Personal account of Israeli Sayeret Matkal operations during 1948‑era conflict

Places like Bet El, Shiloh, or Hebron. They represented the historic wellspring not just of the state we’d created, but of Jewish civilization, our heritage, our moral and ethical foundation. As I drove back to Tel Aviv with Avraham and the others on the morning of fourth day of the war, we heard Israeli ground forces were consolidating their hold there as well. After dropping Avraham at the kirya, we drove back to the sayeret base, but it was nearly empty. The main fighting was now with Syrian armored units on the Golan Heights, and most of the men in the unit had gone north in the hope of joining what seemed likely to be the final stage of the war. Although the precise outcome was not yet clear, there was a dawning certainty, almost surreal, that Israel was gaining control of all the areas across our 1948 borders from which the Arab states around us had shelled Israeli farming settlements, or facilitated fedayeen attacks and ambushes against our citizens — the very border areas where I’d led intelligence operations in Sayeret Matkal. I, too, drove north. Not far from Kibbutz Dan, the staging point for our first Golan operation, I linked up witha group of other sayeret reservists. Israeli tanks had already broken the main resistance of the Syrians, but fighting was continuing in a few parts of the Golan. In the western corner of the Heights which bordered Lebanon, several villages still lay beyond the Israeli advance. We got an order to see if we could take them. It took barely an hour, against no more resistance than I’d met in “capturing” the Egyptians in the Sinai bunker. By the time we had made our way back across the Golan to the now-abandoned Syrian headquarters in Quneitra, it was sunset. The war was drawing to a close. I gave my Jeep to a couple of paratroopers and hot-wired a more comfortable mode of transport back home: a big, black Mercedes which had obviously belonged to a senior Syrian officer. If only because of the license plates, I avoided the main road back into Israel. I found a dirt track running between Syrian positions on the southern edge of the Golan and descended toward the fruit groves of Kibbutz Ha’on, near the Sea of Galilee. I then headed for Givataim in north Tel Aviv, to a place I knew well. It was the home of Menachem Digli. He had been Avraham Arnan’s deputy in the sayeret when I left for my stint in officers’ school. Before I returned to the unit, he had a motorcycle accident, badly damaging his leg. He’d been temporarily reassigned to a post in intelligence. I figured a Syrian Mercedes would make a nice gift. Not wanting to wake him, I left it in front of his house. Sadly, he never got to use it. The next day a couple of military policemen knocked on his door and 93 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011564