Their honeymoon, subsidized by the kibbutz, was spent in Eilat, the southernmost point of Israel, at the tip of the Negev. The Red Sea port was founded by King Solomon to ship out the ore from his mines. And was where he welcomed the Queen of Sheba.
Jason taught Eva how to skin-dive. And they spent the mornings among the multicolored underwater coral.
At night they walked hand in hand from the cheap (but expensive) shish kebab joints to the tinsel (and even more expensive) discotheques.
But they were both happy.
“This must be what the French Riviera is like,” Eva said one night as they were walking on the shore.
“More or less,” Jason replied, not wanting to shatter his bride’s illusions. “The only difference is here, if you go for too long a swim you can end up in Saudi Arabia.”
“Yes,” she acknowledged, “the Arabs are kind of close, aren’t they?”
“They must think the same about us, But their children and ours will probably play together.”
“I hope so,” Eva said tenderly. “I mean, I hope we have a lot of children.”
It would be a good marriage and a strong one. Because it was without any illusions. They cared about the same things. About the same people. About each other. Their love was anointed with tears of abiding grief. And, at the same time, strengthened by a common loss.
During the following year, the Arab guns on the mountains of the Golan Heights incessantly shelled the kibbutzim in northern Israel. From the Jordanian and Lebanese borders, terrorist infiltrators were increasingly successful in crossing over, striking at non-military targets, and murdering civilians. Women in a crowded marketplace on Friday morning. Children in a school playground.
The outraged Israeli population was demanding action, not merely reaction. If they couldn’t keep the Fedayeen out, let them do something to stop them before they got in. Orders came down for an elite group of paratroopers to begin acts of reprisal.
Jason Gilbert was part of an operation that spent weeks rehearsing for the strike across the border.
The night before, they slept in a field a few hundred yards from the Jordanian frontier. At first light they jumped into their vehicles and sped toward the hilltop village of Samua, which Intelligence informed them was a base for El-Fatah commandos. A quarter of a mile from the village, they dismounted and continued the rest of the climb on foot, rifles in hand.
Israeli aircraft appeared overhead. They flew beyond Samua to bomb and distract the Jordanian regulars and keep them away from the operation.
When they were less than a hundred yards from the village, Jason broke into a run and signaled his men to begin shooting to create confusion. As they worked their way up the steep slope, guns appeared at the windows and began returning the fire.
The soldier at Jason’s immediate right was struck in the chest and fell backward. For a moment Jason was frozen, watching the red blood stain the shirt of the man he knew merely as Avi.
It was the first time he had ever seen someone wounded in battle. He continued to stare. It was only when the medical officer rushing toward them waved him on that Jason turned and started up the hill again, his anger inflamed.
As he charged, he pulled a grenade from his belt, withdrew the pin, and hurled it toward the center of the village. It exploded on a rooftop.
By the time the paratroops entered Samua, the terrorists had fled, leaving behind them a few aged and confused inhabitants. The Israelis quickly searched the houses and herded the frightened villagers down the slopes.
A flare was set off to signal that Samua was now empty. With lightning speed, Jason and the explosives experts began to set charges to the houses. Ten minutes later, the Israeli raiding party had regrouped 250 yards below. One of the engineers detonated the first charge. In quick succession the stone houses were blown into the air.
Seventeen minutes later, they were all back across the border. Jason was riding in a half-track with Yoram Zahavi, their chief in command.
“Well,” said Yoram, “Operation Samua is a total success.”
Jason turned to him and said bitterly, “Try telling that to Avi’s parents.”
The officer nodded, shook his head, and answered Jason softly, “Listen, saba, war isn’t like a football match. You can never win by a shutout.”
There were more operations like Samua, but the Israelis still could not stem the rising tide of terrorist infiltrations.
In fact, from early 1967 onward, the guerrilla strikes became bolder and more savage. The shelling from the Golan Heights of the kibbutzim in the Huleh Valley grew more intense than ever.
On the southern front, Cairo Radio was broadcasting the voice of Egyptian leader Nasser shrieking, “A hundred million Arabs are living for the day when the imperialist Israelis will be driven into the sea.”
At the end of May 1967, Captain Jason Gilbert was home with Eva celebrating the birth of their first child — a son they named Joshua in memory of her father — when the radio announced a general mobilization, All reserve troops were being called up.
During the next twenty-four hours, the Voice of Israel poured forth an endless flow of seeming nonsense, like, “Chocolate ice cream must go on the birthday cake,” “Giraffes like watermelon,” “Mickey Mouse can’t swim.” These were the code signals telling the citizen-soldiers where to report with their weapons.
Nasser had massed a hundred thousand men armed with Soviet equipment, as well as a thousand tanks, in the Sinai Peninsula on Israel’s southern border.
War was inevitable. The only question was whether Israel could survive it.
Since 1956, Egypt and Israel had been separated by small token units of the United Nations Emergency Force, scattered along the frontier. Nasser ordered the UNEF units out of his way. When they withdrew, nothing but sand stood between the two countries.
The King of Jordan put his own army under the Egyptian high command and contingents arrived from other Arab countries.
Israel was now confronted by over a quarter of a million troops, two thousand tanks, and seven hundred aircraft. The country was menaced on three borders. Its fourth frontier was the sea. And that was where the Arabs intended to drive them.
With the odds so heavily stacked against them and all the nations of the world preaching restraint but doing nothing to enforce it, they were totally on their own.
Jason Gilbert’s platoon of the 54th Paratroop Battalion had been mobilized for over a week, camping in an olive grove near Tel Shahar.
On the order of Battalion Command, they did endless stretcher training to practice the rapid evacuation of the wounded. This was hardly an encouraging exercise. Nor was the fact that so many of his men had portable radios and could keep abreast of the worsening situation. The British and American Embassies advised their staffs to leave Israel.
As darkness fell each evening, Jason would try to lift the morale of his soldiers. But as the days drew on and the tension mounted, he was less and less convincing. Especially since he himself knew so little of what was happening.
Finally, on the evening of June 4, he received a communiqué: Prepare to move men tomorrow at 0600. It did not say where.
When he told this to his platoon, they were actually heartened. At last they would be doing something other than waiting to be bombed out of existence.
“Try and get some sleep, guys,” Jason said. “We’re going to have a job to do tomorrow.”