but who has lived most of his life in war, and who is writing on the morrow of the latest and most dramatic battle among the Semitic nations, the 1967 so-called SixDay War among Israel and the Arab countries-Egypt, Jordan and Syria.

One's ideas are the outcome of one's experiences. These experiences are, therefore, relevant. My personal story may help in understanding my ideas. I shall try to set it down-not because it is exceptional, but rather because it is typical.

* * *

My name is biblical, Uri, meaning light. Avner, or Abner, was the field marshal of King David, a figure I always liked. I was not born with this name. I gave it to myself. Like most of my age group in what was then Palestine, I changed my name immediately on reaching age eighteen. With this one act we declared our independence from our past; we broke with it irrevocably. The Jewish Diaspora, the world of our parents, their culture and their background-we wanted nothing more to do with. We were a new race, a new people, born the day we set foot on the soil of Palestine. We were Hebrews, rather than Jews; our new Hebrew names proclaimed this.

Actually, I was just ten years old when my parents brought me to Palestine. Even then, politics preoccupied me. I spent my first ten years in Germany. I was six when Hitler gained his first great victory at the polls. After that, the Nazi bid for power was the major influence in our lives. The endless parades of the brown-shirted storm troopers, the street battles between Nazis and Communists, the uniformed private armies of the many parties -these were the landscape of my early youth. Politics provided the main theme of conversation during family meals. Politics was the decisive factor-immensely more serious, more important, even, than the music of Brahms, which my father loved.

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