Having recently posted a piece at Jihad Watch about the Israeli heroes, military and civilian, who fought to save their fellow Israelis on October 7, 2023, I was prompted to look into a handful of Israeli heroes of the 1948 war. I found the story of 12 of them here.
Capt. Yitzhak Bruckman took part in one of the navy’s daring operations in the War of Independence. On October 22, 1948, off the Gaza coast, he escorted troops who were ordered to sink an Egyptian warship using boats loaded with explosives. Bruckman’s task was to collect the sailors from the water after the sabotage was complete.
He risked his life when he steered his boat into steady fire in an area lit up by two powerful searchlights. He then zigzagged across the water and pulled three sailors from the sea. For this the Israel Defense Forces recommended that he receive the second highest decoration, equivalent to today’s Medal of Valor.
Mira Ben Ari killed the soldier who shot and killed her commanding officer after the kibbutz fell to the Egyptians. Ben Ari, who was immediately shot dead, was never decorated, even though she is remembered as a great heroine.
Bruckman, who died in 2018 at 92, did reserve duty in the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War but never received the 1948 decoration. He was one of 1,200 combat troops, both men and women, in the War of Independence whom the IDF recommended for medals. But they never got them because of an order by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.
“We don’t need heroes,” Ben-Gurion told the army. He slashed the list to just 12, who received the Hero of Israel medal, the IDF’s highest decoration at the time.
A few years ago, Offer Drori, a 70-year-old computer specialist from Jerusalem with a keen awareness of heritage preservation, heard about this anomaly. When he asked to see the list of soldiers recommended for decorations, he was astonished to discover that no one knew where it was.
“I knew the day would come when I would try to achieve historical justice, even if belated, and inform the public about these unsung heroes, even if most of them were no longer alive,” Drori says. He believes that all 1,200 should be decorated….
Read the whole article, and learn about some of the heroes of the 1948 war. I found their deeds of derring-do and self-sacrifice memorable. There’s a straight line from their stories to those of the Israelis who held off the Hamas killers on October 7, 2023, for as long as they could.
Cynthia says
So many heroes, so many lost lives to supremacist Islam.
rick says
Yes, every one of the 1200 heroes should be honored. If Israel didn’t fight so hard in this war, the map would have been very different. They fought to survive but also for land. Israel is not through fighting to survive and for the land that Arabs still are looking to steal. Why did Ben-Gurion deny these heroes?
Isn’t it odd that the the number of heroes in 1948 closely mirror the number of Jews killed, tortured and raped on Oct. 7, 2023 by hamas.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Israel pulling off a victory in 1948, when it was subjected to a surprise (maybe not so?) invasion by Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon & Iraq – was a miracle in its own right! Subsequent wars were easier to account for, given that Israel had the time to develop the institutions that would help it survive, but I doubt that they had any of that on their independence day in 1948
OLD GUY says
How sad that the people of the world can’t live in peace.
John Galt III says
Ben Gurion was a total Leftist jerk.
If you want to know why you need a permit in Israel to have gun to protect your wife from being raped and children being slaughtered by Muslims look no further than ben Gurion.
Only 5% of Jews in Israel have a permit. “Never Again” meant absolutely nothing to ben Gurion and his Socialist/Communist Jewish Israelis who have followed in his footsteps. I’ll take Ze’ev Jabotinsky over ben Gurion any day as an heroic Zionist.
dumbledoresarmy says
A good book to read – John Roy Carlson’s “Cairo to Damascus”. Much of it is his (undercover) observations of the mohammedan jihadis; but he was firmly in the corner for Israel, and he writes beautifully about their heroic self-defence. Another classic journalist of the old school, whose writing about Israel is worth tracking down, is Martha Gellhorn.