before the war there were preliminary signs. Members of the Palmach felt like new people with new goals. Intellectual circles like Bamaavak were searching for new spiritual roots - a whole range of curious groups, involved in the most disparate aspects of life.
This great movement needed a symbol, a badge, to represent the char-acter of this army. We had no uniforms. We wore the clothes we had brought with us. But thousands suddenly began to wear the same head-gear, without being told to by anyone: the sock hat.
18 February 1948
Training camp
The sock hat
The khaki bucket hat - kova tembel in Hebrew, meaning "idiot hat" because it makes you look particularly stupid - was the symbol of the pioneering days of Zionism. Who doesn’t remember the propa-ganda pictures of the Zionist organizations? This war has created its own headgear - the kova gerev or "sock hat," that curious woolen stocking which never stays the same shape. The sock hat is the sym-bol of the individualist army. Its main characteristic is that it can be worn in a thousand different styles. You won’t find two soldiers who wear this headgear in the same way. One wears it like a garrison cap, another makes the corners into pointy horns and looks like a Spanish bull fighter, a third flattens out the corners and looks like an Arab Fellah or a Russian Muzhik. Briefly: there is an enormous range of possibilities, limited only by the soldier’s individuality and creativity.
The ordinary soldier likes this article of clothing more than any other part of his military outfit. Nobody leaves the barracks without his sock hat. Even the dandies who won’t wear it to breakfast, in order to preserve the hairstyle that they spent five precious minutes of their free time arranging - they wear it too, but folded under their left shoulder strap.
The sock hat has further properties: it is extremely practical. It can be used for almost anything. When you are on sentry duty on a cold night, and feel as if you are at the North Pole, you can pull your hat over your frozen ears. If your neck is feeling chilly, it turns itself into a scarf. Or if you have secretly taken the evening off and want to get back over the fence, and the sentry is suddenly standing six feet in