The General's Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine by Miko Peled Read Free Book Online

major assignment was commander of the Jerusalem Brigade, which secured and protected West Jerusalem’s precarious border with Jordanian-controlledEast Jerusalem. Jerusalem was not just another region. Jews, Christians, and Muslims had a deep regard for the city, which meant that my father had dealings with diplomats and religious leaders from all around the world. It was a highly sensitive diplomatic post as well as a difficult military one.

Commander of Jerusalem Brigade with Israel’s Prime Minister David Ben Gurion.
     
    In the early 1960s, he served as special advisor on armaments to the deputy minister of defense, who at the time was Shimon Peres. This was the period when, under Peres’s supervision, Israel began developing its nuclear weapons program. It was one role about which my father never spoke, and about which I could find no information, presumably because of its highly classified nature.
    In 1964, when I was three years old, my father was promoted to major general (aluf in Hebrew) as chief of logistics of the Israeli army. This is the highest rank in the Israeli army with the exception of one person, the army chief of staff. His responsibilities included armaments, technology, logistics, the medical corps, weapons and other purchases, and overseeing an enormous budget. The job he wanted was head of army intelligence, and since he was the only general who spoke Arabic at the time, it would have been a logical choice. But chief of logistics was an important position that carried a great deal of responsibility, and the state of logistics in the army was in dire need of reform. So army Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin nominated him to that position, and he remained in it for four years.
    He felt that war was imminent and that the logistical operation needed modernization, and so in the first one hundred days of his command he planned acomplete overhaul of the system. A book on the IDF logistics command that was published years later by the IDF, described his reform:
     
“In a fashion that is uncharacteristic of the army the discussions he led were short and efficient and within six months of him taking command the reforms were approved by Chief of Staff Rabin. Within three months after that the reforms were implemented.”
     
    The description ends by stating that,
     
Only an officer with a broad vision, an understanding of the needs of the military and an extraordinary determination in implementation (as general Matti Peled possessed) is capable of executing an overhaul of such dimensions. 2
     

My father served as chief of logistics of the Israeli army. His rank was Major General, the highest rank in the Israeli army with the exception of one person, the army chief of staff.
     
    On Fridays, my father would come home from work early, and after dinner he would sit in the living room and turn on our beautiful, large wooden radio. I was no more than four or five years old, but I remember it like it was yesterday. He would sit there, still in uniform, and listen to speeches in Arabic given by President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and other Arab leaders of the time. My father spoke Arabic fluently by then. I remember hearing the massive applause the speakers received and thinking that they sounded like a lot of chess pieces being tossed around in a box. Even though I could not understand a word, I would sit in complete silence as he listened for hours to these speeches. He was absorbed in what he was doing and did not acknowledge me or anyone else that may have been there. Still, I felt as though I was witnessing something very important.
    Soon war was on the horizon again. In the late spring of 1967, Egypt’s President Nasser expelled the United Nations peacekeeping forces that had been monitoringthe ceasefire between the two countries from the Sinai Peninsula. He sent Egyptian troops across the Suez Canal and into the demilitarized Sinai Peninsula, and he threatened to blockade the straits of Tiran and not