Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon Read Free Page B

with and played with, but whose families had been at odds with mine for ages. But now our relationships had become something else entirely.” 14
    Some of these boyhood friends were lost during the months of guerrilla warfare that preceded the “real” war against the invading Arab armies after the State of Israel was declared on May 14, 1948. At the time, there seemed little difference between before and after.
    What set that day [May 14] apart was the short pass I had. I would be seeing Gali for the first time in almost two months. That night I was scheduled to lead a raid on the bridge to Kalkilya…[T]here was just enough time to get home, give Gali a kiss, and say goodbye. As I walked toward the children’s school where she still lived, I heard a radio … Ben-Gurion’s voice … announcing the establishment of the State of Israel. “In the Land of Israel the Jewish People came into being. In this land their character was shaped.” These were beautiful words, sonorous words. But they did not excite me … It seemed to me that we already had our independence for the past six months. We had been neck-deep in it and fighting for it since November. The coming night at the bridge to Kalkilya would be no different from all the other nights.
    The Haganah, hard-pressed in the early months after thePartition Resolution, scored some successes in the weeks before independence. In April, Haganah forces broke the Arab blockade on the road up through the hills from the coastal plain to Jerusalem. Convoys of supply trucks brought food, fuel, and ammunition to the city. Mixed cities designated part of the proposed Jewish state were overrun:Tiberias on April 18,Haifa on April 22–23,Safed on May 13–14. Many of theirArab inhabitants fled.Jaffa and Acre, which were both to have been within the proposed Arab state, were also taken. So was much of the western Galilee. On the other hand, a Jewish bloc of settlements south of Jerusalem,Gush Etzion, fell to theArab Legion and local Palestinian fighters. Hundreds of settlers and soldiers were killed or taken into captivity in Jordan.
    The fate of Jerusalem hung in the balance. The city had been designated a
corpus separatum
in the UN resolution, but once it became clear that the fate of Palestine would be decided by war and not diplomacy, Jerusalem became the most sought-after prize—both for Ben-Gurion and for theTransjordanian leader, the emir Abdullah. g The two wily neighbors had hoped not to fight. Ben-Gurion sentGolda Meir to negotiate with the emir, with a view to Transjordan peaceably annexing part of Palestine to his kingdom. But the talks failed. Jordan’s small but well-trained Arab Legion acquitted itself by far the best of all the invading Arab armies.
    It was against units of the Legion, well dug in around a British-built fortress atLatrun, commanding the road to Jerusalem, that young Arik Scheinerman now found himself deployed. This was to be not another derring-do night raid against ill-trained irregulars but a pitched battle against disciplined soldiers, equipped with artillery and heavy machine guns. The Israeli side, moreover, was dishearteningly ill-prepared.
    On May 26, 2005, at a memorial event for the dead of his regiment, the Thirty-Second Regiment of the Alexandroni Brigade, Prime Minister Sharon reflected on that fateful night, fifty-seven years before:
    An olive grove near ancient Hulda. My platoon and I lie sprawled in the afternoon heat under the shade of the trees. Thoughts before the battle. We blend into the scrubby soil, as though we were an integral part of it. Feelings of rootedness, of homeland, of belonging, of ownership.
    Suddenly a line of trucks pulls up nearby. New recruits, foreign looking, pale, in sleeveless pullovers, gray trousers, striped shirts. A mélange of languages. Names like Herschel and Jazek are bandied about, Yanem, Jonzi, Peter. They so don’t blend with the olive trees,the rocks, the yellow earth. They came to us from