by Dayan, Yaël
We were to meet the division in its new home, Bir-Gafgafa, and before we left I asked Arik what he desired. “A salami sausage the length of a helicopter and Camembert cheese.” They don’t make sausages helicopter length, but I figured a few combined may make it. The cheese was obtained, too, some cakes and sweets, cigars, a bottle of wine, and we were on the road south again. My miserable mood changed as soon as we left Gaza and were back on the road to El-Arish where we arrived late at night.
I left Dov and a couple of visitors we had and went to look for Kuti. Somehow, I believed his face would erase the images that kept floating up—youngsters killed or wounded, children’s faces when told “Father will not be back,” mothers in black. The driver was scared. He was told sniping was still a danger in El-Arish and the silence and calm of the Arab city added to his fear. His was the only case of fright I’ve come across during the war. Mosques, trees in blossom, ruined roads, the airport, a few headlights, and back to headquarters where Kuti waited. We didn’t talk much. He offered us some food and we listened to a radio broadcast. I was given a blanket and a room with a sofa and lay awake listening to soldiers’ talk. They were leaving with dawn, they were reservists going home, to the workshops, desks, wives, and children. To the farms and the banks and civilian clothes. In a few days they’d be sitting in cafés telling of “their war” and remembering it with the nostalgia of a reservist. When the wife complains of dust they will say “You should have been in Um-Katef,” and when they meet a stranger in the street who says shalom they will think, “We probably met during the war. I wonder what his name is.” Tomorrow they’ll tell their sons anecdotes and somewhere underneath there will be stories and memories they will never tell or discuss. In a few weeks they’ll complain that the taxes are too high and shout at pedestrians or at drivers. They will think the load of soda-bottles crate too heavy, forgetting the weight of a bazooka, and they’ll swear at the laundry when a shirt is returned with a button missing. They climbed the busses and trucks, some smiling, some sad, others singing. They were going home, to be what they were before—regular citizens.
In the morning we drove to Bir-Gafgafa. The corpses, fewer of them, were still rotting along the road in a frequency of telephone poles, but I welcomed the space, the absence of people, the heat, the desert wind. Bir-Gafgafa was somehow more pleasant than Nahel and it boasted a large airport with several runways, shelters and five hit and burned enormous Russian helicopters. They were the largest we’d seen, MI-6 type, I believe, and the skeleton of their propellers looked like oversized spiders. The metal debris around them was almost beautiful, like a new type of garden, silver and black H. G. Wells plants, almost alive.
The division had just arrived from Nahel and we found a place for a camp. The trailer was cleaned again and tents erected. We were settling in as if for a long, long stay. I sliced the salami sausage and produced the Camembert and bottle of wine—slightly above the required room temperature—and took the jeep for a drive. The prisoners from Nahel now had local prisoners for company. Some of them walked without water for a few days and fainted when captured—and the doctors had a full-time job on their hands. Other prisoners were working—digging or constructing or burying the dead, and those captured in Nahel were in better shape now. The patrols were looking for more of them for humanitarian reasons, helping direct them to a source of water and saving them from death by thirst and starvation.
The papers announced our casualties—679 dead and 2,563 wounded. Of them 255 badly, the others—light wounds. The talks in the trailer were different now. We were not offering final solutions, we were still arguing, but we agreed about some things. It was clear that the previous phase was over. The previous borders and the armistice agreements were annulled by the war. The new reality in the Middle East presented Israel as the strongest element, and as such it can talk a different language and had to be talked to differently.
“Jerusalem is beyond discussion,” we said. We said, we felt, we meant. It will remain united and no decision or agreement can again deprive the capital of its Eastern limb and the holy places. Arik was now commander of the whole area and our headquarters was to handle all official visitors. The first one was my father. He arrived with a group of staff officers in a helicopter. Wearing khaki, tanned, smiling, he was surrounded by men with whom he worked and fought for tens of years. Eizer Weitzman—chief of operations and famous for years of brilliant command of the air force, Zvi Tsur—former chief of staff, Gandi, Shaike—commander of the south, Moti Hod—Commander of the air force, Amos, Man, and Arik. There was something homogeneous about this group of men. They were tough but they had a smile in their eyes. They would sacrifice everything but they cared for a flower, a poem, a piece of land. They were not politicians but they knew what it was all about and they were leaders. They were the men who, as Arik put it, say “follow me” rather than “forward,” and this heritage they gave a whole army and its commanders—to the last section leader. They argued, at times they quarreled, sometimes they gossiped and turned against one another, but what united them was stronger than all—a devotion which knew no limit, an ability to compromise for the common good, and a sense of confidence in the physical and moral strength and superiority of the nation and its army.
They walked to the war room and Arik, aided by maps, explained the division’s action during the war. My father offered me a ride to the Canal. We flew just above the road looking at the destroyed convoys along it. The air force and armor men were dividing the credit, exclaiming, “This one is ours,” “That’s a tank’s hit.” And we landed a mile or so away from the Suez Canal. If Jerusalem inspired me in the total historical emotional sense, here the inspiration was political. Ismaelia was bathed in red poinciana trees and I said to my father, “Look, how beautiful!” “And if it weren’t beautiful, it would be as important,” his answer was. We sat on a small bridge in Kantara, our feet dangling in the water. He told the other officers to join us. “Our feet in the water of the Suez Canal,” he said. “Isn’t that something!” The blue water was waveless. A large Polish airlines sign offered trips to Warsaw and a corpse floated toward us in the water. A Red Cross flag was waved to indicate another transport of prisoners to the other side. They, too, were going home. We evacuated after selection as many as we could. Thousands of them crossed here, scared of what their fate would be once they returned. They were not met as war heroes, and parades of women and children carrying flowers and cakes did not line their route. They were going home, true, and I hoped a mother and wife would tend them and be glad to see them alive, but what a country to be going back to. My father said, “It must be unbearable to be a part of a defeated army,” and one of the commanders added, “What a fortunate state for an army to have never known defeat.” Soldiers applauded the group I was with when we approached the helicopter. Arik and I left them in Bir-Gafgafa and I went to the kitchen tent to prepare a meal. Arik was spoiled by now and didn’t regard our cold K-rations’ meal in Kantara a serious one.
A few days passed. The events that marked our days had to do with a few incidents with still-retreating enemy platoons, reports of patrols, visits, and debates. If Jerusalem was beyond debating, it still left a large number of subjects to argue about. There was the Sinai—wilderness, perhaps, but it bordered on the Canal and had oil and manganese. It had Mount Sinai and Sharm-El-Sheikh, it controlled the sea traffic between Asia, and Europe, and Africa. There was the west bank of the Jordan, fully populated but enjoying the natural border of the river Jordan. The heights of Syria with their preventive importance—artillery fire was no more a daily danger to lives and property of the valley settlements. There was the Gaza Strip, an annexed unnatural part of Egypt populated mostly by the refugees, and there was the refugee problem. No one answer or solution could be given to all areas, but one thing was clear to all of us—the price we were to demand for returning the new areas, or some of them, could not be less than the one thing we were after—peace. And until negotiations of peace c
ommence, we could carry on as we did now. Strategically, those new frontiers gave us an advantage, economically they were a burden and a tremendous undertaking which we believed we could cope with, politically. We were beyond the position when any amount of pressure exercised on us made us jump. “We fought the war alone, we may have to fight the political war alone as well,” people were saying, and it was not going to be easy. The old frontiers were gone and history presented us with the chance of reshaping the country guided by justice and interests. We were not going to miss that chance.
Egypt was rearming itself, France did not remove the embargo on shipments of arms to Israel, ships were stuck in the Canal’s entrance, and Egypt refused to operate the Canal as long as we had its eastern bank, which meant a rise in petrol’s transport fees, having to do an African detour to reach Britain and Europe. Internally our situation was not clean cut either. Will the emergency government continue to act? Will the labor movements unite? Will leadership be improved, and what will be the declared policy concerning the new areas? Sometimes it was like a new game. We were in the trailer enjoying dinner when someone would say, “Suppose it were demilitarized,” meaning the ex-Jordanian west bank, or supervised by the U.N. or autonomous, or annexed, and we would proceed to examine each of the possibilities—the pros and the cons. I didn’t give it much thought then. I hoped we’d not give up anything for less than a permanent agreement which would enable us to exist in peace. I also feared that we’d always be foreigners in the area to an extent and at best friction would take the place of armed conflict, friction of cultures, of backgrounds, religions, attitudes—friction which might in the long run be constructive.
Visiting journalists added their own opinions. We were reluctant to entertain them but also felt a certain responsibility. Public opinion became a major aspect of the political war and although the prewar and combat period produced a certain xenophobia in us we did spend many hours with correspondents and TV people patiently answering their questions.
Civilians from the rear arrived on visits. What for us was routine for them was a novelty. They looked at the Russian helicopters, the damaged roads, the prisoners, the war room as if they were participating in a battle.
I slept in the Lark most nights and turned the front seat into a cupboard. Mail and papers arrived, Yoske’s canteen sold cold drinks and cigarettes, I was driving the jeep in the camp’s area, and all I wanted was never to leave, never to face the daily routine of my “other life,” never to lose the freedom of lack of possessions, lack of responsibilities other than to show a few people around or tend the kitchen. Several nights I found myself crying, almost unwillingly. Shaul asked, “Are you crying for one or for many?” I didn’t know. The many became one, the suspicions became certainty with announcement of funerals, and it was impossible not to accept the fact that some people one loved and cared for were alive no more. A few of the older officers said, “Strange, this seems to be the last war for me,” and yet, they, too, wondered.
On June 18 some of us got the order to leave. Suddenly it was over. Arik packed his small rucksack and folded his two blankets. My things were to travel north in the Lark. Dov was talking to the airport control tower, checking on the time of departure. We said shalom and “See you next week in town,” and if I had tears in my eyes they were attributed to the sandstorm. Arik, Dov, and I boarded the small helicopter. Thirteen days earlier, at eight-fifteen, Arik had said, “Nua-Nua, Sof,” and the Centurions crossed the frontier toward everything that was unknown. And now, thirteen days later, we were returning to all that was supposed to be familiar and homelike—as strangers. “Fly low to El-Arish and follow the beach as low as you can,” Arik told the pilots. We were sitting and watching the scenery through the open side of the helicopter. The road, Gebel-Libni, El-Arish, the palm trees, and the beach. The white sands of Rafah, the camps near Gaza, the feminine curve of the shore line, the beauty of an untouched coast and dunes. Arik tried to shout above the helicopter’s noise. He was stretching one hand as if showing us the view, as if we hadn’t noticed it, and murmuring something. On a piece of paper—as it was obvious we couldn’t hear—he wrote, “All this is ours,” and he was smiling like a proud boy. When we crossed the old nonexistent border the scenery changed. No border stones need mark the difference. The land was now green and cultivated, the houses indicated a modern existence, tractors and combines were growing and harvesting, and girls in bikinis waved to us from the beaches.
Ashkelon, Ashdod, Jaffa and Tel-Aviv. For a brief moment I envied those girls. It must be wonderful for a soldier to meet his girl—wearing a dress, clean, a touch of perfume perhaps, a hair-do, a handbag—something to come back to. There I was. Dirt and dust, a silly braid uncombed for days, burned rough skin, heavy boots, red eyes. We landed and drove to Zahala in silence. Were we all thinking of tomorrow morning? By coincidence Arik met his wife Lilly on the road. He joined her and we drove behind their car. She rested her head on his shoulder. He was home. “All will be well,” Dov promised me. “Home” now was something new, safer, larger, stronger, and happier.
Image Gallery
A natural “facial” after the battle on Nahel—the last day of the war.
General Arik Sharon on top of his half-track with officers.
One hour before the war on June 5. Arik is up after a short sleep; I am writing my diary.
Arik addressing officers in the War Room.
A commander addressing his brigade—regulars and reservists—on Tuesday morning after the battle of Um-Katef.
Um-Katef defended locality. The road to Ismaelia (horizontal line in the foreground) is protected by three ditches held by an infantry brigade.
Our armor on the road, dispersing into a formation for action.
Our headquarters convoy on the road.
The division’s first prisoners. Um-Katef, June 6.
Tuesday morning, after the Um-Katef battle, wounded Egyptians in one of the ditches.
One of the missiles found in the Sinai. Trying to escape, the vehicle was stuck in the dunes and destroyed.
A leftover of a huge Russian helicopter in Bir-Gafgafa airport in the Sinai.
A Russian T-34 tank burning near Tarat Um-Basis. The first morning of the war.
A postcard home from the battlefield in haste—before the helicopter takes off.
Evacuation of the wounded by Air Force helicopters.
Evacuation of the wounded by Air Force helicopters.
Morning prayer in the field.
Between Abu-Ageila and Nahel. The newest Russian amphibian tank enjoying an Israeli crew.
Arik (left) and Dov in Nahel, leaning against the command half-track.
Arik and I, after the Nahel battle. In the background, Itzik the radio operator, and Katz the gunner.
Dov in the foreground after Nahel’s battle, Arik and I in background, Itzik the radio operator on the jeep.
About the Author
Yaël Dayan is an Israeli author and political figure. Her father, Moshe Dayan, was the military leader who oversaw the stunning capture of Jerusalem during the Six-Day War. Like her father, Dayan served in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, of which she was a member for ten years with the Labor Party. An outspoken activist, Dayan has been involved with Peace Now and other organizations fostering the peaceful coexistence of Israelis and Palestinians. She has written five novels, including Three Weeks in October, about the Yom Kippur War. Among Dayan’s nonfiction works are Israel Journal, a memoir about the Six-Day War, and My Father, His Daughter, a biography of Moshe Dayan.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 1967 by Yaël Dayan
Cover design by Tracey Dunham
ISBN: 978-1-4976-9882-6
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated
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