| | | A Handful of Heroes of the 1948
War MAY 2, 2025 4:00 PM
BY HUGH FITZGERALD
COMMENTS
Having recently posted a piece at Jihad Watch about the Israeli heroes, military and civilian, who fought to save their fellow Israelis on October 7, 2023, I was prompted to look into a handful of Israeli heroes of the 1948 war. I found the story of 12 of them here.
Capt. Yitzhak Bruckman took part in one of the navy’s daring operations in the War of Independence. On October 22, 1948, off the Gaza coast, he escorted troops who were ordered to sink an Egyptian warship using boats loaded with explosives. Bruckman’s task was to collect the sailors from the water after the sabotage was complete.
He risked his life when he steered his boat into steady fire in an area lit up by two powerful searchlights. He then zigzagged across the water and pulled three sailors from the sea. For this the Israel Defense Forces recommended that he receive the second highest decoration, equivalent to today’s Medal of Valor.
Mira Ben Ari killed the soldier who shot and killed her commanding officer after the kibbutz fell to the Egyptians. Ben Ari, who was immediately shot dead, was never decorated, even though she is remembered as a great heroine.
Bruckman, who died in 2018 at 92, did reserve duty in the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War but never received the 1948 decoration. He was one of 1,200 combat troops, both men and women, in the War of Independence whom the IDF recommended for medals. But they never got them because of an order by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.
“We don’t need heroes,” Ben-Gurion told the army. He slashed the list to just 12, who received the Hero of Israel medal, the IDF’s highest decoration at the time.
A few years ago, Offer Drori, a 70-year-old computer specialist from Jerusalem with a keen awareness of heritage preservation, heard about this anomaly. When he asked to see the list of soldiers recommended for decorations, he was astonished to discover that no one knew where it was.
“I knew the day would come when I would try to achieve historical justice, even if belated, and inform the public about these unsung heroes, even if most of them were no longer alive,” Drori says. He believes that all 1,200 should be decorated….
Read the whole article, and learn about some of the heroes of the 1948 war. I found their deeds of derring-do and self-sacrifice memorable. There’s a straight line from their stories to those of the Israelis who held off the Hamas killers on October 7, 2023, for as long as they could. |
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