falling near, and after a short session in which we approved some bills to finance the war, we were shooed into the air raid shelter. It was there that a friend of mine, a confidant of the Prime Minister, whispered to me the news that the enemy air force had already been virtually annihilated. This meant that the war had been won before it really started. It changed our mood from one of deepest worry to one of exhilaration. The prospect of a long war with thousands and thousands of casualties was replaced by the prospect of lightning victory.

I am not going to tell the story of this war. Some books have already been written about it, and many more will be. But I would like to trace briefly the events which led up to it-not to reveal new facts, but rather to show how this war happened, like an event in a Greek tragedy, without anybody wanting it, with everybody behaving like actors playing parts written by a hidden playwright, saying words written by somebody else, all according to an inner logic which no one quite understood.

This logic was the result of events going back seventy years and more. They were inherent in everything that happened that month. They-the events, the reasons, the attitudes resulting from them, the whole vicious circle of which this war was just one element-are the subject of this book.

* * *

May 15 was a beautiful day, sunny and hot. It was Independence Day, the most festive day of the year, when the birth of the State of Israel in the middle of the war is commemorated by a military parade. This year the parade was held in Jerusalem, and was therefore quite small. According to the Armistice Agreement, neither Israel nor Jordan was allowed to bring armor, artillery or military aircraft into the Jerusalem area, and our government more or less complied with these restrictions. The parade was limited to infantry units. Yet 200,000 Israelis, one out

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