partition. The Zionist side accepted the partition, at least officially, because it gave them 55% of the land although they represented only a third of the population. The Arab side rejected partition com-pletely. They saw it as a decision on the part of foreigners to take away a large part of their land and give it to intruders. The British govern-ment, which had been administering the Mandate for Palestine fol-lowing the fall of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, committed itself to withdraw from the land by the middle of May 1948. That’s how the war began.

It was an "ethnic" war: a war between two peoples, where both tried to occupy as much of the land as possible with as few of the "enemy" population as possible. Many years before the term "ethnic cleansing" became current, it was put into practice in this war - and not just by one side.

Few Arabs remained in the areas conquered by the Jews. But no Jews remained in the Arab occupied areas, either. The expulsion of the Arabs is more prominent, because the Jews occupied a lot more of the area where Arabs lived, than the Arabs did Jewish areas (although they took the Old City of Jerusalem and Gush Etzion, a block of small settlements south of Jerusalem).

That is the background for the events described in this book. We, the soldiers, were totally convinced that we were fighting for our existence, for our lives, and the lives of the Jewish population. And the Arab Palestinians naturally felt the same. We had internalized the Flebrew mantra which was current at the time - Ein Brerah - "we have no choice."

Until the regular Arab armies joined the war - when the British withdrew in May 1948 - no prisoners were taken. We knew: if we sur-render, we die. We saw photos at the beginning of the war showing the severed heads of our comrades being paraded on stakes through the Old City of Jerusalem. The Palestinians themselves suffered the awful massacre in Deir Yassin, a suburb of Jerusalem, where the Irgun¹ and the Lehi² murdered dozens of men, women and children.

We knew that 635,000 Jews were facing hundreds of millions of Arabs: "The few against the many." The armed Arab villages con-trolled almost all the routes of transport. The later invasion of the "seven Arab armies," with plentiful modern weapons, came on top of that.

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