on the road to the Suez Canal. By October 30, the paratroopers had made it across the expansive desert, had overtaken three Egyptian military bases with ease, and were within fifty kilometers of the canal.
On October 30, the British government issued the secretly planned public ultimatum to both Israel and Egypt, demanding that they withdraw their forces from the canal. The British were essentially ordering the Egyptians to relinquish their control of the canal that they had nationalized. As planned, the Israelis did not respond to the ultimatum. Egypt rejected it out of hand. The next day, British and French fighter planes bombed Egyptian airfields, but no British or French troops landed in the region for six days. Israel fought the Egyptians on its own.
Eventually, worried about the possibility of the contained conflict morphing into a major regional conflagration, the Americans demanded that the British, French, and Israelis remove their forces from the area. The Soviets made the same demand. The Russians had just crushed the Hungarian Revolution and had killed thousands of Hungarians in the process, so they had little moral authority to bring to the table. Still, the confluence of American and Soviet interests here meant that Israel, France, and Britain had to back down.
Israel, though, was not anxious to remove its forces from the Sinai, in large measure because it was loath to allow Gaza to become a launching pad for attacks once again. Ultimately, the Americans recognized that Israel was insistent that it receive guarantees of safety before it pulled out. So the United States promised that if Israel agreed to a “complete and prompt withdrawal” from all the territory it had occupied in the brief war, the Americans would guarantee Israel’s “right of passage” through the Straits of Tiran (narrow sea passages between the Sinai and Arabian peninsula). (See Map 8.) They would also guarantee Israel’s “freedom to act to defend its rights” in the future.
It would not be long before the United States would have to make good on its promise.
On the British side, Prime Minister Eden systematically sought to destroy any trace of the agreement so that the United Kingdom could deny its role in the affair. It did him no good, though. Both Israel and France had archived copies, and Eden resigned under massive political pressure.
In all, the war lasted from October 29 through November 7. Israel lost 231 soldiers with another 900 soldiers wounded. Egyptian losses are estimated at between 1,500 and 3,000, with about 5,000 wounded.
For a short war, the Sinai Campaign had yielded profoundly important results. Israel had secured its right of passage in the Straits of Tiran and had won international guarantees from countries that not long before had doubted its ability to survive. For its citizens, it had established a sense of security and self-confidence after eight years of living under constant infiltration. As Michael Oren put it, the Sinai Campaign had been “Israel’s second War of Independence.”25 The IDF, which astounded the world with its professionalism, had captured the Sinai Peninsula in a hundred hours, and as a result, Israel gained a decade of quiet. The Middle East had a new military power.
IN THE AFTERMATH of the war, it was increasingly obvious to David Ben-Gurion that Israel’s relationship with the United States was becoming much more complex than many had anticipated or hoped. He had good reason for concern. When the United Nations had been discussing Israel’s proposed borders prior to partition, the U.S. State Department encouraged the UN to redraw the borders and give more land to the Arabs. In 1953, John Foster Dulles, secretary of state at the time, suggested a “repatriation of specific numbers of Arab refugees to ‘the area presently controlledby Israel.’” The words presently controlled suggested to some Israelis that Dulles did not believe Israel would long survive. After Egypt signed the arms deal with the Czechs, the United States refused to sell Israel weaponry to restore the balance of power (which is what sent Israel to the French looking for arms). Israel pleaded with the Americans, but to no avail. In fact, “President Eisenhower remarked to French Prime Minister Guy Mollet that there was no point in selling arms to Israel inasmuch as 1,700,000 Jews could not possibly defend themselves against 40 million Arabs.”26(See Map 7.)
After the Sinai Campaign, the United States (along with the USSR) led the charge at the United Nations in denouncing Britain, France, and Israel for initiating the war. The American denunciation may have been a slap on the wrist, but Israel chose to make its case nonetheless and sent Foreign Minister Golda Meir to the United Nations. Meir, who was renowned for her wit, noted with bitter irony that a
comfortable division has been made. The Arab states unilaterally enjoy the “rights of war” [while] Israel has the unilateral responsibility of keeping the peace. But belligerency is not a one way street. Is it then surprising if a people laboring under this monstrous distinction should finally become restive and at last seek a way of rescuing its life from the perils of the regulated war that is conducted against it from all sides?27
BY THE TIME BEN-GURION sent Golda Meir to the United Nations to defend Israel, she had already more than made her mark on the Jewish state. Born Golda Mabovitch (later Meyerson, her husband’s last name) in 1898 in Kiev, she soon thereafter moved with her staunchly Zionist family to Pinsk. When Meir’s sister (who, upon hearing of Herzl’s death, wore black for two full years) invited like-minded peers to Zionist meetings at her house, Golda would perch herself atop the family’s coal stove to catch as many snippets of the conversations as she could. The family moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1906, when she was eight years old.
It was at a parlor meeting there, discussing the kibbutz movement and the philosophy of A. D. Gordon, that Meir met her future husband, Morris, with whom she would have a tumultuous and largely loveless marriage. Soon thereafter, they decided to move to Palestine:
I think it was while we were marching through town [in a parade] that I realized I can no longer postpone a final decision about Palestine. . . . Palestine, I felt, not parades in Milwaukee, was the only real, meaningful answer to Petlyura’s murderous mobs. The Jews must have a land of their own again—and I must help build it, not by making speeches or raising funds, but by living and working there.28
She and Morris departed the United States in 1922. By 1956, she had climbed the ladder of Mapai party leadership, and David Ben-Gurion appointed her foreign minister. One of her first steps was to Hebrarcize her name, like many Zionist leaders who had come before her; she changed it from Meyerson to Meir.
Shortly after the Sinai Campaign, she pulled out Altneuland and read to the staff of the Foreign Ministry a passage from Herzl’s classic novel:
There is still one question arising out of the disaster of the nations which remains unsolved to this day, and whose profound tragedy only a Jew can comprehend. This is the African question. Just call to mind all those terrible episodes of the slave trade, of human beings who merely because they were black, were stolen like cattle, taken prisoner, captured and sold. Their children grew up in strange lands, the objects of contempt and hostility because their complexions were different. I am not ashamed to say, though I may expose myself to ridicule in saying so, that once I have witnessed the redemption of the Jews, my own people, I wish also to assist in the redemption of the Africans.29
When she finished reading from Altneuland, Meir told the members of her staff that it was their task to ensure the fulfillment of Herzl’s vision in this vein. With the beginning of the massive wave of African independence, Meir insisted that African nations and Israel had many shared experiences and struggles: “Like us, their freedom was won only after years of struggle. Like us, they had to fight for their statehood. And like us, nobody handed them their sovereignty on a silver platter.”30
Meir hoped that Israel would be able to provide technology, farming expertise, and most important, a model of a repressed people that had achieved a long-awaited national revival, to African countries that had histories very similar to Israel’s. She hoped that the Jewish story of rebirth and recovered sovereignty would speak not only to Jews, but to nations worldwide.
For a short while, Israel did manage to foster positive relationships with several African countries and used its expertise in agriculture, hydration, and other technologies to help them advance their own productivities. In the long term, Golda’s was a naive hope. The newly founded African countries would soon compose a bloc that would become one of Israel’s largest foes in the United Nations. Israel’s overtures had made no difference.
INTERNALLY, ISRAEL WAS LAYING the foundations of a world-class military. As Dayan had noted in his eulogy for Roi Rotberg, the conflict was not going to end anytime soon, and Israelis began to develop the kinds of deterrent military capabilities they would need both to survive and to provide safety for Israel’s citizens. But Israel had also established a culture of self-reflection, of judicial oversight over military conduct, and had articulated clear moral limits on military orders.
On the global front, the Jewish state had become a player in international intrigue and even war. It had demonstrated a commitment to helping other countries that could benefit from its expertise.
A fledging state now felt less tenuous, and Israelis could begin to think not only about survival, but also about the future. What they were about to discover, however, was that building that future would first require them to confront head-on one of the most painful periods in the Jewish people’s long history.