Communicating these feelings in endless conversations in the field, around campfires and between cactus hedges, I found that many were shared by my comrades. We decided to do something about them, in one form or another, after the war. The opportunity came quite soon. After I came out of the hospital, while waiting for my friends to finish their military service, I published my war diary in book form under the title, In the Fields of the Philistines. Unexpectedly, it became a best-seller. The proceeds, together with some money we scraped together, allowed us to buy a moribund, innocuous little weekly paper, Ha'olam Hazeh ("This World").
Since Passover 1950, Ha'olam Hazeh, also nicknamed "A Certain Weekly" because its many enemies in official circles refuse to mention its name, has become an Israeli institution as unique as a kibbutz. Its journalistic formula is a mixture of extremes-Foreign Affairs Quarterly and Playboy, Walter Lippmann and Louella Parsons, Time and Ramparts. It is a mass-circulation magazine, but people say it preaches heresy; it is boycotted by the army, but popular with army officers; detested by the government, yet indispensable to anyone in government who wants to know what's going on, especially in government. Leading the fight for separation of state and synagogue, against corruption, for civii rights and a written constitution (still missing), for equal rights to the Arab minority and many other issues, it continues to be mainly identified in the public mind with the fight for Israeli-Arab peace.
The turbulent history of Ha'olam Hazeh reads like a cheap thriller. There have been three bomb attacks on its offices, during which several people were wounded; one night attack on its editors, in which my hands were broken; an officially inspired economic boycott, which still lasts after many years, cutting deep into its advertising; several trials at criminal prosecution for sedition (all squashed by the courts).
During the 1956 Sinai war, to which we strongly ob¬