also stammering as he began. Moti advised us all not to be taken in by rumors and all kinds of sick stories that some people might be spreading around. The debriefing was over. We all went to lunch.
HERE I WANT TO ADD something special.
In the Sinai War of 1956, eleven years before the Six-Day War, a reserve battalion commander, Lt. Col. Pinhas Weinstein, was commanding one of the battalions that stormed into Gaza. Pini, a member of my kibbutz, Givat-Brenner, was formerly a Palmach officer. He was my father’s age, and a close friend of my mother’s. I knew Pini well and respected him.
Immediately after breaking through the Egyptian lines, Pini’s battalion captured many enemy soldiers. He called his commanders on the radio and asked them to send some men to take the captives so that his battalion could continue its advance.
The answer he received was, “We have no men available. Kill the prisoners.”
Without hesitation, Pini answered, “Sir, you can kiss my ass.”
Then he left part of his force to guard the prisoners, and continued until his objective was taken. But his blunt words were heard on the open communication channel, and high command had heard them, too.
After the war, Pini was called before a board of inquiry. The board was weighing a charge of disobedience in face of the enemy, or at least insolence to a commanding officer in the presence of soldiers. Pini answered the charges: “There are things,” he said, “that must be said loud and clear, so that every soldier understands.” The charges against him were dropped immediately.
THAT EVENING, AFTER the debriefing in the cinema, the air force celebrated at one more victory ball. Hatzor’s enlisted men’s dining room was cleared of all furniture, newly decorated, and brilliantly lit. Hatzor’s base commander, Col. Benny Peled, stood in the open gate and shook hands with everybody. He looked me up and down with a practiced eye and asked Ali in a harsh voice, “What kind of a wife are you? Where is his belt?”
“It’s not her fault,” I said. I hated belts in my trousers, and probably didn’t have one. After all, when did I ever wear a formal uniform? I was afraid I was going to be sent home to search for the belt.
Benny tapped my flat belly, still being a pedant.
“You don’t eat, either! Well,” he softened suddenly and said with a smile, “You can afford to go without a belt.” He pointed to his own considerable paunch, and only then did I realize that he was kidding.
Ali said, “I’ll take over.” This was fliers’ slang, and they both laughed like idiots. “In the future I’ll see to it that the boy is dressed properly.”
Somebody touched me on the elbow. I turned around. Ran Pecker stood there, his face grim. He beckoned to me to follow him. Of course, I knew this was coming.
I left Ali and Benny and followed Ran. He was sailing deep into the crowd, and I had to rush not to lose him. The hall was already full, dense, and noisy. The orchestra onstage was already tuning up, and the crowd began milling about like one big body full of humming, talking, and smiles, getting warmed up for the dancing and the singing. Ran parted them like an icebreaker, avoiding faces and hands reaching out to him. He directed himself backstage, knowing I would follow him. At last we stopped behind the stage, and he turned to face me. The decorations separated us from the hall. We were alone, surrounded by noise.
He pinned me with a hard hawk’s stare. “What was that supposed to be today, in the debriefing? Huh, Spector?”
“Listen, Ran, some pilots of yours—”
“Don’t mention names and don’t be an informer,” he barked at me. He was right. I shut up. “So you heard something. So people say shit. What makes you run in the street and shout it around? Couldn’t you come to me first and ask what really happened?” Again he was right. I began feeling like a puppy that had wet the rug. “Is this the way friends behave? After all I taught you, after all the times you came to my home?
“Now let me tell you what’s going to happen.” His talk was slow and staccato, like a judge pronouncing sentence. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re finished. This is the end of your air force career. And perhaps you shall have to leave Israel sometime soon.”
We were eye to eye.
“I’m going to finish you.” He turned away and was gone, and a moment later I heard his familiar, hoarse voice above all the others while he joined the singing crowd.
For a while I stood there backstage and thought my thoughts. His threats didn’t scare me; even if this was to be the end of my air force career, and it definitely could have been, nobody can expel me from my own country. But I agonized over the feeling that I hadn’t behaved correctly and had lost an old friend and a man I had respected. And so, only when I rejoined the crowd to search for Ali, did I realize that I never got an answer to what really happened to that prisoner near Jericho that night. To this very day, I don’t know.
THE VICTORY IN THE SIX-DAY WAR put us on a historical arc that hasn’t ended. Biblical Israel, the Land of Israel, opened before us. On Saturdays we went out in sandals to stroll over her hills and in her valleys. They all carried names we had drunk with our mother’s milk. We fell in love with the narrow streets of Old Jerusalem. The Old City bloomed anew out of its ancient history. For us, it was the first time we had seen that rich and mysterious world. The forbidden Wailing Wall stood close to the magnificent Muslim mosques of El-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock. We walked along the Via Dolorosa, from the Basilica of Agony at Gethsemane to Golgotha, where the Holy Sepulcher stands over Adam’s tomb. And then into the Jewish Quarter, deserted and destroyed since 1948, when the Jordanians expelled all the inhabitants and took them prisoner. Then up Mount Zion, to Dormition Abbey, which stands over King David’s tomb, and down into the three-thousand-year-old Shiloah Tunnel, which brought water from the Spring of Gihon to the City of David, to walk five hundred meters underground in freezing water and come out to the Pool. Then the bells began to toll from all the churches: St. James Cathedral, St. John the Baptist, Dominus Flevit, Ecce Homo Basilica, Mary’s Tomb, Mary Magdalene, the Church of the Flagellation, and then Jaffa Gate, from which one entered an Oriental, noisy, smelly, and colorful maze of ancient alleys.
Bible in hand, we plied the markets of the biblical cities of Nablus and Hebron. We peeled grapefruits under the red blossoms of the Regia trees of Jericho. We breathed the air of the summit on the peak of the mountain Joshua named Beit-El (the House of God), and marveled to see the coast of our country spread before us, beyond the low hills of the Sharon, kissing the great, azure expanse of the sea.
Everywhere around, the remains of war were evident. The roads of Sinai were full of the wrecks of burned- out convoys. In the northern territories—the Golan Heights, Judea, and Samaria—parts of vehicles and smashed cars were everywhere. Houses sported shell holes; farms were crushed and blackened.
My family had a special, private experience. We went to visit our family in Hulatta, to share the new feeling of freedom from the threat of the black mountains. First we climbed the Golan Heights, to look for souvenirs in the deserted Syrian strongholds. Then we drove together to Hamat-Gader, the hot springs of El-Hamma, on the southern corner of the heights. This had been one of the points of dispute, from which we had just driven the Syrians. We stood above the Kenyon, and Aronchik pointed to me the remnants of a steel bridge that rusted over the Yarmuk Valley. These were the ruins of a railway bridge, built at the beginning of the twentieth century, connecting Palestine with Trans-Jordan. The Palmach demolished the bridge on the night of June 16, 1946, “the night of the bridges,” together with ten other bridges. This was a protest against the British, who were preventing the few survivors of the Nazi Holocaust from entering what was soon to be Israel.
Aronchik shyly told me that he had commanded the Palmach squad that bombed that bridge. It was news to me, and I was very proud of him. I asked him, “How did you retreat after the explosion without being caught by the British guards?” The only way back was a narrow path on the side of the canyon. It surely had been blocked and guarded.
“We didn’t retreat,” he snapped. Aronchik was not the type to cling to stories of the past. “We crossed to the other side, walked all night in Jordan, and returned to Israel recrossing the Jordan River downstream.”
But of course, I thought admiringly. This was the Palmach, the “indirect approach.”
ALL AROUND THE CONQUERED territories hummed with Israelis. We all were full of immense optimism. In the street of an Arab township north of Jerusalem, a tank driver demonstrated to us, all smiles, how a black Mercedes sedan could be flattened and made the thickness of pita bread. When we stopped to pee at the side of a road, a corpse was lying among the weeds, raising clouds of flies. But the waiting Arabs were respectful and polite.
