1948: A Soldier's Tale - The Bloody Road to Jerusalem

by Uri Avnery, Christopher Costello (Translator)

Acclaimed as the Middle East’s "All Quiet on the Western Front"The first eye-witness account ever published of the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, this riveting memoir of a young Israeli soldier became an instant bestseller on publication in 1949, and is still recognized as the outstanding book of that war, in the tradition of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. First joining the Givati Brigade and later volunteering for "Samson’s Foxes", the legendary commando unit, Avnery took part in almost all the major battles on the Jerusalem and southern fronts. Written from the trenches, and from a military hospital bed, he offers an extraordinarily detailed account of the war, of fast-paced battles, and acts of extreme bravery, as well as the camaraderie and off-duty exploits of young men and women thrust into the front line. This is a gripping, sensitive, and at times deeply poignant account of the day-to-day brutalities of one of the most significant wars of our times.

Genres: History, Israel, Biography, Autobiography, Military Fiction, Nonfiction, Middle East

398 pages, Paperback

First published September 26, 2008

About the author

Uri Avnery (Hebrew: אורי אבנרי‎, also transliterated Uri Avneri, born 10 September 1923) is an Israeli writer and founder of the Gush Shalom peace movement. Often refered to as the (grand-)father of the Israeli Left.

A member of the Irgun as a teenager, Avnery sat in the Knesset from 1965–74 and 1979–81. He was also the owner of HaOlam HaZeh, an Israeli news magazine, from 1950 until it closed in 1993.

He is famous for crossing the lines during the Siege of Beirut to meet Yassir Arafat on 3 July 1982, the first time the Palestinian leader ever met with an Israeli. Avnery is the author of several books about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including 1948: A Soldier’s Tale, the Bloody Road to Jerusalem (2008); Israel’s Vicious Circle (2008); and My Friend, the Enemy (1986).

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

"War is a sandwich - a thin slice of danger between two thick slices of boredom."

Uri Avneri is now 90 years old. He has lived a very interesting and full life, and is well known in Israel as a leftist, a 'peacenik' or an 'agitator', or more cruelly among those more bigoted circles (of which there's no shortage in Israel) as an 'Arab lover'. To some he is a beacon of rational optimism and wisdom, a passionate proponent of a secular Middle East consisting of nations working together towards a prosperous and peaceful future, where taxpayers' money is spent on improving the lives of its citizens, rather than on anachronistic tanks and unaffordable jet fighters; while to others he is at best a naive romantic, a perpetual thorn in the backside of those sensible and wiser types charged with the heavy responsibility of keeping the State of Israel safe from harm, and its people free from the risk of terror.

He has lived a truly remarkable life. Born in Weimar Republic Germany, his family left in late '33, when he was ten, for a new life in Palestine. As a young man Avneri witnessed the 1948 re-birth of Israel from the most intimate observation post - he served in a front-line infantry unit which saw the awful and bloody nitty-gritty of battle in some of the most significant and decisive engagements of that strange war. A war between Jew and Arab which began in earnest in late 1947 (after the UN voted for partition into two states) while the occupying British mandate forces were in chaotic withdrawal. An undeclared civil war between Jewish and Arab paramilitary undergrounds ensued while the British inconsistently feigned neutrality. By May '48 the British withdrawal was complete and they exited clumsily stage-left into the Mediterranean with the setting sun of their empire. David Ben-Gurion declared the State of Israel's independence and the armies of several surrounding Arab states joined the ad-hoc forces of their Palestinian cousins in taking the fight to Israel.

Avneri's engrossing book is a recent publication which joins together in one volume for the first time the two separate titles which were published in the immediate aftermath of the first Arab-Israeli war. The first book - "In the Fields of the Philistines" (ITFOTP) is a compendium of the regular column which Avneri dispatched from the front to the evening edition of 'Ha'aretz' newspaper. They are exhillirating, to the point, and obviously very dramatic. I was reminded at times of the writing of Isaac Babel in "Red Cavalry" such is the immediacy and adrenalin-fizzed freshness of his dispatches. He has inserted commentary which links the chapters, explaining the context and those developments away from the front which the simple squaddie is typically oblivious to.

Avneri was in the 'Burma Road' convoys that kept the lifeline to the besieged Jerusalem open (see Amos Oz's remarkable "Tale of Love and Darkness" for a young boy's perspective to that particular trauma of this war between neighbours). He was sent in futile wave after futile wave against the Arab Legion stronghold at Latrun's old Ottoman/British police fortress, while the Egyptian forces squeezed them from the flanks.

Later -
"...While we are marching through the dunes toward the south, the rumble of our artillery meets our ears. One shell after another explodes in the Egyptian camp. Our hearts leap. That is our revenge for Latrun..."

Perhaps most horrifically of all, he was one of the courageous few that withheld the brutal Egyptian assault against the paper-thin defences at Kibbutz Negba on the southern front. At times it was literally a few dozen fighters with rifles, the odd machine-gun, and a jeep or two, which kept the might of the British equipped tank regiments and mechanised infantry of the Egyptian Army from breaking through to an unchecked onslaught on Tel Aviv.

"...The defenders of Negba - the men who lived in stifling bunkers and threw back assault after assault of tanks and infantry, who were bombarded twenty-four hours a day by artillery and aircraft, soldiers and 'civilians'...behind the cover of destroyed houses and burning barracks..."

Along with his celebrated unit 'Samson's Foxes', he was at every major battle of the central and southern fronts until he was made a casualty late in '48 by a serious shrapnel injury to his stomach after a year of fighting. Despite the fact that it pulls no punches, and is often quite graphic in the description of the harshest of battlefield conditions, as well as the blunt reportage from the seemingly disconnected home front and the smart-pressed uniforms of those who 'organise' themselves 'key roles' at HQ in the rear, ITFOTP was an instant success and bestseller with the jubilant post-war Israeli public.

Avneri was asked to publish more writing. But as he explains in the modern introduction, the first book was written in the heat of the battlefront, often from the back of a jeep, or in the ruin of an abandoned Arab village - brief snapshots of a young man exhilarated to be alive and to be surviving... The second book - "The Other Side of the Coin" (TOSOTC) - was written in very different circumstances. Avneri tells how he wrote it in a burst of energy over a two or three week period as he convalesced towards the war's end. It is straight form the heart, filled with passion, honesty of feeling, and a lot of raw emotion from the perspective of one who has lived through the horrors of war, and been right to the edge of losing his life, and witnessing many others who did. Most of the local publishers wouldn't touch it. When it was eventually published (by a different publisher to the first book), it was a big flop. The reviews were bad and the public turned on him. The Israelis of the early 1950s weren't ready to read first-hand impressions of the horrors of war, or of any compassion for the enemy, or about the terrible and brazen waste of life.

Some accused Avneri of betraying his nation, and of propagating Arab myths of Jewish violence. TOSOTC is indeed full of some very jarring experiences as Avneri weaves a series of flashback episodes into his convalescence at the casualty ward. For what seems an almost intolerable length of time, he must share his room with an unnamed dying soldier who is refused the soothing water he craves by the nurses with their orders. Weaved through the 140-odd pages of TOSOTC this poor soul's suffering punctuates Avneri's escapes to the recent past: memories from the battlefield, home leave, nostalgia for lost comrades, and even his teenage pre-WWII years in the right-wing nationalist underground 'Irgun' movement. It feels like he's in that stifling room for weeks and weeks and weeks. Only at the book's end is there a revelation that confirms for the reader that this has all happened in the space of a mere eight days.

The episodes that Avneri recalls are very memorable, and written with a tenderness that almost jars with the often grisly subject matter, but somehow doesn't. One episode tells how the unit's radio operator - an immigrant from Egypt - reaches out to a nearby enemy radioman he's listening in on. Their 'conversation' consists mainly of a series of mutual cursing and exchanged insults of the most depraved nature. This fast becomes a daily 10 O'clock morning ritual for the two signallers:

"...His highest ambition is to formulate the ultimate, final curse. The one that will shake Ibrahim and shock him so much that he won't be able to find an answer and will have to admit defeat. But Ibrahim also has talent - and time. Every morning he has a newly prepared list..."

"...And amid all these insults Jamus and Ibrahim are telling each other about their lives. If they ever happened to meet, they would surely recognize each other."

After five days Jamus has a day's leave. Under a smokescreen of filthy barbs Ibrahim makes a personal request: His sister in Jaffa.

"He hasn't heard anything from her since the war started... When he Jamus returns the next day, his face is grim."

Avneri asks Jamus what he learnt

" - 'I went everywhere. There are new immigrants living in the house. The Arabs can remember seeing her in the town after Jaffa was already taken. They think she is dead.'"

Jamus can't face another exchange with Ibrahim - whose unit is now surrounded - despite the Egyptian's calls and hope for news of his sister.

"On the third day Ibrahim's voice sounds like a distant echo. The batteries of his radio are nearly dead. For a few moments we hear his weakening calls, until they get mixed up with the atmospherics and fade away beneath them. There are no spare batteries. The invisible bridge between the fronts has collapsed..."

In the years following the war Uri Avneri pursued a career of campaigning journalism, fighting on with his pen and typewriter against the bigotry of ultra-nationalism which still permeates the region. He would go on to enter the Knesset as an opposition MP in a tiny leftist party. By the late 1970s, as the era of Menachem Begin and the new Likud government's expansion of the settlement project within the occupied territories entered full swing, he was one of the early spokesmen of the Peace block. In 1982, during Israel's seige of Beirut at the height of the war in Lebanon, he even manages to become the first Israeli to meet with Yasser Arafat. To this day he is a vocal opponent of Israeli oppression of her Palestinian neighbours, and still campaigns for peace and reconciliation.

I've deducted half a star for the lack of adequate maps in this edition. Why do publishers doubt the significance of the reader comprehending fully the landscape and distances concerned in a memoir such as this? Especially a military memoir that concerns a relatively small area geographically, though one where the frontlines are constantly shifting and very tightly inter-woven. Shame, as it spoils what is otherwise an extremely valuable and important, as well as very moving account from a first-hand witness to one of the 20th century's defining events.

Overall this is a very powerful and important piece of writing. The imagery and sense of feeling that Avneri gets down on paper will remain vivid in my mind for a very long time.

[David P · Rating 5 out of 5]

When was the state of Israel founded? History books point point to 29 November 1947 as the day when UN endorsed the partition of the British "Mandate of Palestine" into a Jewish state and an Arab one. However, the UN provided Jews with no more than a fighting chance, and the vicious fighting which erupted in 1948 claimed casualties on both sides. It ended in a tense cease-fire, following the defeat of the armies of five Arab nations: Israel wound up with most of the land, while the Kingdom of Jordan held the rest. The real losers (apart from the many dead) were hundreds of thousands of Arab refugees driven away by war. Their descendants by the million live in Gaza, in the Palestinian West Bank, in the Kingdom of Jordan itself (where they may constitute a majority) and in countries around the globe, including the USA.

In 1948 Uri Avnery, author of "1948, A Soldier's Tale," was 23 or 24 years old, editor of a small political newspaper. Like many others, Avnery volunteered to defend Israel from the Arabs who rejected partition and who fought against any Jewish state. At first the odds seemed uneven: the Jews relied mainly on small arms collected clandestinely during the British rule, while their foes were supported by bordering Arab states; the armies of those states joined the war on May 15 1948, when the last British soldiers left. Or even before: the army of Jordan, the "Arab Legion," was deployed in Palestine months earlier, and was besieging Jewish parts of Jerusalem well before May 15.

Jewish resistance started gradually, though it was well organized. It included veterans of WW-II, and memories of the Nazi Holocaust gave them a powerful motivation. Jerusalem was sporadically relieved by convoys of trucks shielded by boilerplate armor, and small units fought with mixed success to secure its road connection. Avnery tells about his trip as guard in such a convoy, and how he later participated in the failed attack on Latrun, ending in retreat under fire.

Ultimately the siege was broken by a bypass dirt road south of the main highway, the "Burma Road" so named after a road between India and China in WW II. But then came May 15, when the largest of the Arab armies, namely Egypt's, rolled northward to within 15-20 miles of Tel Aviv. Opposing it were (at first) about 1500 defenders (the number soon grew), among them Avnery. Fortified kibbutz-villages and a blown bridge slowed down the invasion, but what ultimately stopped it were desperate attacks, night and day, by fast moving platoons and companies. New recruits and arms from Europe gradually changed the odds, but at the beginning it was a close thing.

"1948, A Soldier's Tale" actually contains translations of two Hebrew books, "In the Fields of Philistia" (1949) and "The Other Side of the Coin" (1950). The first started with reports in the press submitted by Avnery during the fighting, and "Philistia" was the plain south of Tel Aviv, next to the ocean (the area of 5 biblical Philistine cities). It is a raw, emotional story of pitched battles, at places where survival depended mostly on luck. Avnery's feisty army ultimately drove back the Egyptian one and even surrounded some of it, including a young officer named Abdul Nasser, later ruler of Egypt. Avnery ends with an account of being hit in the belly by machine gun fire and of recovery in a military hospital. The book was an instant hit in Israel and quickly went through 12 printings.

That same fighting, however, also uprooted thousands of leaderless peasants, expelled by Israel fearful that their villages might again become enemy strongholds. (In the Galilee however Archbishop George Hakeem interceded and most inhabitants ended up as citizens of Israel). Avnery witnessed such expulsions, also the murder of Arab peasants caught in the war, and while he repeatedly risked his life defending Israel, he was also turned off by the excesses he saw. It made him a militant peace-lover, associating with Palestinians and often swimming against Israeli opinions. After the war he was quite vocal as owner and editor of the country's leading weekly newsmagazine.

"In the Fields of Philistia" seemed to reflect the "David vs. Goliath" struggle of Israel against the largest of Arab armies and was widely praised. It did not glorify war, but drew attention to the way it was won, by squads in armed jeeps darting across fields and dirt roads. Although many passages in it also described the other face of war, its reception seemed one-sided to Avnery. He therefore wrote "The Other Side of the Coin" (Hebrew equivalent to "on the other hand"), illuminating seamier sides of the same war.

Cast as the recollections of a wounded soldier in a military hospital (of which Avnery had his own memories), "The Other Side" tells of the rejected surrender of a village, of peasants coming under fire while sneaking at night to gather their abandoned crops, of an Arab youth employed in an army kitchen taking food to an old man hiding in an abandoned village, and more. Avnery knew that a factual account would be banned by the military censor and therefore cast it as a work of fiction, replacing given names with nicknames and deliberately fragmenting the story through hospital interludes. It reads well, but when it appeared it sold poorly, because it aired views of the war which Israel preferred to forget.

This translation deserves credit for including it. Its front carries a picture of young Avnery, a stubble-faced youth in uniform. It ends with a picture of white-haired Avnery in his 80s, a strident advocate of Jewish-Arab peace. After 60-odd years it still remains timely.

[Tom Potter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting because it is one of the few first-person accounts from inside the 1948 war that birthed the Israeli state. I would give it 3.5 stars. It is essential reading, but not particularly well-written. There is little context for the events described, no sense of the greater war, troop movements, locations, etc. It is cleansed of most of the blood and guts of war (perhaps thankfully), and the descriptions are not evocative or metaphorical. Chronology is disjointed. It is simply a first-hand account of what one individual sees in simple, black-and-white descriptions. But for those of us who have read the historians' accounts of Israel's birth and history, this is a unique perspective from inside the chaos. Recommend.

[Ietrio · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first part comes as a shock. I know Uri Avnery as a pacifist. And his articles are one of the best glorification of militarism. It is also a good reminder of how people are people. Nazi going to war to expand their living space. Russians going to war to save other people from independence. French going to bring christianity to the world for the glory of the king. This comparison is an abuse from my part. The Jews in 1948 knew there is no place for them. They thought the murderous nazi spree was over once they have left the anti-semitic Europe and now they were ready to start the same story over again. So the context has NOTHING to do with any of the blood thirsty groups from above. But the feeling and atmosphere seems to be the same.

[Scott Bowlsby · Rating 2 out of 5]

not terrible but not great. very very one-sided account of the war but I guess that's to be expected coming from a soldier in the Israeli army. Hardly any mention of what he was fighting for or what his opinion was on the political situation at the time which leaves the reader guessing at how important the creation of the state of Israel was for the soldiers; at most times it seemed as though they were responding to a supposed 'arab threat'. would definitely be nice to hear an arab account of the war.

[Ben Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the first half od this book, I have always been interested in reading books about wars. The first half seemed to fly by, the second half not so much.

The thing about this book is that it really is two books, written at separate times and then spliced together. I wouldn't have necessarily purchased the second without it being connected to the first. The second part of the book did give a different view, I just found it harder to read and seemed to really need to push myself to finish it.

[Orie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating insight into two times in an individual's mind. The first while a young solider fighting for the life of his country against incredible odds. The second years later after being brain-washed into believing he must tarnish his own experiences and memories.