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The tragedy of Palestine pushes you toward the borders.
All are with you in the flaming battle.
A Boy Named Tiran. To the relief of the world, the flaming battle had not yet come, and diplomats in Europe and the U.S. were trying hard to see to it that it did not (see THE NATION). But the guns had already begun to chatter. For the first time, an unsettling outbreak of incidents took place along the front—any one of which might have touched off wider war if either side had really wanted it. In the first combat deaths of the crisis, two Israeli soldiers and a Syrian guerrilla were killed when an Israeli patrol clashed with a group of infiltrators near the Syrian border at Kfar Hanassi. Earlier, also near the Syrian border, an Israeli armored car ran over an Arab-planted mine and blew up, injuring seven soldiers.
There was scattered gunfire from the Jordan side of Jerusalem, including a barrage aimed at an Israeli helicopter that strayed across the wall of no man's land. Palestinian troops in the Gaza Strip lobbed mortar shells at Israeli positions for 40 minutes without hitting anything, and Egypt charged that the Israelis had fired on Arab farmers near Gaza. Along the straight-edged border that divides the Negev Desert (Israel) from the Sinai Desert (Egypt), the Israelis captured an Egyptian colonel and four of his men who had lost their way and wandered onto the wrong dune.
If the Arabs displayed wild fervor and unusual unity in facing Israel, the Israelis themselves reacted with extraordinary spirit. Lately, many Israelis had begun to fear that the dream that created and fired their state might be beginning to fade. Their country faced severe economic problems. Many who had settled it were now abandoning it. Morale among much of the populace was low. For a 19-year-old, Israel suddenly seemed listless, tired and dispirited. The crisis changed all that: suddenly the dream was very much alive again. The Jewish people once more reacted with vigor to the problem that has always faced it: the struggle for survival.
Half the nation seemed to be in uniform. The winding highway from the rugged wooded hills of Jerusalem to Tel Aviv on the coast was crowded with reservists hitchhiking to join their units. In the cities, girls in khaki miniskirts and pertly cocked overseas caps were on round-the-clock duty at sandbagged gun positions. Middle-aged men volunteered for temporary police duty, and middle-aged housewives enlisted for service as air-raid wardens. Schoolchildren delivered the mail, and university students paid their own way to remote kibbutzim (collective farms) to replace teachers called to arms. In Jerusalem, two wealthy merchant brothers responded to the emergency by paying up five years of back taxes. In Tel Aviv, an army officer and his wife named their newborn son Tiran after the disputed Strait at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba, now under Egyptian blockade.