Israel at 50: an American Jewish Volunteer Reflects on the Last ‘good’ War

As the American Jewish community celebrates the 50th anniversary of Israel’s independence, those of us who went over to fight as volunteers in the fledgling country’s armed forces can look back with special pride and remembrance.

We were privileged to take part not only in a momentous chapter of Jewish history, but in the last “good” war of this century — in which the line between right and wrong was unblurred and the righteousness of our cause unquestioned. Having been part of Israel’s rebirth remains the single most memorable and important act of our lives.

Yet, before those brave days are suffused by a mist of nostalgia and mythology, it is fitting to take an honest and unsentimental look backwards.

American Jewry, not nearly as wealthy and infinitely more timid in 1948 than now, contributed considerable money — and a few chanced jail and loss of citizenship to smuggle arms and airplanes to the beleaguered yishuv, the Jewish population there.

But if a people’s commitment is judged by the ultimate test of putting their lives at risk, then the American performance was little short of pathetic.

From the largest Jewish community in the world, and one of the few to emerge from the war with greater strength than before, a paltry 1,400 went over to fight for Israel in her life-and-death struggle.

Relative to the size of their Jewish populations, other English-speaking countries and most European nations sent vastly larger contingents.

As in most matters Zionistic, the South Africans were in the lead, sending 700 top-notch volunteers out of a Jewish population 2 percent of the size of America’s.

The disparity in the number of volunteers reflected the differences in communal attitudes and civic courage. South Africa’s Jews, and Britain’s to a slightly smaller degree, set up their own selective service system, complete with physical and psychological testing, and rallied fully behind their young men and women heading for the battlefield.

In contrast, organized American Jewry, fearful of accusations of double loyalty, generally averted its collective eyes and prayed silently that those crazy kids going over would not prove an embarrassment.

The absence of communal participation, including the lack of screening on the South African model, often produced ludicrous results.

I remember bunking down in a tent at the Tel Letwinsky army camp the night I arrived in Israel and being startled to see an American on the next cot taking off his pants and unbuckling his artificial leg.

“How did you ever make it over here?” I asked. He shrugged his shoulders and replied, “Nobody asked and nobody checked.”

The Americans also contributed a rather high percentage of psychological misfits, but that was to be expected. Largely by self-selection, those who volunteer to leave their home countries and fight in a faraway war are an odd breed, be they Frenchmen in the American Revolution, Americans in the Spanish Civil War or Western Jews in Israel’s War of Independence.

Our motives for going to Israel were diverse and not always clear to ourselves. Most of us had fought in World War II and found it hard to settle down. Some had long been imbued by Zionist ideology; others suddenly discovered their commonality with the Jewish people. Some were genuine idealists; others came to escape personal problems.

The mixed motives were not unique to the Americans. One volunteer, novelist Harold Livingston, wrote with only slight exaggeration:

“Ben Gurion’s Foreign Legion. They took anyone. Misfits from America, English communists, South African Zionists, Soviet army deserters, Polish noblemen, ne’er-do-well soldiers of fortune. If you want adventure and excitement, come on over… If you want to write a book. If you’re running from the police. If you want to get away from your wife. If you want to prove that Jews can fight. If you want to help build a new land.”

How important were the contributions of the men and women of Machal, the overseas volunteers?

Some of us, hewing to the bravado of World War II patriots, will claim that the Yanks (with a little bit of help from the Brits and the Palmach, the Jewish strike force) pretty much won the 1948 war. Israel, on the other hand, has pretty well ignored the role of the Machalniks, as has the American Jewish community,.

The truth lies somewhere in between. In the days of the British Mandate, the Haganah, the forerunner of the Israel Defense Force, had managed to train an underground army, but you can’t create a clandestine air force and navy. In these two branches, the “Anglo-Saxons,” almost all tested in World War II, played a major role, especially in the early months of the fighting.

On the ground, the Israelis won their own war. We may have helped a little bit, but the real value of our presence, I think, was to give the embattled Israelis a sense that the Jews of other countries were with them and shared in their determination to forge a free Jewish state.

Some of our comrades were killed in battle. A few in our ranks, very few, were “heroes,” the most overused and misused word in the English vocabulary.

But at least, borrowing from World War II’s immortal Kilroy, we can scrawl on the wall of history — “We Were There.”

Tom Tugend, a JTA correspondent in Los Angeles, was a combat infantryman with the U.S. 7th Army in World War II and served in the “Anglo-Saxon” 4th Anti-Tank Unit during Israel’s War of Independence.