My grandparents moved several more times, and had five more children — Nahman, my father; my uncles Ya’akov and Zvi; and my aunts Sarah and Havah. But finally they decided against the kibbutz as a way of life, envisioning instead a settlement that combined their individualistic spirit with the science of collectivism. Thus they reached Nahalal, a hill surrounded by a malaria — ridden swamp in the Jezreel Valley.
Their moshav, as they called their experimental farming community, would not be as communal as the kibbutz, where the fields belonged to everyone and nobody had private possessions. Instead of collectively owning the land, each family received an equal share of land and the same means to make the land produce food. They did not have to worry about marketing their produce — the moshav movement created an organization to handle marketing — and the settlement included artisans and craftspeople whose skills earned them a place in the community.
As a scientifically planned community, Nahalal’s very architecture served as a symbol as well as a function of the society’s organization. They laid out the settlement in a circle, putting a ring of houses around the perimeter and slicing the land around the circle like a pie, with each family getting the same amount of land. Every season, the farmers met to plan what to grow in the coming year, and everyone received the same supply of seeds and equipment. Nobody would own a tractor unless everyone owned a tractor. Until then, they shared. And in 1921, the moshav elected my grandfather Yisrael Betser as its first mukhtar, the mayor of Nahalal.
My mother, Sarah Hurvitz, whose family was already five generations in the country (she was born and raised in Tel Aviv), met my father, Nahman, in Kibbutz Haim in the Jezreel Valley, and gave birth to me in my grandparents’ house in Nahalal in 1945.
I spent my first four years there, until the end of the War of Independence. Then, answering David Ben-Gurion’s call for experienced workers to help build the country, my father took us to Haifa, where he worked as a contractor on major construction sites.
But he preferred the Jezreel Valley — and so did I. Moving back to the valley, just before my eighth birthday, became one of the happiest days of my life. Though we moved to Bet She’arim, it was only a ten-minute gallop on a horse across the fields to my grandparents’ home in Nahalal.
I grew up barefoot — not because we could not afford shoes, but because we learned to love the feel of the ground beneath our feet. Like my uncles and aunts and my brothers and sisters, I inherited Yisrael Betser’s genes, which gave me height, and Shifra Shturman’s genes, which gave me strength. By sixteen I was the tallest of my friends — six — foot — three. And though I weighed only a hundred and sixty pounds, it was all muscle, and remained my constant weight throughout all my years in and out of the army.
I swam, played basketball, rode horses, and most of all, I ran. My greatest pleasure, running, gave me a feeling of freedom. Later, when I went to the army, it would be one of the first things the officers noticed about me. I always came in first, second, or third in the long double — time marches or in the platoon punishments that taught us the discipline of soldiering.
Raised to believe in farming the land to develop it, and soldiering to defend it, army service was more than duty for me; it was a responsibility. But in our family, indeed throughout the Jezreel Valley, war stories were nothing to relish or brag about, indeed were rarely told.
For many years, a rifle hung on the wall of my grandparents’ dining room, which also served as their living room. It was not there as decoration or nostalgia. A few years before my birth, an Arab threw a hand grenade into a Nahalal house one night, killing a baby. It could happen again. The fedayeen continued coming across the borders to terrorize the Jews of the Land of Israel.
By the age of ten I knew how to use a rifle, an old Lee Enfield my father kept at home. But along with my father’s practical lessons in the weapon’s handling came a much more profound one. Only if we proved our readiness for self-defense would the Arabs ever accept us in the country. Peace, not war, was the goal. To reach it, we needed to be strong.
Though he was wounded twice as a fighter — once with Wingate, and then later in the War of Independence — I never heard a war story from my father. In the Jezreel Valley, his friends and neighbors admired his farmer’s abilities, his readiness to help anyone who needed it, and his preference for deeds over words.
So, like most of the kids of Nahalal-and indeed the rest of the farming settlements of the Jezreel Valley — we learned of our own families’ historic heroism through hearsay and the schoolbooks of our country’s modern history.
Growing up in Nahalal, even with all the reticence about talking about war and combat, my roots included the Haganah and the Palmach. A self-defense organization, created in the underground during the days of the British occupation of the country, the Haganah provided protection from the Arabs when the British did little to help.
As its strike force, the Palmach became the model for all the special operations forces in the IDF. A combination of British military tactics and kibbutz and moshav values made the Palmach an extraordinary military force, in which young men and women fought together. Using creativity and improvisation to counter the overwhelming numbers of Arab enemies, their guerrilla tactics made the most out of meager resources. Imbued with a profound camaraderie amongst its few hundred members, the Palmach’s fighters came from the farms and the labor movement, the elite of the country’s youth, recruited by friends and sworn to secrecy.
For me, the best stories I heard from the old — timers in the village gave me clues and hints where to find forgotten arms caches, hidden in the valley during the years of the British Mandate, when it was illegal for a Jew to have a gun — even while under constant attack from Arabs.
Following those clues, I led my friends to caves in the hills above Nahalal or to underground caches hidden beneath the floorboards of old barns. Once, I dug up an old septic tank to find an arms cache that included a Sten gun. My father had built that cache — not that he ever told me about it.
When I turned fifteen, my brother Udi went to the army — to the famed paratroops brigade. Like me, he had sought out old arms caches and tried out the guns he found in the old quarry in the hills north of Nahalal. But suddenly, when he went into the army, he changed. Soldiering stopped being a game for him.
Now, when he came home from the army, he went into the hills with his friends, other new soldiers. I spied on them when they told stories about the army. Combat soldiers all, they complained about tough sergeants and laughed about moments of fear that they overcame. I listened eagerly to their stories-not because I looked forward to war or combat, but because I looked forward to the challenges they described: the long marches and sleepless nights, the exhilaration of parachuting, and the sense of satisfaction that comes from shooting accurately.
Never much interested in school — I attended an agricultural high school not far from Haifa — I preferred hiking the land to reading about it in schoolbooks. Often my girlfriend, Nurit, and I took off for a few days or even weeks to go hiking and camping, whether in the Galilee’s hills or in the Negev’s desert. For us, no greater pleasure existed than tracing the course of a wadi we visited for the first time.
Indeed, field navigation using only a map and the stars became my favorite pastime, and one of the reasons I wanted to go to a sayeret, an IDF special force, where field navigation is a key to the craft of soldiering.