properly introduced-dozens of times in the darkness of night battles.

Eventually, on the last day of our brigade on the Southern Front, I was wounded in a sector near Faluga commanded by Nasser. By that time, I was a platoon leader. My men were a strange mixture of Moroccan, Tripolitanian and Turkish Jewish volunteers, who had come to us straight off the ships. I had trained them myself, using gestures and simple words; we could hardly converse. That day, I was told to relieve another platoon, on a little hill opposite the Egyptian position, in broad daylight. I knew the order was quite wrong, but after twelve months of battle, one did not really care very much any more. I went up to the hill, left my men on the reverse slope and met the other platoon leader on the top. Standing there casually, reviewing the enemy position, we came suddenly under murderous machine-gun fire. Some bullets hit me in the abdomen and the arm. It was always a wonder to me how my men, those green recruits, rushed up and got me out of that death-trap, under fire. Because I owe them my life, I am easily angered by loose talk about the inferiority of Oriental immigrants-a familiar attitude of mind in Israeli conversation.

* * *

All through the war, I became increasingly upset over many features of the new state, which assumed its form somewhere behind the backs of the young people who manned the fighting brigades. I did not like the identification of the state with religion, the spoils system practiced among the functionaries of the old party machines, the dependence on foreign aid, the social set-up itself. But most of all I objected to the sterility of the new state's approach to the main problem: how to achieve peace with the Arabs. The war turned combat soldiers, those of us who survived, into passionate partisans of peace.

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