Personal memoir of an Israeli officer recounting post‑war experiences

armies: one-and-a-half million soldiers. Thousands of tanks. Hundreds of fighter jets. Other, much larger nations had endured months, even years, of hell before prevailing in such circumstances: the Soviet Union, for instance, with its huge strategic depth, or France, rescued by its American-led allies, during World War Two. But any pride in having prevailed was outweighed by simple relief Israel had survived. Even that was nothing compared to the sadness felt over friends lost, and the resentment and sense of betrayal toward the generals and political leaders who had failed to prepare the country for the surprise attacks, or the initial confusion and dissension in some of our commanders’ response to the early setbacks on the ground. Dozens of meetings were held in military units after the war to talk about what had gone wrong. I was not the only young officer to notice that the higher up the command chain they went, the more unedifying they became. After we’d heard one too many senior officer fine- tuning his account with each retelling, minimizing his share for the huge losses, a new phrase entered Israeli army slang. Sipurei kravot — “battle stories” — were the words usually used to describe a normal debriefing process. That expression was now amended, to shipurei kravot. Battle improvements. I was assigned to convert my makeshift force into a regular armored training unit: Battalion 532, and that slightly delayed my reunion with Nava and Mikhal. But in their absence, I found us a larger apartment in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Hasharon. Nava and I agreed that at the first opportunity, I’d return to California and we’d fly back together. I went at the end of the year. We bought a refrigerator and a washing machine for the new flat — better models, and cheaper, than those available in Israel — and came home. Those few December days in Palo Alto were a jumble of emotions. Happiness, at being back together. But also a sobering sense, now that I was outside Israel for the first time since the war, of the enormity of the threat we’d faced and the frustration and fear Nava must have felt as we’d fought to defeat it. The year-end news retrospectives we watched on American TV were full of film clips from the first hours of the war, when it looked very possible we would lose. I remember being struck by the thought that, if we had lost, if Israel had ceased to exist, ceremonies of memorial and mourning would have been held across America, probably in Stanford. But that once the shock and sadness had passed, Israel’s disappearance would not have impinged on a single NFL Sunday, or delayed a single family shopping visit to J. C. Penny. 158 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011629