Sublime

THE DESPERATE NEED FOR rearmament led to one of the most potentially catastrophic events of the war. On May 26, David Ben-Gurion had brought the Haganah out of “clandestine status” and declared in a simple one-page typewritten memo of twenty brief lines that it would now become the Israel Defense Forces, the official army of the new state of Israel

Weizmann continued to meet with MacDonald; Ben-Gurion said that it was “psychologically impossible” for him to do so. “In my view, he is like a member of Hitler’s gang, and our friends need to know that no Jew can meet with him.”

But it is no irony at all. It is the result of deliberate calculations made by Palestinian leaders who understand how easy it is to provoke democracies into overreaction by murdering their most vulnerable civilians.

After the end of the War of Independence, Shtrikman changed his family name to Sharon and started to work on his PhD dissertation at the faculty of agriculture in Rehovot. Thereafter, he joined the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, was promoted to the rank of professor, and gained a worldwide reputation based on his research on lectins and carbohydrat

Force 17, Yasir Arafat’s personal bodyguard

The Haganah commanders and the leaders of the Jewish Agency decided that British destroyers should be damaged to prevent similar interceptions in the future. Sharon was asked to prepare his “Sharks.” “Sharks” were loaded onto a fishing boat and an attack was planned for the following night in

In other words, Israel was prepared to risk the lives of its own civilians in order to spare the lives of Palestinian civilians, including the wife of a major terrorist.

My company was part of Brigade 401, in the Sinai. It was one of two armored forces that were rotated every three months into action on the front line. In a stroke of good fortune, the brigade commander was Dovik Tamari, Avraham Arnan’s first successor as commander of the sayeret. While we awaited our forward deployment, due in September, he include