al-Wad. There our comrades from Jerusalem are still fighting. On the other hand we had to retreat before the enemy’s greater firepower.

We returned from Latrun with troubled thoughts. In the first con-frontation with heavy weapons we had to give way. The road to Jerusalem remained closed. And that meant Operation Maccabi had failed.

But after a few days we learned some secret information. Between Beit Jiz and Beit Mahsir, in the area captured during Operation Maccabi, while we held off the enemy in Latrun, a new road had been built. A "Burma Road"²* to Jerusalem. The heavy losses at Latrun were not in vain.

On 15 May, English hegemony over the land is supposed to end. Somewhere, far, far away, in the civilian world, a heated discussion was going on - should we form our own government or not? A faint echo of this debate reached us. It was said that Ben-Gurion was in favor and Shertok²⁴ against.

On the afternoon of 14 May one of our comrades stormed into our tent encampment and told us what he had just heard on the radio: the Israeli state had been declared. We crowded into the large dining room of the Hulda Kibbutz — which soldiers were forbidden to enter - and heard Ben-Gurion’s speech in English. We had missed the transmission in Hebrew.

Even though we were far away from politics and from the speeches of politicians, the news still moved us. The battles were not for nothing, then. We looked at each other and all had the same thought: we were the ones who founded this state! With our blood and our sweat. When Ben-Gurion spoke about the contribution of the defense forces to this historic moment, we accepted his words as the gratitude of the Yishuv.

After the transmission we lay on the lawn behind the dining room. We were informed that this evening we would again be going into action. Issar Barsky, a nineteen-year-old company commander, organized his people for the operation. We also heard that company number one, under the command of Aryeh Kotzer, had captured the village of Abu Shusha near Gezer. We could guess the aim of the new operation.

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