Secret weapons of the flesh.(Scan: Short news and commentary)(arab-Israeli conflicts)(Critical essay)

I recently turned 80 years of age. Descended from short-lived stock, I've sometimes wondered why I have not, like nay parents, gone to an early grave. Then I read the lengthy essay "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" by professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, and I understood why I had been spared.

Walt and Mearsheimer spread distortions about historical events they could not have witnessed, but about which I have firsthand knowledge, having participated in Israel's War of Independence. "Israel is often portrayed as David confronted by Goliath," they write, "but the converse is closer to the truth. Contrary to popular belief, the Zionists had larger, better equipped, and better led forces during the 1947-49 War of Independence."

I believe I know the source of this whopper: it comes from revisionist Israeli scholars eager to trash the contributions of their fathers to a legendary war that these dissenters were too young to fight. But it's a falsehood. I was a grunt in the Hagana (the nascent Israeli militia) during the early phase of the independence war. As a witness to those days, I can testify to Israel's desperate shortage of arms during the opening stanzas of the war, and can report that Israelis came very close to losing a genocidal conflict.

Within days of the U.N. vote to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, Arabs launched a guerrilla war in defiance of the resolution. I joined the Hagana and was assigned to the Palmach--reputedly the elite Israeli strike force. The weaponry of this unit of 75 men and one woman consisted of, to the best of nay recollection, only the following:

* six Sten light automatic weapons (three British built, three crude Israeli knock offs tacked together in underground machine shops)

* three British, WWI vintage, Lee-Enfield infantry rifles

* three Canadian Enfields