Nearly every place in Israel has a biblical history, even dots on the map like Latrun. Christian tradition says Latrun takes its name from the Latin, latros, which means robber, and that this was the home of one of the thieves crucified alongside Jesus. But Latrun is there in the Old Testament, too. It's where the sun and moon stood still so Joshua would have more daylight in which to avenge his Israelite army against the Amorites.

The sun and moon didn't stand still for the Israelis in 1948, Weiss remembers sadly.

The two-lane highway that was Jerusalem's lifeline took a loopy path toward Tel Aviv on the coast through rock-strewn wild lands that crumple up against both sides of the roadway in places. It snaked through a sharp natural cut which gave Arabs the high ground over Israeli convoys trying to reach Jerusalem with food, water and reinforcements.

Jewish forces trying to open the gap were scraped together from several brigades, including Weiss' 7th Brigade and battalions of untrained immigrants just arrived from British detention camps on Cyprus. Weiss remembers a French boy fighting next to him who hadn't the slightest idea how to use the rifle someone had handed him.

The Israeli troops were decimated as Arab bombs and artillery rained down on them. "It was a bloody mess," Weiss remembers.

In the end, it only made the Jews more determined.

"Late in the afternoon, the jeeps went out to pick up the wounded and the dead," said Weiss, wiping at his eyes. "I get emotional when I think about this. The soldiers came back to Hulda, to the showers, dog-tired, but they all began to sing.

"And I said, 'What a people! They go out to pick up the bodies and they come back to the showers singing!' "

The Arab blockade proved unbreakable, but there was a way around it.

At night, in near silence so as not to tip off the enemy, the Israelis worked on a bypass. They used mules and cattle and sometimes hauled supplies on their own backs, moving single file like ants in the darkness, carving a one-track road about six miles long through the rugged hills.

They called it the Burma Road after a World War II Allied supply route through Burma. One of the engineers brought in to build the Israelis' Burma Road was Walter Fuchs.

The bypass road linked with the main highway, Highway 1, at a place known as Bab el Wad. Israelis have left the gutted hulks of the trucks, tanks and armored cars of war scattered along the route as a reminder to commuters between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv of the struggle it once took to keep them connected.

Historians say that, by all rights, the combined Arab armies and the Palestinian irregulars should have won the war easily. They were well-equipped with British tanks, heavy artillery and bombers. But most of the ground troops were not well-trained and there were factional squabbles among the Arab League leaders.

For their army, the Jews had the former Haganah forces. They'd spent years perfecting commando tactics as they defended Zionist settlements and harassed the British authorities. And they were united by desire.

Ben Gurion did not have to plead with his fighters to hold every inch of land. The Jews had already lost too much, in the 2,000-year Diaspora, in the ovens of the Nazi camps.

By the time the war ended with a temporary truce agreed to in U.N. peace talks, Israel had solidified toeholds in the north, near the Lebanese border and around the Sea of Galilee, and gained the deserts of the south to the Red Sea. Syria controlled the Golan Heights; Transjordan controlled the West Bank, including the holy places in Jerusalem's Old City.

The truce held for 18 years, although sporadic fighting made for anything but peace.