The tales soldiers tell

I have not seen the controversial documentary, NAZA, in which Israel is accused by Israeli military personnel of war crimes in Gaza. Still, I’ve written three books on the Israeli military over the years, interviewing more than 400 combatants along the way. Almost all were “salt of the earth” and credible, but that didn’t necessarily mean that their testimony was reliable. Some were carried away by the storytelling, filling in gaps on their own; some exaggerated their role; many were confused regarding the details. Here and there, someone was just not telling the truth.

I made it a policy to interview at least two witnesses to any substantial story, more if possible. Often there were no other witnesses because they had been killed or I couldn’t locate them. In such cases, I would make my own assessment about the credibility of the interviewee. I cannot be sure that I was always right.

After the Six-Day War, while writing The Battle for Jerusalem, I interviewed an officer who was one of the first to reach the Western Wall after the break-in to the Old City. We’ll call him X. There were then low stone walls on the approaches to the Wall. At one point, when X was alone, he saw something chiseled into a wall. It was Hebrew. “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning.” Psalm 137. He offered no guess as to who might have done it.

For a long time afterwards I tried to imagine a scenario that might fit. Might it have been a Mossad agent in Arab garb exulting in the brief period between the pre-dawn flight of most of the Jordanian defenders and the arrival a few hours later of Israeli paratroopers, or perhaps a foreign cleric residing in the Old City. I was surprised I had not seen any mention of the inscription in the Hebrew press.

At the time, I was making periodic trips to interview reservists around the country who had been involved in the Jerusalem battle. It was months before I reached X’s deputy who lived in the Haifa area. I saved the question about the inscription for the end. The deputy and his wife, who joined us in the living room, looked at each other. He was aware of the story, the deputy finally said, but there had been no inscription. It was my understanding that X was no longer repeating his tale.

I also interviewed members of the Jerusalem Brigade who participated in the battle, including a pair of snipers who had been posted to the Musrara Quarter overlooking Damascus Gate, the main gate of the Old City. One was a Hebrew University student, the other slightly younger. They were staying in the apartment of an elderly woman who plied them with food while they waited for the war to start. After the war, I sought them and found the younger reservist first. “I killed 34 Jordanians on the rampart above the gate,” he said.

“What?” I said, incredulous.

“Well, maybe 25.”

I had talked to paratroopers who reached Damascus Gate early in the battle. They found no bodies on the rampart. When I caught up with the Hebrew University student, he laughed when I told him what his partner had said. “Neither of us hit anybody there,” he said.

Fast forward to the Yom Kippur War. The battle of the Chinese Farm near the Suez Canal was the most intense Israel would know. It was fought in darkness so deep that opposing tanks sometimes ran into each other. Falling flares periodically illuminated bodies and burned-out tanks on the battlefield. Col. Amnon Reshef, commander of the tank brigade at the heart of the battle, asked tank commanders to search for wounded crewmen and bring them to the aid station that had been set up.

One tank stopped alongside a group of figures lying on the ground. The driver descended and gingerly walked among them, unsure who was Israeli and who Egyptian. He called out in a stage whisper, “Yehudi?” (Jew?).

There was an affirmative response, and one figure tried to rise. When the driver reached the ghostlike figure, he said in Yiddish, “und iz shver tsu zein a yid” (and it’s tough being a Jew).

This was a familiar comedic punch line in Yiddish theaters on Second Avenue in New York’s Lower East Side. In the circumstances, it seemed to be an irreverent summing up of 3,000 years of Jewish history.

He was a tank platoon commander, Lt. Yiftach Yaacov, nephew of former Chief of Staff and future Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. His tank had been hit. Although severely wounded, he got his three crew members, all of them wounded, onto other tanks which evacuated them. There was no room for him and he remained alone on the battlefield among dead Egyptian soldiers.

After the war, he was awarded a decoration for exceptional bravery.

(His mother, Rachel Rabin– sister of Yitzhak Rabin – died last week at age 101, at Kibbutz Manara on the Lebanese border where she lived most of her life.)

Yaacov went on to become a high-tech investor and a venture capitalist. His Yiddish remark on the battlefield deserves to be remembered for the resilience it encompassed.