Ido was just a few inches over five feet, he was strong and athletic, a star even on the basketball court. Moshe was taller, if a bit overweight. He was nowhere near as strong as Ido, but still stronger than me, and had a streetwise intelligence and a sardonic sense of humor. Both had tested the patience of our teachers to breaking point. Ido had been sent off to a vocational school in Netanya. Moshe was moved to Mikveh Israel, a school which focused mostly on agriculture. On Friday evenings and Saturdays in the kibbutz, however, they filled their time with a variety of minor misdeeds. My role — the cement in our budding partnership — was as designated lock-picker.
Our first caper targeted the concrete security building near the dining hall. It contained the kibbutz’s store of weapons, with a metal door secured by a padlock. Late one Friday night, with Ido and Moshe as lookouts, I crouched in front of the lock and took out my tools. In less than a minute, I had it open. We darted into the storeroom. There were about 80 rifles, along with a few machine guns, on racks along the walls. Ido took a rifle from the furthest end of the rack and wrapped it in a blanket. Moshe pocketed a box of ammunition. As the others hurried back to our dormitory, I closed the lock, making sure it was in the same position I’d found it, and joined them. The next afternoon, we stole away through the moshav of Kfar Hayim into a field on the far side. We test-fired the rifle until sunset, when we returned to the kibbutz and replaced it in the armory. It felt like the perfect crime: foolproof, since no one was likely to notice anything. Essentially harmless. And repeatable, as we confirmed by returning on Friday nights every month or two.
This modest pre-adolescent rebellion never extended to doubting the national mission of Israel. Growing up on a kibbutz in a country younger even than we were, we all felt a part of its brief history, and its future. That was especially true after my kibbutz mentor, Yigal, left for his military service and joined one of the Israeli army’s elite units.
The 1948 war had been won. But it had not brought peace. Palestinian irregulars, fedayeen operating from Jordan and the Gaza Strip, mounted hit-and- run raids. In armed ambushes or by planting mines, they killed dozens of Israeli civilians and injured hundreds more. The country was in no mood for another war. The newly created Israeli armed forces — known as 7zahal, a Hebrew acronym for the Israeli Defense Force — also seemed to have lost the cutting edge, or perhaps the desperate motivation, of the pre-state militias. At first, Ben- Gurion relied on young recruits in the new army’s infantry brigades to counter the fedayeen attacks. Nearly 90 reprisal operations were launched in 1952 and
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