But my excitement wasn’t very long-lived. For us, victory seemed very, very distant because Jerusalem was surrounded. From [Jerusalem’s] Old City I heard a Jewish girl’s voice on the radio saying, “We are going to surrender! Please tell us how to surrender!” It made me ill to hear such words. How can it be that our forces are surrendering? When a girl is saying those words it’s even more impressive. Then I heard the voice of a male: “You will have to wait, we will give you instructions.” For me, it was very disgusting.
I forgot that in a war, you cannot win all the battles. But here we were in Palestine–Israel–where every man should be a hero. When the ship first brought me here, I wondered: “Am I really alive? And out of the 250,000 Jews in Lithuania, I am one of the few who survived? Why me?” Some of the sabras [native-born Israelis] who met me said, “You’re a good man. You were a partisan [in the Lithuanian resistance]. But how could all the others go [to the concentration camps]? If something happens here, we will not give up.”
And here I was seeing the same behavior. People here persuaded me to believe that here they are another people–yet here they were also surrendering. So it was a day of mixed feelings for me.
Then we heard that all the Arab armies are marching toward Palestine. So I made up my mind that it would be very hard times, that it would not be so easy. I had seen what [weapons] we had. In such a small strategic place–Mount Scopus, which was one of the highest places in the entire Jerusalem area–we had only about 40 rifles and homemade tommy guns. The heaviest thing we had was one small two-inch mortar. We had many people who wanted to do something, but they had no weapons. We were surrounded.
Some of the men had families in Jerusalem, and they were already homesick. One night we were bombed on Mount Scopus. Our commander was a former major in the British Army, and we students asked him to train us more. We were funny soldiers–soldiers usually don’t want a lot of training.
The Jordanian forces came very close to our position and one of our guys, also a former partisan, stopped them with his lousy antitank gun with two or three bullets. At one point it was very, very dangerous to be on Mount Scopus. Elsewhere in the country it wasn’t going badly. But I had to be concerned about what was going on where we were.
PALESTINE, 1944-48:Former Israeli prime ministerYitzhak Shamirwas a member of the right-wing Jewish underground organization Lehi when the British pulled out of Palestine in May 1948.
We executed some people–British soldiers, people of the [British] criminal-investigation department. The terrorist character of our war was most appropriate. We made it clear there was no use to a British military presence in Israel. It influenced other countries. [In 1944] two of our comrades executed the British minister-resident in Cairo, Lord Moyne. At this time the British Army was in Egypt. The Egyptian youth were excited, and all of them were talking about how they had to follow the way of the Jews. They held demonstrations for our two boys, who were arrested and hanged afterward.
