7 - Palmach Fighters

Summary

Israel's narrative of its foundational war, 1948, was inevitably mythologized. The mythologization of war, Samuel Hynes wrote, is neither a fabrication nor the creation of fiction. Rather, it is the simplification of a narrative, turning it into something imaginable and manageable (1997:xiii). Mythologized war is often reduced to being merely good or bad, a success or failure. In contrast, the narratives of war that are told by the participating soldiers, mostly not in public contexts, are anything but single-stranded myths. They are often chaotic, lacking chronology or a wider context. They are scattered reminiscences. There is a necessary gap between personal war recollections and official historiography. Because official historiographies are prevalent and only partial, to get a fuller picture of war we must seek personal accounts. “If we would understand what war is like, and how it feels,” wrote Hynes, in The Soldiers' Tale, “we must turn away from history and its numbers, and seek the reality in the personal witness of the men who were there” (1997:xii). Following Hynes, who wrote of other places and settings, this chapter explores how the 1948 war felt for the Palmach soldiers who survived it. However, while Hynes's title suggests that the soldiers' narratives, placed together, form a single tale, this chapter seeks the multiplicity of war narratives.

Furthermore, while Hynes was interested in all aspects of the soldiers' war experience, the emphasis here is on the “untold”; on what was perceived as causing uneasiness and discomfort.