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Looking more closely, I saw a wooden box, the kind we used in Mishmar
Hasharon to crate oranges. It was filled with hay. At first, I thought the stirring
inside was a family pet. Then, I saw it was a baby. I said nothing until we had
left. "Was that really a child?" I asked Yigal. "A baby?" He replied, with a tinge
of sadness but also a look that seemed to convey surprise at my naivety: "Yes.
They don't have room for him."

* * *

My evolving feelings about the Arabs, the other people with dreams of what
they still saw as Palestine, would become more complex as my childhood drew
to an end. As mentioned, I barely registered the fate of the absent villagers of
Wadi Khawaret.

And yet as I got older – in my teens – I came to understand why the
Palestinians were fighting us. Before the 1956 war, Dayan gave a brief speech
that had a powerful impact on me. It was a eulogy, but it was for someone
Dayan didn't know personally. His intended audience was the rest of the
country. He spoke in Nahal Oz, a kibbutz on the border with Gaza often
targeted by fedayeen. In April 1956, a group of Arabs crossed from Gaza and
began cutting down the wheat in Nahal Oz's fields. The kibbutz security officer,
a 21-year-old named Roi Rotberg, rode out on horseback to chase them away.
The intruders opened fire as soon as he got close. They beat him, shot him dead
and took the body back over the armistice line. The corpse was returned,
mutilated, after an Israeli protest through the UN.

With Israeli newspapers full of agonized accounts of what had happened,
Dayan's message was that we should not blame the Arabs for Roi Rotberg's
death. We should look at ourselves, and the neighborhood in which we lived.
"Why should we talk about their burning hatred for us?" he asked. "For eight
years, they have been sitting in the refugee camps of Gaza, while before their
eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages where they and their
fathers dwelt." Of course, they hated us and the state we were building. Rotberg
had allowed his "yearning for peace to deafen his ears, and he did not hear the
voice of murder waiting in ambush." Dayan said the danger was that other
Israelis had become similarly naive. "How did we shut our eyes, and refuse to
see, in all its brutality, the destiny of our generation?" A generation which was

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