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The War of Independence
Ruth, the daughter of Walter Fuchs, was 16 when the War of Independence began. She had met Asher Or, who would become her husband, four years earlier, when he was 17. They were members of The Young Guardians, a youth organization that sent members to work on kibbutzim -- cooperative farms -- every summer. The couple has a photograph of themselves working in a kibbutz cornfield. Another photograph shows Asher and two other grinning boys -- Arab friends before the War of Independence made friendships between Arabs and Jews so complicated. Ruth and Asher also joined the Haganah, training with sticks and revolvers because rifles were in short supply. With independence, the Haganah became part of Israel's regular army, the Israel Defense Forces. At 21, Asher Or became a land-mine saboteur with the new army. Shortly after, a mine blew up as he tried to plant it, injuring him just badly enough to bring his military career to an end. Israeli women have always been drafted into the military, the same as men. But Ruth was too young when the war started. When she turned 17, she received a deferment because she had started law school in Jerusalem. The War of Independence lasted a little more than a year. Terror was ever-present, and any effort to maintain a normal life in the war zone that was Jerusalem was impossible, Ruth says. The bus she took to school every day became a moving target as it rolled through the city's Arab neighborhoods. Many times, she stayed overnight with friends near school rather than make the perilous trip home in the evening. There were many narrow escapes. A member of her father's car pool was taken by terrorists one day and never seen again. Another time, her father gave an elderly man his seat on a bus. There was a sudden crack and the man was dead, shot through the bus window. Sometimes the violence hit closer. In the middle of one night, Ruth's best friend, also named Naomi, woke to find her window shaking and rattling. She put a blanket over her head just before the chandelier fell, showering the bed with glass. A bomb had gone off nearby. When Naomi found out later that the house that had been bombed was the home of a boyfriend, she went there to look for him. On the way, she was caught in crossfire and killed. The Arab Legion blocked the main highway connecting Jerusalem and Tel Aviv at Latrun, a dot on the map in the Ayalon Valley about 15 miles west of Jerusalem. The roadblock isolated Jerusalem from the rest of Israel. "We didn't have water then," Ruth remembers. "We didn't have food to eat. We didn't have kerosene to stay warm. We had to have the road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem." Eric Weiss, by now 33, was in Latrun on May 19 when the Israelis launched their first ill-fated assault in a long and bloody struggle to open the road to Jerusalem. |
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