Pick Your Battle

Just before shipping out for active duty in June 1967 Mike was sitting with a friend watching the Boston Red Sox on television when the game was interrupted by a news flash — Israel was at war with her Arab neighbors. Suddenly he felt a cloud of dread telling his friend “Heck I hope I didn’t join the wrong war” (Photos: Shlomi Cohen Family archives)

I t was the heat of the first Palestinian Intifada in 1988 and Reb Gedalia Becker — a former helicopter gunship pilot in Vietnam — was driving along the narrow desert road in eastern Gush Etzion on his way home to the religious settlement of Maale Amos. For the past few volatile months Arabs had been attacking Jewish drivers from an olive grove that bordered the road and after numerous unanswered requests to the authorities to at least cut back the first row of olive trees Becker bought a couple of pruning saws and cut the trees down himself destroying the Arab cover. But the young terrorists just shifted position taking their slingshots and Molotov cocktails to a cliff overlooking a dangerous turn in the road instead where they continued to hit private cars and even firebombed a school bus full of children.

As the late afternoon winter sun was about to set Becker slowed down his white Subaru station wagon fingered the pistol at his side and peeked up at the overhang where he’d been ambushed three times in recent weeks. Sure enough his peripheral vision caught a glimpse of two shadowy figures as a flaming bottle sailed overhead and crashed on the road right in front of his car. He slammed on the brakes and got out lifted his gun with both hands and — with a bit of the G.I. Joe still in him — fixed on the moving targets and shot off an entire clip. Both of them went down.

As the shots faded into the desert a racing army jeep pulled up with a screeching halt. An officer jumped out in shock looked at Becker and his smoking gun let out a string of expletives under his breath and then sped away to check on the casualties. It turned out that the Israeli army had finally decided to do something about the Arab attacks and sent undercover Israeli soldiers into the area dressed as Arabs in order to catch the perpetrators in the act.