Loud and Clear

by Iftach Spector

  HERE I WANT TO ADD something special.

  In the Sinai War of 1956, eleven years before the Six-Day War, a reserve battalion commander, Lt. Col. Pinhas Weinstein, was commanding one of the battalions that stormed into Gaza. Pini, a member of my kibbutz, Givat-Brenner, was formerly a Palmach officer. He was my father’s age, and a close friend of my mother’s. I knew Pini well and respected him.

  Immediately after breaking through the Egyptian lines, Pini’s battalion captured many enemy soldiers. He called his commanders on the radio and asked them to send some men to take the captives so that his battalion could continue its advance.

  The answer he received was, “We have no men available. Kill the prisoners.”

  Without hesitation, Pini answered, “Sir, you can kiss my ass.”

  Then he left part of his force to guard the prisoners, and continued until his objective was taken. But his blunt words were heard on the open communication channel, and high command had heard them, too.

  After the war, Pini was called before a board of inquiry. The board was weighing a charge of disobedience in face of the enemy, or at least insolence to a commanding officer in the presence of soldiers. Pini answered the charges: “There are things,” he said, “that must be said loud and clear, so that every soldier understands.” The charges against him were dropped immediately.

  THAT EVENING, AFTER the debriefing in the cinema, the air force celebrated at one more victory ball. Hatzor’s enlisted men’s dining room was cleared of all furniture, newly decorated, and brilliantly lit. Hatzor’s base commander, Col. Benny Peled, stood in the open gate and shook hands with everybody. He looked me up and down with a practiced eye and asked Ali in a harsh voice, “What kind of a wife are you? Where is his belt?”

  “It’s not her fault,” I said. I hated belts in my trousers, and probably didn’t have one. After all, when did I ever wear a formal uniform? I was afraid I was going to be sent home to search for the belt.

  Benny tapped my flat belly, still being a pedant.

  “You don’t eat, either! Well,” he softened suddenly and said with a smile, “You can afford to go without a belt.” He pointed to his own considerable paunch, and only then did I realize that he was kidding.

  Ali said, “I’ll take over.” This was fliers’ slang, and they both laughed like idiots. “In the future I’ll see to it that the boy is dressed properly.”

  Somebody touched me on the elbow. I turned around. Ran Pecker stood there, his face grim. He beckoned to me to follow him. Of course, I knew this was coming.

  I left Ali and Benny and followed Ran. He was sailing deep into the crowd, and I had to rush not to lose him. The hall was already full, dense, and noisy. The orchestra onstage was already tuning up, and the crowd began milling about like one big body full of humming, talking, and smiles, getting warmed up for the dancing and the singing. Ran parted them like an icebreaker, avoiding faces and hands reaching out to him. He directed himself backstage, knowing I would follow him. At last we stopped behind the stage, and he turned to face me. The decorations separated us from the hall. We were alone, surrounded by noise.

  He pinned me with a hard hawk’s stare. “What was that supposed to be today, in the debriefing? Huh, Spector?”

  “Listen, Ran, some pilots of yours—”

  “Don’t mention names and don’t be an informer,” he barked at me. He was right. I shut up. “So you heard something. So people say shit. What makes you run in the street and shout it around? Couldn’t you come to me first and ask what really happened?” Again he was right. I began feeling like a puppy that had wet the rug. “Is this the way friends behave? After all I taught you, after all the times you came to my home?

  “Now let me tell you what’s going to happen.” His talk was slow and staccato, like a judge pronouncing sentence. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re finished. This is the end of your air force career. And perhaps you shall have to leave Israel sometime soon.”

  We were eye to eye.

  “I’m going to finish you.” He turned away and was gone, and a moment later I heard his familiar, hoarse voice above all the others while he joined the singing crowd.

  For a while I stood there backstage and thought my thoughts. His threats didn’t scare me; even if this was to be the end of my air force career, and it definitely could have been, nobody can expel me from my own country. But I agonized over the feeling that I hadn’t behaved correctly and had lost an old friend and a man I had respected. And so, only when I rejoined the crowd to search for Ali, did I realize that I never got an answer to what really happened to that prisoner near Jericho that night. To this very day, I don’t know.

  THE VICTORY IN THE SIX-DAY WAR put us on a historical arc that hasn’t ended. Biblical Israel, the Land of Israel, opened before us. On Saturdays we went out in sandals to stroll over her hills and in her valleys. They all carried names we had drunk with our mother’s milk. We fell in love with the narrow streets of Old Jerusalem. The Old City bloomed anew out of its ancient history. For us, it was the first time we had seen that rich and mysterious world. The forbidden Wailing Wall stood close to the magnificent Muslim mosques of El-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock. We walked along the Via Dolorosa, from the Basilica of Agony at Gethsemane to Golgotha, where the Holy Sepulcher stands over Adam’s tomb. And then into the Jewish Quarter, deserted and destroyed since 1948, when the Jordanians expelled all the inhabitants and took them prisoner. Then up Mount Zion, to Dormition Abbey, which stands over King David’s tomb, and down into the three-thousand-year-old Shiloah Tunnel, which brought water from the Spring of Gihon to the City of David, to walk five hundred meters underground in freezing water and come out to the Pool. Then the bells began to toll from all the churches: St. James Cathedral, St. John the Baptist, Dominus Flevit, Ecce Homo Basilica, Mary’s Tomb, Mary Magdalene, the Church of the Flagellation, and then Jaffa Gate, from which one entered an Oriental, noisy, smelly, and colorful maze of ancient alleys.

  Bible in hand, we plied the markets of the biblical cities of Nablus and Hebron. We peeled grapefruits under the red blossoms of the Regia trees of Jericho. We breathed the air of the summit on the peak of the mountain Joshua named Beit-El (the House of God), and marveled to see the coast of our country spread before us, beyond the low hills of the Sharon, kissing the great, azure expanse of the sea.

  Everywhere around, the remains of war were evident. The roads of Sinai were full of the wrecks of burned-out convoys. In the northern territories—the Golan Heights, Judea, and Samaria—parts of vehicles and smashed cars were everywhere. Houses sported shell holes; farms were crushed and blackened.

  My family had a special, private experience. We went to visit our family in Hulatta, to share the new feeling of freedom from the threat of the black mountains. First we climbed the Golan Heights, to look for souvenirs in the deserted Syrian strongholds. Then we drove together to Hamat-Gader, the hot springs of El-Hamma, on the southern corner of the heights. This had been one of the points of dispute, from which we had just driven the Syrians. We stood above the Kenyon, and Aronchik pointed to me the remnants of a steel bridge that rusted over the Yarmuk Valley. These were the ruins of a railway bridge, built at the beginning of the twentieth century, connecting Palestine with Trans-Jordan. The Palmach demolished the bridge on the night of June 16, 1946, “the night of the bridges,” together with ten other bridges. This was a protest against the British, who were preventing the few survivors of the Nazi Holocaust from entering what was soon to be Israel.

  Aronchik shyly told me that he had commanded the Palmach squad that bombed that bridge. It was news to me, and I was very proud of him. I asked him, “How did you retreat after the explosion without being caught by the British guards?” The only way back was a narrow path on the side of the canyon. It surely had been blocked and guarded.

  “We didn’t retreat,” he snapped. Aronchik was not the type to cling to stories of the past. “We crossed to the other side, walked all night in Jordan, and returned
to Israel recrossing the Jordan River downstream.”

  But of course, I thought admiringly. This was the Palmach, the “indirect approach.”

  ALL AROUND THE CONQUERED territories hummed with Israelis. We all were full of immense optimism. In the street of an Arab township north of Jerusalem, a tank driver demonstrated to us, all smiles, how a black Mercedes sedan could be flattened and made the thickness of pita bread. When we stopped to pee at the side of a road, a corpse was lying among the weeds, raising clouds of flies. But the waiting Arabs were respectful and polite. They looked nice and were exotic in their “Franji” suits or abayas, kaffiyehs, and tobacco-stained mustaches. They welcomed us and entertained us with miniature cups of cardamomed, extra-sweet coffee. Their women, all wrapped up, peered at us sideways, and already had begun bargaining with our women. Some Hebrew words began to be heard with a heavy Arabic accent. The defeated Arab countries could convene and vow their three insulting noes. So what? We were already seeing with our own eyes the truth—or what we hoped was the truth. We saw a bridge of peace beginning to be built between Jews and Arabs. It was happening before our eyes, materially.

  IT TOOK US A LONG TIME to realize the fateful meaning of the path we had unintentionally chosen. Suddenly we became masters over vast areas where an alien nation lived. Immediately after the war, the government of Israel declared that we would hold the conquered areas just as a guarantee, and that all would be returned to their owners when they had made peace with us. The offended Arab states, on the other hand, reacted with the three noes of the Khartoum Conference: no to recognition of Israel, no to negotiations, no to peace. Just no, no, and no.

  So days passed and turned into months and years, and our initial intention to hand the conquered areas back dissolved. Inside us, feelings of ownership began to grow. After all, the freed areas were part of the Land of Israel, the cradle of our nation. At the same time, the Palestinian people in the conquered areas lost their former Arab masters and were left hanging. So while we fantasized about “enlightened occupation” and boasted of improvements we brought to the region, a new nationalism, Palestinian, began to crystallize and be directed against us Israeli Jews, the occupiers. Both nations, unable to compromise in any way on their one land, were struggling more and more with each other like two people trying to sit in the same chair.

  But my story has only gotten to July 1967. At this time, only very few, extremely visionary people in the Israeli community could begin seeing the coming disaster. Their warnings and demands that we leave the conquered areas as soon as possible sounded ridiculous. We didn’t understand the mortal threat to the Jewish state that was building. We saw such people as eccentrics, fools—or traitors.

  Chapter

  10

  Toledano

  The Twenty-three of the Boat. Spring 1941, Nazi forces built up in the West African desert. A Vichy French regime was established in Syria and Lebanon. Most Arabs leaned to Hitler and Mussolini. A German takeover of the Middle East meant Jewish annihilation, and the end of any hope of a revival of the nation.

  The British needed troops for special operations. Twenty-three commandos were sent to demolish oil refineries at Tripoli, Lebanon, a vital source of fuel for Vichy and the Luftwaffe there. On May 18, 1941, the boat Sea Lion, under the command of Zvi Spector, went to sea.

  The boat never arrived. The crew vanished without a trace. Their fate remains unknown.

  IN 1945 I WAS TOLD HOW my father had died. The story was told to me in rather a surprising way. At that time I was living in a kibbutz called Alonim, in the Izreel Valley. Samuel and Rebecca Admon were friends of my mother’s, and they agreed to take her little boy. One day my Uncle Israel Spector, my father’s elder brother, came to visit me. It was spring and everything was green. We walked together in the fields near the kibbutz and took pictures—Israel was a professional photographer and had a Leica camera, with a tripod. Once wound up, we could get in the picture while the timer buzzed.

  Israel told me that he, too, was a Palmach fighter—in my opinion this was obvious—and then he disclosed a military secret to me. This was the way he located a machine gun nest: the enemy had hidden a Bren gun somewhere in an Arab village near Jerusalem, and fired it only at night. And this is how my Uncle Israel located it: before evening he stood his Leica on its tripod and photographed the village. After night came, he opened the shutter (he demonstrated to me how this was done) and waited. As usual, the enemy began shooting their Bren gun under the cover of darkness, at the nearby Jewish neighborhood. The muzzle flashes would burn a light dot on Israel’s film.

  “On the same evening,” Israel told me, “after I developed the film, I knew which window they were shooting from!”

  I was full of admiration, and we both continued discussing operational matters. And then, perhaps unintentionally, Israel told me that his brother Zvi had been lost at sea. Until that moment all I knew from my mother and my foster parents was that my daddy “was traveling far away.”

  “So my father is dead?” I asked him excitedly.

  He confirmed it.

  When I updated my mother, all hell broke loose. Israel immediately was put on the banned list, and I was warned not to believe anything I was told by anybody. “The Twenty-three are missing!” she shouted, “and who says they are dead? They are still looking for them!”

  “Yes, yes,” I nodded obediently. So I joined the legion of semi-orphans who search for their fathers for the rest of their lives.

  I RECEIVED FACTUAL, real information about the man who was lost to me from Dvorah. She gave me a book, A Hidden Shield, to read. I read that Zvi was born in Jerusalem on May 18, 1915, finished the Hebrew Secondary School with honors, and was one of the founders of the local Boy Scout community, and its leader for years. “He was outstanding in his diverse talents, his sterling character, and his rich spirit. His was one of the first group of brave youngsters who reconnoitered on foot the whole circumference of the Dead Sea.”

  Yitzhak Sade had secondhand knowledge of this, or perhaps of another, not less daring trip. “At the time of the Arab Revolt, 1936–1938, when ordinary people thought themselves courageous if they took the bus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Zvi decided with a few friends to go by camel through the Judean Desert all the way to Petra, in the mountains of Trans-Jordan. They wanted to know firsthand what was going on out there in the desert. But when they arrived at Petra, they ran into some agitators. It was clear that two or three Jewish boys in a sea of sand were easy prey for everyone. Then Zvi organized a show of marksmanship, using the Mauser pistol he carried with him. His shooting was so good that it became clear that hunting such boys might end badly for the hunters. So the expedition returned unscathed.”

  After finishing high school, Zvi went to England, hoping to continue his education. Short of money, he had to cut his studies short and return to Israel. Back home, Zvi devoted himself to security issues. During the Arab Revolt of 1936 (for emotional reasons, the Jews gave it a neutral name: “the Events”) he established with his friends Israel Ben Yehuda (“Abdu”) and Yossi Harel a small unit of volunteers and called it “the Jerusalem Wanderers.” They were the first to go “beyond the fence,” mounting offensive operations against the Arab rioters, rather than just passively guarding. Then the older and more experienced Yitzhak Sade came and took command of this squad of wild kids. Sade was a veteran fighter; he had headed armed groups in the Russian Revolution and then led working groups in Palestine. He thought big, and turned the small units he gathered into unified field platoons. This was the first budding of an organized Jewish force, the predecessor of the Palmach.

  In the summer of 1939 the “Mossad for the Second Channel of Immigration” (the organizers of illegal immigration to Palestine) decided that an emergency effort was needed to rescue the Jews of northern Europe. The Jews there were already in real danger. Growing numbers were being sent to concentration camps. Agents were sent to Europe and bought a small, old ship named Dora. Zvi was sent to Hollan
d to command this immigration operation.

  He met the ship and its foreign crew in Amsterdam Harbor. It looked unseaworthy, and the snobby Dutch Jews, after they saw the Dora, refused to board. Some even threatened to call the police, to prevent it from sailing. He wasn’t deterred; after a lot of discussion and some arm wrestling, the decrepit Dora finally sailed from Amsterdam on July 15, with three hundred immigrants on board.

  She stopped at Antwerp, where she loaded an additional 180 people who had escaped from Germany. On the night of August 12 she anchored opposite Shefayim Beach, north of Tel Aviv, and disgorged her cargo of immigrants. It was Saturday, a moonless night. The Dora immigrants were some of the last to escape from Europe before the outbreak of the war and the Holocaust.

  Yitzhak Sade knew an anecdote from this landing. “At night, as the last of the illegal immigrants were being unloaded, a British patrol boat appeared and began searching the area with its spotlight. The Dora was totally blacked out, of course,” said Sade, “but the captain panicked and decided to give up the ship. He was ready to order the ship’s lights on, when Zvi came in. Out of his pocket he took a large key, and stuck it in the captain’s belly, ordering him to turn and go to his cabin. The captain surrendered under threat of the ‘revolver,’ and Zvi locked him in his cabin. Then he told the sailors, ‘I arrested your captain, and now I am in charge here. Go on, finish your work!’

  “After all the immigrants had been unloaded, Zvi jumped overboard. A kilometer swim got him to the beach. The ship stayed dark and made her escape.

  “Surely,” Sade concluded with a smile, “the captain must have been grateful to Zvi for locking him up.” Zvi was twenty-three then.

  When I lifted my eyes from the book I saw Dvorah watching me. Blushing furiously, I read her the last sentences in the story about my father. “Zvi, who was very brave, a daring and talented officer, was selected to command the Sea Lion on its mission to Tripoli. His second in command was Yitzhak Hecker, and the captain was Katriel Yaffe.” There were an additional twenty-one names, and I learned them all by heart. They are all wandering the seas with the Flying Dutchman until they remember to come home.