The General's Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine (8 page)

I was five years old at the time, but I remember the ensuing flurry and the preparations for the war: the adults unable to conceal their worry, the news broadcasts playing more often than usual, and the newspaper headlines striking even my five year-old eyes as more intense. My father was spending his nights and days at army headquarters. My older brother Yoav, by then a lieutenant and a platoon commander
in the Armored Corps, was in active duty, and we neither saw nor heard from him.

I was particularly anxious because we were notified that Motza Ellit, where we lived, was in grave danger. Less than a mile from our house is an ancient crusader castle called, plainly,
The Kastel
. In 1948, in a bloody battle that took place there between the Haganna forces and Palestinian fighters, Palestinian commander and national hero, Abdel Kader el-Husseini was killed and his death was a severe blow to the Arab forces. It was said that the Arabs planned to take
The Kastel
and avenge the death of el-Husseini. What did that mean? Would they come and kill us all? I kept my worries to myself, relieved to see that the army positioned an artillery battery in the valley nearby.

Our house had no bomb shelter and may well have been the only one in the entire country without one. “Bomb shelters are useless and unnecessary,” my father insisted, and no amount of convincing would sway him to build one. When he made up his mind about something, he seldom offered an explanation. He had no patience for people who questioned his knowledge or authority as an expert.

So even though our house had only recently been built, there was no place for us to sit when the sirens went off. We did have one spot in the house that was somewhat guarded. The small downstairs bathroom, situated on the ground floor and directly under the upstairs bathroom, was the safest place in the house. So my mother and sisters and I, who were alone at home during the war, would rush to sit there whenever we heard the sirens. To give the place some dignity, my mother put a vase with flowers in it, and she hung an autographed photo of David Ben-Gurion on the wall. The bathroom is barely large enough to fit two people at a time.

Our house was an imperfect shelter in other ways. Because my father wanted us all to be able to enjoy the view of the Judean Hills surrounding our home from the kitchen and living room, there were massive glass doors on the main floor. This meant danger of glass being shattered. So I helped Ossi and Nurit to plaster the windows with strips of cloth.

During the day, it all seemed like some sort of festive occasion, because there was no school and my sisters and I were home together. But at night I was frightened. From my bedroom window I saw the endless stream of helicopters bringing wounded soldiers to the Hadassah hospital that sits on a hill directly across from our house. I would get up and go down the corridor to my mother’s bedroom, only to find that my sisters were there too. We all tried to calm our fears by cramming into my mother’s bed.

I was a child; I had no inkling what war meant, I just knew that we Israelis were heroes, and we would surely win. Like other Israeli children, I was taught that we were descendants of the Maccabees, who beat the entire Greek Empire, and King David, who was but a child when he killed Goliath the Philistine. I knew that even though we were few and they were many, we won every war since Israel was established. I heard stories from my mother about the brave fighters of the Haganah,
who fought the British and the Arabs with their superior weapons. We outsmarted and beat them every time.

As it turned out, the whole thing did not last long. The surprise attack led to the total destruction of Egypt’s air force, the decimation of the Egyptian army, and the re-conquest of the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula in a matter of days. Israeli army intelligence confirmed that the Syrian and the Jordanian armies were no match to the IDF. After the campaign against Egypt went smoothly, the field commanders, in collusion with Moshe Dayan, decided to take the West Bank and the Golan Heights, two regions Israel had coveted for many years. Both had strategic water resources and hills overlooking Israeli territory. The West Bank contained the heartland of Biblical Israel, including the “crown jewel,” the Old City of Jerusalem.

The fact that the West Bank and the Old City of Jerusalem remained in Arab hands in1948 was a sore spot for many of the senior officers. So when the opportunity arose again they acted swiftly and decisively. They referred to it as “finishing the job.”

In 1953, when my father was still a young lieutenant colonel, Moshe Sharett had invited him to speak in front of a delegation of American Jews. Both Sharett and Ben-Gurion were present and both expressed their delight at the eloquence and the content of the lecture. In his memoirs, Sharett writes that my father said in no uncertain terms that the army is preparing for war “in order to complete the conquest of the Land of Israel and to push Israel’s eastern border to its natural location on the banks of the Jordan River.”

When the opportunity arose, the army did this without waiting for orders from the civilian authorities.

In six days, it was all over. Arab casualties were estimated at more than 15,000. Israeli casualties were 700, and the territory controlled by Israel had nearly tripled in size. Israel had in its possession not only land and resources it had wanted for a long time, but also the largest stockpiles of Russian-made arms outside the Soviet Union. Israel had once again asserted itself as a major regional power.

I remember the jubilation. The radio played victory songs, and
Yerushalaim Shel Zahav
, Jerusalem of Gold, written by Naomi Shemer, became an international hit. My father finally came home, and there was news that my brother Yoav was OK. In a sheer coincidence, he and my father met in the field after the Sinai Desert was taken. My mother has a photo taken by a friend showing a very young and tired Yoav, full of dust from the desert, and my father facing one another and talking. Then there were the ceremonies. I recall we went to Army Headquarters in Tel-Aviv as the victorious generals were all awarded their victory pins. In a photo I have and treasure, Israel’s president, Zalman Shazar,
Dod Zalman
, is surrounded by the entire Israeli army General Staff with an autograph of each of the generals at the bottom. I was so proud at that time, I felt that I could fly.

Israel’s president, Zalman Shazar, surrounded by the victorious Israeli army General Staff after the 1967 war.

I had no idea that my father was concerned about any unintended negative consequences this victory posed to the Jewish state.

The late Ze’ev Schiff, who was Israel’s most prominent military analyst, would later say that in his role as chief of logistics, my father’s contribution to the war’s success was unprecedented and cannot be overstated. He and his comrades who, as young officers made the victory of 1948 possible, were now the generals who led the victory of 1967 and the complete return of the historic Eretz Yisrael after 2,000 years to Jewish hands. And on top of that, this was taking place less than 30 years after Nazi-controlled Europe was systematically murdering Jews.

But this massive conquest of lands troubled my father. When he was pushing for the war, he had imagined it would be a limited war with Egypt to punish the Egyptians for their breach of the ceasefire and to assert Israeli legitimacy and military might. Taking the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights was never part of any official plan. In an article in the daily
Ma’ariv
, journalist Haim Hanegbi vividly describes the first weekly meeting of the General Staff after the Six-Day War.
⁴
He
states that Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin and the other generals were beaming with the glory of victory, but when the meeting was nearing its end, my father spoke.

Never one to rest on his laurels, he cleared his throat and in his unmistakably dry, analytical manner, he spoke of the unique chance the victory offered Israel to solve the Palestinian problem once and for all. “For the first time in Israel’s history, we are face to face with the Palestinians, without other Arab countries dividing us. Now we have a chance to offer the Palestinians a state of their own.” He later also claimed with certainty that holding onto the West Bank and the people who lived in it was contrary to Israel’s long-term strategy of building a secure Jewish democracy with a stable Jewish majority. If we kept these lands, popular resistance to the occupation was sure to arise, and Israel’s army would be used to quell that resistance, with disastrous and demoralizing results. He concluded that this would turn the Jewish state into an increasingly brutal occupying power and eventually into a bi-national state.

My father said all this as the gun barrels were still smoking and before Israel began its settlement project in the West Bank and Gaza. The other generals listened, but they did not want to discuss the issue. They claimed the Palestinians would never settle for the West Bank and Gaza and would demand more land. So he proceeded to bring intelligence reports that showed clearly that an overwhelming majority of Palestinians thought as he did. Finally, Yitzhak Rabin took him aside privately and told him it wasn’t the right political climate to discuss this.

Even though I was only six years old when my father retired from the IDF, my entire life has been affected by his military career. In Israeli terms—where the army is regarded above all else, and the generation of 1948, or the “Palmach Generation,” have all but been made into gods—it was no ordinary career.

It was during these early years that I was infused with patriotism and a belief in the Zionist cause. Having been born an Israeli Jew at this time in history, I had a desire to fulfill my destiny and to serve when my turn came. At the time, I wanted very much to be a hero and a great general like my father.

1
Matti Peled, “The Palestinian Problem,”
Ma’ariv
, June 27, 1969.

2
Israel Defense Forces,
The History of the IDF Logistics Command
, (Ma’arachot, publishing arm for the Israel Defense Forces).

3
Minutes of the meeting between IDF General Staff and the Israeli cabinet at IDF headquarters on June 2, 1967, The Israel Defense Forces and Defense Establishment Archives (IDFA), Tel-Hashomer military base.

4
Haim Hanegbi, “Peled, His Mouth and His Heart,”
Maariv
, April 7, 1995.

My father planned to retire immediately after the 1967 war, but was asked by the new army chief of staff, Haim Bar-Lev, to stay another year. There was a need for major armament and logistics organization after the war, so he agreed to stay and get the job done. But my father had no interest in governing an occupied nation, and he was eager to move on with his life. So in 1968, he opted to retire from the army and embark on a much-anticipated academic career. He donated his huge military library to the IDF and filled his study with books on Arabic literature.

The transition from the intensity of military life to civilian life is not easy, and naturally it took my father some time to adjust. The first few years after he retired from the military, he would not answer the phone—he was used to having a secretary; that was understandable. If I answered the phone, I would need to find out who was on the other end, and once I told my father he would sharply ask, “Well, what does he want?” To which, of course, I had no answer. At one point, he decided to answer the phone by himself, but always in a tone that suggested the he was being pulled away from something important.

And indeed he was. Matti Peled was always doing something important. His greatest joy was work, and he took himself and his work extremely seriously. Interruptions were never welcome.

Upon his retirement, my father had lucrative career options. As IDF chief of logistics, he headed an immense logistic, administrative, and financial organization, and he did this with unprecedented success. When he retired, he was only 45 years old, and already considered an enormous hero. He could have done pretty much anything he wanted to at that time. He fielded offers to head some of Israel’s largest and most successful corporations. He also had several attractive options in government and politics, but he found none of those appealing.

He did not believe that one should choose work because of money or position. “One’s work,” he used to say, “should to be determined by principles, by the ability to contribute, or by one’s own interests in life.”

For him, building an army for the Jewish state was based on principle. Becoming a scholar of Arabic literature fulfilled his interests. Being involved in politics and
being an advocate for Palestinian rights was his contribution to the moral fiber of the state that he fought to establish for the Jewish people. When I was old enough to appreciate the benefits of having money, I asked him why he turned down those lucrative offers. “What do you mean why? Do you think I should spend my life manufacturing zippers?” “Zippers” was his way of referring to anything that he thought was of little consequence to the world.

So, immediately after my father retired from the army, our family moved to Los Angeles for three years in order for him to pursue his second career, as a professor of modern Arabic literature. During this time, he managed to complete his PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

I was six years old, and I was ecstatic to go to America. I would show off my vast knowledge about America to my friends: “In America, they have cars with automatic transmission and phones where you can see the person on the other end of the line through the phone!” I actually imagined the stick shift moving on its own, and I was seriously disappointed when I learned that it was not like that at all. “Plus we fly in an airplane to get there.”

Although I loved America, these turned out to be three very difficult years for the rest of the family. My father was given a scholarship, but it was not a very generous one, and so we lived in an apartment in what was called the UCLA Married Student Housing. There were several poor married students, some with kids. There were also a few respectable international refugees who, more often than not, had fled their own countries as a result of a coup. And there was one Israeli couple who had two cats and with whom I would spend a great deal of time. My best friends were Vita from Tanzania, Berno from Ecuador, and Piyush from India. Vita’s family lived on one side of our apartment; on the other was the Babikian family, Armenians from Lebanon. I remember the mother, Margot, and my mother became good friends. They also had a son who was younger than I, Ariel, with whom I would often play.

The army retirement plan was not generous at the time, and so money was very tight. Although I was never in want of anything, I realize now how hard and stressful it must have been on both my parents. I was always a cheerful young boy and my mother, my sister Nurit, and friends of the family all made sure that I was having a good time—and I did. We would go to the pool on campus a lot and participate in summer camps there.

My brother, Yoav, left after a year and returned to Israel. Nurit left shortly thereafter to study at the Sorbonne in Paris. Ossi, the sister closest to me in age, and I remained the entire three years. Realizing the amount of stress under which my father had placed himself and how his mood affected the rest of the family, my mother did her best to remain cheerful and make our life livable.

When we first arrived in Los Angeles, we stayed in a very nice apartment building not far from UCLA. The apartment was spacious and the corridors leading to it were carpeted like a plush hotel. There was a swimming pool, and since most of the residents were older, my sisters and I had it all to ourselves. But it turned out that my father’s stipend could not afford us this arrangement and we ended up moving into a smaller apartment on Sawtelle Boulevard, among families who were younger and far less affluent. I knew no English when we arrived but, being six and having a TV set, I picked it up quickly. I went to second, third, and fourth grade at the Clover Avenue School in Los Angeles.

I loved living in the U.S., and the experience gave me an edge that cannot be overstated. I became completely fluent in English, which made me bilingual at a very young age. I was exposed to American culture and, more than that, to the diverse nature of Los Angeles and particularly the UCLA campus during the late 1960s and early 1970s. I remember going with my father to the drive-in theatre to see the famous fight between Joe Frasier and Mohammad Ali, where Frasier knocked out Ali. When we returned, I saw that the entire neighborhood was in uproar, particularly the African Americans who lived there. More than a boxing match, this was a huge social and political match even though both Frasier and Ali were African American. Ali represented the antiwar, anti-establishment African-American rebellion of the time. His defeat was viewed as unfair, and as a loss for the African-American struggle.

We were also there during the presidential elections when Richard Nixon beat Hubert Humphrey. It’s almost hard to believe today, but my father supported Nixon over Humphrey. As he supported the U.S. bombing of Cambodia and Vietnam—because he was completely and thoroughly anticommunist and pro-American. Watergate began to surface during our final days in the U.S.

Even after we returned to Israel, I kept up with American politics and culture, much more so than most Israeli kids my age. And I held on to certain pop culture associations from the time: Peanuts, the young Michael Jackson, and all the television series and shows that marked that period and remained iconic in American culture. So that when I moved back to Southern California as an adult, I was in some ways returning home.

My father had an office at UCLA on the tenth floor of one of the tall buildings on campus, and he spent most of his time there. In the evening, after dinner, he would watch the news and then I would join him on the couch for an episode of
Bonanza
or
The Wild Wild West
, or a police drama, before going to bed.

While I enjoyed America, I was glad to eventually return to Jerusalem. But in Israel things did not go so smoothly for me. I had first-grade Hebrew skills and was sent to fifth grade, but received no help in order to catch up. Plus, what was cool in the U.S. was not necessarily cool in Israel. Here no one cared about UCLA beating USC at basketball; I knew nothing about local sports; and the American mannerisms I’d picked up made me an outsider from the get-go.

The first day of school my mother dropped me off at the house on 18 Rashba Street—our old building where my grandmothers now lived—and said, “Just follow all the other children, they are all going to the same school.” I didn’t know my way around so I was terrified, but I did what she said. Then once I got to school, I had no idea where to go. There were hundreds of children who seemed like they knew what to do and where to go, and I was embarrassed to admit I was clueless. Eventually, I found my class, and the teacher gave me name cards to hand out to all the students, not realizing I could not read Hebrew well enough to read the names.

The first couple of years back in Israel, my greatest fear was that I would be asked to read out loud and people would find out that I couldn’t read very well. I fell behind in all subjects and that, along with my father’s unpopular views, made for some tough times for a ten-year old. Because my father, the retired general, called for compromise and criticized the state, he was called an “Arab lover,” and so was I—although I still hadn’t formed any particular political views. It’s safe to assume that the other kids repeated at school what they heard at home, and it made little difference if I held the same views as my father or not. It took me three years to catch up, both socially and academically. By eighth grade, I felt pretty good and I had a few friends. As far as school was concerned, other than English, with which I felt at ease, my confidence was always low and my performance poor. So while three years in the U.S. was a great opportunity, because no one thought to work with me through the transition, the return home was very difficult.

Meanwhile, my father helped to found the Arabic Literature Department at Tel Aviv University. He gained a reputation as a serious and innovative scholar and later became the first Israeli professor of Arabic literature to introduce studies of Palestinian prose and poetry into the academic curriculum. He taught at Tel Aviv and Haifa Universities until he retired for a second time in 1990.

While we were still in the U.S., my father started writing a weekly opinion column in
Ma’ariv
, a mass-circulation daily newspaper published in Israel. Because of his résumé, everyone expected him to align himself with the Israeli government’s narrative, which claimed that Israel had been viciously attacked by three Arab armies in 1967 and defended itself heroically because it had the wits and, more importantly, the moral high ground. This narrative also claimed that Israel’s rights to the land of Israel were absolute, if not for religious or historical reasons then for military and security reasons.

But he saw things differently. He came out and stated publicly that the 1967 War was not an existential war but a war of choice:

I was surprised that Nasser decided to place his troops so close to our border. He must have known the grave danger into which he placed his forces. Having the Egyptian army so close allowed us to strike and destroy at any time we wished to do so, and there was not a single knowledgeable person who did not see that. From a military standpoint, it was not the IDF that was in danger when the Egyptian army amassed troops on the Israeli border, but the Egyptian army.
¹

He fiercely criticized the army’s building of an expensive defensive line in the Sinai Desert along the shores of the Suez Canal. He thought the army should be mobile and agile and that throughout history defensive lines had proven themselves to be costly and ineffective. This line was later named
Kav Bar-Lev
, or The Bar-Lev Line, after Chief of Staff Haim Bar-Lev. During the 1973 Arab-Israeli War
²
, the Egyptian army stormed through the Bar-Lev Line and it proved to be a disaster, providing no defense at all. After the war everyone liked to joke:

Question: “What remained of the Bar-Lev Line after the war?”