One of our group composed a melody, and we sang it in the following days, as we bade farewell to our dreams.
The moment the UN resolution was adopted, it was clear that our world had changed completely, that an era had come to an end and a new epoch had begun, both in the life of the country and in the life of every one of us.
We hurriedly pasted on the walls a large poster warning of a "Semitic fratricidal war" but the war was already on. When the first bullet was fired, the possibility of creating the joint, united single country was shattered.
I am proud of my ability to adapt rapidly to extreme changes. The first time I had to do this was when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany and my life changed abruptly and completely. I was then nine years old, and everything that had happened before was dead for me. I started a new life in Palestine. On November 29, 1947, it was happening again-to me and to all of us.
As the well-known saying has it, one can make an omelet from eggs, but not eggs from an omelet. Banal, perhaps, but how very true.
The moment the Hebrew-Arab war started, the possibility that the two nations would live together in one state expired. Wars change reality.
I joined the "Haganah battalions," the forerunner of the IDF. As a soldier in the special commando unit that was later called "Samson's Foxes," I saw the war as it was-bitter, cruel, inhuman. First we faced the Palestinian fighters, later the fighters of the wider Arab world. I passed through dozens of Arab villages, many abandoned in the storm of battle, many others whose inhabitants were driven out after being occupied.
It was an ethnic war. In the first months, no Arabs were left behind our lines, no Jews were left behind the Arab lines. Both sides committed many atrocities. At the beginning of the war, we saw the pictures of the heads of our comrades paraded on stakes through the Old City of Jerusalem. We saw the massacre committed by the Irgun and the Stern Group in Deir Yassin. We knew that if we were captured, we would be slaughtered, and the Arab fighters knew they could expect the same.
The longer the war dragged on, the more I became convinced of the reality of the Palestinian nation, with which we must make peace at the end of the war, a peace based on partnership between the two peoples.
While the war was still going on, I expressed this view in a number of articles that were published at the time in Haaretz. Immediately after the fighting was over, when I was still in uniform convalescing from my wounds, I started meeting with two young Arabs