President Zalman Shazar came by the beds to ask his questions. “What’s your name?” the elderly man asked me.
“He can’t talk!” shouted my comrades. The president kept peering at me, a crowd of hospital personnel and reporters gawking from behind.
“I see,” said the president. “So, where are you from?”
Another time, Yaffa Yarkoni, a singer who had entertained Israeli troops since the days of Palmach, came to visit. She sang a few songs, and then noticed me, my jaw all wired up, the bandages covering the stitches in my throat. She reached a line in a song about a loved one, and came over to me to give me a big kiss. I must have looked pretty bad, getting all that attention.
Mostly, we talked in the ward about what had happened — the best debriefing of all, the survivors’ dialogue. We all knew what went wrong, but the politicians and generals did not want to know our versions of Karameh. The cover-up began, with combined interests at stake.
Both military and political decision makers responsible for the operation worked to make sure that the public never knew of the debacle. Instead, in newspaper interviews and speeches, the politicians and generals made Karameh sound like a smashing success.
Then-Chief of Staff Haim Bar-Lev gave interviews about how the raid fulfilled all our goals. The politicians and generals could not admit that the IDF had failed to meet its objectives. As far as they were concerned, more casualties meant greater heroism. Uzi Narkiss, the general in charge of the operation, quietly paid the price. A few months later he gave up his uniform for a cushy job with the politicians.
The PLO said Arafat escaped on a motorcycle on the road heading east. I did not see him. But if the sayeret had reached our place on time, we might have caught him and the rest of the PLO, and changed history.
I do know that the IDF lost nearly thirty soldiers that day, with seventy wounded. The IDF disgracefully left three bodies behind in the field, and the Jordanians paraded them along with the abandoned tanks in downtown Amman.
For the PLO, Karameh became known as a great victory, despite the fact we killed hundreds of them and destroyed their base. Attacked by the vaunted IDF, they survived less than a year after the IDF humiliated the combined armies of the Arab world.
Walking back to Matan alone from the firefight, waiting for the bullet that would end my life, I had thought about the great big Israel Defense Forces, the army that beat back all the Arab world less than a year before but went into battle without planning, certain that Arab irregulars were no match for them.
I thought about how soldiers without commanders, like those three around Arazi, can panic. And I thought about my own sense of shock at being wounded, not only because of the pain, but because it meant leaving my soldiers behind, in trouble. And, of course, I thought about how I had died — and was given the chance to live.
Victory can be measured by the balance between plan and action. If you win, you planned well. Defeat provides an opportunity to learn. Where did you make mistakes? Did you underestimate or overestimate the opposition? Were there gaps in the intelligence? Was the approach wrong? The timing off? The right means chosen? Who faltered? Who panicked?
But no harmony existed between plan and action. We did not meet our goals. Karameh could have become a textbook case of how not to integrate an organization made up of many parts. But the IDF never asked what went wrong at Karameh. No summaries or formal conclusions were written up, no recommendations made for further inquiry.
In a single stroke, my perceptions of the IDF and its strength, and of my own invincibility, had changed forever. At Karameh I understood my own vulnerability, as well as the IDF’s. Since then, before every battle, every operation, and every project I began, I have seen Karameh in my mind’s eye, where I learned to learn, and the first thing I learned was that if the IDF could fail so badly, peace was still a long way away.
They reached me at the hospital about a month after the battle, sending a junior officer who had not seen the battle and did not understand anything I talked about. Nobody gave the order for a full investigation with teams to debrief everyone within two weeks, while the events remained fresh in the minds of the participants.
Moshe Dayan came to visit with Nurit one day. I would have told him about what I saw and learned, but by then new medical problems plagued me. I was infected with jaundice from one of the blood transfusions during my operation. I could only sleep and drink water, which I immediately vomited back up through the horrible wires holding my jaw together. Worse than the wound itself, the jaundice left me in no condition to discuss much at all, let alone Karameh.
Six months of recuperation lay ahead of me, said the doctors. But I would not lose touch with my unit. The brigade command picked my brother Udi to replace me as deputy commander of the sayeret. “Betsers go and Betsers come” became a motto in the brigade while I went home to the Jezreel Valley to recuperate in Nahalal, my birthplace, where the story of my life really begins.
BASIC VALUES, BASIC TRAINING
One of my earliest memories is the sweet-and-sour smell of cow dung and damp straw, mixed with the sound of steaming milk spraying into metal buckets as my grandparents milked the cows in the little barn behind their house, my birthplace.
Russian revolutionaries and social experimenters, my grandparents rejected religion for the sake of farming, and gave up schooling to work with their hands. They believed in action, not words, an ethos that dominated the original settlement movement of the Jezreel Valley.
But they loved ideas. Radical democrats, they planned to turn the Jewish world they knew on its head. In their revolution, Jews became farmers, workers, and artisans instead of intellectuals, merchants, or beggars. Their revolution led them to Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, and to the Land of Israel, a sparsely populated corner of the decaying Ottoman empire at the very beginning of the twentieth century.
Born in Russia, my grandfather Yisrael Betser came to the Land via Argentina. His parents started him on his revolutionary course by moving their household from Russia to northern Argentina. A nineteenth-century German-Jewish philanthropist, Baron Maurice Hirsch, had established a self-sufficient Jewish farming colony there.
But living in Moisesville, as Hirsch called his Argentine settlement, did not satisfy Yisrael’s aspirations for Jewish self-determination. In 1907, after a year in Moisesville, at the age of twenty-four he traveled alone, halfway around the world, to join the Zionists in the Land of Israel.
Two years later, he met my grandmother, Shifra Shturman, the oldest of three Russian sisters who had arrived in the country calling themselves “workers in the revolutionary movement” and seeking work alongside the men.
Yisrael and Shifra met at Umm Juni, south of the Sea of Galilee, along the banks of the Jordan River, where the Zionist movement sent them to create a settlement. Neighbors to a few tribes of Bedouin, they eked out a living off the banks of the river. Shifra was the only woman with the six men — including Moshe Dayan’s father-in the first years at Umm Juni.
The seven young people — all in their early twenties — created the first kibbutz, Degania. And at the end of their first year in the commune, Yisrael Betser and Shifra Shturman married, and then moved southwest to Merhavia, in the Jezreel Valley, where they helped found the second kibbutz.
My aunt Yardena was born there, and so was my father’s oldest brother, my uncle Moshe, whom I never knew and for whom I am named. He died early in World War II, a volunteer in the British Army. According to everyone in Nahalal, my uncle Moshe stood out among all the youth of Nahalal for his wisdom, modesty, humor, and diligence. But most of all, they told me, my uncle Moshe stood for honesty.