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Much of Israel is like Mishmar Ayalon—an armed frontier land where the settlers live in constant dread of a shot, a raid, a sudden grenade. The danger breathes down your neck as you drive to Jerusalem through a road cleft into a gorge, under the eyes and weapons of Jordanians perched on the hills. You feel it on the narrow-gauge railway that winds into the city alongside Jordan territory so close that sunflower seeds spat from the train windows fall onto Arab soil. Where Jordan bulges westward, the Israeli beachhead is barely eight miles wide. It takes less than 20 minutes to drive from Tel Aviv on the Mediterranean to the Jordan border.
This fact dominates Israel. "If we retire ten miles," said one Israeli general, "we're in the sea. If we move back 500 yards in Jerusalem, we give up our Knesset [the Parliament]. We must hold the border, yielding not an inch."
At Kfar Saba, a stone-and-stucco frontier outpost twelve miles from Tel Aviv, the border runs through tangled orange groves. Almost every night Arab infiltrators flit from tree to tree, and so across the border, to steal and destroy. Some of the intruders are harmless: they come to visit Arab relatives left on the Israeli side, or to steal a bag of oranges from groves that were once their own. But in the past month the settlers of Kfar Saba have lost six cows, seven mules, three horses and three donkeys.
The commander of Kfar Saba is a mild-looking young man named David Tryfus, 29, the son of a German physician. He is responsible for the ten-mile strip of border running north and south between the Arab towns of Qalqiliya and Tulkarm. At night he called his patrol to attention, and pointed to a map marked with red lines that showed the infiltrator routes. "We ambush here tonight," he said.
With Tryfus' patrol, I rode off in an armored halftrack, preceded by a jeep. The jeep's probing searchlight scanned the countryside. "Keep your heads down," said Tryfus as we approached a railroad bridge. Twice in the past year it had been mined. We waited for a train to pass, climbed aboard a gasoline-driven "handcar" and rolled down the track to inspect the railroad line. Suddenly, in the darkness, a pink flare leaped. We stopped and found a land mine, planted on the rails after the last train passed just a few minutes before.
The patrol unlimbered its Bren guns and disappeared into the night in the direction of the Jordan border. Soon the men came back with a prisoner. He was an Arab of medium height, and he tried to make himself smaller by pressing his hands against his belly. The Israelis searched him roughly, and one of them thrust the snout of a Tommy gun into his stomach. He made a noise like a wounded animal. Then Tryfus tried to thrust the land mine into the prisoner's hands. The Arab shrank back, and Tryfus laughed grimly. "He knows nothing," mimicked one of the policemen. "They never know anything . . . They steal and kill but when we capture them they are babies born yesterday."
By dawn we were back in Kfar Saba, sipping glasses of tea.