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| Maj. Gen. Amos Horev Debbie Hill/Special to the Monitor |
Israel's never-ending struggle for security
On May 7, Israelis began celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Jewish state. Soon, Palestinians will mark the nakba, or catastrophe. The Monitor looks, in a 2-part series, at the differing narratives of Israelis and Palestinians who lived through 1948.
from the May 8, 2008 edition
Page 2 of 3
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Reporter Ilene Prusher talks about the major issue surrounding the creation of an Israeli state six decades ago and today.
"I think a lot about them now, all my classmates I lost, what they would have done later, what good scientists they would have made, too." Horev, an outstanding science student with a knack for logistics, was sent by the Israeli army to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after the war to complete his BA and a master's in mechanical engineering. During the war itself, he had figured out how to adapt American-made Sherman M4 tanks to the local terrain, turning them into M-50s that lasted Israel until the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Into the 1950s and 1960s, he served as the Israel Defense Forces' (IDF) chief of ordnance and chief of logistics.
"Most of the 6,000 killed were part of that generation, my generation. It may not sound like a lot, but it was 10 percent of our population," he recalls, looking at the photos of friends in uniform that now seem almost baby-faced, as he names each of them and whether he survived. "We were the right generation, because we were born at a moment that occurs once in a thousand years: the chance to create a new nation, a new state."
During the war, Horev's wife of more than 60 years, Shoshana, remembers not hearing from her husband for more than three months. By the end of the war, she says, "more of our close friends were dead than alive."
About a month before Israel declared its independence, Horev was deputy commander of the 6th Palmach Battalion, second to Yitzhak Rabin, the famous Israeli who would become prime minister and be felled by an assassin opposed to his peacemaking policy.
One of their missions was to secure the road to Jerusalem to stop nearby Arab villages from overcoming a Jewish settlement called Kfar Uriah. "If they had succeeded, nobody would have come out alive," he says, pointing to a map of where it was situated, surrounded by a cluster of Arab villages southwest of Jerusalem. "There were no neutral villages around Jerusalem," he says.
Two colliding narratives
What happened to the residents of those Arab villages is one of many crucial points where Israeli and Palestinian narratives collide. Palestinians say some people fled, expecting to come home later, but that many villages were evacuated by force by Zionist militias and destroyed. Most Israelis, including Horev, spurn that version of events. But what some Israeli academics loosely refer to as the "New Historians" say that the Palestinian account of events was more credible than previously acknowledged, and that incidents of ethnic cleansing occurred.
Horev says he wasn't involved in any such missions. "When Arabs from other countries started to operate here, their bases were the villages. Some people left because they were scared. Some were promised they could come back," he says. He thinks Israel's mistake was signing the armistice agreement with Jordan in 1949, which meant agreeing to a cease-fire line without an actual border. It invited more attacks, he says. Such questions of cease-fires versus real peace touch on Israel's dilemma in negotiations with the Palestinians today. Hamas, which won the last Palestinian elections, says it supports a period of calm with Israel, but will never recognize it.
In his mid-80s, Horev is optimistic about the progress of his country, which in his lifetime has moved from the margins to modernism. He grew up in a place famous for exporting oranges and today lives in a hub of high-tech. But he believes the conflict has become even more complicated than it was 15 years ago. When his old friend Mr. Rabin decided on the Oslo "experiment" in 1993, Horev supported it because the conflict seemed solvable in territorial terms. Now, he believes, too, many people across the Middle East view this as a battleground of religious ideology, of the Islamic East against the Judeo-Christian West.
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