The War of Attrition started
and Golda capitulated.
After a couple of years or something
they established...
now I am really confused.
they established the Bar-Lev Line.
Bar-Lev was Chief of Staff -
not a genius but a German,
thorough, a man who could be depended on.
As I said, I was in pretty close contact with many of the generals
I need to focus on the timetable.
First, there was the Latrun affair.
Immediately after the war a soldier came to me and said:
'They are destroying the Arab villages near Latrun'.
I ran to the car and hurried there.
They didn't let me get close, but I saw from a distance
that the bulldozers were working there.
I rushed to Jerusalem,
wrote a report
and wrote a letter to Levi Eshkol,
to Menachem Begin and the Mapam ministers, if I remember correctly,
about this thing. But it was too late.
The demolition took two or three days.
Then Amos Kenan, who was a soldier in that sector, came to me.
He told me about it. I asked him to write a detailed report about what he had seen,
including the expulsion of the population.
I submitted it to several ministers but it didn't help.
It is a beautiful document, by the way, written in Amos's style.
Later they came running to me: 'They are destroying Qalqilya'.
I hurried there and saw that an entire district of Qalqilya
was being systematically destroyed.
Once again I rushed to the Knesset, once again I approached the ministers
and they stopped it.
Apparently, Moshe Dayan had done this, 'without orders, without permission.
They stopped in this neighbourhood and built it again.
They stopped expelling the residents,
and let them return.
At that same time, I didn't witness it, I only heard about it later.
Ranan Lurie told me, that also in Tulkarm they started the expulsion,
loaded them onto buses and drove them to the Allenby Bridge,
but that also stopped.
Meanwhile, of course, there was the famous speech that Rabin made.
Rabin was receiving an Honorary Doctorate at the University,
made a nice speech, including,
'We mourn the enemy's dead',
something which is so not Israeli.
Then Mor'eleh (Mordechai) Bar-On claimed that he had written the speech.
But to me it does not matter, Rabin is the one who delivered it.
And from then on I was watching Rabin.