What Are You Currently Reading? 2014

[Firn]

A Soldier's Tale: The Bloody Road to Jerusalem by Uri Avnery.

This book unites two classic works on the War of 1948, first published in 1949 and 1950 and adds an introduction and some commentary.

The first book, 'In the Fields of the Philistines' was a huge success. Still today it feels fresh and captive, pulling you sometimes right into the actions and giving you the impression of looking out of the eyes of somebody else. The style is powerful and able to paint memorable and fitting pictures for the mind. The author later explained how the book was crafted.

I wrote before the action, during the action, and after the action. When an exhausting battle was over, my comrades would lie down and snore. I picked up my pencil and paper and wrote. I wrote on the ground, in the trenches, and on the hood of a jeep. I wrote in the canteen surrounded by hundreds of noisy comrades and I wrote in bed at night.

I wasn’t writing a diary. A diary is a dialogue with yourself, a record of your most intimate thoughts. But my articles were meant to be published. I knew they would appear the next day in black and white in the newspaper. All these reports appeared in the paper Yom Yom (Day by Day), the evening edition of the great Israeli daily paper Haaretz (The Land).

He was involved in many important battles during the war, first around the road to Jeruslam and later in the South and becomes a member of the famous Samson's foxes. Mounted on Jeeps, perhaps influenced by the SAS experience in North Africa, the small unit is highly influential because it is a rare combination of mobility and firepower. Some themes become a bit repetitive, like the conflict between front line troops and the 'shirkers' back home and his view about politicians. He sounds indeed like the radical voice of the 'youth'.

'The other side of the coin' was written in one go after the war and offers sometimes a stark contrast to the first book. It combines the story of his recovery at a hospital with intermitting memories, handling themes which didn't make it into the field reports. To avoid the military censorship it was tagged as literature, and it does certainly contain actions and orders which show dark sides. For example civilians get shot following orders from higher up with the intention to get others to flee and to stay away.*

All in all it offers a multifaceted view of the conflict from a soldiers eyes and ears, with acts heroic, good, curious, strange, bad or ugly.

*As Ariel Sharon died I took a look at his life and his controversial role as leader of unit 101. Having read the book the Qibya massacre does no longer stand out that much as it is put into a bloody and murky context of other war crimes inflicted by people on both sides.