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Paratrupers at the
Western Wall 1967
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Being 10 years old I have never experienced war before, the unknown, it was scary and exciting and unbelievable. Trenches were dug everywhere for people to run into when the sirens go off. We play in them; run from side to side, having drills checking how fast we can get into them. (11 seconds I think it was..) They were dug by large yellow machines and scarred the Kibbutz lawns all over.
At school we dug our own trenches. There was an eerie feeling in the air, we felt our very lives are questionable. The Kibbutz was empty of young men for few weeks already. The older men, the women the children took charge of the on going functioning of the Kibbutz. I felt mixed feelings of excitement and bewilderment. We had some real underground shelters, but apparently not enough or not near enough to were we were.
I remember the exact moment the war started. I was in 3rd grade. The Kibbutz is closed to an air force base. Suddenly there was this chuk, chuk, chuk loud sound and a bunch of helicopters flying low right above us. We did not realize that was the war until a bit later, but it felt like an ominous sign of an impending war.
Reflecting back on it, I find it hard to get the chronology right, but I believe it was the morning after that we woke up and found in the newspaper the unbelievable news that Israel managed to destroy the Arab's air force before the war has really started. We felt we were saved from certain demise.
On the next day we had several alarms and had to go into shelters. We had a shelter right under the synagogue, which was used as synagogue storage at normal times. When there was an alarm at night, we will go there until the relief alarm was sounded. It held maybe 50 or 100 people. We will huddle together and the younger children had little bank beds. It was sort of an adventure.
We actually grew up with no contact to Arab people. The Arabs were the faceless daily workers, picking up olives in the orchards, we never came into contact with. They were the enemy. It was very easy to demonize people you never really met face to face and for them to demonize us, and thus the cycle of violence goes on, unfortunately it is still going on. Put together politics mix it with religious extremism and demonizing education, add some hurtful history to the mix and what do we get? A perpetual state of war, aren't we?
I don't hate Arabs. Few people in the Kibbutz were killed in the war, but I do not hate them for that. It is an unfortunate cycle of violence that like Einstein said "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them"
So the war ended, and men start coming back from the war, few never came back. My father was a paramedic and he saw some tough things he never talked to us about. He also brought all these mementos from the war, Egyptian match sticks and insignia, all kind of little things left behind by the retreating Egyptian army. In retrospect I feel it was sad, the whole thing was sad, it was a waste. And I hope we are moving into a time when we can see each other more as brothers and sisters, relatives with a common interest, peace.
OK, I cannot end up without the hope that the younger generation will know better, will resist the temptation of perpetuating the situation, and I feel they are able to turn the table around, maybe not in one year but over their life time, one can hope.
With hope
Boaz Pnini
Bridges 2 Israel
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