Eitan Haber
Tal Cohen
A list of 24 guardians
Eitan Haber says thank you to mostly anonymous group behind Israel’s ‘deterrent power’
I think it was Mideastern affairs expert Prof. Bernard Lewis who once said that if all the data about Israel was entered into a computer, the computer would have exploded and claimed: “There is no such thing,” or “it can’t be,” or “you can’t go on like that.”
Israel is already 60 years old, and many in the world still view us as a miracle: How do we manage not to drown in the Muslim ocean around us? According to the dry figures at least, we should have disappeared from the maps and atlases a while ago.
Some people say that states and peoples do not disappear, but those are foolish words. Several states disappeared in our generation alone, Yugoslavia for example, and were erased from the atlases. As to peoples disappearing, it would suffice to take a look at a Bible chapter to see how many peoples have turned into five or six letters in the Book of Books, leaving no other trace besides that. And on another note, only several days ago, between the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz, we witnessed the effort to exterminate a whole people in the 20th Century – only 65 years ago.
This entire long introduction regarding the Israeli miracle, which this week will mark its 60th anniversary, was meant to allow me to mention some names – many of them unknown to the general public. I believe that because of them, we are still here.
Hundreds of thousands of people contributed to Israel’s security in the past 60 years. Roughly 23,000 of our young people even paid with their lives (how terrible it is to say “roughly” when talking about human lives.) Many Israelis are worthy of being included in the national pantheon that may be established one day.
However, on the eve of our 60th birthday, I wish to, this one time, praise, extol, and glorify a small group of Israelis, some of whom at least never received the recognition they deserve. These people have so far stood as a buffer between us and the possibility of annihilation, and will continue to do so in the future. They are the ones who dreamed and implemented, under extremely difficult conditions, what today we refer to as “Israel’s deterrent power.”
There is not enough room here to tell about them and their deeds, yet it would be appropriate for us to know that we owe our existence here, surrounded by enemies, to these people, most of them anonymous soldiers, who until this day have not received the gratitude they deserve.
Below are the names, without titles or posts; a list that may seem as if it came out of a phonebook, but once every 60 years, only once, we are allowed to thank them. To my regret, many of them are no longer alive: Ernst David Bergmann, Manes Pratt, Amos De-Shalit, Israel Dostrovsky, Zeev (Venia) Hadari (Pomerantz,) Gideon Yekutieli, Munia Mardor, Binyamin Blumberg, Zvi Zur, Shalhevet Fryer, Yohanan (Zenka) Ratner, Igal Talmi, Dan Tolkovsky, Israel Pelah, Yona Ettinger, David Peleg, Gideon Rechavi, Gideon Frank, Uzi Eilam, Yosef Tulipman, Giora Amir, Avraham Sarusi, Micha Daft, Yitzhak Gurevich.
I am sorry that there is no “exclusive” here or “revelations” ahead of Independence Day, and still, this is an opportunity to show a little chutzpa and claim the right, on behalf of the people of Israel, to say thank you.
P.S. We haven’t forgotten, heaven forbid, the architects of this “deterrent power,” David Ben-Gurion and Shimon Peres. However, today our intention was to talk about the wonderful people who stood behind them and made the dreams come true.
