Other people’s stories join my own memories. They settle together into my mind — not in a jumble but in a line, each memory leading to the next, forming the road to Yoni’s death at Entebbe.
It’s been 16 years since the Yom Kippur War, and my friend from my days in the Unit has a hard time finding the exact spot where the battle took place. We drive a bit north from Nafah, toward Wast Junction. The road rises and falls, and each time we drop into a depression, we lose sight of the surrounding plateau with its low stone walls. On an uphill stretch, before we get to the top, he says: “Here’s the place.” We stop and get out.
“The Syrian commandos were scattered here, to the left of the road,” he explains. “The helicopters that had brought them had already flown back to the east.” Yoni’s force had been assigned to defend the main military headquarters on the Golan Heights, at Nafah, and one of his teams had spotted the helicopters landing. As soon as he received the report, he gave the order to get in the halftracks — the Syrian force couldn’t be given time to get organized. Within minutes, everyone who had managed to grab a place on the half-tracks, about 40 men, had left. Heading in the general direction of where the commandos had landed, they passed a force from the Golani infantry brigade that had already exchanged fire with the Syrians and sustained casualties. Yoni was unable to get a clear picture from them of precisely where the Syrians were, and he advanced a little further. He stopped the half-tracks where we’d just stopped the car, and the men climbed out.
I remember a description I heard years before from Shai Avital, a young officer in the Unit at the time of the battle, of how it began: “Suddenly, they opened up with pretty heavy fire, while we were still standing out in the open next to the half-tracks. Luckily, we crouched and the shells and bullets flew over us. But one of the officers was hit, and he died later of his wounds.”33
So this is where Gideon Avidov, my team-mate from the service who went on to be a squad-commander, got hit, I note to myself, here on the road, just as he began combing the area for the Syrians. Says my friend: “We pulled him back to that little ditch by the side of the road, to the right, and we started treating his wounds. You have to understand that some of the Syrians were already firing from behind that wall, the close one.” I look to my left, and see a long stone wall a few yards off, parallel to the road. “The Syrians were positioned on the ground just beyond it.”
Shai was among those who advanced on the wall after the first burst of fire. As he told how it happened: “The Syrians had us where they wanted us — they had cover, and we were still out in the open, unprotected… It could have been really bad. I could see the officer who’d been hit, only a few yards from me. There wasn’t much shooting after that first barrage, and there was this feeling of suspense, that someone should do something. I remember I started getting scared, real scared. And what I saw then I’ll remember the rest of my life. Suddenly, I see Yoni get up, perfectly calm, as though nothing was going on there at all. I remember that he had on a green helmet, without any camouflage netting. With his hands, he motions to us all to get up along with him — we’d all grabbed what cover we could — and he starts advancing, like it was a training exercise. He was upright, giving out orders right and left, advancing and shooting and calling out with that same calm he’d had in other actions too. I remember the thought I had, as someone under him, as a soldier: Hell, if he can do that, I’m not giving in, either. I got up and started to fight.”
We make our way across the field, between the scattered stones and the half-ruined walls.
Shai’s story: “I managed to catch up with him. I was all worked up from the battle. Yoni told me to calm down, and asked how my ammo was holding out. I told him I didn’t have much left. We’d been shooting quite a bit. He told me: ‘When you kill them, do it with single rounds, like I taught you. It’s much more accurate. Don’t use bursts. Go on like I say.’
“Yoni didn’t just run forward, he advanced carefully, in a real thought-out way. And that’s the way we moved forward, combed the area and defeated them.” Baruch Zuckerman was killed behind one of the walls, as he advanced at Yoni’s side. We start looking for a tank emplacement in which about a dozen Syrian fighters took cover. It’s hard to find, and when we finally do, it’s shallow and flattened out from years of erosion.
I look over the area for a moment. There, up above, must be the spot from which Muki provided the covering fire. As he told it: “When I reached the top of the hill, I noticed a kind of depression in the ground, and soldiers shooting from it. I shouted to Yoni that he should cover me, and I’d storm the place…I’d hardly shouted that there were Syrians there, and Yoni had already taken his men and in a matter of seconds he was charging them. The only thing left for me to do was cover him… The picture that’s engraved in my mind is of Yoni running first with eight of his men against ten Syrian commandos, and wiping them all out. That’s the picture that always comes back to me: Yoni rushing toward the emplacement and shooting and leading his men in battle.”
By now we’re several hundred yards from the road. We turn back, picking our way through knee-high thistles. By the time Yoni and his men finished combing the area a second time and found the Syrians who had stayed at the rear, the battle had gone on for an hour and a half. I get in the car, still finding it hard to grasp the course of the battle and its outcome. The Unit suffered two dead and one wounded. The Syrian force, which had also numbered about forty men, was completely wiped out. “To come out of it like that after being taken totally by surprise at close range, to organize a scattered force — it’s thanks to Yoni that it turned out the way it did,” said Shai. And Muki: “Yoni waged a battle here the likes of which I’ve never even read about.”
Yoni himself summed up the battle in a laconic report he wrote after the war, and commented at the end: “This proves once again that a force of ours, fighting according to all the simple rules, will win… Heavy covering fire has to be provided before every movement on the field… The decisive stage is clearly reached when the enemy’s mood shifts to one of defeat. The breaking point comes when the enemy is seized by the fear of death. That fear paralyzes men completely… Until that point is reached, the enemy will continue to calculate his actions and constitute a dangerous opponent.”
Yoni never told me the details of this battle, and I didn’t ask. Only once did I hear him remark offhandedly: “Poor Syrians. What rotten luck to run into the best fighting unit in the world.” And I thought, without saying it to him, that they’d had even worse luck: They’d run into him.
Yoni didn’t tell our parents about the battle, either. Once he did say to our father: “You can’t tell a good commander just by victory in battle. If you’re willing to sacrifice enough people, you’ll almost always win. The real measure of a good commander is that he wins with few losses.”
The same picture of Yoni in battle repeats over and over. It portrays him at Entebbe, and it portrays his first battle, in 1966, when he was twenty — a retaliatory raid against terrorists at Samua in the West Bank, then under Jordanian rule. “It seems there are people,” he wrote after that action, “who lose touch with reality under fire and don’t know exactly what they’re doing at the moment. And then there are people who feel no different than usual — or at least that’s how I felt myself: no less concentration, no less sense of judgment, no less touch with reality, and practically no more tension than I feel any other day.”
And the same picture depicts him late one night in the hills of Gush Etzion in Judea, in the early 70s. “We were supposed to attack a house where terrorists were holed up,” recounts Boaz Baron, a soldier who served under Yoni in the Haruv commando unit. “We went there four or five nights in a row, but we didn’t get the go-ahead to attack. One night we hiked twelve miles through the mountains to get there… On the last night, the lookout they’d posted outside suddenly spotted us. We froze in our tracks; Yoni, who realized that we had to go into action immediately, jumped over the stone wall alone, stood in the doorway and started shooting… Afterwards he was unhappy about how we’d carried out the attack, even though it was only our first battle. Only two of the five terrorists had been killed. The rest got away… Yoni was quiet that night, withdrawn. We could feel that he wasn’t pleased, that things hadn’t gone the way they were supposed to. We didn’t talk about it much. It was clear what had happened.”
And more generally, Boaz says, “he wasn’t just a commander, but also an educator. A great educator, I think… He was special even in the way he disciplined someone. It could just be a tough conversation with him; that was punishment enough.”
My thoughts move according to laws of their own; maybe it’s the word “educator” that suddenly makes me think of what Yoni once told one of his soldiers, when he was a young platoon commander in the paratroops. “We were sitting in a dugout during some defensive exercise,” the soldier remembers.34 “Five of us had to share each battle ration, and only two could eat at a time. I happened to be the one who got to eat with Yoni. The man was hungry. He sat with the can of meat and the can of peas in front him, and for a minute he just wanted to eat, like a normal, hungry person. But he was also the platoon commander sitting next to one of his men, and it wasn’t so nice for him to pounce on the food or eat too much. I could see him wavering, and it looked like the eating side won out this time. He ate a little more than his share. I saw that he was embarrassed that he’d eaten that extra amount. Of course, I had been looking for a chance to catch Yoni on something like this and point it out, so I asked him: ‘What about the rest of the men?’ He lowered his head and said: ‘If you’re ever a commander, don’t do that.’ Three-four years later, both of us commanders now, I was sitting with him, and it’s interesting, it’s that incident he brought up. ‘You remember?’ he said. ‘I hope you don’t eat your men’s food.’”
The men of that paratroop platoon, Yoni’s first soldiers, parted after that year of training; but even afterwards, they met once a year. “Every New Year’s Day we’d get together at Dizengoff Square in Tel Aviv, and the turnout was almost always perfect,” one of Yoni’s soldiers says. “We’d go to a restaurant or a club and hang out until deep into the night. At those get-togethers, Yoni was one of us. He’d speak from the heart, pour out everything that had built up inside him… When we realized how he felt about us, we developed a very powerful attachment to him.
“The moment people are soused, they’re happier and start getting wild. Every year we’d always tell the same stories, relive the same experiences… And you could see how happy Yoni was, maybe because he had more of a tie to us. It wasn’t like it got to be later, after he was promoted and his connection with the men under him got weaker. I think he was pretty introverted. If he didn’t know someone well, if he didn’t have a really close relationship with him, I don’t know if he would have been able to start a personal conversation with him. But with us, he was just the opposite. He talked about everything in the world, even himself.
“At the last get-together, one of the guys didn’t make it. Yoni couldn’t understand it. How could somebody skip a reunion like this? What right did he have not to show? He couldn’t see it…he almost went to get the guy. We said to him: ‘Forget it, someone in his family died.’ He just couldn’t believe it.
“Every time, when the reunion was over, you could see that he was so sorry to leave, that he had no desire to go back to wherever he’d come from. He felt so good to be together with the guys… He would drink with us, horse around, and always, half an hour or an hour before leaving, he’d go off to the side to drowse a bit. Then he’d come to, get up, say ‘Take care, guys,’ and disappear.
“The last time, he really danced and went wild all night, completely carefree. We had a gallon jug of whiskey, and no one could leave until that bottle was gone… He was the only one who got to pour out the drinks, he and no one else, until finally it was gone. Towards morning he had to leave, to go back. Then we noticed: He didn’t even shake hands with anybody. He just waved from a distance, said ‘Goodbye,’ and went. He was sad to go.”
We drive on, to the north side of the Golan Heights. “Over here,” my friend points to the right, “is the area where we broke through into the Syrian enclave.” The night of the breakthrough, Yoni’s force was attached to the 7th Brigade of the Armored Corps. That’s when Yoni first met Avigdor Ben-Gal — Yanosh — the brigade commander.
Says Ben-Gal: “It was in some tent during the night, six or seven hours before the breakthrough. I think we were introduced by Rafael Eitan. It was right before the divisional briefing, and Raful said to me: ‘Look, this is Yoni. He’s under your command. Take him.’ That was it. I put him in the first battalion to go through… During the fighting, contact between us was really hurried, quick and dry, to the point. You got an order, you got your mission, you reported. But even then, somehow, I took to him. I was always glad when he showed up and we could talk.
“A few days later, he was called to Northern Command headquarters. Right in the middle of the war, they take him. I think they flew him in by copter to give him some mission elsewhere. I told him: ‘Refuse anything they give you. You’re coming back to us.’ He said: ‘Listen, I’m turning down anything else and coming back. All the rest is nonsense.’ And he did. Later, they took him out a second time for something having to do with retaking Mt. Hermon. I was sorry they were taking him, and I’d known him, what, ten days? Maybe less.”
The friendship between the two continued after the war; when Yoni finished the transfer course into the armored corps, he was put in with Ben-Gal’s division, which was on the Golan Heights.
“As time went by, Yoni had a real effect on me,” Ben-Gal says. “There was a pretty big gap in our ages. I was forty and Yoni was thirty when he died, a difference of ten years. I was always senior in rank to him, but what drew me to him — since we were in the army, with all its hierarchy, I always had to approach him, not the other way around — was that I felt I could learn a lot from him. I appreciated him, in the full sense of the word, as a person whose strength and inner resources you could draw on. Everyone — it doesn’t matter how old or what rank or what he does — looks for someone he can rely on, to feel stronger. In the army, in that kind of work, you particularly need that. It’s only natural that the people who surround you wait for you to give them that support, and they’re stronger by being around you. That’s how I felt about everyone I worked with in the army, and without meaning to brag, I felt a little above them. But when I met Yoni, I felt here’s someone who’s above me in many ways, in most ways. I wanted his company so I could, to phrase it badly, take advantage of what he had, so some of it would rub off on me — in short, so I could lean on him.
“When I was with him, when I talked with him, I felt intellectually stimulated. It was as though I’d just read a good book. A book like that — it’s an asset, it’s uplifting. There was something impressive about him, a presence. But I don’t think it’s worth listing particular traits. It’s more important to explain how a man feels than to give labels to everything.”
We pass through a landscape of dun expanses, out of which round-peaked hills jut upward. On the horizon ahead looms Mt. Hermon. “You know,” my friend, sitting beside me, continues, “at the time of the breakthrough there was heavy Syrian shelling. We moved away from the crossroads a bit and waited at the side of the road. There was nothing we could do but wait for the shelling to end. We all hugged the bottom of the half-track. Only Yoni stood and watched what was happening. We said: ‘Yoni, get down.’ But he kept standing. Why did he do it? There was nothing he could do anyway.”
I hadn’t heard this story before, but it’s as if I had. Yoni remained standing, I think to myself, because it wasn’t his nature to act differently. True, it was an unnecessary risk. He certainly would never have allowed the men under him to act like that. When it came to their safety, he was frightfully strict and careful. Once he even upbraided his brigade commander in the armored corps for appearing in his company compound without his bullet-proof vest. But to understand why he stood, you have to know that the natural, physical fear of death that almost everyone has — certainly a young man of twenty-seven — was something Yoni never felt. As commander, even if there were nothing he could do at the moment, he’d watch and study the fighting.
A little later in the war, Yoni heard on the radio that Lt. Col. Yossi Ben-Hanan, commander of a tank battalion in Ben-Gal’s 7th Brigade, remained wounded in the field after his attack on the hill of Tel-Shams had been repulsed. All but the dead and wounded had pulled back; and Yossi’s tank, which had taken an enemy missile, was still at the foot of the hill while Yossi, wounded and bleeding, lay on the ground where he had been thrown by the blast. The driver of the tank hadn’t been hurt, but had chosen to stay with his wounded commander and care for him rather than run for his own life. Yossi had managed to report to the rear on his situation with a portable transceiver Yoni had given him the day before. He and his driver were completely alone in what had been Syrian-controlled territory, and it was only a matter of time before the Syrians returned.
“We [Yoni’s men] were eating battle rations outside Yanosh’s brigade headquarters and following the battle on the radio. Suddenly, we heard that Yossi’s force had been hit with missiles and stopped, and that he personally had to be pulled out of there,” recalls Shai.
“I didn’t exactly know what to do and how to extricate Yossi from there, since it was deep inside enemy territory,” says Ben-Gal. “It was already dusk, with night-fall coming on. And then Yoni came to me, at his own initiative, and said, ‘Give me the mission and I’ll get him out of there.’”35 Without a second’s delay, a dozen men, including Muki, Giora, and Shai, went with him in two armored personnel carriers. “Friends of mine, officers from the 7th Brigade, said: ‘Listen, Shai, what you’re doing is suicide. It’s nuts.’ ‘Shut up,’ I told one, ‘Don’t talk like that in front of the men.’”
The two APCs, swaying and bumping in the rocky expanse, followed the treadmarks left by Yossi’s tanks; then the men spotted the flames from a Syrian antitank jeep that had been hit in the battle and drove toward it. The hour was dusk, and by the time they reached the bottom of the hill, it was dark. Leaving the APCs, they continued on foot, running, until they reached Yossi. Yoni ordered several men to check the disabled Israeli tanks to make sure that there was no one in them, and strapped Yossi onto a stretcher. Then they hurried to pull out. Only a short while later, the Syrians arrived and towed the Israeli tanks to Damascus — with the bodies of crewmen that the soldiers from the Unit had apparently missed in the darkness.
“Yoni’s arrival with his men saved me,” Yossi said years later. “I owe my life to him.”36
Just after the war, after visiting Yossi in the hospital, Yoni wrote him a letter. It praised Yossi’s abilities as a combat officer, made no mention of the rescue, and said: “I was happy to hear you say, from inside that cast you were wrapped in, that the important thing is that you’re here, that you’re alive… You reminded me very much of how I felt when I was lying in Rambam Hospital after the Six-Day War, as the doctors around me discussed what would happen to my left arm. It seemed to me they were worried about an absolutely minor matter. What matters is to live; everything else is trivial.”
My memories move on, passing one crossroads after another on the way to his last rush forward at Entebbe. I think of something he said to me during a conversation we had in the last year of his life. I was trying to convince him to act a certain way; Yoni, in a moment of openness, said he couldn’t accept my advice because he looked at life differently from how I did. He said he couldn’t think seriously about “tomorrow” and do the “rational” thing because he couldn’t count on being alive when tomorrow came.
“My life belongs to me, and so does my death,” Yoni had shot back at Bibi once, years earlier. It was just before another hostage rescue, when a hijacked Sabena airliner had been landed by Arab terrorists at Lod airport in 1972. Yoni reached the scene minutes before the operation began. Bibi already had his gun, as did his men, ready to storm the plane. There was a standing order in the army against two brothers taking part in the same action, and Yoni, who wanted desperately to join the operation, demanded that Bibi let him fight in his place.
“How can I let my men fight while I sit on the sidelines?” Bibi argued.
Yoni answered: “OK, you’re right. So we’ll both go in.”
“Think of our parents,” Bibi tried to persuade him. “Think of what would happen to them if we were both killed.”
Yoni answered as he did: that he would be the master of both his life and his death.
But Ehud, who was the commander of the operation, would not let Yoni take part. And Yoni’s anger quickly gave way to other feelings when he saw Bibi wounded after the gun battle.
To this day, I have no idea how Yoni succeeded in including me once in an operation he led. The aim of the operation was to abduct Syrian officers and exchange them for Israeli pilots and navigators long held in Syrian prisons. Perhaps it was easier to look the other way because I was assigned to a secondary force responsible for blocking a road. I saw Yoni for only a moment during the operation, but that was enough for me to understand the effect he could have — the look in his eye, the tone of his voice — on men in battle. Our force, under Muki Betser, had a marginal role, and we weren’t around for the lion’s share of the main action — overpowering the Syrian officers and the Lebanese gendarmes escorting them. The main force, led by Yoni and his second-in-command for the operation, Uzi Dayan, crossed into Lebanese territory in civilian cars to the area where the abduction was to take place, even as the Syrian convoy was heading west toward the same spot. Yoni’s men pulled over by the side of the road and pretended to be a group of Lebanese having trouble with a car. Suddenly, Yoni’s observation team reported that something had gone wrong. The Syrian convoy had been stopped by villagers who apparently suspected something, and had begun turning around. Yoni instantly ordered his men into the cars. After a short chase they overtook the Syrians and the Lebanese, and in the ensuing fire-fight overwhelmed them.
When we, Muki’s force, approached from the roadblock in the west, only a few last shots could still be heard. The Syrian officers had already been captured and gathered together. This was the first time my comrades and I had participated in fighting of any kind, and when I reached the area of the shooting, I was as tense as I could be. Yoni stood on the road, calmly giving orders in a forceful voice, without excitement, telling us what to do — and the tension dropped. We were assigned by him to comb the area to the north for a lone Syrian officer who had managed to escape during the fight. When we returned several minutes later without the Syrian, Yoni was gone already. He’d left Uzi in charge of bringing the prisoners and their vehicles to Israel, and had driven to the nearby Arab village to oversee the search for an Arab car, possibly from the convoy, that had fled there. When we crossed the border into Israel, triumphantly escorting the captured vehicles and the band of high-ranking prisoners, he wasn’t with us.
We’re driving past the area of the Golan where Yoni’s tank battalion was based. Yoni built the base; shortly after his death, it was renamed Camp Jonathan and our family was given a tour. Entering the base we saw, painted in big black letters on the wall of one a building, a few key sentences of Yoni’s parting speech to the battalion. The words had been reconstructed by members of the battalion from memory after his death, more than a year after he’d addressed them — and were strikingly close to the text of the speech we’d found in Yoni’s papers.
“Kirsch, Yoni’s second-in-command, assembled the entire battalion in a big open area.” says Yehezkel Kellner, one of the battalion’s staff officers, describing the change-of-command. “It was after some exercise. The tanks were arranged on three sides of a large rectangle, facing inward. Yoni stood in front of them on an APC and made his speech.
“I believe there can be no compromises on results,” Yoni said. “Let us never compromise in this battalion with results that are less than the best possible — and even those let us improve,” he said, giving his credo. “I believe in Israel, and in the sense of collective responsibility that must accompany every man fighting for the survival of his country.”
“When he was done,” continues Kellner, “he saluted the battalion to show his esteem. That’s how he wound up his command.”
At the center of the base was Yoni’s office, which at times had also served him as a place of refuge, where he could let go of the army world of grey barracks and paths marked with whitewashed stones and enter a different realm. “One night, I finished working at two or three in the morning, and I saw a light on in his office,” recalls Kellner. “I went to see what was up. Yoni had been in the field all day, at a company exercise. I look in, and see him reading a book of poetry — Bialik, I think it was.”
“At the time, if he slept two or three hours a night, it was a lot,” says Ben-Gal, who was then Yoni’s division commander. “He literally lived the battalion twenty-four hours a day. It’s rare that you meet a person with such drive to succeed at something. Little by little, he built the battalion and shaped it, and exercises started to take proper shape.
“His first battalion exercise was an utter failure. It was basically a technical exercise, and it just went wrong, partly because of Yoni’s inexperience with tanks, partly just because of bad luck. Sometimes, if you start on the wrong foot, nothing helps. It happens.
“I was sorry that the exercise he’d led had gone so poorly. I reviewed it for about fifteen minutes in front of everyone, and then I said: ‘Yoni, come.’ I took him and analyzed what had happened from A to Z, blow by blow. I didn’t know how he’d respond to my coming down on him so hard. I wasn’t angry or shouting, but I was still criticizing in the most serious way possible, and sometimes that’s the hardest thing to bear. I saw how he was writing everything down, not just saying ‘OK,’ but asking questions and analyzing things himself. And suddenly I felt that instead of my reviewing one more standard exercise, we were having a real discussion: I’d say something, he’d speak, he’d ask and I’d answer, I’d elaborate on something, and so would he, and it turned into a real conversation between two people. We sat for four-five hours and talked about the exercise. We’d go off on a tangent about military history, philosophy, geography, and then go back to the exercise — all of it somehow connected to the matter at hand. I saw he had a desire to learn, be educated, understand. He didn’t sit there like someone getting a reprimand, waiting for the lecture to be over and the humiliation to end so he could get out of there. He didn’t want to leave… I asked him, ‘How long do you need before you can do the exercise over?’ He said a week or two, and at the end of that time we held it again. Then you got to see what it means when someone can take what he learns and really put it into practice. It was first-rate. He didn’t repeat one mistake he’d made the first time.”
On Independence Day, almost a year after he’d taken command of the battalion, Yoni was supposed to go to Northern Command headquarters to receive the rank of lieutenant-colonel from Rafael Eitan. “He didn’t have an Armored Corps black beret for the ceremony, just a regular, green work cap,” recalls a staff officer. “In fact, he didn’t have any of the different emblems or insignia either, like a Six-Day War service ribbon. All of those little external symbols that they wear around every day in Tel Aviv in the Kiryah for people to see, he was missing. He’d go around the base with these tattered major’s epaulets, and I had already told him once, half joking, that maybe it was time to get new ones. But before the ceremony, Haim Kirsch, his second-in-command, who was also a major, had given him a pair of his own epaulets, and I think maybe a belt, and between the two of us we got him everything he needed. After that, he hurried off to Northern Command to get his promotion.”
As a battalion commander, Ben-Gal says, Yoni was “professionally and personally, one of the finest officers in the division, both in his ability to analyze the overall military picture, and in his personal ability to handle a tank. He knew all the tricks of the trade; he’d made a point of studying them. His unit was the best in the division. He infused it with his personality and turned it into the top battalion — in dry professional terms and in terms of morale and how much the men identified with the unit.
“I wanted him to stay in the Armored Corps. I told him: ‘Well make you a deputy brigade commander after you finish your stint with the battalion. In my opinion you’ll be a brigade commander in a short time.’ I believed in his abilities, his leadership.”
What would have happened if Yoni had stayed in the Armored Corps, I think to myself. “I tried to convince him not to go back to the Unit,” Ben-Gal told me, and I can’t get his sentence out of my mind. But my speculation is pointless, not least because there was never the slightest chance he would make any decision but the one he did.
Yoni came back to the Unit. He returned to the crucible where he had been formed, as he devotedly called it, and with that move, he became even more deeply alone.
“He struck me as a different type from the other commanders I’d known,” says one of the Unit’s staff officers. “To a great degree he was an intellectual… He was quite a bit more mature than we. There were lots of things we couldn’t understand then that I see differently today… Only in the last few years have I begun to understand what it was he was doing. Then, we were too young to get it. And because we were young, the criticisms that some of us used to make of him were pretty harsh. But over the year he commanded the Unit, I had the chance to see him in wider forums, outside the Unit, and I began to have a different idea of who he was… I was at his house once, and we talked about all sorts of things. He was sick and had asked me to come over. I realized then that the breadth of his knowledge was much greater than I’d imagined. That was when I began to change my mind about him, and to understand much more. First of all, I began to see that he noticed everything, even if he didn’t always find it necessary to comment. When he thought it was important, he’d express his opinion. He could be forgiving, but only up to a certain point — if it went past that, he’d give you a kick in the pants. He wanted people to learn from their mistakes, to try to correct themselves and improve by their own initiative, and not because he’d used his authority…
“He had much more experience in life than we, and it affected his behavior. He had a really good heart. You saw it in the little things, inside the Unit and outside.
“On one hand, he tried to develop a closeness, and the men were a lot less intimidated by him than by other top commanders. On the other hand, he was a riddle in a lot of ways. We didn’t understand him, and I think he knew it.”
In many respects, Yoni was an enigma to the enlisted men as well. “He was different,” says one. “You could see that, despite his efforts to get close to us, he remained withdrawn, pensive… When we went somewhere, or when we were waiting for a briefing to begin, he used to sit by himself with his pipe and a book. But when we were going out on the town in the evening and needed a car, we’d send a note into his conference room asking if we could have his car — something it takes a lot of impudence to ask the commander of the Unit — and we’d get it.”
Another trip of mine, this time to the south, to Masada. I enter the big cistern on the south side of the mountain. I know that, not long before his death, Yoni climbed down these endless stairs until he reached the bottom of the empty cistern that had served the Jewish fighters of the revolt against Rome for three years. In his hand was the pamphlet given to visitors. Here, deep beneath the earth, on the cistern floor lit by shafts of light from openings in the ceiling high above, the air was cool and still. He could look at leisure through the pamphlet. On the last pages was the final speech of Elazar Ben-Yair, the leader of the Jewish fighters who were to take their own lives and those of their families just before the final Roman assault. In the silence of the cathedral-like space, with only Bruria at his side, he was caught by the words and read them aloud. She begged him to stop, but the lines spoken by the commander of Masada 2,000 years before came from his mouth and echoed between the stone walls:
“For death were we born, and for death did we give birth to our children. From death escape not even the most contented of men. But a life of disgrace and slavery… these evils were not decreed to be the fate of men from birth… Surely, we will die before we will become the slaves of those who despise us, and free men will we remain as we leave the land of the living.”
“To live” wrote Yoni in his last letter, just days before his death, “and as long as you possibly can.” He didn’t want to part from life. The question that stayed with him was: Which life to lead? In just going from one day to the next he could see no point.