Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon Read Free Page A

years later. “But what I felt now seemed completely different from anything I had felt before.” Margalit Zimmerman, whom everyone called Gali, was just sixteen, a student at the boarding school for immigrant children next door to his parents’ farm. He had furtively watched her weeding and wassmitten. Happily, his Haganah duties required him to impart military rudiments to the boys in Gali’s class, and through them he communicated his first request for a date. “I cut a hole in the wire fence that surrounded the yard so she could sneak through … In the evenings we would go out and sit next to the old village well in the middle of the groves, holding hands and talking in the dark.” 12
    On November 29, 1947, endorsing the recommendations of a special commission of inquiry, theUnited Nations General Assembly voted by 33 to 13 with 10 abstentions to partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. Jerusalem was to remain under international control. Throughout the country, Jews took to the streets dancing, singing, and weeping with joy. Ben-Gurion watched the celebrations with a heavy heart. “I knew that we faced war,” he wrote in his diary, “and that in it we would lose the finest of our youth.”
    The youth were now called up in their thousands for full-time service as the Haganah steadily morphed into a regular army, ready to be proclaimed as such as soon as the British flag was hauled down and the Jewish state declared, the following May. The intervening months quickly deteriorated into countrywide civil war. The Palestinian political leadership flatly rejected partition. Palestinian fighters, backed by Arab volunteers from Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, attacked Jewish settlements and transportation. The Haganah, spread too thin to defend the entireYishuv, attacked city suburbs and villages seen as strongholds of the Palestinian forces. The British for their part, having announced their departure date, effectively washed their hands of their security responsibilities. Their troops protected only their own evacuation routes. Ben-Gurion sent emissaries abroad on a desperate quest for arms; he anticipated with dire certainty that the Arab states would pitch their regular armies into the battle once the Jewish state came into being.
    Arik was mobilized on December 12. He did his initial fighting in the general area of Kfar Malal, in the center of the country. “Operating around the old coastal highway, we raided Arab bases and set ambushes … Typically we would leave our camp in the middle of the night, picking our way through the orchards…[W]e would be at our ambush site before first light, waiting for the early-morning traffic between the Arab villages and bases … As one action followed the next, I became aware that the others in our platoon had developed confidence in my ability to lead them into these actions.”
    The guerrilla war was “vicious, cruel and littered with atrocities.” 13 On the last day of 1947, armed Arabs killed 39 Jewish workers at theHaifa oil refineries. The Haganah hit back, killing 60 Arabs in the villageof Balad el-Sheikh. In February, two terrorist bombsin Jerusalem killed a dozen Arabs and 60 Jews. In March another 17 Jews died and many more were injured in a truck bombing at the Jewish Agency headquarters in Jerusalem. On April 9, 110 Palestinian civilians were killed by the Etzel in an attack on the village ofDeir Yassin, just outside Jerusalem. Four days later, in a revenge attack, 77 Jewish medical staff died in an ambush on a convoy traveling to a beleaguered Jewish hospital on Mount Scopus, ineast Jerusalem.
    Arik was part of theAlexandroni Brigade, a loose collection of local Haganah units gradually taking shape into a regular military formation. After a large-scale night attack on Iraqi irregulars in the village of Bir Addas, he was formally appointed a platoon commander. “A good many of the soldiers I was now leading were from Kfar Malal, boys I had studied