Loud and Clear

They looked nice and were exotic in their “Franji” suits or abayas, kaffiyehs, and tobacco-stained mustaches. They welcomed us and entertained us with miniature cups of cardamomed, extra-sweet coffee. Their women, all wrapped up, peered at us sideways, and already had begun bargaining with our women. Some Hebrew words began to be heard with a heavy Arabic accent. The defeated Arab countries could convene and vow their three insulting noes. So what? We were already seeing with our own eyes the truth—or what we hoped was the truth. We saw a bridge of peace beginning to be built between Jews and Arabs. It was happening before our eyes, materially.

IT TOOK US A LONG TIME to realize the fateful meaning of the path we had unintentionally chosen. Suddenly we became masters over vast areas where an alien nation lived. Immediately after the war, the government of Israel declared that we would hold the conquered areas just as a guarantee, and that all would be returned to their owners when they had made peace with us. The offended Arab states, on the other hand, reacted with the three noes of the Khartoum Conference: no to recognition of Israel, no to negotiations, no to peace. Just no, no, and no.

So days passed and turned into months and years, and our initial intention to hand the conquered areas back dissolved. Inside us, feelings of ownership began to grow. After all, the freed areas were part of the Land of Israel, the cradle of our nation. At the same time, the Palestinian people in the conquered areas lost their former Arab masters and were left hanging. So while we fantasized about “enlightened occupation” and boasted of improvements we brought to the region, a new nationalism, Palestinian, began to crystallize and be directed against us Israeli Jews, the occupiers. Both nations, unable to compromise in any way on their one land, were struggling more and more with each other like two people trying to sit in the same chair.

But my story has only gotten to July 1967. At this time, only very few, extremely visionary people in the Israeli community could begin seeing the coming disaster. Their warnings and demands that we leave the conquered areas as soon as possible sounded ridiculous. We didn’t understand the mortal threat to the Jewish state that was building. We saw such people as eccentrics, fools—or traitors.

Chapter 10 Toledano

The Twenty-three of the Boat. Spring 1941, Nazi forces built up in the West African desert. A Vichy French regime was established in Syria and Lebanon. Most Arabs leaned to Hitler and Mussolini. A German takeover of the Middle East meant Jewish annihilation, and the end of any hope of a revival of the nation.

The British needed troops for special operations. Twenty-three commandos were sent to demolish oil refineries at Tripoli, Lebanon, a vital source of fuel for Vichy and the Luftwaffe there. On May 18, 1941, the boat Sea Lion, under the command of Zvi Spector, went to sea.

The boat never arrived. The crew vanished without a trace. Their fate remains unknown.

IN 1945 I WAS TOLD HOW my father had died. The story was told to me in rather a surprising way. At that time I was living in a kibbutz called Alonim, in the Izreel Valley. Samuel and Rebecca Admon were friends of my mother’s, and they agreed to take her little boy. One day my Uncle Israel Spector, my father’s elder brother, came to visit me. It was spring and everything was green. We walked together in the fields near the kibbutz and took pictures—Israel was a professional photographer and had a Leica camera, with a tripod. Once wound up, we could get in the picture while the timer buzzed.

Israel told me that he, too, was a Palmach fighter—in my opinion this was obvious—and then he disclosed a military secret to me. This was the way he located a machine gun nest: the enemy had hidden a Bren gun somewhere in an Arab village near Jerusalem, and fired it only at night. And this is how my Uncle Israel located it: before evening he stood his Leica on its tripod and photographed the village. After night came, he opened the shutter (he demonstrated to me how this was done) and waited. As usual, the enemy began shooting their Bren gun under the cover of darkness, at the nearby Jewish neighborhood. The muzzle flashes would burn a light dot on Israel’s film.

“On the same evening,” Israel told me, “after I developed the film, I knew which window they were shooting from!”

I was full of admiration, and we both continued discussing operational matters. And then, perhaps unintentionally, Israel told me that his brother Zvi had been lost at sea. Until that moment all I knew from my mother and my foster parents was that my daddy “was traveling far away.”

“So my father is dead?” I asked him excitedly.

He confirmed it.

When I updated my mother, all hell broke loose. Israel immediately was put on the banned list, and I was warned not to believe anything I was told by anybody. “The Twenty-three are missing!” she shouted, “and who says they are dead? They are still looking for them!”

“Yes, yes,” I nodded obediently. So I joined the legion of semi-orphans who search for their fathers for the rest of their lives.

I RECEIVED FACTUAL, real information about the man who was lost to me from Dvorah. She gave me a book, A Hidden Shield, to read. I read that Zvi was born in Jerusalem on May 18, 1915, finished the Hebrew Secondary School with honors, and was one of the founders of the local Boy Scout community, and its leader for years. “He was outstanding in his diverse talents, his sterling character, and his rich spirit. His was one of the first group of brave youngsters who reconnoitered on foot the whole circumference of the Dead Sea.”

Yitzhak Sade had secondhand knowledge of this, or perhaps of another, not less daring trip. “At the time of the Arab Revolt, 1936–1938, when ordinary people thought themselves courageous if they took the bus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Zvi decided with a few friends to go by camel through the Judean Desert all the way to Petra, in the mountains of Trans-Jordan. They wanted to know firsthand what was going on out there in the desert. But when they arrived at Petra, they ran into some agitators. It was clear that two or three Jewish boys in a sea of sand were easy prey for everyone. Then Zvi organized a show of marksmanship, using the Mauser pistol he carried with him. His shooting was so good that it became clear that hunting such boys might end badly for the hunters. So the expedition returned unscathed.”

After finishing high school, Zvi went to England, hoping to continue his education. Short of money, he had to cut his studies short and return to Israel. Back home, Zvi devoted himself to security issues. During the Arab Revolt of 1936 (for emotional reasons, the Jews gave it a neutral name: “the Events”) he established with his friends Israel Ben Yehuda (“Abdu”) and Yossi Harel a small unit of volunteers and called it “the Jerusalem Wanderers.” They were the first to go “beyond the fence,” mounting offensive operations against the Arab rioters, rather than just passively guarding. Then the older and more experienced Yitzhak Sade came and took command of this squad of wild kids. Sade was a veteran fighter; he had headed armed groups in the Russian Revolution and then led working groups in Palestine. He thought big, and turned the small units he gathered into unified field platoons. This was the first budding of an organized Jewish force, the predecessor of the Palmach.

In the summer of 1939 the “Mossad for the Second Channel of Immigration” (the organizers of illegal immigration to Palestine) decided that an emergency effort was needed to rescue the Jews of northern Europe. The Jews there were already in real danger. Growing numbers were being sent to concentration camps. Agents were sent to Europe and bought a small, old ship named Dora. Zvi was sent to Holland to command this immigration operation.

He met the ship and its foreign crew in Amsterdam Harbor. It looked unseaworthy, and the snobby Dutch Jews, after they saw the Dora, refused to board. Some even threatened to call the police, to prevent it from sailing. He wasn’t deterred; after a lot of discussion and some arm wrestling, the decrepit