A 'Made-Up' Nation

While Dayan encouraged Israeli forces to advance at all costs in Sinai, he held them back along the border with Jordan. Even as Jordanian artillery bombarded West Jerusalem on the first morning of the war, Dayan hoped that King Hussein had launched the strikes merely to mollify Jordanians' anti-Israel fervor. But as the attacks persisted, Dayan realized that for Hussein, the leader of a "made-up nation," failure to join the Arab cause might mean exile, revolution or murder.

From this review of Steven Pressfield's The Lion's Gate.

And even Menachem Begin and the Irgun get a mention:

… When we of “A” Company entered the Lion’s Gate on the morning of June 7, our object, despite the ongoing gunfire and the danger from enemy snipers, was only to reach the Western Wall. Moshe Stempel had joined us then, my dear friend and our deputy brigade commander. Together we had swept across the Temple Mount and passed through the Moroccan Gate. We were on the steps above the Wall, but had not yet gone down to take possession of it.

Stempel ordered me to send one of my men down while the rest of us followed him back up to find a place above the Wall where we could hang the flag of Israel that I had carried all night and all day and all night and day again.

I picked a young sergeant named Dov Gruner.

This Dov Gruner was not the first to bear that name. The original Dov Gruner, after whom ours was named, had been a fighter for the Irgun Zvai Leumi, the underground paramilitary organization that fought the British during Mandate days, before Israel had achieved its statehood.

English soldiers captured this first Dov Gruner and put him on trial for participating in an assault on the police station at Ramat Gan. He was sentenced to death by hanging. At the final hour he was offered a reprieve, if he would admit his guilt.

Dov Gruner would not.

He refused to defend himself, standing upon the principle that to do so would be to acknowledge the legitimacy of the British court. On the last day of his life Dov Gruner wrote to his commander, Menachem Begin, and to his comrades in the Irgun:

Of course I want to live: who does not? I too could have said: “Let the future take care of the future” . . . I could even have left the country altogether for a safer life in America, but this would not have satisfied me either as a Jew or as a Zionist.

There are many schools of thought as to how a Jew should choose his way of life. One way is that of the assimilationists who have renounced their Jewishness. There is also another way, the way of those who call themselves “Zionists”—the way of negotiation and compromise . . .

The only way that seems, to my mind, to be right is the way of the Irgun Zvai Leumi, the way of courage and daring without renouncing a single inch of our homeland . . .

I am writing this while awaiting the hangman. This is not a moment at which I can lie, and I swear that if I had to begin my life anew I would have chosen the exact same path, regardless of the consequences for myself.

Dov Gruner was hanged at Acre prison on April 16, 1947. As it chanced, his brother’s wife had recently given birth to a son, whom they had named Dov.

This boy grew to be our Dov.

Moshe Stempel was asked once by a journalist, “Why did you pick Dov Gruner to be first to the Wall?”

“I did not pick him,” Stempel replied. “History did.”...

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