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joined Giora Zussman’s detail, and together we entered the Old Terminal. The operation itself took barely a few minutes.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  “The following day we came back to Israel with the hostages. I was sent to Jerusalem, to the home of the Netanyahu family, to tell them about Yoni’s last moments. That was a painful task.”

On May 14, 1948, the British Army and administration leave Palestine after thirty years of British rule. That same afternoon Israel’s independence is proclaimed by David Ben-Gurion in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The United Nations, by a vote taken six months before, on November 29, 1947, has decided to partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state, but the Arabs reject partition. The local Palestinian Arabs and the armies of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq, as well as units of Arab volunteers from all over the Middle East, set out to invade and destroy the Jewish State. David Ben-Gurion is elected prime minister and minister of defense. The acting chief of staff is Yigael Yadin, a future world-renowned archaeologist.

CHAPTER 2
    TO SAVE JERUSALEM, 1948
    O n May 24, 1948, while Israel’s Independence War was raging, David Ben-Gurion summoned Yigael Yadin. He approached the map of Palestine, hanging on the wall in his office, and pointed at a crossroads marked “Latrun.”
    â€œAttack! Attack at all costs!” he forcefully said.
    Yadin refused.
    Ben-Gurion, “the Old Man,” was sixty-two years old, a stocky Polish-born man with a defiant face, a jutting chin, piercing brown eyes—all this crowned with two tufts of snow-white hair hovering like wings over his temples. Yigael Yadin was half his age—a thin young man, balding and with a luxuriant mustache. Before the war he had studied at Hebrew University, following in the footsteps of his father, a noted archaeologist.
    Ben-Gurion was haunted by the situation in Jerusalem. The Jewish part of the city was under siege, surrounded by the Arab Legion—Jordan’s first-rate army. Starved, thirsty, its defenders and weapons insufficient, Jerusalem was in immediate danger of collapsing.Ben-Gurion believed that if Jerusalem fell, the newborn Jewish State wouldn’t survive. The fortress of Latrun, near a Trappist monastery, controlled the road from the coastal plain to Jerusalem; it had been occupied by elite units of the Arab Legion. To break the siege, Latrun had to be conquered.
    But Yadin had other priorities. The Arab armies had penetrated deep into Israeli territory. The Syrians had reached the Jordan Valley; the Iraqis were close to the Mediterranean coast, threatening to cut the country in two; and the Egyptian expeditionary force had set up camp on the shore of the Lakhish River, thirty-five kilometers from Tel Aviv. Yadin believed he had to stop the Egyptians first.
    Latrun, Ben-Gurion repeated, had to be taken. Nothing else mattered as much. A heated exchange erupted between the two, and Yadin angrily slammed his hands on the glass plate covering Ben-Gurion’s desk, breaking it. But the Old Man wouldn’t budge. While respecting Yadin and even admiring his fiery character, he stuck to his guns. Yadin finally gave in, and in a telegram to the commander of the Seventh Brigade repeated Ben-Gurion’s order: “Attack at all costs!”
    Wave after wave of Israeli soldiers stormed the Latrun fortress over the next weeks; time after time their attacks ended in failure. Hundreds of Israelis were killed and wounded, but the Arab Legion repelled all the attacks. In the meantime UN envoys were feverishly trying to broker a temporary cease-fire between Jews and Arabs. Ben-Gurion knew that the cease-fire agreement would “freeze” the situation on the different fronts. This meant that if the cease-fire was achieved while Jerusalem was still under siege, that fact would be finalized in the UN reports, and Israel wouldn’t