Looking more closely, I saw a wooden box, the kind we used in Mishmar

Looking more closely, I saw a wooden box, the kind we used in Mishmar Hasharon to crate oranges. It was filled with hay. At first, I thought the stirring inside was a family pet. Then, I saw it was a baby. I said nothing until we had left. “Was that really a child?” I asked Yigal. “A baby?” He replied, with a tinge of sadness but also a look that seemed to convey surprise at my naivety: “Yes. They don’t have room for him.” My evolving feelings about the Arabs, the other people with dreams of what they still saw as Palestine, would become more complex as my childhood drew to an end. As mentioned, I barely registered the fate of the absent villagers of Wadi Khawaret. And yet as I got older — in my teens — I came to understand why the Palestinians were fighting us. Before the 1956 war, Dayan gave a brief speech that had a powerful impact on me. It was a eulogy, but it was for someone Dayan didn’t know personally. His intended audience was the rest of the country. He spoke in Nahal Oz, a kibbutz on the border with Gaza often targeted by fedayeen. In April 1956, a group of Arabs crossed from Gaza and began cutting down the wheat in Nahal Oz’s fields. The kibbutz security officer, a 21-year-old named Roi Rotberg, rode out on horseback to chase them away. The intruders opened fire as soon as he got close. They beat him, shot him dead and took the body back over the armistice line. The corpse was returned, mutilated, after an Israeli protest through the UN. With Israeli newspapers full of agonized accounts of what had happened, Dayan’s message was that we should not blame the Arabs for Roi Rotberg’s death. We should look at ourselves, and the neighborhood in which we lived. “Why should we talk about their burning hatred for us?” he asked. “For eight years, they have been sitting in the refugee camps of Gaza, while before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages where they and their fathers dwelt.” Of course, they hated us and the state we were building. Rotberg had allowed his “yearning for peace to deafen his ears, and he did not hear the voice of murder waiting in ambush.” Dayan said the danger was that other Israelis had become similarly naive. “How did we shut our eyes, and refuse to see, in all its brutality, the destiny of our generation?” A generation which was 47 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_027895