Grandma's army

  A DIFFERENT WAR – I   The Israeli paratrooper battalion was duly dropped at the Mitla Pass , in the Sinai Peninsular of Egypt, as the detonator for an international bombshell - the French and British landings in Suez. That was its sole mission. As for the Israeli objective, Moshe Dayan , the IDF Chief of Staff, knew that the only way to get the Tiran Straits reopened and free passage guaranteed by the Americans was, if we are holding Sharm el Sheikh .   So, the children of Israel went marching once more into the Sinai desert as in Bible times - only this time going the other way! The route to reach Sharm was “man-killing” territory, murder on machines, and seventy miles of it uphill. They knew they had only three days in order to stall the UN from forcing them to withdraw.   When the brigade had at last struggled over the top of the seventy-mile rise, it was strung far out of sight along the slope, and desperately needed a respite.   The politica...

LATRUN - II One of the fiercest and most crucial battles of the War of Independence was the fight for the fortress of Latrun , which commands the main road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. This series of engagements is important in its own right, and also because some who fought there went on to become important figures. Two would even rise to the office of prime minister: Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon . The fortress at Latrun, and the nearby Trappist monastery overlook the scenic Ayalon Valley, about 16 kilometers west of Jerusalem Its commanding location along an ancient route gives it great strategic value, making it the site of many battles, going back to biblical times. Here, Joshua prayed for God to make the sun stand still so he could finish defeating the Amorites (Joshua 10:12-13). In 167 BCE the Ayalon Valley was where Judah the Maccabi won an important victory over the Seleucids. The Templars built a fortress there in 1187.   In the late 1930s in Mandatory Pale...

The prophet Isaiah said in the 8th century BCE:  “I the Lord have called to you in righteousness, and will take hold of your hand and keep you and present you as the people of the covenant , a  light unto the nations. ” (42:6) “It is too light a thing for you to be My servant, to establish the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the scions of Israel, and I shall submit you as a  light unto the nations , to be My salvation until the end of the earth”. (49:6) In his writings and speeches, Israel’s first Prime Minister  David Ben-Gurion  (1886–1973) emphasized his vision of the state of Israel as a moral and social beacon to the whole world, thereby implementing the vision of the prophets.  The selection of the Menorah  (candelabra) as the Emblem of Israel  was derived from the image of the state of Israel as a  Light Unto the Nations .   The present Prime Minister   Benjamin Netanyahu has referred, more than once to th...

For a country that has to spend such a huge, disproportionate   slice of the national   budget    on defense needs in order to exist, Israel can still be considered as the People of the Book. A fledgling state which resolved to make the most of the only resource it had – human intellectual capital – with results far exceeding what anyone could have imagined. Abba Eban once wrote that the Jews gave humanity the notion of “civilization. “ For 3,000 years, the creative tension between the People and the Book generated philosophy and law, offered models of piety and morality and defined a discipline leading to personal commitment and communal compassion.” In the words of Ben Gurion : "In Eretz Israel [the Land of Israel] arose the Jewish people, in which was formed its spiritual, religious and national image, in which it created national and universal cultural treasures and bequeathed to the world entire the eternal Book of Books…" Ben Gurion also wrote: “Anyon...