Hesh Kestin - The Siege of Tel Aviv

IN OCTOBER OF 1973, I flew to New York from my home in Israel to tell my parents their younger child, my twenty-six-year-old kid brother Lawrence, was dead. This was not something I could do by phone. Freshly married, Larry was an architect working for an Israeli government agency responsible for planning new Jewish settlements in what some called liberated Judea and Samaria and others called the Arab West Bank. Whatever you called it, on a dirt track near Jericho the car he was traveling in flew off the road and tumbled into a dry river bed. An Arab shepherd nearby heard the stuck horn and managed to flag down two Arabs in a pickup truck, who drove them to the nearest Arab hospital, in Ramallah, bypassing Jerusalem. Bad luck. The Arab doctors in Ramallah then sent my brother and his driver back to Jerusalem. Thus what was probably an act of Arab terrorism was balanced by the humane reaction of other Arabs to try to save their lives.

Following surgery at Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem, Larry’s driver remained comatose for months, then came to. Larry died on the operating table, possibly the first casualty of the Yom Kippur War, which would break out in a matter of days. Any investigation into this mysterious single-car accident would be put off and then filed away. Israel had more urgent matters to attend to.

I was with my father in synagogue when I heard two men behind us whispering that war had broken out. We left immediately. I had to get home: my wife and then infant daughter Margalit were alone within rifle range of three Arab villages. But all commercial flights to Israel had been canceled.

I called the Israel consulate. Unimaginably on Yom Kippur, someone picked up the phone.

“Consulate of Israel, how may I help you?”

“I need to get to Israel immediately.”

“I regret we are providing transportation only for Israeli citizens.”

“I’m an Israeli citizen!”

“Then why are you speaking English?” she asked with that wonderful bureaucratic impatience that Israeli government functionaries have honed to an art form.

I switched to Hebrew. “Because, you—” Here I inserted a long list of biblical and more contemporary curses, some of them physiologically improbable— “you were speaking English! Now can you get me on a fucking plane?!”

“Be at Kennedy Airport at three,” she said, and rung off.

The El Al flight was full of silent IDF reservists, but no one needed military expertise to know how bad it was. In the north, Syrian tanks were threatening Haifa; in the south, masses of Egyptian mechanized infantry were within artillery range of Tel Aviv. It was inconceivable that the few hundred of us on the plane could make a difference. The mood was somber until, over the Mediterranean, about a half hour’s flying time from Ben-Gurion Airport, we picked up an escort of two Israeli Super-Mystère fighters. The entire cabin broke out in song. If the Israel Air Force could spare two of its twenty-four Mystères, perhaps things weren’t so bad.

Alas, they were. Flushed with confidence from Israel’s victory over the same enemies in the 1967 Six Day War, Israeli military intelligence had failed the nation. The IDF did not believe the Arabs were up to mounting a successful multi-front invasion.

Apparently, neither did the Arabs. Unaccustomed to victory, there were no plans to finish the job. Fearful of going forward with out orders, the Arab armies stood in place. But the enemy’s major blunder was timing: they chose the one day on the Jewish calendar where most of the IDF, especially the reservists who made up two-thirds of its manpower, were either at home or in synagogue. The roadways were deserted and thus wide open for soldiers to speed to their units’ staging areas.

I found my way home to another kind of threat. My wife Leigh answered my knock at the door with a loaded shotgun pointed at my head. Later she told me she’d considered cutting the intruder down through the door; she couldn’t imagine that I had managed to return home.

As for what ensued, at the price of 3500 Israeli fatalities, the IDF regrouped, counter-attacked, and repelled both Egyptian and Syrian invasions. But there was another price. Never again would Israelis take for granted that their country would be safe from Moslem conquest. Rarely discussed, this nightmare lives within the heart of the entire nation.

Could it happen? You’ve come to the right book.

ALEX LOVES SILK. IF she lived in a colder country she would love furs as well, to say nothing of black leather. She delights in high heels—hers this evening are knock-offs of an Italian pair she saw in Vogue , size twelve, made by a talented pair of Christian Arab brothers whose workshop is a hole in the wall in Jaffa, not a virtual hole in the wall but a real hole in a real wall—just as she loves nylons, and jewelry, and perfume, and her collection of wigs that scream woman . Were it not for Alex’s profession, she wouldn’t mind growing her hair out, but the Israel Air Force frowns on its fighter pilots wearing theirs long enough to catch in the complex wiring of an F-16 helmet or, worse, tangling in the hundreds of miles of cable exposed when a pilot blasts out of the cockpit in an emergency ejection. This is why female pilots in the IAF wear their hair cropped short. But Alex does not quite fall into that category.

As it happens, Alex is the IAF’S leading ace, a pilot so skilled, her reflexes so honed that, simply in terms of physical abilities, the specific athletic attributes of a fighter pilot, he is the most perfect specimen the Israel Air Force has ever strapped into the seat of an F-16. Alex is as known for his leadership qualities as she is for her capacity to survive a 4-G power dive for three minutes without blacking out, and as admired for her guts as he is for her unique ability to choreograph and control a multiple jet fighter attack as though one brain were at the instruments of many aircraft.

She, he? His, hers? If this is confusing consider the effect two years earlier on General Motta Ben-Sheikh, commander of the IAF Fighter Academy, who happens one evening to be sitting with his wife in the lobby of the Tel Aviv Hilton entertaining relatives visiting from France, a yearly ritual that is never anything beyond familial obligation. General Ben-Sheikh’s people, originally from Morocco, chose different places of refuge when it became clear after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 that the Jewish community of Fez had no future in a Muslim country: most fled to Israel, many finding careers in the armed forces and police. The wealthier, however, emigrated to France, where seemingly without exception they prospered in the manufacture of women’s undergarments.

Whenever his Parisian cousins visit Israel Gen Al-Sheikh makes it a point to entertain them at the Hilton, a not so subtle indication that he in his way has done as well as they in theirs. And moreover that while the Al-Sheikhs of Paris, despite their wealth, will forever be outsiders in their adopted country, filthy Moroccans, second-class citizens in la belle France , the Al-Sheikhs of Tel Aviv are not second-class anything.

This particular evening, General Al-Sheikh finds himself looking past his garishly dressed nouveaux-riches relations to a woman seated at the bar with a group of equally young and stylish Israelis. From a distance he can just about make out their easy banter in colloquial Hebrew, and he tries to hear what this especially striking young woman is saying when he feels his wife kick him under the table. Hard.