Many centuries ago the children of Israel followed Moshe (Moses¹) through the Sinai Desert to the Promised Land. Historians are not sure how many centuries ago that really was. They seem to like the number ‘thirty three’ which has a nice onomatopoeic ring to it: ‘thirty three centuries …’ – just like the sound of waves rolling the clams when they recede from the shores of the Red Sea. Historians, in general, prefer faraway times; distance in time gives them a lot of leeway to conjure creative ideas which are all but impossible to dispute because the falsifying evidence or lack of it thereof is buried very deep in the sands of time. Truth be told, we cannot expect the historians to sift entire deserts with the little strainers that are all they can afford on their limited budgets. Fortunately when it came to Moses historians did not have to dig – the pyramids stand right there, towering hundreds of feet above the sand. Clearly someone had to put them there and who could have done the job better than the ancient Israelites? Can there be any lingering doubt about the credibility of the story if both the Bible and Francis Lloyd Weber concur? Still it is hard to imagine Moshe treading through the desert with everyone plodding along behind him, bitching and moaning about the heat and the flies: ‘Moshe, are we there yet?’ ‘Not yet, my children.’ ‘How much longer?’ ‘Forty years…’

Such obedience over such a long period of time is highly unlikely. Doubts are not welcome when one is trying to setup a new faith. A new religion has to be marketable and appealing to the masses. True or false, the children of Israel wanted their descendants to continue telling their story over the generations. A common way for a people to fortify an event against historical doubt is to commemorate it with a holiday. A holiday is reason enough for a story to become immortal tradition regardless of the facts. The followers of Moshe assumed the roles of founders of a nation and set aside a whole week of festivities which they called ‘Passover.’ Passover does not come for free. You have to eat ‘Matzah’ which is Nahn in its petrified form. The secret of Petrifying Nahn on a one-day’s notice was invented by one of Moshe’s less known lieutenants called Manishevitz (ancient Pig-Latin for ‘Matzah’) whose descendants continue its distribution to this day in the Kosher food section at the Molly Stone deli in Palo Alto. The rational for petrifying Nahn was to stimulate the children of future generations to ask ‘why are we eating this crappy bread?’ This would be the queue for the parents of these children to recite the story of the Exodus from Egypt, the consequent hasty bread making the ensued and the long march through the desert:

- Why did we have to leave so quickly, Dad? Why the Expedited Exodus?

- Son, you mean ‘Expedited Exit’.

- What’s the difference?

- ‘Expedited Exit’ is a nice alliteration.

- What’s alliteration?

- It is a rhetorical device, my son, which makes a phrase memorable by repeating the first sound, consonant or vowel.

- So what’s wrong with ‘Expedited Exodus’?

- ‘Exodus’ means ‘Expedited Exit’ therefore ‘Expedited Exodus’ implies ‘Expedited Expedited Exit’.

- Isn’t that a stronger alliteration?

- No, my son, it is an ‘illiteration’

- ?

- …an illiterate person’s alliteration.

- If they had more time we wouldn’t need alliteration.

- The lord works in mysterious ways my son.

- Your soup is getting cold dear…

The child is right of course (kids often are) – it would have been better if Moshe had better planned the trip back to the Promised Land and spared the people having to eat bad food rations for forty years, supplementing their diet with migrating quails stuffed with fried locusts. All Moshe had to do was use the same travel maps that Jacob used four hundred years earlier when he took his children for the first recorded tour of Egypt – minus the pyramids of course. The maps were available in the book of ‘Genesis’ which was already in print when Moshe was drafting ‘Exodus’.

Is this a stretch? Not if you realize the story of Exodus is a fairy tale which symbolizes the truths it wants to conve y. This fairy tale is about a people in search of identity and their faith being put to the test. The Sinai test would repeat itself with surprising resemblance. Four generations would live through this repetition. These are personal anecdotes from their journey.

***

History began its repetitions on a small scale in November 1948. It was during the final phases of Israel’s war of independence that units of the ‘Negev’ Brigade led by ‘Shu-alei Shimshon’ (Samson’s Foxes²) reconnaissance units captured ‘El-Arish’ half way between the would-be international border and the Suez Canal. No s ooner had they captured the town, it became quite clear that there was nothing to do there so they drove back home.

 

History decided to try again in October 1956. This time it was a show on a much grander scale along with the British and the French, who felt a little better about themselves and decided that it was time to try a new colonial escapade. You have to stop and wonder how the French kept spoiling for fights. During WWII they either ran or hid a performance which was followed by their recent beating at Dienbienphu. As for the British they were forced to relinquish control of half the planet, licking their wounds. God only knows where they got the notion that they were ready to re-colonize it especially at a time when colonialism was no longer ‘in’. Both nations had to use a better excuse in order to appear politically correct so they s aid they only wanted the Suez Canal back. To be on the safe side they asked Israel to help. On October 29 1956 the Israeli Defense Forces, commanded by another Moshe (Dayan) fought their way to the mountain passes twenty five miles east of the canal, destroying the ‘Fedayeen’ (Suicide Fighters) bases which had been terrorizing southern Israel since 1950. The ruckus from the Middle East annoyed Eisenhower who had just been elected for a second term without his knowledge as he was recovering from a heart attack. Eisenhower had had enough of Charles de Gaulle’s stressful tantrums twelve years earlier during the liberation of Paris. The last thing Eisenhower needed was to let the British and the French stir up the Middle East now the Russians had the H-Bomb so he shooed everyone out of Sinai. In case you are wondering what the French did – they went to pick on someone their own size and started a war in Algeria. This would keep them busy for another eight years. Years later they would have another power trip which would drive them to nuke Mururoa to smithereens. The British, on the other hand, would be fine fighting only worthy wars. They would successfully test their strength in the Falkland Islands, prove their worth in Desert Storm and find themselves as the only true coalition ally in Desert Shield and the occupation of the oil fields, which is where you can find them to this very day. Righteous as they may seem, the British reserved one last laugh for Israel.

 

As for Israel, you have to pick your fights when you are small, so Moshe had to pack up and lead the troops back home in a hurry even though what happened was not his fault – ‘they started it’. On the up side, a lot of the guys came back with bullet holes in their condoms and started a baby boom – which was my generation. While we did not know it a t the time (babies don’t know much about anything) we would have a very different set of tests cut out for us. We would be on the forefront of the battle for peace slowly but surely making our way out of Sinai.

 

Israel had to go to Sinai one more time. The Egyptian president Nasser re-imposed a blockade on the Straights of Tiran, removed the UN troops from Sinai and the Gaza strip, and moved seven of his divisions into Sinai. Nasser also armed a Palestinian division under Ahmed Shukieri, who had one of the best anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli resumes in the Middle East. From where we stood as nine year old children, the caricatures of Jews withering at the tips of Arab bayonets as they were dumped into the sea were something to worry about. The French did not want to take sides but did not want to be left out either. As the romance with Israel was waning (after they gave us a nuclear reactor), the French needed a subtle way to side with the Arab world. De-Gaulle came up with the idea that ‘the country that would fire the first shot would lose the support of [his beloved] France.’ The British knew they would have the last laugh at Israel’s expense and kept quite. One way or another it seemed that the world was quite at ease with the idea that a Jewish state was held in an economic strangle-hold with Arab armies massing on its borders.

 

‘But teacher isn’t the blockade of the straights an act of war? Doesn’t strangulation count as shooting?’ I was in the forth grade. For four years I had been crossing the fine line between ‘great student’ and ‘nerd of the year’ back and forth. ‘Class, Yiftah just asked an excellent question…’ the teacher responded in wh at was the worst possible way to simply say ‘yes’. Teacher follies such as these, rather than personal character flaws, pushed kids like me over the nerd line. My nerdy stature was further aided by a pair of Clark Kent glasses which I wore since I was five. Granted, in those days they were not as socially devastating as they would be today, but they certainly did not help. The precariousness of my social status was stretched to the limit by two chipped front teeth which appeared as though they were perpetually growing no where. The truth is that my teeth were fully grown, somewhat unaligned, but fully grown never-the-less. It’s just that my good friend and classmate Shy-ke (nickname for Yee-sha-a-yahu, or Isaiah in English) voluntarily helped me with my orthodontics. Shyke inherited his motor skills from his father who was a watchmaker. Indeed, he was very gentle with a two-by-four and managed to knock off only a third of two of my front teeth. Stopping to examine his work, h e was somewhat taken aback by my exhibition of pain and anger. Boaz, another classmate, watched me munching pieces of my own teeth in my bloody mouth, decided then and there that he would devote his life to finding a more humane manner to straiten people’s teeth and became an orthodontist twenty years later. Things being as they may, the social climate of the times, and well balanced mutual benefits saved me from leading the life of a class outcast. A whole bunch of us Beny, Udi, Boaz, Roni, Shyke were friends since we were four. We accepted each other for what we were, ignoring each others warts and wrinkles. I kept teachers occupied with questions and ‘insights’ while the rest got away with not doing homework. We grew up in the same cradle – we were very close, bound by friendships that last to this day.

 

When the time came to help the adults prepare f or war, we chimed in, filling sandbags for hours on end. The days went by quickly, mornings at school, afternoons in the sandbags. Time slowed down significantly during the night. Those caricatures scared me, how could the grownups be so sure that everything would be all right? How did they know? When you worked the numbers there were so many more of them than there were of us. Our fathers were away from home with their units. All of Israel was mobilized. As nine year olds we were not fully cognizant of it, but seeing our fathers, uncles, older brothers all go to prove those caricatures wrong, taught us a lot about commitment.

 

After four scary days in a makeshift bomb shelter and it was over. A few weeks after the Six Day War, I was sitting with my uncle in my Grandfather’s living room. My uncle was the surgeon of one of the paratrooper battalions who fought in th e Gaza Strip and had seen his share of the other side of bloodshed. Out of the blue he turned to me an asked: ‘Suppose you are…’ ‘Uh-oh’ ‘… a battalion surgeon, and two wounded soldiers are brought to your field hospital. One of them is Israeli, the other Egyptian. The Egyptian’s wounds are life threatening, the Israeli’s are not. Who do you treat first?’ He sat there looking at me through my Clark Kent glasses. ‘The Egyptian’ I answered, more because I sensed a trick question than out of conviction. ‘Kol HaKavod’ (well done) he said, and went on to tell me how shocked a wounded Egyptian soldier was when my uncle lit a cigarette for him: ‘they are not treated well by their own officers’ he said. ‘You can only imagine what they were told to expect form us should they fall into our hands.’ He left me dangling so I went for the pretzels³.

 

The weeks after the war were a joy of ‘search and explode’. We roamed the fields where military units had camped, collecting live bullets and discarded mortar shell charges⁴. We would twist the bullets off the cartridges and collect the gunpowder in piles which we ignited. We would stand and watch as the powder burned with glorious ferocity. Someone had the brilliant idea to throw the empty shells into the fire so that the firing caps would explode. The magnesium of tracers was a pure joy to watch as it burnt. All this was exiting at first but the masses quickly became bored. ‘Let’s put a live bullet in the flame?’ Beny declared. ‘You can kill someone with that’ Ud i answered.

 

Beny was our uncalculated-risk taker. Udi was our Jiminy Cricket, too much so to our liking at times. True to his role, Udi went to sulk on the side. We allowed him the privilege of being angry with us, he was considered a ‘very good kid’ which was a valuable political asset when one fell into the wrong hands: ‘Leave him alone, he’s Udi’s friend’ was all it took for a threat to fizzle. Other than the fact that he was an enthusiastic contributor to his nasty neighbor’s lethal heart attack, Udi really was a model citizen and a role model from a very early age.

 

‘What if we cook the bullet behind those rocks?’ I asked, not wanting to let Beny’s good idea pass without exploring its mer its. ‘We’ll need a fuse’ Roni said. ‘Why don’t we layout a trail of gunpowder?’ Shyke suggested. We all scrambled behind a rock pile. We setup a small ring of explosives as if they were the sandbags of a tiny gun emplacement. We placed a 7.62 machine gun bullet with its firing cap against the inner side of the ring of explosives, the rim of the cartridge resting on its opposite side, the bullet tilted upward like a tiny missile. We traced a path of gunpowder from the pile of rocks to a safe distance, surveyed our work a few times and settled down for the countdown. We lit the gunpowder (of course we had matches, how else were we to light the cigarette butts we collected) and watched as the flame raced along the snake of gunpowder leaving a charred shadow in its path. The flame disappeared behind the rocks. A few seconds later we heard a popping sound, much weaker than we had expected. We bounded back to our lab to review what had gone wrong. The cartridge lo oked different from the hundreds of spent shells we had come across in our excavations. The rim which held the bullet to the cartridge was torn and bent outward like the petals of a rotting flower. ‘Without a chamber the pressure of the gasses ripped the cartridge’ I explained. ‘It will work only with real gun.’ We would have to wait another eight years.

 

***

 

I visited my grandparents the day before I enlisted to say goodbye, knowing that from now on I would be gone for weeks on end, and will not be able to see them as often as I used to. My grandfather was torn apart with worry. He was a man of superior intellect, one of the greatest critiques of Jewish literature in the twentieth century, a writer, a poet, head o f faculty, schooled in history, philosophy, art, religion and political science. He had well formed opinions of the world. The picture he painted was bleak. He signaled me to follow him into his library. The room’s walls were lined with thousands of books, stacked from the floors to the ceilings, in parts two rows deep, books in eight languages which he could read and write fluently. Two windows did their best to let in whatever sunlight penetrated towering pine and fir trees which towered over the house. Despite the windows’ best efforts the room had only enough light to make out his silhouette. My grandfather did not turn on the light when he entered so I left it off as well, sensing that he needed the shield of darkness. He walked towards the window at the far side of the room. From a bench laden with books, he picked up his Talit (prayer shawl), put on his Kipah and motioned me to come towards him and sit on what little space the bench offered. The cynicism in me was subdued by a spasm of maturity which over the years would become more frequent and slowly win the battle for my character. He put his hand on my head, opened the Sidur (prayer book) and blessed me with a safe journey where ever it would take me. When he was done, we both left the room without a word.

My grandfather had serious doubts about the prospects of a modern Zionist Jewish state. The social, political and ethical challenges as he perceived them with the phenomenal depth of his perception were irreconcilable. Defining himself as a skeptic, he no longer felt that he could practice Jewish faith in public. He had stopped praying in his synagogue many years back, but continued to do so in the privacy of his house. The educator he was, he preferred to work with God one-on-one. His prayer that day was an expression of love, fear, frustration and whatever little hope he dared put i nto it. It was the only way he could reconcile his pessimistic view of Israel’s predicament⁵, having to send his grandson to bear the brunt of what the foreboding future held, being utterly helpless to do anything about it. It was his way of saying ‘we need a Passover like miracle to prevent a train wreck, please God, perhaps this is the time to allow our people to find some peace.’ Though neither of us knew it at the time, God was listening; after all, my grandfather had his way with woman.

 

I joined the IDF⁶ two years after the Yom-Kippur War. By that time Israel had already pulled back its forces in Sinai to what was called the ‘A&rsq uo; line – East of the ‘Mitleh’ and ‘Gidi’ mountain passes. This was a step in a teetering peace process which by that time had been stymied. This stagnation lasted for three more years, and the tension in Sinai was building up again.

 

‘The tanks have to be ready to move out in fifteen minutes.’ We had just stepped off the buses which drove us back to our base in Sinai after a weekend back home. ‘Maintain radio silence and head for the staging areas.’ Talk about a bad way to start the week. As I climbed my tank the gunner turned to me ‘Lieutenant…’ I cut him short ‘Call me Yiftah.’ Which answered his question – this was not an exercise.

 

It was Sunday Septembe r 4^th 1978 – Menahem Begin, the Israeli Prime Minister was on his way to Camp David for face to face negotiations with Anwar El-Sadat the Egyptian president. News anchors all around the world explained to their moderately interested viewers that the peace negotiations which had started four years earlier were stymied. In their authoritative yet soothing voice the anchors continued to explain that this meeting was arranged as a last attempt to move the process forward. After deliberating with their ‘special guest and expert on middle eastern affairs’ the anchors concluded that should the talks fail, it was ‘likely’ that another war would break out in the Middle East. Some viewers probably continued to watch the late night talk shows, while the misguided among them preferred X-rated movies. Eventually the viewers went to bed leaving us to worry about what it really meant to have another war in the Middle East, more specifically in the Sinai desert.

 

Politicians and their military analysts prefer metaphors rather than the gory details of what it means to send people into battle. They much prefer to think of the ‘forces of evil’ confronting the ‘tip of the spear’ of the ‘righteous cause’. I did not much mind thinking in those terms myself when sitting at the Passover table. Right now, we were the ‘tip of the spear’ – that strategic asset that would pass through and secure the western entrance of the Gidi pass. Somewhere down the chain of command practicalities demanded that a leading division be picked, from which a leading regiment would be picked, continuing on to select a battalion, a company, a lead platoon and finally and most important of all – a specific tank and four crew members to fill the position of the tip of the spear. I don’t know what the planne rs were thinking it might as well have been something like:

 

Somebody, somebody has to you see,

So she picked four somebodies

‘Yossi’ and me⁷

 

Guided by their bogus memories of Dr. Seuss the planners knew they were looking for a crew with three Yossi’s (Yossi is a nickname for Joseph – the conversion it done at birth) and a ‘Me’. My crew was the only crew in the IDF with three Yossi’s so we would be the ‘tip&rsq uo;.

 

I thought of the guys from the neighborhood. Beny wasn’t that far away, probably less than thirty miles north of where I was, an infantry machine gunner. Roni was approximately the same distance to the south, an armored company commander facing the Mitleh pass. Udi was in the Jordan valley. Shyke was in the Golan Heights. ‘Lucky bastards those two’ I though to myself ‘they’ll probably watch this round from the sidelines.’ To even think about changing the order of the tip was a violation of the ‘cradle-to-grave’ camaraderie code that was engrained in us. We would stand up for each other in the broadest sense of the word. I knew that any one of them would have fought tooth and nail to take my place, and I would have refused. It was not blind obedience that made you honor the code, nor was it chivalry. It was the terribl e realization that as individuals we had to make sacrifices to a greater cause so that as a people we lived on. It is for that reason alone that my grandfather could only talk about North Dakota, he understood as we all did that there was no other choice; perhaps better decisions could have been made along the way – but at the present you played the cards you were dealt sharing the responsibility.

 

So there we were, three Yossi’s and me: driver, loader, gunner and commander. My driver was from Jerusalem. Years later he would become a bus driver there and I would ride with him from time to time. The loader was from Bnei-Brak – an ultra orthodox town north east of Tel Aviv. The gunner was from Beit-Shemesh, a town on the western slopes of the Judea hills, south west of Jerusalem, along the ‘old road‘to Tel Aviv. Having three crew members with the same name had its quirks. Quite often I would end up with three-of-a-kind whenever I asked for something: ’Yossi can you pass me a screw driver, please’. In general it was not an issue. A tank is such a complex machine, each crew member specializes in operating and maintaining specific sub-systems, so they all knew which one of them I was talking too based on the context. The thought of referring to them by their last names was alienating and out of the question.

 

Yossi the driver was of eastern European origin, which meant Polish origin but I didn’t want to rub it in. The parents of Yossi the gunner were from Morocco and he had the temper to go along. My parents were Israelis with roots going back to Russia, Poland and the United States. Yossi the loader was a son of God – I never asked him about his parents and he didn’t volunteer any infor mation. He was an ultra-orthodox Jew; his kind rarely serves in the military. He had shed his social beliefs but not his religion. He was incredibly naïve and obedient, applying higher rabbinical value scales to the behavioral codes expected of a soldier. He was closer to ‘blind obedience’ than any soldier I have ever known. He was older than we were, catching up with his civil duties after shedding his previous way of life. He had a wife and children which further polarized his being there with us, yet he never uttered a complaint or expressed a worry. You could only marvel at the strength he drew from his faith.

 

Yossi the gunner was aware of the power of faith in an opportunistic manner. He wore a ‘knitted’ Kipah (the little Jewish hat – as my children’s Taiwanese piano teacher would call it many years later) which bears significant differences to the ‘black’ Kipah that Yossi the loader wore. A knitted Kipah qualified him for the fringe benefits of a religious soldier without the burden of being a true believer. He would cut ceremonial corners left and right as the daily routine demanded. He would pray in his sleep to save himself the trouble of waking earlier for morning prayers. On the other hand, he would become the religious leader when the time came to check the wire marking the ‘Sabbath Zone’ as it saved him half an hour of maintenance work before the rest of the unit was discharged for the Sabbath. I liked him for his ‘hutzpah’, observing more out of respect and solidarity than out of belief in God. It was very much like playing poker on Yom-Kipur to pass the time while fasting. ‘Funny how far you can stretch Judaism without breaking it’ I thought to myself. Stretch the faith, shrink the land, make it work, we had no other choice.

 

There was not a whole lot to do in the staging areas but train, eat and deal with fear. For the most part one manages to push fear to the back of one’s mind. Every now and then you find yourself looking more closely at the sky, finding finer details on the horizon, envying the simple life of a desert beetle, or contemplating how much you would be willing to give up if you were promised that you could go on living as you were, right there in the middle of nowhere.

 

After two weeks of waiting, on September 17^th 1978, the news anchors gathered again and proclaimed to the world: ‘This is one of those rare bright moments in human history’ describing how our prime minister and the president of Egypt embraced in celebration of the peace accords they had signed ea rlier that day. It was. Twenty five years later, in an interview with Larry King Jimmy Carter recalled that ‘Sadat was quite easy to deal with; Begin on the other hand could not bring himself to be the one that would give up Jewish land for peace displacing Jews from their homes in the process.’ I watched the show, thankful that we were not privy to this potentially fatal lack of rational during our thirteen days at the tip of the spear. The idea that our fates were being decided emotionally would have been hard to bear. In retrospect it was all about emotions. The challenges to control emotions and face facts were just beginning on the road to peace.

 

‘We have to take the vegetable garden and return it to the Egyptians’. I heard what the battalion commander was saying but the words were not connecting to a cohesive message. ‘Do we supp ly the Egyptians with vegetables as part of the peace agreement?’ I asked hoping to hide my lack of understanding by trying to sound politically astute. ‘They forgot the vegetable garden and the laundry of the ‘Neot Sinai’ settlement, on the Egyptian side when they drew the ‘B’ line’ the battalion commander continued, his body language like that of a child reading a poor composition in front of the class. ‘In a last ditch negotiation effort Prime Minister Begin managed to move the B line west of the laundry’ ‘What about the vegetable garden?’ ‘They forgot to tell him about it so he did not bring it up…’ ‘Heaven help us if Johnny Carson got hold of this story’ I thought to myself. It was so stupid it was actually amusing. It was peace making in the works, at times sloppy and ridiculous. ‘How much time do we have?’ ‘The Egyptians are coming tomorrow at noon…’ To the res t of the world it would be ‘one more step in the implementation of the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt’. As far as we were concerned the ‘spear’ had turned into a ‘broom’. Now we were the stage crew that would have to rush in and clean up the mess, so that the stage would be ready when the lights came on.

 

The battalion commander was struggling to maintain his composure in front of the chuckling company commanders. As the battalion’s operations officer I had to step in and support my fearless leader at his moment of need: ‘We will flank through the tomato patch, and come downwind through the onions while the Apaches⁸ lead a head-on assault and push the settlers back towards the washing machines’. These wer e the most idiotic ‘plans of attack’ I had ever come up with – but they suited the moment. It was all but impossible to relate to this as a military operation. The officers in the room expressed serious concerns. Was there sufficient moral ground for us as citizen soldiers of a democracy to use force against our own people? This was not an issue which we could decide; this was an issue which would have to play itself out. All we could hope for was that all sides involved shared the same concerns. ‘One last thing – no weapons.’ I wanted to ask about slingshots but kept my mouth shut – the time for slingshots would come.

 

We came in using the ‘cover of darkness’ to lose our way. We headed right into the melee, behind the Apaches exactly as we hadn’t planned – not that it would have made any difference. By daw n (as dramatization would have it) we had been scuffling for hours, it was an alley fight but on a grander scale – lieutenant colonels and majors scuffling with farmers and bus drivers with lesser ranks throwing in their support. The level of violence was escalating and subsiding randomly. It was only a matter of time before someone got hurt. ‘Where’s grandma when you need her’ I though to myself. Grandma had established herself as the protector of her four younger siblings on the streets of Chicago during the heydays of bootlegging and meat packing– alley fights were her forte – she would know what to do. After she married she moved to Palestine (because it was safer) but made it a point to stay in shape, never passing an opportunity to stir up a ruckus. As far as grandma was concerned there is a lingering fight in every daily situation. At times it was a diamond in the rough, but with a little bit of effort you could expose all of its beauty. Well, grandma could n’t make it to the vegetable garden on such short notice, but Geula Cohen did. Geula was the head of the ‘Thiya’ right wing party whose ideology rejected the peace terms. I remember her making her way between groups of soldiers and settlers towards the center of the brawl were a few dozens of soldiers, with me included and a similar number of settlers where locked in a bad-breath struggle. At first I thought Geula was coming after me, having found out that I had voted for the left wing six months prior, but Geula had other things on her mind.

 

On that day, on that tiny patch of land, in the very early hours of the morning, right there in the middle of a fist fight that nobody was enjoying, Geula gave us all a sixty second lesson in democracy that we would never forget. As she got closer I could hear her voice over the noise: ’stop, please stop&hellip ;’ she was calling as she went. A few more steps, some more tugs and pulls, ‘pull back all of you’ She stopped three feet away from where I was standing, positioned herself between a soldier and a settler who were clutching each other by the colors of their shirts. She pushed them away from each other, wincing as they tried to throw departing blows past her face. She stood there, her hands on their chests, holding them apart. ‘Stop this right now’ she ordered. We were happy to oblige. ‘This is not the way to do it’ she continued. ‘There is a government decision to give back this patch of land which only the government can change, stand down all of you.’ The message was loud and clear – the people and the democracy took precedence over personal beliefs. I wanted to hug her, but her son was my age… ‘Where is our government’ someone shouted. ‘They are on their way’ she answered. The government flew in by he licopter a short time later and talked the settlers out of the garden. A short ceremony was held, a flag was lowered and we left the vegetables to the Egyptians. It was a tiny dress rehearsal for bigger acts which were yet to come.

 

The stage crew that we were, we were asked to head for the El-Arish airstrip to mark the line separating us from the Egyptians. The Egyptians stage crews were much farther along when we got there. An Egyptian Hercules transport airplane was standing on the tarmac. As we watched, a motorcade of blue and chrome ‘Harleys’ purred out of the belly of the aircraft. It struck me how well dressed and organized they seemed. We stood there looking at what used to be ‘the enemy’ admiring their motorcycles. These were the moments before the moments that the news anchors called ‘history in the making’ – soldiers wh o five minutes earlier still thought of each other as enemies shaking hands and exchanging currencies as souvenirs. Someone asked me if I knew what the exchange rate was: ‘land for peace’ I answered – ‘a vegetable garden for an Egyptian Lira’ – it was certainly worth it in the grand scheme of things.

 

The larger evacuation took place nine months later when Israel pulled back to the ‘Green Line’ – the international border. It was a sad homecoming from Sinai. The world remembers the pictures from ‘Yamit’ – a town which the IDF evacuated by force. Very few people remember ‘Holit’, a kibbutz which Beny and his Nahal battalion (Hebrew acronym for Fighting Pioneering Youth) built six years earlier along with its sister kibbutz ‘Sufa’. On the night of their departure the members of t he Holit built a sign of metal mesh, covered it with sacks drenched in oil, lit it and sent it floating into the Mediterranean. The sign burned the words: ‘Vitarnu Leman Shalom’ (‘we gave up this land for peace’) into the night. They stood there in tears watching memories drop along with the embers into the water. Then they got into their cars and drove away to rebuild on the east side of the border.

 

[The day Sadat was assassinated]

 

On a map whose scale is 1:100,000 a one-millimeter-thick line is one hundred meters wide in the real world. A wider ‘marker’ can easily draw a line that is 500 meters wide. Normally you would not give it a second thought unless you happened to live on that five hundred meter strip. I stood by my bicycle; my M-16 rifle strapped across my back, a two way radio on the back of the bicycle, and looked at the abandoned three story house in the middle of no-mans-land that cut the city of Rafa (Rafiah) in two. This was one of those untidy details on the backstage of peace. I was looking at what used to be the Villa of a Palestinian refugee called Mustafa Hirzalla, who, disillusioned with Arafat, decided to stop being a political weapon and built his own house outside the refugee camp. Unknown to Hirzalla, he built his house in the path of the the international border between Israel and Egypt (also know as the ‘green line’). The Green Line was straight as an arrow and the Egyptians wanted to keep it that way so Mr. Hirzalla was forced to go back to the camp as the bulldozers tore down the path of no-mans-land. The abandoned house was left standing, perhaps as a reminder that there was still work to be done on the road to peace. It is strange how many flavors peace can have. Here I was, a reserves officer, on a routine tour of duty, patrolling the peaceful border on a ten speed bicycle, while people were forced out of their house to make room for that peaceful border to pass.

 

[Hebron 1988 – a pebble of compassion in a pool of hatred]

 

[Taba 1988 Aviya Sonesta- Sunset]

 

The width of the border line on the map would take another toll in August of 1989 – ten years after the Camp David accords were signed. International arbitration ruled that Israel was to hand over ‘Taba’ – a tiny beach resort and the ‘Avia Sonesta’ hotel – over to Egypt. It was the end of a cryptogra phic quirk which the British marker left on the map of Sinai when he drew the border between the British and the Ottoman empires back in 1906. It was a bitter sweet pill for Israeli’s to swallow. On one hand the peace with Egypt was fully ratified, on the other the British had had their last laugh – they had decided the border of a land they had no moral foundation to claim, a last gasp of centuries of colonialism which hit close to home.

 

Still there would be no peace.

***

‘You know you are humiliating yourself fighting them with rubber bullets’. I was talking to an Egyptian officer, who was standing on the guard tower facing ours at the northern tip of the boarder. The towers were so close we could pass coffee cups to each other. ‘Look at how quite our side is’. The first Palestinian Intifadah had been raging for over a year. It was our unit’s turn to be back on the border. From where we stood you could clearly see the plums of black and white smoke from the Israeli side of the Rafa refugee camp. The black smoke was from burning tires, the white was tear gas. The Egyptian side called the ‘Canada’ camp was as peaceful as an empty beach resort. ‘You know what your problem is?’ the Egyptian officer continued philosophically, ‘You Jews have your moral codes’ he paused to see if I was paying attention and continued. ‘You know why our side is quite?’ He was sincerely trying to give me sound advice. I knew why but I wanted to hear how he would say it. ‘Why?’ I asked, coaxing him on. ‘Because we kill them as soon as they venture out to riot.’ He swatted a fly. I thought of my uncle in my grandfath er’s living room. I looked at the smoke; there were some explosions, probably stun grenades, possibly booby traps. ‘We can never kill indiscriminately’ I answered. ‘I know’ he said.

 

[Gaza strip 1990 - The sniper]

 

[Gaza strips 1990 – Curfews do not stop labor pains]

 

***

The Sunnyvale city council spent the 1990’s debating its options regarding a new swimming at the ‘Fremont’ High School. During that time Israel signed the Oslo accords with the PLO, a piece agreement with Jordan, continued low key talk s with Syria and absorbed a massive influx of Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union.

 

[2000 – Swastika in Sunnyvale]

***

‘Hi Dad, we’re on the bus to Haifa but the traffic has slowed down to a crawl’. This was my oldest daughter Yeela calling from Israel two months after she had gone back to Israel by with nine other high school friends form Sunnyvale. ‘I see smoke and fire up ahead…’ I knew she was headed towards the site of a suicide bombing on another bus, which was being reported on CNN as we spoke. ‘The bus is burning, Dad, and there are people in it, … there are bodies on the ground around it, ambulances, police, the wounded are…’. Who needs CNN when one h as an eighteen year old child with a cell phone on the front lines reporting live about death? As her voice trembled, I could see her breaking into tears. I switched to my normal ‘silent mode’ ‘uh-huh-ing’ and ‘go-on-ing‘, lest Ima (mom) connect the TV and the phone conversation. There will be weeks and months to tell the story a few minutes from now. ‘Omer [Friedman] is sitting next to me is comforting me, Dad – I’ll call you back’.

 

I went to visit her. Her living quarters in the Kibbutz were the size of a gloried cubicle. She had brought very few material belongings and a trove of sentiment in the form of ‘Prince Teddy’ – the teddy bear she received from her late grandmother when she was a baby. Over the years Prince Teddy was elevated to the stature of ‘bedroom monarch’. Sh e and she alone could touch or move him. PT‘s treasure chest of memories made any ‘place’ a ‘home’. ‘The first eighteen years are the hardest’ I smiled to myself. ‘If PT had made it this far, he was well on his way to becoming a family heirloom’. When it was time for me to go she walked me quietly to the gate. She rested her head on my shoulder. I could feel her sobbing quietly. I rested my cheek on her soft hair cherishing the moment. As I drove south I could see her in the rear view mirror, silhouetted against the mountains where the boarders of Israel, Lebanon and Syria met. She was looking down the Northern border at the future of our people, committed to do her share.

 

Beny called me from Jerusalem, and invited me over. Later that night, we sat in his front yard watching his kids, the oldest only a year older than my young est, were playing in the living room. A steady staccato of gunfire was coming from the other side of the ridge. Beny picked up a copy of the New York Times. ‘Yiftah, you’re not going to believe this, I’m on the front page.’ I started reading. ‘Dr. Beny Sapir, a veterinarian, kept seeing certain symptoms in dogs and cats who lived on Jerusalem’s margins, where the days and nights are pierced by gunfire, explosions and sirens. They would shake or stop eating. Some stopped going outside, even hid under the furniture⁹…’ I looked up at the tracers in the night sky, listened to the sounds of gunfire, watched his kids, thought of my own. I envisioned my grandfather sitting up there with God, watching the tracers coming towards their cloud like reversed raindrops, only to fall back to the ground. My grandfather was giving God hell: ‘What do y ou mean I only prayed for my grandson, can’t you extrapolate? He has children now; all of them have children now.’ God was on the defensive: ‘But, Simon, you know how many requests I get, I’m really doing my best.’ ‘You gods are all alike – if I had known how all this would turn out I would have gone to North Dakota to live like a Red Indian…’

 

Beny read parts of my nerdy mind. ‘Look Yiftah, were you for one moment unhappy when the shells were falling thirty five years ago? I’m not talking about fear; I’m talking about having doubts, regrets. In retrospect would you have had it any other way? I don’t regret a thing, not one.’ ‘Even the stun grenade you threw in Tel Aviv?’ I fired back with a smile. We both laughed – ‘that doesn’t count, Begin finally signed the peace agreement, there was reason to celebrate, remember?’ I stuffed another piece of watermelon into my mouth. ‘Try it with the salty cheese’ he offered ‘it’s the best way to eat watermelon.’

 

[2005 The Little Prince]

 

We watched it with the news anchors

Describe what’s happening in some of the pictures, then multiply it as many times as necessary, mention the settlements by name, go back to the boy at the end of it all – there to help his mom, where is your dad – in the cemetary, do you have siblings my sister is in the cemtar y. Then the story of Jobe, then the little prince

Some thing about the compassion and the tears

Yeela was feeling guilty for not having signed up a third time – show it – you cannot stay in the service until an event catches you. You were there to do your share and you did not come up in the cards. While this is going on Tal should say ‘I am not going back to NYU’ and then how we felt about it

On date so and so the X forces crossed the green line. Their names were different but they were of the same people

Two soldires closed the gate of the Kissufim (what’s its name), it was 38 years x months and y days since Israel into Sinai. As the sun rose over the desert the forces took up positions along the green line a lone Command vehicle continued east towards Jerusalem with a sheep in the back seat.

Perhaps the story of Exodus wasn’t such a streach after all.