Historical Background and Interviews
III. A New Beginning A New Beginning
came to an impasse. Begin would give no more than 80 percent of the weapons to the IDF. Ben-Gurion, insisting on Etzel submersion into the IDF, ordered an attack on the ship. In front of the Tel Aviv shoreline, a bloody clash erupted, during which at least sixteen died and ten were wounded; the ship caught fire after being hit and sank, taking all of the cargo with it. A second truce followed on the heels of the first one. But in mid-September, while it was still in place, a group from Lechi mur- dered the UN mediator who was pushing for a new partition plan with less land for Jews, along with his assistant. The Israeli gov- ernment arrested hundreds of former Lechi members, dissolved the former Etzel troops in the IDF, and on October 17, ordered that the Palmach disband. 3 Enlisting with the IDF, the Dror group engaged in various battles in the War of Independence near Jerusalem, including Ma’ale Ha- Hamisha, Abu-Ghosh (near what is now Beit Shemesh), and Beit Natif (which became kibbutz Nativ HaLamed Hay). “The war began,” recalled Behira Zakay, “and we who wanted to join [the army] started arguing.” Some wanted to finish school while others were eager to join the army. After two older members of the Dror group, Kalman Offir and Eliezer [Leon] Rubinstein, volunteered, the rest of the young people enlisted together, even though most of them were younger than the required age of seven- teen, Zakay said. At the time, she was anxious to join the war ef - fort, but today she has mixed feelings about the recruitment of the Dror group. As orphans, they were not supposed to be allowed to fight, but the IDF recruited them anyway. Trosman left the kibbutz in which he had been living, Gan-Shmuel, and rejoined the group in May 1948 “when they decided to stop studying and to join the war effort,” as he put it. In a Yagur Journal article dated July 18, 1948, Aharon described the group’s decision to fight. “Once the war broke out in the coun - try,” he wrote, “a visible change in our group’s society and lives oc- curred. The first place this was felt was in our studies. Our thoughts
359
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online