‘I can fix it.’
‘If you get through, tell them Qarash Pass. Give these coordinates. Six Egyptian tanks dug in behind the hills. But there won’t be six very long.’
It was a morning of heroic action, with the scattered Israeli forces swooping down on first one Egyptian tank, then another, usually with no success, for turrets would turn to confront them from whatever quarter they came. Yigal, watching now and then from the radio truck, saw two of the tanks lumber forward a few yards, unloose incredible bursts of gunfire at unseen attackers, then retreat to their established positions. From time to time one of the tanks would lob shells at the stalled trucks, setting one or another afire, but apparently the Egyptian commanders judged that the trucks were empty, because during long periods there was no shelling.
In frustration Yigal fought to bring some kind of order into his ruined equipment and became oblivious to the fighting in the valley, but in mid-morning he heard the four men in his truck cheering, and looked up in time to see one of the Egyptian tanks exploding in a fiery ball. A detachment had gotten to it with thermite charges.
But in the excitement of this local victory, one of the men in the truck threw something out, and when this was seen by the Egyptian command they realized that the truck was occupied and deduced that it must be the communications center. They directed their guns to wipe it out, but when the tanks concentrated on this problem they left their flanks unprotected and two more went up in flames.
This infuriated the Egyptians and they sent two commando units in to destroy the truck. One of Yigal’s friends shouted, ‘Here they come!’ In one swift glance Yigal saw that no Israeli unit was close enough to interdict the assailants, and that he and his four companions must hold them off during at least the first two assaults. He grabbed a machine gun, with which he was not too familiar, and threw himself under the truck.
The Egyptians were not well led, but they were brave and came forward with resolution. In the brief moment before the fight began Yigal wondered if they had heard over the radio that the war was lost, that they were an enclave without hope—one that must soon be discovered by the Israelis and destroyed. He guessed not, because they began their attack as if they were part of a larger victory.
Yigal and his men drove off the first attack, inflicting enough casualties to make the Egyptians withdraw and call in more supporting fire, but when the tanks disclosed their positions, one or another of the Israeli units swooped down and silenced them. The firing ceased and the Egyptian commandos returned for a second try.
This time they fired low, trying to get their shots underneath the truck, and they succeeded, for in the first salvo they killed the man to Yigal’s left. Instinctively Yigal reached for the dead man’s gun in case his own jammed, and by firing rapidly and with good effect, the four surviving Israelis drove their attackers back.
This gave the Sabra time to double back from his assault on the tanks, and he interposed his well-trained men between the commandos and their escape route. With terrible, crackling efficiency the Israelis picked off every one of the attackers—killed every man in the unit. Then the Sabra ran to the truck and asked, ‘You all right?’
‘One dead.’
‘Can you fix the radio?’
‘Give me half an hour,’ Yigal said.
‘You got it. We’ll keep you covered,’ and he returned to fighting tanks.
Yigal and his men climbed back into the truck, ignoring the shells that whistled past. With a zeal that he had never before known, Yigal went patiently over each item of his remaining equipment: ‘This is all right. This is good. This is functioning. This is getting current.’ He worked without fear, without anxiety, and finally he decided that if he changed one set of tubes the system would have to work. ‘Signal that we’ve got it fixed,’ he told one of his helpers, but before he could test the gear a cry went up.
‘There goes another tank!’ Yigal stopped long enough to look out the shattered back door and see a fireball exploding more brightly than the morning sun. It was then that he fitted the whole together, tested it, and sent the message that electrified the high command and the people of Israel when they heard it: ‘Qarash Pass. We are surrounded by six enemy tanks and have destroyed four of them.’
When planes finally arrived, wiping out the remnants of the Egyptian position, the battered Israelis gathered at the radio truck to direct the fire of the aircraft, and after the planes had sped eastward to their home base at Beersheba and Haifa, and when it was known that an armored column was sweeping north to bring relief, the tired Sabra sat with his men and said, ‘Learn from this. If you ever command tanks, don’t dig them in to fixed positions. Tanks are nothing unless they’re kept moving. Because if you leave them static, a determined team can destroy them every time.’
When exultation swept Israel, Yigal took no part in the celebration. During the first days he was idolized as ‘the boy radio operator of Qarash,’ but this passed when it was realized that in her time of crisis Israel had produced a thousand heroes.
In the beautiful summer months, when investigation proved how superior the enemy armament had been and how numerous his army, the miraculous nature of Israel’s escape was appreciated, and people caught themselves whispering to each other, as parades of captured Russian weapons passed through the streets, ‘Thank God, we were so lucky.’
Doris Zmora wrote to her parents in Detroit, with a carbon copy to the Cliftons in Canterbury:
In these days of reappraisal, I am constantly reminded of Biblical criticism—especially the revisionist theories of German scholars. Two thousand years from now, when critics look back on our June days, they will write ponderous essays explaining that when we said we were faced by a hundred million enemies we didn’t mean a hundred million, for we were using the word million symbolically. What we really meant was that we faced a hundred hundred. And when they read that our few defeated their many in only six days they will explain that we didn’t mean six days. We were speaking euphemistically, with a day representing a season, so that the war really lasted three summers and three winters. But I can tell you, from having been here with all my senses and with fears for my son who was at the front when he should have been in school, that we did really defend ourselves against a hundred million aggressors and we did really force them to surrender in six days.
Yigal wasted no time with such thoughts. He found it exhilarating to see the new maps which depicted vastly extended borders—‘About where they should always have been,’ some said. ‘Much too extended,’ the cautious warned—but he found that what the people he knew really wanted was peace. His friends had expected a peace conference by August; by early September it became apparent that peace would not be attained easily … if at all.
None yearned for it more than Yigal, who now felt that because of his dual citizenship, he had to evaluate the situation prudently. In Detroit he could rely on peace—not guaranteed and not immune to civil disturbance, but nevertheless a kind of peace. In Israel he knew none, and the difference disturbed him: ‘At Qarash I found I wasn’t a coward. But I don’t think a man ought to live on the edge of Qarash the rest of his life. It was a great experience, serving under the Sabra, but one not to be repeated.’
By September, when the time came for him to fly back to Detroit to finish the American part of his education, he was quite content to bid Israel farewell, and during the last picnic in the hills overlooking the Sea of Galilee, he left his sisters and wandered by himself to a high point from which he could survey one of the most impressive sights in the world, beloved by Romans in their day, and by the band of Jesus, and by the Arabs who had followed. Each of these groups had found and left a desert, but the Jews had made it a flowering paradise in which he now sat down to grapple with the big concepts of history.
Maybe the phrase means something, he thought. Push us into the sea! Maybe if the Arabs hold on … refuse to parley with us … bide their time … he hesitated, unwilling to continue this line of r
easoning, but the summation came of itself: Maybe it will be like the Crusades. Maybe the Arabs will hoard their strength for two hundred years, and then, slowly, like a glacier, push us into the sea, erasing everything that went before. He began to see how this might be possible, for he was perched on one of the hills used by Saladin in his mighty thrust against the Crusaders, the push that eventually drove them into the sea: If I were a young Arab, I’d plot ways by which this could be accomplished—it would become an obsession with me … He snapped his fingers with the joy of intellectual discovery, even though this particular discovery could bring him no personal joy: And I’d operate not from reason, nor from need, but rather in the spirit of a game. I would oppose Jews just for the hell of it. He paused to digest his thoughts: I’d make it the national pastime—year after year through the decades.
He realized that such a commitment presupposed a renewal of the Six-Day War: It’s going to happen all over again—Haifa under the bombs … tanks crossing the Sinai. The Sabra will become an old man lecturing the new tank commanders—‘Never dig your tanks in to fixed positions.’ What a hell of a life. He saw, however, one gleam of hope: If somehow both sides could sponsor conciliation … honestly … get down to rock bottom and settle these grievances. Shaking his head mournfully, looking regretfully at the Galilee, in which the Jews had accomplished so much and the others so little, he concluded: Not in my lifetime … the bitterness is too great. For the next two hundred years this isn’t going to be a good place to live. But then, with the inextinguishable hope of youth, he thought: Unless we can get together.
With this tentative conclusion, which he chose not to discuss with his sisters, for they did not have American citizenship, he returned to Detroit, where he entered a special hell which kept him in agitation throughout the academic year of 1967–1968. On the one hand, sentimental Jews made a hero of him—none worse than his grandfather, who moved among his acquaintances, saying, ‘You kept telling me that because Jews don’t go out for football they can’t fight. You hear about my grandson … sixteen years old’—but what was worse, he had to listen to inept jokes about the futility of the Egyptians; intuitively he knew that this was not a constructive approach to the problem. The Egyptians he had faced at Qarash may have been poorly led, but they were not cowards, nor were they jokes; they were men faced with problems which permitted no solution.
In the first days of school Bruce tried to explain what had really happened at Qarash—the bravery of the Egyptians, how they had chopped up the Israeli trucks, how foot soldiers had moved in and killed his buddy under the truck—but no one cared to listen. The war was a joke in which Egyptians were the clowns.
More serious, however, was his growing awareness that a surprising number of well-educated Jews in the Detroit area were turning against Israel and finding it fashionable to parade pro-Arab sentiments. He first encountered this phenomenon when a young Jewish leader from the University of Michigan conducted a seminar in Grosse Pointe during which he charged that Israel was no different from Hitler Germany and that Arabs were morally justified in opposing what had to be seen as American imperialism. Bruce considered the first charge preposterous and the second unfounded, but even in his own school three of the top Jewish students announced that they were pro-Arab; when he asked them if they understood what such a statement implied, they brushed him off: ‘It’s in the interest of American Jews to see that Israel is absorbed by its neighbors.’ This pronouncement gained wide currency, and one of the Jewish boys was invited to address the local Rotary Club to explain it.
Intellectual Jews took special umbrage at the conspicuous figure of General Dayan. Whereas some of Bruce’s friends made Dayan a popular hero—anyone could get a quick laugh by wearing an eye patch and declaiming, ‘General Westmoreland, President Johnson set me to help clean up the war in Vietnam. I can spare you six days’—those who were leading the philosophical attack on Israel pointed to Dayan as evidence of the new Jewish imperialism. Bruce wondered if they knew what they were talking about, and one night when he and his grandfather attended a meeting at which this line was peddled by a clever Jewish writer from New York, Bruce stood in the audience and asked, ‘Are you prepared to sponsor the slaughter of two million Jews in Israel?’ and the speaker laughed and said, ‘Young man, you’ve been listening to fairy stories,’ and Bruce shouted, ‘I’ve been listening to Radio Damascus,’ and the speaker brushed him off airily with, ‘All people engage in hyperbole, just as you’re doing now,’ and the audience had laughed comfortably at having had this ghost laid to rest. Bruce was not trained in psychology, so he could not analyze what impelled some of the Jewish intellectuals to adopt this unexpected posture, but he did know enough to dissect the next phenomenon for what it was worth. Grosse Pointe allowed no Negroes, but nearby Detroit contained many, and wealthy householders in Grosse Pointe listened with approval as their Negro servants began to express violently anti-Jewish sentiments. It was rather exciting to hear one’s maid say, ‘Adolf Hitler was right. Them Jews, they run everything. They the enemy of all good people.’ White matrons were tempted to encourage the Negroes, and nodded gravely when the latter said, ‘Blacks ain’t never gonna have a chance in this here country till we take care of them Jews that’s holdin’ us down.’
At Bruce’s school it was customary to enroll four Negroes each year, basketball players if possible, and since the process of selection was meticulous, boys of more than average ability were enlisted. Prior to the Six-Day War, these Negroes had usually found common ground with boys like Bruce, but in the strange backlash that followed the war, they began to stay aloof from the Jews, especially from Bruce, who was reported to be an Israeli. There was much talk of, ‘Them poor Arab refugees. Maybe we gonna have to go over there and set them free.’
In February the school invited to its forum one of the Arab representatives at the United Nations, and he gave an excellent account of himself. He had a few jokes against the slothfulness of his people, a few titillating views of Islam as an exotic and lovely religion, and a series of soft-sell persuasions calculated to instill a partiality for his side. In short, he was doing, for the first time, what able Israeli diplomats had been doing at similar forums for the past twenty years. He created a sensation, and after the meeting, conducted an informal session with the students, at which the four Negro students asked a series of probing questions. He told them frankly, ‘The future of your race in Africa is to align yourselves with Islam. The future of your people in this country is to do the same.’ After he had left the campus two of the Negro athletes announced that they had become Muslims, and one snarled at the end of history class, ‘We gonna push you right off that land you stole.’
It was in this rapidly shifting climate that Bruce Clifton graduated with high grades, and this raised a new set of problems, for his proud grandfather launched a series of campaigns which resulted in his getting offers of scholarships to the University of Michigan and Cal Tech. To his grandfather’s astonishment, Brace said, ‘I’m not going to college in America. I’ve enrolled at the Technion in Haifa.’
‘You must be out of your mind!’ his grandfather shouted. ‘Do you realize how tough it is to get into Michigan? Or Cal Tech? Like getting into heaven.’
‘I want a good education,’ Bruce said. ‘At the Technion …’
‘Just because your father works there. Bruce, it’s a high school compared with a place like Michigan … or Cal Tech.’
‘In the fields I’m interested in, it happens to be better than either of them.’
‘Insularity,’ Melnikoff stormed. ‘That’s what’s wrong with Israel. Goddamned insularity.’
But Bruce would not even consider the application forms when his grandfather placed them before him. ‘I’m going to the Technion,’ he said stubbornly, but one night his grandmother came to his room and said, ‘Bruce, when a boy has a grandfather who has a lot of money—who has to write a will whether he wants to or not—with such a grandfather a young boy shouldn’t be
obstreperous.’ Bruce looked at her stonily, and she continued, ‘So you’ll be a good boy, please, and tell him you’ll go to Michigan or maybe California. I hear they’re both very nice.’
Bruce explained that he needed to know Israel better, that he wanted to reestablish association with the boys he had grown up with, and that nothing could keep him from returning there. The next morning he scribbled a hasty note to his grandfather, enlisted a friend to drive him to the airport, and boarded a plane to Israel, but when he found that it stopped at London, he decided on the spur of the moment to break his journey and visit his other grandparents in Canterbury.
On the third day of his visit, Bruce was astonished by something his Grandfather Clifton told him. He had always regarded the Cliftons as strange and unimportant people, deriving this interpretation from comments made at odd times by Grandfather Melnikoff—‘They’re downright stuffy’ and ‘As a lawyer he’s pettifogging’—but on this day Grandfather Clifton said, ‘Son, I want you to lunch with me at my club. Time you understood British ways.’ And he took Bruce to his dark and somber club, where everyone looked to be over sixty, even those in their thirties, and he showed Bruce how to order dishes that were the mainstay of the menu: beef with Yorkshire pudding and trifle. When the bowl containing the latter was passed, Bruce took a modest helping, whereupon his grandfather grabbed the serving spoon and piled the riches on his grandson’s plate. ‘Boys always like trifle,’ he said. ‘I did. Your father, too.’
When the dessert was finished—one of the best Bruce had ever tasted, with its curious combination of flavors: sherry, custard, raspberry—Grandfather Clifton led the way to a dark-paneled room, where he asked the servingman to fetch a briefcase crammed with papers. When these were delivered he said, ‘Bruce, I’ve been watching your progress carefully. You’re a remarkable boy … one of the few. You’ve proved you have that glorious trio: character, courage, intelligence. Your parents gave you the character. Courage you developed yourself. God gave you the brains. What you going to do with ’em?’