“A Day of Blood and Valor”: terrorism and social tensions in 1970s Israel

ABSTRACT

On June 13, 1974, four Palestinian militants penetrated kibbutz Shamir in northern Israel, killing three women before being killed by an ad-hoc force of kibbutz members. The attack on Shamir generated a new discourse in Israel about civilian reaction to terrorism and the concept of the citizen-soldier. But this discourse was intertwined with contemporaneous social and ethnic conflicts, as it included comparisons between the events in Shamir and in other communities struck by Palestinian terrorism around the same period. Analyzing the public reactions to the raids on Shamir and other Israeli communities – mainly the towns of Kiryat Shmona and Ma’alot – this article argues that, in contrast to received opinion, security threats did not serve as a social glue keeping together a divided Israeli society, but rather accentuated ethnic and social tensions plaguing Israel in the 1970s.

KEYWORDS:

• Israeli-Palestinian conflict
• terrorism
• Mizrahi-Ashkenazi relations
• social tensions
• Kibbutz
• development towns

Introduction

On the morning of June 13, 1974, four members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC) penetrated kibbutz Shamir in Israel’s northern Upper Galilee, having crossed the border from Lebanon two nights earlier. Armed with rifles, pistols, and explosive belts, they entered the apiary building, located on the outskirts of the kibbutz. Most of the apiary workers had already gone for breakfast in the kibbutz dining hall, but two women – Shoshana Galili and Edna Mor – had stayed in the building to complete their work. Shoshana was a 58-year-old mother of three, a member of the generation that had established the kibbutz in 1944. Edna was 28, a mother of an eight-year-old boy and pregnant with her second child. The terrorists murdered both of them at their working desks. At some point, the terrorists split as two of them stayed in the apiary and the other two headed toward the kibbutz. When these two reached the area of the children’s houses (where kibbutz children were living and learning), they were spotted by a seven-year-old boy and two apiary workers who were on their way back from breakfast. The terrorists shot and wounded one worker and then turned back to the apiary. Now they encountered another member of the apiary team, 19-year-old Judith Sinton, who was on her way to the dining hall. Judith had come to Shamir from New Zealand a few weeks earlier as part of the “volunteer” program, which brought young people from abroad to live and work on kibbutzim (plural of kibbutz). They killed her on the spot.

In the meantime, a group of kibbutz members who were finishing their breakfast heard of the attack and formed a small ad-hoc fighting force. They rushed to their apartments to grab their rifles, located two of the terrorists and killed them in a close-range shoot-out near the apiary. The two other terrorists died about twenty minutes later as they blew up the apiary building, where they had remained during most of the battle. Toward the end of the fighting, units of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) arrived and took command of the event after the shooting stopped.¹

Shamir’s fighting squad: on the way to the apiary and during the battle. Photographer: Avraham Eilat.

Growing up in kibbutz Shamir, I was familiar with the basic details of the event from a young age. The story was conveyed to us on various occasions during our childhood and acquired a mythical status in our collective consciousness. The tragic and heroic features of the story were captured in the phrase “A Day of Blood and Valor,” the title of a short essay in a memorial booklet the kibbutz published one month after the attack.² Those features were amplified by the fact that two members of the fighting force who had engaged the terrorists from a close distance received a merit citation from the IDF’s Chief of Staff for their performance in the battle. One of them was Uzi Tzur, a reserve paratrooper officer who had led the counterattack. The other was Ya’akov Mor, Edna’s husband, who kept fighting although he knew his wife was inside the apiary. I also had personal connections to the event: my father and grandfather were on the managing team of the kibbutz apiary at the time and were luckily absent from the scene. The seven-year-old boy who spotted the terrorists is my cousin, whose father – my uncle – was on the fighting force. While the local and personal resonances of the story are obvious, until recently I had not been interested in the broader national ramifications of the attack on Shamir.

In this article, I show that the incident in Shamir generated a renewed discourse in Israel about the reaction to terrorism. The raid on Shamir was one in a series of raids that Palestinian militants launched against Israeli villages, towns, and cities in the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The attack on Shamir was preceded by even more deadly attacks on the towns of Ma’alot and Kiryat Shmona and was followed by attacks on places like Nahariyah, Beit She’an, Kfar Yuval, the Savoy Hotel in Tel Aviv, and others. But Shamir was the only place where local residents defeated the terrorists independently, without the intervention of Israel’s security forces. There were other cases where local civilians participated in the fighting – for example in Nahariyah, Kfar Yuval, and Beit She’an – but their actions were less successful, and they did not act independently of the official forces.³

The conduct of the fighters of Shamir was therefore lauded as a model for proper action in the face of terrorism. Political leaders, military figures, commentators, and members of the public praised Shamir’s members for their courageous and effective action, placing an emphasis on the need for civilians to be able to defend their communities independently, without relying on the army. A central component of this discourse was the image of the citizen-soldier: a civilian living in a frontier community who is capable of transforming him or herself instantly into a fighter.⁴ The idea that civilians should participate in defense missions against terrorism received an institutional expression with the establishment in the summer of 1974 of the Israeli Civil Guard, a voluntary self-defense force operating within the police.⁵ While the Israeli police started organizing Civil Guard units even before the attack on Shamir,⁶ observers cited the incident in the kibbutz as an example in discussions about civilian self-defense.⁷

I also argue, however, that the new discourse on counter-terrorist action and the citizen-soldier was grounded in distinct cultural assumptions. The discourse highlighted what was perceived as the values of the Israeli Labor movement, especially the kibbutz movement, and drew a connection between those values and the ability to meet successfully the challenge of terrorist raids against civilian populations. Many of the other communities who came under Palestinian attacks during that period were not part of the kibbutz movement, and their conduct was often compared to the ideal Labor-style citizen-soldier, as manifested in Shamir.

This public discussion had a specific political-historical context. It took place during the early-to-mid-1970s, which saw a decline in the values, prestige, and political power of the Israeli Labor movement, which had dominated Israeli and Zionist politics in various incarnations since the 1930s. This process was accelerated by the devastation of the 1973 war, as postwar protest brought about the resignation of Golda Meir’s government in April 1974, only to be replaced two months later by another Labor government headed by Yitzhak Rabin. Labor’s decline culminated three years later in the “upheaval” of 1977, when the party was for the first time ousted from government by the right-wing Likud party. This political drama was accompanied by the rise in the political prominence of groups such as Gush Emunim, which promoted Jewish settlements in the territories taken in the 1967 war, and Jews originating from Muslim countries (Mizrahi Jews or Mizrahim). The latter engaged in a significant ethnic social protest and started supporting Herut, Likud’s predecessor, in large numbers, contributing to Labor’s fall from grace. Against this background, the emphasis on the values of the kibbutz (which was a prominent institution of the Labor movement) as part of the discourse on security seems like an attempt – especially by people affiliated with the kibbutz or Labor movement – to distinguish themselves from other groups, cling to a dying glory, and revive a vanishing world. Although this public discourse centered on questions of security, it was intertwined with contemporaneous social and ethnic tensions and included messages that could be interpreted as polarizing rather than unifying.

The notion that external threats do not necessarily enhance social cohesion is not entirely new. Historians have recently challenged the myth of national unity in Britain during World War II, arguing instead that wartime British society was divided by class antagonism and social tensions.⁸ Likewise, in Israel in the early 2000s, there were complaints about a lack of solidarity with communities in the south that came under missile attacks from the Gaza Strip.⁹

But those insights are rarely reflected in the scholarly literature on the impact of terrorism on Israeli society. Studies of the subject tend to focus on the social psychology of Israeli Jews as expressed mainly in stereotypes of Arabs and attitudes toward peace negotiations and democratic values, especially in the context of the Second, or al-Aqsa, Intifada of the early 2000s.¹⁰ Even studies that take a more comprehensive approach speak of the “unifying effect” of terrorism on Israeli society. This is part of a larger view emphasizing the “rally around the flag syndrome,” whereby terrorist attacks are followed by a rise in patriotic sentiments and in-group cohesiveness – not only in Israel but, for example, also in the United States following the 9/11 attacks and in Russia in response to Chechen terrorism.¹¹ A widely held assumption in scholarship on Israel particularly is that external threats such as war and terrorism serve as social glue keeping together a deeply divided Israeli society.¹²

This article challenges this assumption. Through a comparison between the reactions to the attacks on Shamir and other communities, especially Ma’alot and Kiryat Shmona, I argue that the public discussion of terrorism did not promote unity and cohesiveness but, in fact, threw into sharp relief social, ethnic, and cultural rifts between different groups in Israel.

The attacks on Kiryat Shmona, Ma’alot, and Shamir

What was the background of the Palestinian attacks on Israeli communities during that period? The political reality in the Middle East following the 1973 war posed a challenge to the Palestinians. The United States and the Soviet Union jointly sponsored peace talks between Israel and Arab countries, compelling the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the dominant force in the Palestinian arena, to decide whether it wanted to join the diplomatic process or remain aloof. Joining the process would have potentially enabled the PLO to take advantage of the demonstration of Arab power during the war and make territorial gains from Israel. But it would also mean abandoning the longstanding goal of destroying the foundations of Israel as a Jewish state and reclaiming Palestine through armed struggle. In the words of historian Yezid Sayigh, this dilemma gave “rise to an intense and deeply divisive debate within the PLO.”¹³

Toward the end of 1973, the mainstream PLO leadership started advocating a departure from the existing strategy of constant war to liberate the whole of Palestine, accepting instead the idea of a diplomatic process that would only lead to the liberation of the territories that Israel had occupied in 1967. Several guerilla groups opposing that moderate position created the “Rejectionist Front” within the PLO. The leading bodies among them were the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), created in 1967 by George Habash, and the PFLP-CG – the group responsible for the attack on Shamir – which had split from the PFLP in 1968 under the leadership of Ahmad Jibril. Both organizations had played a central role in the Palestinian armed struggle since the late 1960s. Now they feared that the PLO was heading toward direct negotiations with Israel, which might lead to significant Palestinian concessions. In order to undermine PLO’s new policy, the rejectionist guerilla groups decided to launch attacks against Israel from south Lebanon, which had become a basis for Palestinian military activity since the expulsion of the PLO from Jordan in 1970.¹⁴

Thus, on April 11, 1974, three militants from the PFLP-CG broke into two different apartment buildings in Kiryat Shmona, an Israeli town located near the Lebanese border. They went from apartment to apartment and shot the residents. They also seized hostages and demanded the release of 100 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails. Israeli forces stormed into the building to confront the terrorists, who were killed in the ensuing shoot-out. 18 Israelis, including eight children and two soldiers, died in the incident.¹⁵

In Palestinian circles, the raid on Kiryat Shmona was seen as a great success of the armed resistance that elevated the prestige of the rejectionists while also intensifying the criticism against the diplomatic track espoused by the PLO leadership. In response to this pressure, an additional group, the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP, to be distinguished from the PFLP), which had previously supported PLO’s moderate stance, launched its own attack on Israel.¹⁶

On May 15, 1974, a PDFLP squad penetrated the Israeli northern town of Ma’alot and took over a local school building, which on that day was hosting a group of high school students on a trip from the nearby town of Safed. Even before seizing the school building, the squad killed three people in and near Ma’alot. They held 85 students as hostages inside the school and demanded the release of 26 Palestinian prisoners. The Israeli leadership debated whether to accept the terrorists’ demands or use military force to free the hostages. About half an hour before the expiry of the deadline that the terrorists had set for the release of prisoners, the IDF launched a rescue operation, in the course of which the terrorists killed 21 students before being killed themselves.¹⁷

Like the attacks on Kiryat Shmona and Ma’alot, the PFLP-CG attack on Shamir on June 13, 1974, was also related to internal Palestinian politics. Before the attack, the PFLP-CG leadership shifted toward PLO’s moderate political program. A radical faction within the PFLP-CG initiated the attack on Shamir in order to assert its objection to the organization’s new moderate stance.¹⁸ The militants attacking Shamir carried Hebrew copies of two leaflets, one of which demanded, like in previous attacks, the release of 100 Palestinian prisoners.¹⁹ But the chain of events in Shamir dictated that the raid did not evolve into a hostage crisis.

Although the political and regional background for the raids on Kiryat Shmona, Ma’alot, and Shamir was similar, the incidents unfolded differently, as we saw – and so did the reactions in Israel.

Shamir, after the attack. Photographer: Avraham Eilat. Uzi Tzur, leader of the counterattack in Shamir, and the media. Photographer: Avraham Eilat.

Between terrorism and ethnic tensions

Three days after the attack on Shamir, Davar, the Labor movement’s daily, reported on a special government meeting dedicated to the events in Shamir during which Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Defense Minister Shimon Peres, and the IDF’s Chief of Staff Mordechai Gur had all commended the courageous and exemplary conduct of Shamir’s members against the terrorists.²⁰ Peres and Gur had voiced their praises even earlier during a visit to Shamir immediately after the attack. Peres said that the courage and decisiveness of Shamir’s people and the example they set were the foundations upon which Israel’s strength rested. Gur described Uzi Tzur and Ya’akov Mor as “the splendor of Israel.”²¹ A writer in Al Ha-Mishmar, the daily of Ha-Kibbutz Ha-Artzi, the kibbutz movement to which Shamir belonged, called the events in Shamir a turning point in the nation’s mental preparedness for the war on terror.²² Newspapers not affiliated with the kibbutz movement applauded the alertness and fighting skills of Shamir’s fighters,²³ and writers of personal letters to members of Shamir depicted their conduct as a “model” for the entire nation.²⁴

Defense Minister Peres and Chief of Staff Gur in Shamir. Photographer: Avraham Eilat.

Some of the observers responding to the events in Shamir stressed the differences between the conduct of Shamir members and that of other communities targeted by Palestinian terrorism. In a column in Davar, Haim Gouri, a renowned poet and major proponent of the Labor establishment, wrote that when he had first heard the news from Shamir, he thought it was another version of Kiryat Shmona and Ma’alot. Yet when more details arrived, he realized that “this time things developed differently. This time, the locals fought. This time, they did not stand helpless, waiting to be saved by the army, witnessing a massacre as it unfolds … ”²⁵ A writer in Yediot Aharonot, a daily not affiliated with the kibbutz or Labor movement, found it “difficult to avoid the comparison with other cases, which remain scorched in the hearts of all Israelis; all the more so in the hearts of the residents of Kiryat Shmona, Ma’alot, and Safed.”²⁶ An implicit yet meaningful comparison appeared in Shamir’s memorial booklet, noting the “absence [in Shamir] of the almost normal phenomena accompanying such events: panic and hysteria followed by confusion and uncalculated actions.”²⁷

Those comparisons had some basis in reality, especially as far as the attack on Ma’alot was concerned. Shortly after the rescue mission in the school in Ma’alot had ended, it turned out that earlier in the day, some of the adults accompanying the school trip from Safed had seized an opportunity to exit the school building, leaving behind the students taken hostage. A commission of inquiry established by the Israeli government to investigate the events in Ma’alot condemned this act, while Israel’s Attorney General showed more leniency toward the trip leader, who had been among those who had left the building, and argued that he had done so in order to get his rifle that he had left in a car near the school.²⁸ In any event, the behavior of some of the adults in Ma’alot obviously did not compare favorably with the performance of those in Shamir.

Beyond those details, however, the comparison between Shamir on the one hand and Kiryat Shmona and Ma’alot on the other evoked deeper cultural and social undercurrents stemming from the different status of those communities in Israeli society.

Both Kiryat Shmona and Ma’alot originated in the late 1940s and early 1950s as immigrant transit camps, established – like many other similar camps throughout the country – to house Jewish immigrants who had come to Israel as part of the mass Jewish immigration during the early years of the state. Both later evolved into “development towns,” and, in 1963, Ma’alot was also united with the Palestinian Arab village of Tarshiha into a joint Arab-Jewish town officially called Ma’alot-Tarshiha. Development towns were small urban communities that the Israeli government built in the 1950s in the northern and southern peripheries of the country with the aim of dispersing the growing population away from the densely inhabited central areas of the country. Most of the people sent to those development towns were Mizrahi Jews, as immigrants from Europe were more likely to be settled in bigger cities or more central areas. Residents of development towns lived in isolation from the economic and cultural centers of the country, and often were employed in low-paying, low-status jobs and received a lower level of education. This deprivation was part of a larger phenomenon of discrimination against Mizrahi immigrants during that period, related to a tendency among the dominant European-born (Ashkenazi, pl. Ashkenazim) establishment and the general population to disrespect the cultural background of Mizrahim and treat them as primitive, backward and unenlightened in comparison to Ashkenazi Jews.²⁹

While Mizrahim were marginalized by the Zionist nation-building project, kibbutzim were considered the vanguard of the enterprise. Established as collective agricultural farms by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who were guided by a combination of Zionist and socialist ideals, the kibbutzim became a model of a just and egalitarian society already during the period of the Yishuv – the Jewish community in Palestine prior to the creation of Israel in 1948. They embodied the Zionist ethos of return to the soil and were regarded as the “standard-bearer” of the nationalist endeavor, ready to settle in frontier areas, fulfill military and pioneering missions, and “volunteer for whatever else needed to be done.”³⁰

The kibbutzim maintained their prestige through the post-1948 period, although their status in fact began to decline as the volunteering missions that the kibbutzim had fulfilled in the pre-state era were now handled by official state bodies.³¹ Moreover, already in the 1950s, relations between the largely Ashkenazi kibbutzim and Mizrahi immigrants, especially those living in development towns, became strained. Due to the scarcity of economic opportunities in development towns, they became suppliers of cheap and unskilled labor for industrial factories established and managed by neighboring kibbutzim. The kibbutzim were also better organized, had stronger connections in the corridors of power, and controlled more land than development towns. Those socioeconomic and political gaps – compounded by ethnic and cultural disparities that had existed since the days of the transit camps – caused rupture and tension between the two groups. In the words of Anita Shapira, the kibbutzim, which had been the symbol of egalitarianism, now “found themselves at the center of a class and ethnic conflict.”³²

The conflict between the kibbutzim and development towns was just one front of the larger ethnic rift between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim in Israel, construed as a conflict between the privileged “first” Israel and deprived “second” Israel, respectively. While this rift had its origins in the great immigration of the 1950s, it received serious political and public expression in the early 1970s, largely due to the rise of the Israeli Black Panthers – a Mizrahi protest movement calling to end socioethnic discrimination – whose mass demonstrations brought the Ashkenazi-Mizrahi cleavage to the fore.³³

All of those tensions found their way into the discussion of the terrorist attacks of the 1970s. Several articles in Pi Ha-Aton, the student journal of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, expressed aversion to the admiring tone prevalent in public reactions to the events in Shamir and especially the message emerging from the comparison between Shamir on the one hand and Ma’alot and Kiryat Shmona on the other. The writers of those articles framed their objections in the context of the gaps between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim. A short article in the journal’s satirical section stated, “Shimon Peres praised them, as if three women had not been killed in the recent murderous attack on the kibbutz … Well done, Shamir, may there be more like you, let the horrors of the apiary repeat themselves so that the scenes of heroism in the Hula Valley [where Shamir is located] will also be repeated.” The article thus rebuked the consensus view that saw the incident in Shamir as a story of heroism. In the same sarcastic style, the article then responded to reports emphasizing that as opposed to the residents of Kiryat Shmona and Ma’alot, Shamir members had not asked for support from state institutions after the attack. The writer related this issue to the economic advantage of kibbutzim over development towns: “A wonder of wonders: perhaps there is another reason here for praising [Shamir]? Not a heated pool, not another cultural center, not another carpeted chicken coop – they did not ask for a thing. Only in Kiryat Shmona and Ma’alot a massacre was not prevented. Not only did the people living there fail in halting the murderers, but they have the audacity to request help and support from state institutions.”³⁴ Another piece in Pi Ha-Aton’s satirical page attacked the description of Kiryat Shmona and Ma’alot as helpless in comparison to Shamir by ironically calling on the young people of those towns to be ashamed of themselves for not serving in IDF elite units, for not being among “the chosen ones” - and for not being Ashkenazim.³⁵ Even more acerbically, an opinion column in the same journal declared, “The people of Ma’alot and Kiryat Shmona are a bunch of cowards … who need the IDF to protect them. To the people of Shamir – the handsome boys of beautiful first Israel – well done.” The article continued by linking the public discussion of the terrorist attacks with the ethnic tension and specifically the Mizrahi protest, referring to an infamous statement of former Prime Minister Golda Meir, who in 1971 had complained that the Black Panthers were “not nice:”

The members of Shamir took up their weapons … and fought independently without waiting for the IDF. When the Black Panthers of Kiryat Shmona and Ma’alot had fought independently for their right to equality vis-à-vis first Israel, they were called “notnice.” If the residents of Ma’alot and Kiryat Shmona also take up arms and demand that their towns receive the same subsidies that kibbutzim had received, the cycle of helplessness will be rolled back. The ‘success’ of first Israel stems from keeping second Israel helpless.³⁶

The writers of those articles drew a clear connection between the treatment of the events in Shamir, Ma’alot, and Kiryat Shmona and the wider ethnic conflict in Israel. The satirical texts scolded the common distinction between the military heroism of kibbutz members and the supposed helplessness of development town residents, implying that Shamir’s people were described as heroes only because of their privileged status compared to residents of development towns. They thus protested against the cultural and ethnic assumptions, which, in the authors’ view, shaped the public perception of the events in the three communities. The second article used the military discourse to hint at the possibility of a Mizrahi armed resistance against institutional discrimination, weaving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the ethnic conflict within Israel into one narrative. Those texts demonstrate how the Israeli-Palestinian clash brought up to the surface internal divisions within Israeli society rather than serving as a social glue or unifying force.

Israel’s long history of dealing with Palestinian terrorism has not been free of public controversies. In the 1950s, there were debates between “activists” and “moderates” over the proper response to Palestinian cross-border attacks.³⁷ The violence accompanying the Oslo peace process of the 1990s generated an aggressive protest demanding the government to stop the process.³⁸ During the Second Intifada, debates revolved around Israel’s “targeted killings” of Palestinian militants and political leaders.³⁹ But while those controversies related to strategic, ideological, and ethical aspects of Israeli foreign and military policies, the articles in Pi Ha-Aton point to the strong connection between the themes of security on the one hand and ethnic, social, and cultural issues on the other, which are often perceived as disconnected arenas.⁴⁰ These were only several articles in a relatively marginal publication, but an analysis of other responses to the attacks in question corroborates this trend.

Rethinking reactions to terrorism

The attack on Shamir, as we saw, marked a turning point in the Israeli discourse on reaction to Palestinian raids on civilian settlements. Following the events in Shamir, military and political leaders and other commentators insisted that civilians living in border areas should be prepared to defend themselves against terrorist attacks instead of relying on the IDF.

Thus, Chief of Staff Gur said on his visit to Shamir that since the IDF could not totally prevent cross-border infiltrations, Israeli citizens should be able to act like the members of Shamir did.⁴¹ In a visit to Ma’alot shortly after the attack on Shamir, Prime Minister Rabin said, “the government can only help those willing to help themselves.” The government would help by improving defensive installations, but the general defense mission, according to Rabin, also depended on “the locals, whose ability to face challenges and overcome difficult situations is indispensable … this is the most important thing in this new type of war that was imposed on us.”⁴² These ideas were echoed in numerous newspaper articles, highlighting the contribution of Shamir to the concept that well-trained civilians can act effectively “against terrorist groups infiltrating into their territory.”⁴³ Haim Gouri seconded the call for civilians to participate in security missions, but drew an even broader lesson from what had happened in Shamir: “Thus the security problem becomes the problem of every individual, a true partnership is created, a responsibility is born. One can no longer blame someone else. You are responsible for your own fate. And thus between the individual and the state a fabric is created, which is the war of volunteers, local people, who do not rely on miracles and do not wait for redemption from the outside.”⁴⁴

Beyond the implicit criticism against communities that had not reacted like Shamir, Gouri’s words suggest that the incident in Shamir should not only change military conceptions, but also open a new chapter in the relationship between citizens and the state around the question of security.

The approach expressed in the statements above was in fact not new. In the 1950s, as growing numbers of Palestinian refugees were crossing the borders into Israeli territory, sometimes with the intention of hurting Israeli citizens, the Labor government nurtured an ethos whereby citizens living in frontier regions were expected to shoulder military responsibilities and be ready to fight.⁴⁵ But, as Orit Rozin has shown, this idea, which had its origins in the Yishuv period, started changing in the mid-1960s. As cross-border movements declined, public attention gradually shifted away from the resourcefulness of civilians living in frontier settlements toward the professional capabilities of the IDF. Citizens were no longer expected to fulfill military duties but to rely on the official army.⁴⁶ This new trend, however, was reversed in later years. Although Israel’s stunning victory in the 1967 war further enhanced the prestige of the IDF, the debacle that the army had experienced in the early phases of the 1973 war resulted in the shattering of “complete faith” in the power of the IDF.⁴⁷

The terrorist attacks that came after the war prompted commentators in the press and opposition politicians to advocate for arming and training civilians in frontier kibbutzim and development towns. At a memorial ceremony for the victims of the attack on Ma’alot, held one day after the attack on Shamir, Menachem Begin, leader of the Likud party, spoke of the importance of a civil guard. Weaving the issue of terrorism into a hawkish criticism of the government, Begin explained that “yesterday’s events in Shamir proved that armed and well-trained civilians, working in conjunction with the armed forces, could prevent massacres on the scale of Ma’alot.” The government took steps to that effect, the most important of which was the establishment of the Civil Guard about a month after the attack on Shamir.⁴⁸ One newspaper article published following the events in Shamir nicely captured this process: “In the shadow of the omnipotent capability of the IDF we have permitted ourselves to be passive, to always wait until the security forces arrive … The Yom Kippur War was the first crack in this wall of blind faith. The escalation of terrorist attacks … were an additional shock that increased the need for personal initiative and responsibility.”⁴⁹

The crisis of the 1973 war, then, combined with the terrorist attacks after the war and the example set by Shamir, created fertile ground for the revival of the ethos of self-defense and the citizen-soldier, which had been dominant during the Yishuv period and the 1950s. Yet, now this ethos was often formulated not in universal but in specific cultural terms. Existing literature suggests that already in the 1950s, veteran Israelis and new immigrants living in the same frontier areas reacted differently to security threats and to the Labor movement’s expectation that they conduct themselves as soldiers. But this expectation is presented as a general concept, relating to “a normative Israeli” rather than to members of a particular group.⁵⁰ By contrast, the discourse of the 1970s was characterized by an attempt to establish a link between the idea of the citizen-soldier and values associated specifically with the kibbutz movement – and thereby implicitly emphasizing the uniqueness of the movement and its differences from other groups.

“There was No Panic Here:” Shamir and the mythology of heroism

This emphasis is evident in letters that Israeli citizens sent to Shamir in the aftermath of the attack. These were letters of support, consolation, and admiration, some of which were infused with ideological undertones. Dov Yermia, a former commander in the Hagannah (the main paramilitary body of the Yishuv), a retired IDF colonel, and a peace activist, wrote to the members of Shamir that he was “full of appreciation and amazement” at their “courage, resilience and resourcefulness.” He added, though, that only a community “with a way of life like yours can be blessed” with such qualities.⁵¹ A woman named Haya Admon likewise wrote to a couple from Shamir, “only your way of life prevents the murderers from executing their evil plans.”⁵²

Other writers elaborated on themes traditionally identified with Labor and kibbutz culture, including a strong bond to the land, sacrifice for the national cause, asceticism, reticence, and steadfastness in the face of military and other physical or mental challenges.⁵³

David Rabin of Kibbutz Mizra expressed his solidarity with Shamir through a poem combining the motifs of militarism and love of nature. According to Rabin, the members of Shamir “grew fields and orchards” and “lawns of love.” And “they raised sons, the best youth, the best fighters, and fought for [their kibbutz] with determination you will not find in any army.” They were “blocking with their bodies the borders of the land flowing with milk and honey – and so much blood.”⁵⁴ In another poetic letter, Tzvi Markman of kibbutz Hazor similarly celebrated the “glorious steadfastness” of Shamir, thanks to which they had created “a new entrenched defensive shield, in a powerful spirit, confident in [their] just way.” With this spirit they had not only produced “bread and cotton, vegetables and juicy fruits,” but also raised children, planted in their hearts love and freedom, and “invigorated their hands to carry arms in defense against the enemy.”⁵⁵

Some letters related the attack on Shamir to difficulties that the community had endured in the past, including living in threatening proximity to the Syrian border (before 1967), or building the kibbutz on a Rocky Hill beneath the Golan Heights – a task that involved the arduous work of stone clearing, which was a founding myth of Shamir.⁵⁶ Yemima Avidar-Tchernovitz, a leading author of children’s Hebrew literature, sent a letter to friends in Shamir one day after the attack reminding them of the old days of the establishment of the kibbutz: “With utter simplicity, you had carried the rifles on your backs and marched toward labor and defense … this spirit, this simplicity of ‘we are here’ is, I believe, the surest and deepest guarantee that no murderers will displace or defeat us.”⁵⁷

While some writers referred to the particular history of Shamir, others connected the attack on the kibbutz to previous violent incidents in Zionist and Jewish history. In a second article in Davar dedicated to Shamir, Haim Gouri compared the battle there to the battles of Yad Mordekhai and Negba – two kibbutzim that had been attacked by Egyptian forces in the 1948 war, and whose fighting has since occupied a central place in the Israeli mythology of heroism.⁵⁸ Shimon Avidan, representative of Ha-Kibbutz Ha-Artzi and prominent commander in the 1948 war, compared the events in Shamir to the battle in the settlement of Tel Hai in 1920, which is regarded as the foremost symbol of the Zionist ethos of defense and pioneering.⁵⁹ Meir Ya’ari, the leader of Ha-Kibbutz Ha-Artzi, offered an even broader historical perspective: “One chain leads from the defense of guards on the roofs of Lviv [Ukraine] against rioters in 1920 through the defenders of Tel Hai and the Warsaw Ghetto fighters – to the fighters of Negba and the defenders of kibbutz Shamir. This is the defense of the supreme value of Jewishlife, of the continuation of a 4,000-year-old Jewish history, of its martyrology, and the greatness of its national and universal values.”⁶⁰

By incorporating Shamir into this “chain” of violent and heroic periods in Jewish history – dating back to ancient times and including not only Tel Hai and Negba but also the pogroms in Eastern Europe and the Holocaust – Ya’ari related to the incident in Shamir as a myth of heroism in its own right. Gouri and Avidan likewise imbued the events in Shamir with special historical meaning by mentioning them alongside earlier episodes that were already ingrained in Israeli collective memory as symbols of sacrifice and heroism.

Despite those comparisons, the battle in Shamir did not become an Israeli myth. For example, at least two popular books surveying key events in Israeli history do not mention Shamir in their overview of terrorist attacks in the 1970s.⁶¹ A report in Ha’aretz on Ahmad Jibril’s death in July 2021 excluded Shamir from a summary of attacks carried out by Jibril’s PFLP-GC.⁶² Shamir members are not indifferent to this trend. This is evidenced by a letter that one kibbutz member sent in May 2000 to the editor of the weekend magazine of Ma’ariv complaining about the omission of Shamir from an article on attacks against communities in northern Israel,⁶³ and by more recent speculations of Shamir members regarding the possible reasons for the relative absence of the raid on the kibbutz from Israeli collective memory.⁶⁴ A full analysis of the commemoration of the terrorist attacks of the 1970s is beyond the scope of this article. But the contrast between the intensive response to the battle in Shamir in its immediate aftermath and the battle’s near exclusion from national memory in later years paradoxically helps to underscore the strong impression it made on Israeli society at the time.

In any event, alongside statements that placed battles that had taken place in kibbutzim within a larger narrative of Jewish and Zionist heroism, there were efforts to emphasize the uniqueness of the kibbutz movement in reacting successfully to military challenges. One writer for Al Ha-Mishmar believed that the conduct of Shamir members during the raid had again confirmed “the essentiality of the kibbutz movement,” which was “the first to rid itself of the delusions of complacency and passivity, and face the new reality.”⁶⁵ A statement from the neighboring kibbutz of Lehavot Ha-Bashan responding to the raid on Shamir used the memory of the 1948 war, when many kibbutzim had faced attacks from Arab armies, to stress the importance of kibbutzim in the present: “The terrorists had known since 1948 that kibbutzim are able to defend themselves. The kibbutz is a defensive power that can quickly organize to fulfill security missions … The attack on Shamir demonstrates that even today, the kibbutz should take the first blow.”⁶⁶

In this context too, the special qualities of the kibbutz were adulated not only by writers or publications affiliated with the movement. One week after the attack on Shamir, Ma’ariv published a long report on life in the community, venerating the kibbutz spirit and painting a romantic picture of its members as citizen-soldiers. The report featured photos of Shamir members carrying rifles and dwelled on the conspicuous presence of weapons in the kibbutz routine. According to the article, kibbutz people were

Placing the “Uzi” near the table before sitting to eat [in the kibbutz dining hall]. Then, nonchalantly placing it on their shoulders when going to wash their hands. When driving down to work in the fields, the “Kalashnikov” is close by. At home, the “Karl Gustav” lays next to the refrigerator or under the bed. When bringing their kids to the children’s house, they carry their weapon the way city women carry their purses. A whole kibbutz is carrying arms.

The report focused specifically on the story of Edna’s sister, Tirtzah, and her husband Mark, a native of New York. The couple had previously left the kibbutz to live in New York for several years but were “disgusted” by the way of life there. People around them were “malcontent,” “bitter” and “hopeless.” In the kibbutz, however, they found meaningful community and family life. Visiting the couple’s apartment, the reporter witnessed Mark placing his FN rifle on the table upon returning from a workday in the kibbutz’s cotton fields: “Mark loves the fields, loves to see the cotton growing slowly, as if a powerful force pulling it out of the ground.”⁶⁷ The report thus interweaved the couple’s life story into a larger narrative romanticizing kibbutz life through the themes of self-defense, bond to the land, and local patriotism – all against the background of the attack that had shaken the kibbutz a week earlier. The reporter accordingly concluded that “The short battle that Uzi … and his friends conducted against the terrorists is typical of the spirit of kibbutz people.”⁶⁸

Not all observers emphasized the uniqueness of the kibbutz. David Rosen of kibbutz Shamir, for example, said that “Shamir shares the same fate with Ma’alot and Kiryat Shmona,” without making a distinction between the communities.⁶⁹ But the prevailing tone was different. It was perhaps most starkly expressed in the words of another Shamir member, who maintained that “until now, the murderers had chosen more vulnerable, less organized targets” such as development towns, “where panic was [the terrorists’] most important weapon.” Yet, “if they thought the same would hold true for the kibbutz,” he continued, “they were wrong. There was no panic here … ”⁷⁰

The comparison, to be sure, is unfair to Ma’alot and Kiryat Shmona. As a small, close-knit, and highly organized community, bearing a strong tradition of commitment to self-defense, a kibbutz has a clear advantage over other forms of settlement in dealing with a military attack.⁷¹ It has also been shown that in earlier periods kibbutzim used their political power to obtain assistance from the state in matters of security.⁷² But many commentators on the attack on Shamir preferred to dwell on the social and cultural qualities of the kibbutz – perhaps as a reaction to the crisis that the Labor movement was experiencing at the time.

Between “Furious Pride” and “Tragic Pride”

The public discussion was concerned not only with the military reaction to terrorism but also with the atmosphere in the affected communities in the immediate aftermath of violence. Observers notably dwelled on the self-restraint of Shamir members and the silence that had descended on the kibbutz after the attack.⁷³ Silence and emotional restraint in the face of trauma and loss were indeed part and parcel of the ethos of Labor Zionism since the days of the Yishuv, and later played an important role in shaping Israeli culture, especially in molding the image of the Israeli soldier.⁷⁴ But in the historical context of the terrorist attacks of the 1970s, references to the silence in Shamir assumed an additional comparative dimension.

Israeli newspapers also reported on reactions in other communities that had been struck by terrorism during that period. In Safed, locals cursed and tried to physically attack government representatives who visited the town to attend the funeral of the students who had been murdered in Ma’alot. The funeral ceremony ended abruptly because of the commotion and the officials left the place under police protection. Before and after the funeral, young people demonstrated on Safed’s main street, carrying signs saying, “Death to the Arabs,” “For Security – Terrorists to the Gallows,” and “Our blood is Not Cheap.”⁷⁵ At the funeral in Kiryat Shmona, there were “cries of rage and revenge.”⁷⁶ Residents of both Ma’alot and Kiryat Shmona traveled to demonstrate near the Knesset (Israeli parliament) building in Jerusalem. Some demonstrators shouted “Kiryat Shmona is turning into a concentration camp,” “our children are afraid to go to the restrooms” and “death to the Arabs.”⁷⁷

The demonstrators from Kiryat Shmona wanted to meet with government ministers and Knesset members but were disappointed to find that most officials had already left the locked building. According to one report, a group of local Black Panthers helped the demonstrators break into the building despite the resistance of the Knesset Guard. Representatives of the demonstrators were eventually invited to present their claims to the Knesset committee of internal affairs. The heads of the delegation, Nissim Samana and Edri Albert, demanded a more effective arm supply to residents, enhancement of security measures, and the establishment of a hospital in Kiryat Shmona, alongside assistance in the socioeconomic sphere, including new housing construction and subsidy of essential goods.⁷⁸ At a similar meeting in the Knesset, residents of Ma’alot demanded improvements such as a reinforced police station, bomb shelters in schools, and “vigorous treatment of social and educational issues,” which they saw as directly related to physical security. Eli Ben-Ya’akov, the head of Ma’alot’s town council, called for “immediate attention to all the problems, especially the issue of security – not only for our benefit, but so that what happened in Ma’alot will not happen again in other places.”⁷⁹

Although those demonstrations were propelled by the events in Ma’alot and Kiryat Shmona, they are even better understood in the context of the turbulent political climate in Israel at the time. After the 1973 war, demobilized soldiers and other citizens outraged by government policies leading to the war participated in mass demonstrations that eventually led to the fall of the government in April 1974. The demonstrations, moreover, helped bring about a transformation in Israeli political culture, as “political protest as a permanent event, expressed in demonstrations and mass pressure on the government aimed at influencing policy” has been a central phenomenon in Israeli public life ever since.⁸⁰ While the 1973 war was the catalyst of that transformation, the protest of the residents of Ma’alot and Kiryat Shmona show that the terrorist attacks after the war were also part of that process. The image below helps illustrate this connection: one of the central demands of the post-1973 war protest was that Defense Minister Moshe Dayan take responsibility for the war and resign. The image shows that participants in the funeral in Kiryat Shmona also directed their anger at Dayan, carrying a sign that asks: “Mr. Dayan – why won’t you live here?” Hinting at Dayan’s responsibility for the tragedy in Kiryat Shmona, the people carrying the sign merged their outcry with the post-1973 war protest, showing how the responses to the terrorist attacks were part of the tumultuous political atmosphere of that period.

This point is further reinforced by a comparison to civilian reactions to Palestinian cross-border attacks in the 1950s. During that period, both veteran and new immigrant residents of beleaguered frontier communities were often dissatisfied with the help they received from the state, and, like the people of Ma’alot and Kiryat Shmona, demanded greater support in dealing with security threats. But they expressed their grievances mainly through appeals to the authorities, and – especially in the case of new immigrants – also by abandoning settlements.⁸¹ They did not, however, translate their complaints into active political protest. The demonstrations following the attacks on Ma’alot and Kiryat Shmona, by contrast, testify to the growing connection between security anxieties and political-social tensions in the 1970s.

Protest at the funeral in Kiryat Shmona. The sign reads: “Mr. Dayan why won’t you live here?” Photographer: Avraham Eilat.

The attacks on Ma’alot and Kiryat Shmona also gave rise to tensions between Jews and Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel. For ten days after the attack on Ma’alot, there was a “complete separation” between Ma’alot and Tarshiha during which Arabs from Tarshiha did not come to their workplaces in Ma’alot. In the negotiations between leaders of the two communities, Jews implied that Arabs from Tarshiha had collaborated with the terrorists.⁸² Residents of Kiryat Shmona attacked Druze people. To prevent escalation, Druze in neighboring communities were banned from Kiryat Shmona for at least one week after the terrorist attack there.⁸³

The most extreme response to a Palestinian attack during that year was in the development town of Beit She’an near the Israeli-Jordanian border. On November 19, 1974, a PDFLP squad penetrated an apartment building in the town and killed four Israeli citizens. After an IDF unit had killed the terrorists in one of the apartments on the second floor of the building, several Beit She’an residents entered the apartment and threw the bodies of the terrorists out the window. Other locals, who had gathered around the building, mutilated the bodies and burned them in a bonfire. Tragically, the avengers did not notice that one of the bodies was of an Israeli victim of the attack.⁸⁴ The security forces were later ordered “to remove all the Arabs” from Beit She’an, presumably to forestall clashes with locals.⁸⁵

Two days after the raid on Beit She’an, Ma’ariv reported on a public statement of the Israeli police commissioner connecting the events in Beit She’an to the Mizrahi protest. The report opened with the commissioner’s contention that while the Black Panthers’ activity stemmed from real problems of “discrimination and injustice,” he disapproved of the violent nature of their demonstrations. The report then proceeded with the commissioner’s remarks on the difficulties faced by the police: Israeli society was composed of people with “diametrically opposed norms of behavior:” what one group saw as “a reasonable action and acceptable expression of agitation” another group viewed as “an unreasonable crime.” Ma’ariv maintained that although the commissioner had not spoken directly about the behavior of residents of Beit She’an, he “clearly referred also to that.” The commissioner also referred explicitly to the terrorist attacks, emphasizing the need to develop “an instinct of self-defense, which had existed before the creation of the state, also among all those who had not been here during that period.”⁸⁶ By combining seamlessly the commissioner’s comments on the Black Panthers, the differences between communities in Israel, and the violence of people in Beit She’an, Ma’ariv established a conceptual link between social and ethnic tensions on the one hand and reactions to terrorism on the other.

Some commentators used racist arguments in their attempts to explain the agitation in Beit She’an and Safed following the attacks, reflecting contemporary stereotypes of Mizrahim as violent and uncultured.⁸⁷ A writer in Ha-Olam Ha-Zeh maintained that the rioters in Beit She’an had imitated the behavior of their ancestors in their countries of origin, speculating that “the Israeli education system had not succeeded, apparently, in instilling in them other forms of reaction.”⁸⁸ A columnist in Ma’ariv referred to the rioters at the funeral in Safed as “savages of the desert,” adding that their conduct was a manifestation of the “spirit of the Orient,” which, according to this writer, was characterized by the inability to “control one’s instincts.”⁸⁹ Even observers who did not resort to racism foregrounded the link between ethnic tensions and reactions to terrorism in their comments on the atmosphere in Ma’alot and Kiryat Shmona after the raids. In an article titled “Ha-adama ro’edet be-Ma’alot” [The Ground is Shaking in Ma’alot], the poet and writer Moshe Dor recounted the grievances of the town’s residents. “The catastrophe,” he wrote, had “broken the valves of security – not only the tangible, literal, but also the mental ones. Everything that had been hidden and stirring underneath overflowed and burst in a powerful flow unto the trembling ground.” Dor’s conversations with people in Ma’alot had led him to the conclusion that although the terrorist attack was the immediate trigger for the unrest, the attack merely helped unleash deeper frustrations caused by a “scathing sense” of years-long socioethnic discrimination.⁹⁰ In the same vein, scholar and journalist Arieh Avnery lambasted the government for sending only one representative to the funeral in Kiryat Shmona. Avnery insinuated that the government was afraid of confronting the justified “bitterness” and “rage” of the residents of “that battered town.”⁹¹

Novelist Hanoch Bartov expressed similar sentiments, albeit in a more nuanced and sophisticated fashion. Like Avnery, he lamented the meager presence of state officials at the funeral in Kiryat Shmona and the absence of wider expressions of national solidarity with the town. But Bartov also included descriptions that characterized the reports on Shamir. He wrote that except for several incidents, the funeral in Kiryat Shmona was in fact quiet. He also linked the attack on Kiryat Shmona to earlier hardships that town residents had endured, including fighting in the 1973 war. He furthermore evoked the battle of Tel Hai, reminding his readers that Kiryat Shmona was named after the eight victims of the battle (“Shmona” meaning eight in Hebrew). As testimony to the steadfastness and local patriotism of the people of Kiryat Shmona, Bartov quoted one local who had said he would never leave the town “even for one day.” Although Bartov’s account of Kiryat Shmona included themes that also appeared in the discourse on Shamir, his article still conveyed the sense of a chasm between the isolated and “tormented town” of Kiryat Shmona and more established Israelis. Bartov tellingly observed that the general disposition in Kiryat Shmona was one of a “furious pride.”⁹²

The funeral in Kiryat Shmona. Photographer: Avraham Eilat.

Even the more nuanced account by Bartov does not diminish the impression of the contrast between reports on the post-attack atmosphere in Shamir on the one hand and Ma’alot and Kiryat Shmona on the other. After the attack on Shamir, Yediot Aharonot reported, kibbutz members spoke of the “lessons to be learned,” but “there was no shouting, no pointing fingers” and no threats directed at the government. ⁹³ According to Al Ha-Mishmar, in Shamir there were “no screams of sorrow and hysteria. No groups of angry people crying out their helplessness to the sky. No clenched fists looking for something to squash. All was silent.”⁹⁴ While the children of Kiryat Shmona were “afraid to go to the restrooms,” the children of Shamir – who, in accordance with kibbutz norms, were regularly sleeping in children’s houses and not in their parents’ homes - “asked to sleep in bomb shelters and settled in there independently” on the evening after the attack.⁹⁵ Even “volunteers,” who drew the attention of reporters due to Judith’s death, were “impressed” by the locals’ reaction to the attack and felt confident.⁹⁶ The kibbutz secretary said in a newspaper interview several weeks after the attack that some volunteer groups had canceled their arrival to Shamir, but “surprisingly” there was no departure of those already living there.⁹⁷ A former volunteer accordingly recalls that although embassies of various countries offered “support in getting home quickly,” there was no volunteer “exodus” from Shamir.⁹⁸ Yediot Aharonot concluded that Shamir was “as strong as a rock.”⁹⁹

Those sentiments were evident not only in press reports but also in the self-perception and memories of Shamir members. Twenty years after the event, a veteran kibbutz member recalled, “we did not go to Jerusalem to demonstrate against the army and the government.” “After all,” she added, “we had settled on this rocky hill voluntarily.”¹⁰⁰ This latter assertion could be read as a comparison – perhaps inadvertent – with residents of development towns, who had not necessarily settled in frontier areas out of their own will or as part of a pioneering mission, as the members of Shamir did.¹⁰¹ Another Shamir member recalled the difficulty of witnessing the horrible scene at the apiary building when returning to work there the day after the attack. Nevertheless, she recounted, “We are Israeli and kibbutznik and we are expected to be tough and bite our lips and go on.”¹⁰² In a memorial booklet published a year after the event, David Yehudai, the apiary manager, wrote, “We will entrench and strengthen our home. We will not abandon the border … we will continue the dull, daily work. We will face the challenges. And when necessary, also with our back against the wall, because this is our only choice.”¹⁰³ Those statements reflect an internalization of the Zionist ethos of ein brerah (no alternative), namely the notion that reality in Palestine/Israel leaves no alternative but to endure and fight.¹⁰⁴

The apiary after the attack. Photographers: Avraham Eilat (left); Yehuda Shenhar (right).

While those public pronouncements conveyed steadfastness and strength, other sources reveal a wider range of emotional reactions. Children in Shamir – who, like all the non-fighting population of the kibbutz, had spent the day of the attack in bomb shelters – spoke openly about their fears in conversations held a year after the event. One sixth-grade student recalled, “I literally shook in fear and hugged Neta out of fear, and she hugged me.” A fifth-grade student recognized the fear on the face of a teacher, who had been standing near the bomb shelter door ready to confront the terrorists with a hoe in her hands. The teacher herself remembered feeling despair and being “frightened to death.”¹⁰⁵ In a recent conversation, Shamir members who had been kids or adults during the attack recalled “trauma” and fears that accompanied them for weeks after the event.¹⁰⁶

Those testimonies help to paint a more authentic picture of the impact of the attack on Shamir’s community. But the discrepancy between those testimonies and the more public pronouncement of steadfastness further emphasizes the desire to use the events in Shamir to enhance the image of the kibbutz as a powerful institution.

A particularly thoughtful treatment of the atmosphere in Shamir was an essay by Yehoshua Sobol in the weekend magazine of Al Ha-Mishmar. Sobol, a leading Israeli playwright who was then at the beginning of his career, had lived in Shamir between 1957 and 1965. He traveled to Shamir to participate in the funeral of Shoshana and Edna and used his insider-outsider perspective to reflect on “the day after” in the kibbutz. “For many Israelis,” wrote Sobol, “traveling from the city to the kibbutz is like an intimate journey into themselves.” Like Kiryat Shmona and Ma’alot, Shamir is also located in Israel’s geographical periphery. But as opposed to the writers who depicted Kiryat Shmona and Ma’alot as isolated and neglected places, Sobol presented the kibbutz as an integral part of the Israeli psyche. Sobol repeatedly underscored the silence in Shamir, which reached its climax when the funeral reached the cemetery: “All around – armed young men. And silence. A continuing silence. Someone is saying something near the grave, but to your ears, amidst the crowd, reaches only a distant echo of a silent and restrained speech, which further emphasizes and illustrates the silence … not a lament or an outcry. Silence.”

While other writers saw the unrest in Ma’alot and Kiryat Shmona as symptoms of the disadvantaged position of those towns, Sobol related the silence in Shamir to a “strange sense of strength.”¹⁰⁷

The funeral in Shamir. Photographer: Avraham Eilat.

In the days following the attack on Shamir, Sobol kept thinking of the sentence “The sense of humanity has not yet left me.” The philosopher Immanuel Kant used this sentence to explain why he had risen from his chair to greet the physician who had come to see him on his deathbed. As Sobol explained, art historian Erwin Panofsky interpreted Kant’s behavior as “a man’s proud and tragic consciousness of self-approved and self-imposed principles,” contrasting with his subjection to mortality.¹⁰⁸ The sense of humanity, in other words, was the “tragic pride” of a person struggling to adhere to his principles even in the face of death. Sobol grasped the meaning of Kant’s sentence when he heard that Uzi Tzur had been paralyzed by fear upon realizing that the terrorists were near the children’s houses of Shamir, but enlisted all the powers within him to shake off the fear and chase the terrorists. In Sobol’s mind, Uzi’s experience meant that the terrorists were defeated in Shamir “not because they had encountered a well-oiled war machine, but because they had encountered a society, human beings, whose sense of humanity had not yet left them.” Following Panofsky, Sobol then rephrased his impression of the feeling in Shamir: it was not simply strength, but a “deep sense of tragic pride.”¹⁰⁹

In Sobol’s philosophical and psychological thinking, Shamir’s “tragic pride” – which could be contrasted with the “furious pride” that Bartov identified in Kiryat Shmona – represented the unique moral qualities of the kibbutz. Uzi and his friends defeated the terrorists not because they possessed a military advantage but because of their humanity as individuals – and, importantly, as members of the kibbutz society. Sobol similarly linked the resounding silence in Shamir to the strength of the community. Sobol did not necessarily have Kiryat Shmona or Ma’alot in mind when he wrote about Shamir. But his essay was part of a larger discourse, which, as we saw, included implicit and explicit comparisons between the reactions of different Israeli communities to the shock of terrorism, and which drew a connection between kibbutz values and the capability of dealing effectively and calmly with the shock – both during and after the event.

Conclusion

The public discussion surrounding the terrorist attack on Shamir should be understood in the context of the historical processes shaping Israeli society at the time. In the 1970s, the Labor movement was losing political support, while the socialist and collectivist values long identified with the movement were gradually replaced by a liberal ethos and stronger emphasis on individual liberties. This decline was intensified by the national trauma of the 1973 war, which further undermined Labor’s status as the dominant force in Israeli public life.¹¹⁰

The place of the kibbutz movement in Israeli society was part of that process. As we have seen, the erosion in the status of kibbutzim had begun with the transition from the voluntary Yishuv society to a statist framework in 1948. In subsequent decades, kibbutzim had difficulties maintaining themselves as socialist islands within an increasingly capitalist state and suffered from internal ideological and social frictions and the tendency of the younger generation to question the ideals upon which their communities were based. Although the kibbutz movement still enjoyed its prestige as the very symbol of Zionism, in the early 1970s there was a growing recognition that it had moved away from its idealistic pioneering image and lost its status in Israeli society.¹¹¹

Around that period, a public debate erupted over the fate of the kibbutz movement following a series of newspaper articles that dwelled on the decline of the movement and the gap between its great social promise and the actual reality of kibbutz life at the time. Kibbutz sympathizers rallied to fend off the criticism with a wave of passionate responses insisting on the unique contribution of kibbutzim to Israeli society. As Anita Shapira observes, sensitivity to criticism, a “need of constant confirmation” and a sense of crisis have accompanied the kibbutz from the early years of the state.¹¹² In the 1970s, those sentiments were part of a larger crisis inflicting the Labor movement, of which the kibbutz was a central pillar.

The glorification of Shamir may be viewed in the context of the efforts to safeguard the status of the kibbutz movement, and perhaps the Labor movement more broadly. The military conduct of the fighters of Shamir helped revive the public discussion about the importance of the citizen-soldier and the need for frontier communities to deal independently with security threats – a discussion that had been central to the Zionist ethos during the pre-state period and the early years of the state. As part of that discourse, observers also praised the culture of the kibbutz, which had been similarly at the forefront of the Zionist project during those earlier days. Various texts analyzed in this article linked the values of the kibbutz to the ability to deal successfully and independently with the threat of terrorism.

But the historical circumstances of the 1970s dictated that the public discussion of civilian reactions to security threats could not be divorced from the social and ethnic tensions plaguing Israeli society at the time. As we have seen, comparisons between the conduct of Shamir members and that of residents of Ma’alot and Kiryat Shmona aroused opposition on grounds of ethnic and class sensibilities; the Mizrahi protest – including the Black Panthers – was integrated into the press coverage of the attacks and the demonstrations that followed them; and writers visiting Ma’alot and Kiryat Shmona after the attacks related the atmosphere in those towns to the Mizrahi-Ashkenazi cleavage.

This article has not been concerned with explaining the actual differences between the unfolding of the events in Shamir and other communities struck by terrorism. But it does show that the public perceptions of those differences are revealing as to the interplay between the question of security on the one hand and cultural and social issues on the other: despite the prevailing assumption that security threats serve as social glue holding together a divided Israeli society, we have seen that Palestinian terrorism in the early 1970s instead accentuated social divisions, bringing them into sharper relief.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ori Yehudai

Ori Yehudai is the Saul and Sonia Schottenstein Chair in Israel Studies and Associate Professor of History at The Ohio State University. He is the author of Leaving Zion: Jewish Emigration from Palestine and Israel after World War II (Cambridge, 2020).

Notes

1. The information is based on “Tkifat ha-mehablim be-Shamir” [Terrorist Attack on Shamir], an IDF debriefing, Kibbutz Shamir Archives [hereafter KSA], box 127; an internal kibbutz debriefing, published in a kibbutz memorial booklet, July 13, 1974, 8–16; and on Cna’ani, Kibbutz Shamir, 2–7. Many kibbutz members at the time kept personal weapons in their homes due to security concerns.

2. “Yom damim ve-te’uzah” [A Day of Blood and Valor], Kibbutz memorial booklet, July 13, 1974, 1.

3. On Nahariyah: Yo’el Dar, “Ha-lailah ha-arokh be-Nahariyah [The Long Night in Nahariyah], Davar, June 26, 1974, 7; Arieh Hashaviah, “Ba-hazarah le-tashah” [Back to 1948], Davar, July 12, 1974, 44. On Kfar Yuval: David Shalev, “Toshavei Kfar Yuval hishtatfu ba-hista’arut al ha-mehablim [Kfar Yuval Residents Participated in Fighting the Terrorists[, Ma’ariv, June 16, 1975, 1. On Beit She’an: David Shalev et al., “Shnei ezrahim siy’u la-ko’ah ha-poretz shel tzahal [Two Civilians Helped the IDF Forces], Davar, November 20, 1974, 3.

4. For a recent discussion of the Israeli citizen-soldier, see Mitelpunkt, Israel in the American Mind, 117–228.

5. Moskovich, “The transformation of the Israeli Civil Guard,” 353.

6. ”Ha-mishtarah me’argenet mishmar Ezrahi shel mitnadvim” [The Police is Organizing a Volunteer Civil Guard], Ma’ariv, May 5, 1974, 6.

7. Ya’acov Friedler, “Terrorists Slain in Kibbutz Fight after Murdering Three Women,” Jerusalem Post, June 14, 1974, 1; Shalev, “Toshavei Kfar Yuval,” Davar, June 16, 1975, 2.

8. Field, “Nights Underground,” 181–217.

9. Rafi Feuerstein, “Cold shoulder for periphery,” Ynet, June 25, 2006, www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3266956,00.html. Accessed February 20, 2023; Lilach Ben David, “Let’s talk about Gaza, Sderot and the racist valuation of lives,” +972 Magazine, July 8, 2014, www.972mag.com/lets-talk-about-gaza-sderot-and-the-racist-valuation-of-lives/. Accessed February 20, 2023; Yonatan Orekh, “Nisharu levad: alafim bodedim be-hafganat toshavei ha-darom be-Tel Aviv” [“Left Alone: Thousands at the Demonstration of the Residents of South Tel Aviv”], NRG August 15, 2014, www.makorrishon.co.il/nrg/online/1/ART2/607/728.html. Accessed February 20, 2023; “Alafim hifginu be-Kikar Rabin be-Tel Aviv le-ma’an toshavei Otef Aza” [Thousands protested in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv on Behalf of Residents of the Gaza Strip], Ha’aretz, August 15, 2014, www.haaretz.co.il/news/politics/1.2406703. Accessed February 20, 2023.

10. Bar-Tal and Labin, “The Effect of a Major Event on Stereotyping,” 265–280; Bar-Tal and Sharvit, “The Influence of the Threatening Transitional Context,” 147–70; Canetti-Nisim, Halperin, Sharvit, and Hobfoll, “A New Stress-Based Model of Political Extremism,” 363–389; Sharvit, Bar-Tal, Raviv, Raviv, Gurevich, Sharvit, “Ideological Orientation,” 105–121.

11. Waxman, “Living with Terror,” 4–26; Pedahzur, Suicide Terrorism, 184.

12. See, for example, Almog, Preida mi-Srulik, 301; Yuchtman-Ya’ar and Shavit, Megamot ba-hevrah ha-Yisraelit, Kerekh 2, 1208; Cohen, Year Zero, 52–3; Del Sarto, Contested State Identities, 115.

13. Sayigh, Armed Struggle, 332–3.

14. Ibid., 339; Kimmerling and Migdal, The Palestinian People, 434–5.

15. Dolnik, Understanding Terrorist Innovation, 85; Ciment, World Terrorism, 404; Becker, The PLO, 233; Herf, Undeclared Wars, 255.

16. Sayigh, Armed Struggle, 339–41.

17. Various reports, Ma’ariv, May 16, 1974; Dolnik, Understanding Terrorist Innovation, 85; Ciment, World Terrorism, 404; Herf, Undeclared Wars, 265; Udi Edri, “Ha-dramah hehelah be-sha’ah 5:25 bediyuk: ha-pigu’a be-Ma’alot – tmunah ahar tmunah” [The drama began at exactly 5:25: the attack in Ma’alot picture by picture”], May 15, 2019, Israeli National Library, https://blog.nli.org.il/maalot/. Accessed February 20, 2023.

18. Sayigh, Armed Struggle, 340–1.

19. Copies of the leaflets are in KSA, box 27.

20. “Peres dive’ah la-memshalah al retzah Shamir” [Peres Reported to the Government on the Murder in Shamir], Davar, June 16, 1974, 3.

21. “Shalosh nashim nirtzehu be-hadirat mehablim le-Shamir” [Three Women Murdered in Terrorist Attack in Shamir], Davar, June 14, 1974, 2.

22. Mark Gefen, “Shamir – tafnit ba-ma’avak neged ha-teror” [Shamir – A Turning Point in the Fight Against Terror], Al Ha-Mishmar, June 16, 1974, 3.

23. Y. Gilbo’a, “Ha-pa’am lo nitkelu ha-mehablim be-anashim hasrei yesha ve-neshek” [This Time, the Terrorists did not Encounter Helpless and Unarmed People], Ha’aretz, June 14, 1974; Ya’akov Erez, “Ha-dilemah be-gvul ha-tzafon” [The Dilemma in the Northern Border”], Ma’ariv, June 16, 1974, 13.

24. See, for example, Savir family, Kibbutz Ein Ha-Shofet to Uzi Tzur, June 13, 1974; Doni and Miri, Kibbutz Ramat Yohanan to Uzi Tzur, June 13, 1974, KSA, box 27.

25. Haim Gouri, “Mashehu al ha-hitrahashut ha-bo-zmanit” [Something on the Simultaneous Event], Davar, June 14, 1974, 2.

26. Yoela Har-Shefi, “Yeled ben sheva she-hivhin rishon ba-mehablim be-Shamir ratz le-hazhir et haverav be-veit ha-yeladim” [A 7 Year-Old-Boy Who First Noticed the Terrorist Ran To Warn His Friends in the Children’s House], Yediot Aharonot, June 14, 1974. See also Gefen, “Shamir – tafnit ba-ma’avak,” Al Ha-Mishmar, June 16, 1974, 3.

27. Motaleh Baran, “Mi-tguvot ha-rega ha-rishon” [Immediate Reactions], Kibbutz memorial booklet, July 13, 1974, 18.

28. “Duah va’adat ha-berur be-inyan Ma’alot [Report of the Commission of Inquiry Concerning Ma’alot], August 20, 1974, Israel State Archives (ISA)/PMO/GovernmentSecretary/000junx/7314/21.

29. The literature on this topic is vast. See, for example, Rozin, The Rise of the Individual, 139–79; Yuchtman-Ya’ar and Shavit, Megamot ba-hevrah ha-Yisraelit, Kerekh 1, 428–9; Shafir and Peled, Being Israeli, 74–95; Yiftachel, “Nation building and the Division of Space,” 33–58; Gigi, “Relations between Development Towns and Kibbutzim,” 121–139; list of transit camps, on the website of the Association for Transit Camp Heritage, accessed on February 20, 2023, https://maabarot-story.org; on Ma’alot-Tarshiha, see Smooha, Israel: Pluralism and Conflict, 399.

30. Shapira, “The Kibbutz,” 2–3.

31. Ibid., 2.

32. Ibid., 8. Also Ben-Rafael, “The Kibbutz in the 1950s,” 272; Goldstein, “The Kibbutz and the Development Town,” 96–120; Gigi, “Relations between Development Towns and Kibbutzim,” 121–39.

33. Chetrit, “Mizrahi Politics,” 51–65.

34. “Anshei Shamir einam hasrei yesha!” [Shamir People Are Not Helpless!], Pi Ha-Aton, June 17, 1974.

35. “El Tze’irei Kiryat Shmona ve-Ma’alot!” [To the Young People of Kiryat Shmona and Ma’alot!], ibid.

36. Gideon Eshet, “Hasrei ha-yesha” [The Helpless], ibid.

37. Caplan, “Why Was Moshe Sharett Sacked?” 275–297.

38. Sprinzak, “Israel’s Radical Right,” 97–128.

39. Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 508.

40. Recent studies that combine security with cultural questions include Rozin, “Infiltration and the Making of Israel’s Emotional Regime,” 448–72; Mitelpunkt, Israel in the American Mind.

41. “Gur: Ha-teroristim yitaklu le-ha-ba be-anashim hamushim” [Gur: From Now On, Terrorists Will Encounter Armed People], Davar, June 14, 1974, 2.

42. David Shalev, “Rabin: lihyot im ha-lehimah ba-teror” [Rabin: To Live with the Fight against Terror] Davar, June 25, 1974, 3.

43. Erez, “Ha-dilemah,” Ma’ariv, June 16, 1974, 16; Friedler, “Terrorists Slain,” Jerusalem Post, June 14, 1974, 1; “Yom ha-damim be-Shamir” [The Day of Blood in Shamir], Al Ha-Mishmar, June 14, 1974, 1; Shulamit Har-Even, “Himush Ha-ukhlusiyah – shikulim be’ad” [Considerations in Favor of Arming the Population], Ma’ariv, July 5, 1974, 16; Shalev, “Toshavei Kfar Yuval,” Davar, June 16, 1975, 1.

44. Gouri, “Mashehu al ha-hitrahashut,” Davar, June 14, 1974, 2.

45. Rozin, “Infiltration and the Making of Israel’s Emotional Regime,” 462.

46. Rozin, “Pahad be-tzel totaheyah shel Suriya,” 109.

47. Lomsky-Feder, “The Meaning of War,” 301; Sheffer and Barak, “Introduction,” 7.

48. For the direct quotation from Begin, see “Begin Urges Arms for Trained Civil Guard,” Jerusalem Post, June 14, 1974, 2; see also Erez, “Ha-dilemah,” Ma’ariv, June 16, 1974, 16; Shalev, “Rabin: lihyot im ha-lehimah,” Davar, June 25, 1974, 3; Har-Even, “Himush Ha-ukhlusiyah,” Ma’ariv, July 5, 1974, 16; Moskovich, “The transformation of the Israeli Civil Guard,” 353; “Ha-yeshivah ha-shivim-ve-sheva shel ha-Knesset ha-shminit” [“Protocols of 8^th Knesset, 66^th meeting”], July 24, 1974, https://fs.knesset.gov.il/8/Plenum/8_ptm_253465.pdf. Accessed February 20, 2023.

49. An article in Ha-shavua ba-Kibbutz ha-artzi, quoted in Shhorim pirhei ha-tzuf [Black Are the Nectar Flowers], (kibbutz memorial booklet published in June 1975),16.

50. Rozin, “Infiltration and the Making of Israel’s Emotional Regime,” 459.

51. Yermia to Shamir, June 14, 1974, KSA, box 27.

52. Admon to Surika and Milia, June 15, 1974, ibid.

53. Shapira, Yigal Allon, 322; Gan, “From ‘We’ to ‘Me,’” 33–46.

54. David Rabin to Shamir, June 26, 1974, KSA, box 27.

55. Letter from Tzvi Markman, undated, ibid.

56. Kibbutz Gal-On to Shamir, June 16, 1974; Kibbutz Nir David to Shamir, June 21, 1974; letter from Tzvi Markman, ibid; David Yehudai, “Ba-halof shanah” [A Year Later], in Shhorim pirhei ha-tzuf, 21; Galia Ben-Horin, “Esrim shanah le-ason ha-mehablim” [Twenty Years after the Terrorist Disaster], June 13, 1994, KSA, box 206. On the myth of stone clearing, see Shani, Milah ba-sela: Shamiripedia [The Shamir Encyclopedia], 125.

57. Yemima and Yosef Avidar to Surika and Milia, June 14, 1974, KSA, box 27.

58. Haim Gouri, “Shalom lakh, muvla’at” [Farewell, Enclave], Davar, June 19, 1974, 2.

59. For Avidan’s comment, see Davar, June 16, 1974. On Tel Hai, see Zerubavel, “The Politics of Interpretation,” 133–160.

60. Quoted in shhorim pirhei, 16.

61. Mishal, Ve-eleh shnot, 190–1; Ben-Ami and Mishal, Ve-eleh toldot, 268.

62. Jackie Houri and Ofer Aderet, “Meyased ha-hazit ha-amamit le-shihrur Falastin – ha-mifakdah ha-klalit, Ahmad Jibril, met be-gil 83” [“Founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command, Ahmad Jibril, Dies at Age 83”], Ha’aretz, July 8, 2021, https://www.haaretz.co.il/news/law/1.9978914. Accessed February 20, 2023.

63. Yael Shpigler to Avi Bettelheim, undated. Bettelheim’s response is dated May 29, 2000. Sent privately to the author.

64. Author’s conversation with Shamir members, January 7, 2021; interview with Dina and Yigal Ben Efraim, Shamir, July 12, 2021.

65. Banko Adar, Ha-shavua ba-kibbutz ha-artzi, quoted in Shhorim pirhei, 16.

66. Eini Burenstein, Lehavot Ha-Bashan, June 13, 1974, KSA, box 27. See also Kibbutz Gal-On to Shamir, June 16, 1974, ibid.

67. Yigal Lev, “Al rovim u-mitnadvim be-kibutz Shamir” [On Volunteers and Rifles in Kibbutz Shamir], Ma’ariv, June 21, 1974, p 8–9; 41.

68. Ibid.

69. David Goren, “Be-dim’ah atzurah huv’u shtei havrot Shamir li-mnuhot” [Two Shamir Members Buried with Restrained Tears], Al Ha-Mishmar, June 16, 1974, 8.

70. Yoela Har-Shefi, “Yeled ben sheva,” Yediot Aharonot, June 14, 1974.

71. Morris, The Birth, 15, 32; Drory, Lewin, and Ben-Ari “Kibbutz Under Fire,” 121–43.

72. Rozin, “Infiltration and the Making of Israel’s Emotional Regime,” 458.

73. Har-Shefi, “Yeled ben sheva,” Yediot Aharonot, June 14, 1974; letter from Tzvi Markman, box 27, KSA; Hotam, June 21, 1974; Shmuel Socha, “Ha-yom ha-bilti nishkah” [The Unforgettable Day], in Shamir’s memorial booklet, July 13, 1974, 21.

74. Rozin, “Infiltration and the Making of Israel’s Emotional Regime,” 449; Shapira, “Al ha-shtikah,” 20–33.

75. “Revavot be-levayot korbanot ha-hatkafah be-Ma’alot, be-Tzfat, be-Hatzor u-ve-Elifelet” [Tens of Thousands at the Funerals of the Attack Victims in Ma’alot, Safed, Hatzor and Elifelet], Davar, May 17, 1974, 2.

76. David Shalev, “16 korbanot ha-tevah huv’u le-kever ahim be-Kiryat Shmona” [The 16 Massacre Victims were Buried in a Mass Grave in Kiryat Shmona], Davar, April 14, 1974, 3.

77. “Shotrim leyad ha-kneset hasmu be-alot u-meginim me’ot mafginim zo’amim mi-Kiryat Shmona” [Police Blocked with Batons and Shields Hundreds of Furious Protesters from Kiryat Shmona near the Knesset], Ma’ariv, April 18, 1974, 7; Yosef Vaksman, “Yehakru tlunot shel toshavei Ma’alot al mehdalim bithonyim” [Complaints of Ma’alot Residents on Security Failures Will Be Investigated], Ma’ariv, May 19, 1974, 7.

78. “Shotrim leyad ha-kneset,” Ma’ariv, April 18, 1974, 7.

79. Vaksman, “Yehakru tlunot,” Ma’ariv, May 19, 1974, 7.

80. Shapira, Israel, 341–2.

81. Rozin, “Infiltration and the Making of Israel’s Emotional Regime,” 456–9.

82. “Ma’alot-Tarshiha,” letter from Counselor on Arab Affairs, Haifa, to Counselor on Arab Affairs, Jerusalem, March 31, 1974, ISA/PMO/ArabAffairsAdvisor/R0003mhy/13946/5; “Aravim mabi’im retzonam le-hishtatef be-tafkidei avtahah” [Arabs Express Will to Participate in Security Roles], Ma’ariv, May 19, 1974, 6.

83. Ya’akov Erez, “Hayal Druzi hukah be-milui tafkido be-Kiryat Shmona” [A Druze Soldier Beaten on Duty in Kiryat Shmona], Ma’ariv, April 18, 1974, 1.

84. Henry Kamn, “Israelis Bury Four Victims Amid Grief, Anger, Shame,” New York Times, November 21, 1974, 1; Dalia Mazori, “He-hamon ha-histeri be-Veit She’an tza’ak” [The Hysterical Crowed in Beit She’an Shouted], Ma’ariv, November 20, 1974, 1; David Shalev, et al. “Shnei ezrahim siye’u la-ko’ah ha-poretz shel tzahal” [Two Citizens Helped the IDF’s Breaching Force], Davar, November 20, 1974, 3.

85. Shalev, et al. “Shnei ezrahim,” ibid.

86. “Ha-panterim meyatzgim be’ayah she-tuatea mi-tahat la-shatiah” [The Panthers Represent a Problem that Was Swept Under the Rug], Ma’ariv, November 21, 1974, 7.

87. Shohat, “Sephardim in Israel,” 30.

88. “Ba-medinah” [In the Country], Ha-olam ha-zeh, November 27, 1974, 14.

89. “Intzident be-Tzfat” [An Incident in Safed], Ma’ariv, May 24, 1974, 15.

90. Moshe Dor, “Ha-adamah ro’edet be-Ma’alot” [The Ground is Shaking in Ma’alot], Ma’ariv, May 22, 1974, 5.

91. Arieh Avnery, “Tlishut ve-onshah” [Detachment and Its Punishment], Davar, April 18, 1974, 7.

92. Hanoch Bartov, “Dam Kiryat Shmona” [The Blood of Kiryat Shmona], Ma’ariv, April 14, 1974, 5.

93. Har-Shefi, “Yeled ben sheva,” Yediot Aharonot, June 14, 1974.

94. Guga Cohen, “Bo ba-yom” [On that Very Day], Hotam, June 21, 1974, 6.

95. Har-Shefi, “Yeled ben sheva,” Yediot Aharonot, June 14, 1974.

96. Friedler, “Terrorists Slain,” Jerusalem Post, June 16, 1974, 2.

97. Banko Adar, “Litpos mahaseh! Mehablim ba-nagaryah!” [Take a Cover! Terrorists in the Carpentry Shop!] Ha-shavua ba-kibbutz ha-artzi, undated clipping from KSA, box 127.

98. Georgina Bush, private correspondence with author, July 11, 2021.

99. Har-Shefi, “Yeled ben sheva,” Yediot Aharonot, June 14, 1974.

100. Ben-Horin, “Esrim shanah.”

101. On the different meanings that kibbutzniks and new immigrants attached to living in frontier areas, see Goldstein, “The Kibbutz and the ma’abara,” 32.

102. Hedva Segal, recollection of the attack on Shamir sent privately to author, April 2019.

103. Yehudai, “Ba-halof shanah.”

104. Abramson, Drama and Ideology in Modern Israel, 42; Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 39.

105. “Boker ha-13 be-yuni be-miklat 13” [The Morning of June 13 in Shelter 13] and “Mitokh sihot im yaldei kitah vav” [Conversations with Sixth-Grade Children], in Shhorim pirhei, 7–8; 17–20.

106. Author’s conversation with Shamir members, January 7, 2021.

107. Yehoshua Sobol, “Le-maharat ha-yom” [The Day After] Hotam, June 21, 1974, 7.

108. Willis, The Emerald City, 64.

109. Sobol, “Le-maharat,” Hotam, June 21, 1974, 7.

110. Shapira, Israel, 348; Elmaliach, “The Demobilization,” 123–46.

111. Shapira, “The Kibbutz,” 7.

112. Ibid., 1, 6, 11.