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Netiva Ben-Yehuda at 18, in her Palmach fatigues.

Ex-Commando. Recalls
War Of Independence

GINNI WALSH

Harvard Row Mall
11 Mile & Lahser

78

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 1989

Special to The Jewish News

354-4650

M

ay 15, 1948, when
Ben-Gurion de-
dared the State of
Israel before an ecstatic crowd
in the Tel Aviv Museum,
demolitions expert Netiva
Ben-Yehuda was deep in
Syrian territory laden with
50 pounds of explosives. Ap-
proaching the bridge targeted
to be blown up, neither she
nor her comrades from the
Palmach, the striking force of
the Haganah (the forerunner
of the IDF), knew that a
Jewish state had been official-
ly declared.
Today, sitting in an apart-
ment clutterd with piles of
newspapers, files and books,
Ben-Yehuda shrugs and says,
"In the battlefield the an-
nouncement of a state didn't
make a difference, but after
the United Nations vote in
November 1947, we knew we
had a state and we knew we
had to keep on fighting."
At 60 years old, Ben-Yehuda
can still be imagined leading
a commando raid with a rifle

slung over her shoulder. Clad
in a rumpled sweatshirt and
sweatpants, with shoulder-
length reddish hair and pier-
cing soft blue eyes, she's as
gruff as she is charismatical-
ly candid. Unrestrainably
blunt, she cuts through the

"To be killed by a
Jewish woman
was too
humiliating."

myths of war like a surgeon
with a scalpel.
With her books, Between
Eras and Between the Binding
Ropes, she not only exposed
the gritty details of war but
also challenged established
practice by writing in collo-
quial Hebrew. She is the co-
author, with Dan Ben-Amotz,
of the two-volume World
Dictionary of Colloquial
Hebrew. Shooing one of her
five cats off a tattered chair,
she says Between Eras was
written in language "that
people can understand."
Quickly lighting another

4

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