Now that we were in a fight —the single fiercest battle in Israel’s advance

Now that we were in a fight —the single fiercest battle in Israel’s advance across the Sinai — Lieutenant-Colonel Eitan reacted swiftly. Standing tall amid the shellfire and the flames, he radioed for supporting fire, only to be told that none of our artillery batteries was within range. Realizing we couldn’t penetrate the front armor of the Egyptian tanks, he ordered a platoon from the rear to leave the road and fire on the Egyptians’ from their flank. When one T-55 was hit and started to burn, he ordered the rest of us to collect the dead and wounded and retreat toward Bir Gafgafa. As we pulled back, we encountered a company of Centurion tanks from the Seventh Brigade, sent in to relieve us. We pulled off the road to let them pass. The battle ended up raging for another hour. By the time it was over, the Egyptian tank unit was nearly destroyed. But almost two dozen of Eitan’s reservists had been killed. A few days later, I learned that the commander of the Centurions had also been killed. His name was Shamai Kaplan. Though I didn’t know him personally, he was married to one of my kibbutz “sisters” from Mishmar Hasharon. The pace of the war, its intensity, and the transformative capture of territory across our 1948 borders had accelerated dramatically since we’d joined the reserve battalion’s ill-fated advance toward the canal. Back at Bir Gafgafa, we learned that Israeli troops had broken through in fierce fighting with the Jordanians and taken the whole of east Jerusalem, including the Old City and the site of the remains of the ancient temple. The news sent a shiver down my spine. I was still only 25, a kibbutznik raised on the assertively secular creed of Gordinian Zionism. But I was old enough to remember the war of 1948, the bitter struggle for the ancient city in which Judaism had been born, the packages of food we had sent to try to help break the siege there, and the division of Jerusalem at the end of the war, leaving us with only its newer, western half. And while I may not have read the Torah in the same way as a religiously observant Jew, the meaning of Jerusalem was no less powerful for me. It was part of our people’s history, of who we were, where we’d come from and how we had ended up in the place where I’d been born, where I’d grown up, and which I’d spent the early part of my adult life defending. This was no less true of the biblical sites of Judaea and Samaria — the West Bank of the Jordan river. 92 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_027940