With Dina capture, Israel’s future lies in balance

Jabalya. Anyone who has been there has no desire to go back. A nasty piece of real estate in the Gaza strip, Jabalya is a densely overpopulated refugee camp that is always waiting to explode, which is exactly what happened back in 1987, when an Israeli truck driver ploughed into a crowd of Arabs, killing three and wounding many more. 

The subsequent rioting that eventually spread all through Gaza, Judea and Samaria, has since become known as the Intifada, and in the spring of 1988, on my first reserve duty, we were smack in the middle of it.

The Israeli Army was completely unprepared for this type of warfare. How do you deal with women and children throwing Molotov cocktails and heaving cinderblocks off of apartment buildings? You never knew what was waiting for you around any given street corner, and you were as concerned about not ending up in military court for giving the wrong order as you were about ending up in a hospital for the same reason.

One morning, we were on a twelve-man patrol in the heart of Jabalya, trying to get through another day. We were maintaining day distances (about 40 feet between each man and the man behind him, to prevent anyone taking out an entire patrol with one volley or one grenade) in two columns of six men, traversing both sides of the street. To this day, I am not sure how he sneaked up on us, but the only warning we got was the “Allah’hu Akbar” (“G-d is great”) scream yelled by the terrorist wielding an axe as he jumped on one of the men in the rear of the column.

It seemed certain that Shmuel, a father of three, was about to die. But at the last minute, Shmuel, who was carrying a ten-liter jerry can on his back, bent forward to avoid the axe, and it embedded itself in the jerry can. As the water exploded in all directions, and this Arab terrorist attempted to pull the axe back out for another swing, he was surrounded and overpowered by the soldiers on either side.