That night the war with the Arabs broke out, and we saw before us the choice which we were to face again and again. Should or should we not fight in this war we thought was a historical tragedy and which, we believed, could have been avoided if wiser council had prevailed on both sides? Losing the war meant physical annihilation of our people, the end of our nation. Shirking our duty, for whatever reason, would render us ineffective after the dust of war had settled. In the hour of Israel's danger, our place was in the combat units, peace our unrelinquished goal.

I joined the Giv'ati brigade, a Haganah formation charged with defending the South of Israel. After several months as a private in the infantry, fighting for the road to Jerusalem and later against the Egyptian army moving up from Gaza, I took part in creating a new type of combat unit, a commando team mounted on open jeeps, which took the place of light tank cavalry, making up with speed and fire-power for the lack of any protective armor.

In June an Egyptian unit cut off a kibbutz called Negba, a focal point of our defense. We were ordered to drive the enemy out of their fortified position on Hill 105. In pitch darkness, in eight open jeeps-each equipped with two machine-guns blazing away-we literally overran the open trenches. Next day we were told we had won the decisive engagement of the war, in appreciation of which we received the honorary title of Samson's Foxes. ("So Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and took torches, and he turned them tail to tail, and put a torch between each pair of tails. And when he had set fire to the torches, he let the foxes go into the standing grain of the Philistines....")

Much later I read that an Egyptian officer named Gamal Abd-el-Nasser was wounded in that battle. We must have been very close to each other in the melee. This curious association between Nasser and the Foxes continued throughout the war. We must have met-without being

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