Today we know that it wasn’t quite like that. The Jewish popula-tion was cohesive, well organized, and had available informal mili-tary units that had been trained and armed in secrecy. On the other side the Arab population was divided, had no central command, and was armed only with old and simple weapons. The Arab world was almost no help to the Palestinians, and when they did intervene they spent more of their energy fighting against each other than against the common enemy.

All this became clear only later. This book shows what the soldiers then thought, as they made history, and not what later became clear and entered the history books.

If someone had told us at the end of 1948 that the Israeli-Palestinian war would still be raging sixty years later - nobody would have believed it. But that is the reality: this war still occupies the headlines, every day people are dying, and the gulf between the two sides is not reducing. The conflict has had its ups and downs. For forty years the Palestinians have been suffering under our brutal occupation. Terrible things happen on both sides. And each side is convinced that it is the victim of the other side.

The descriptions of the situation by the two sides bear no resem-blance to each other. This applies to every single event of the last hundred years. For example, we Israelis talk about the "War of Liberation" or "of Independence," while the Palestinians call it sim-ply Nakba, the catastrophe. Many Israelis still believe that the Palestinians want to throw us into the sea. And many Palestinians are convinced that the Israelis want to drive them into the desert. As long as people think like this, there will be no peace.

Perhaps this book will help the reader to understand what hap-pened and why it happened - and what must be done to put an end to it all.

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