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By Root 1123 0

as "vell.") "We were talking about Begin and your big laugh. You laughed at him for the wrong reason that day, my young friend. You laughed at him because the word 'arm' can be taken in different ways. Vell, so be it. You know what you should really have laughed at? Laughed till the floor collapsed? I'll tell you what. You shouldn't have laughed at the 'arming' but because Menachem Begin truly believes that if he were prime minister, everybody, the whole world, would immediately leave the side of the Arabs and come over to his side. Why? Why would they do that? For what? For his beautiful eyes? For his polished language? In memory of Jabotinsky, perhaps? You should have laughed your head off at him, because that's exactly the politics that all those layabouts in the shtetl used to like. All day long they would sit behind the stove in the house of study and talk that kind of politics. They used to wave their thumbs around like Talmud teachers: 'Foist of all, we send a delegation to Tsar Nikolai, an important delegation, that will speak to him very nicely and promise the Tsar to fix for him what Russia wants most of all, a way out to the Mediterranean. Then, we ask the Tsar that in exchange for this he should put in a kind word for us with his friend Kaiser Wilhelm, so our Tsar should get this Kaiser to tell his good friend the Sultan of Turkey to give the Jews, right away, no arguments, the whole of Palestine from the Euphrates to the Nile. Only after that, when we've sorted out the whole redemption once for all, then we can decide according to how we feel if Ponya (that's what we called Tsar Nikolai) deserves that we should keep our promise and let him have a way out to the Mediterranean or not.' If you've finished there by any chance, vell, let's both go and empty our baskets into the bin and move on to the next tree. On the way we can check with Alec or Alyoshka if they remembered to bring a pitcher of water with them or if we'll have to go and complain to Tsar Nikolai."

A year or two later my class was already sharing night-watch duties in Hulda; we had learned to use a gun in our paramilitary training. These were the nights of the fedayeen and the reprisal raids before the Sinai campaign of 1956. Almost every night the fedayeen attacked a moshav or a kibbutz or a suburb of a town, blowing up houses with people inside them, shooting or throwing hand grenades through people's windows, and laying land mines behind them.

Every ten days it was my turn to keep watch along the perimeter fence of the kibbutz, which was only some three miles from the Israel-Jordan armistice line at Latrun. Every hour I would sneak into the empty clubhouse, against regulations, to listen to the news on the radio. The self-righteous, heroic rhetoric of a beleaguered society dominated those broadcasts as it dominated our kibbutz education. Nobody used the word "Palestinians" in those days: they were called "terrorists," "fe-dayeen," "the enemy," or "Arab refugees hungry for revenge."

One winter evening I happened to be on night duty with Ephraim Avneri. We were wearing boots, tattered army fatigues, and prickly woolly hats. We were tramping through the mud along the fence behind the storehouses and cowsheds. A stench of fermenting orange peels that were used for making silage mingled with other agricultural smells: compost, rotting straw, warm steam from the sheep sheds, feather dust from the chicken coops. I asked Ephraim if he had ever, in the War of Independence or during the troubles in the 1930s, shot and killed one of those murderers.

I could not see Ephraim's face in the dark, but there was a certain subversive irony, a strange sarcastic sadness in his voice as he replied, after a short pensive silence:

"Murderers? What d'you expect from them? From their point of view, we are aliens from outer space who have landed and trespassed on their land, gradually taken over parts of it, and while we promise them that we've come here to lavish all sorts of goodies on them—cure them of ringworm and trachoma, free them from backwardness, ignorance,