Honouring the military defenders of Israel

Val here.

The day after our visit to Yad Vashem we went to the Armoured Corps Museum at Latrun.

We faced another wall of names of the deceased. This wall lists 1,100 sons and daughters right up to the end of 2006 who have died since 1947 in their tank batallions fighting battles with Israel's unfriendly neighbours.

Another day takes us to the Palmach museum of Tel Aviv. It is a remarkable interactive museum which takes you through the lives and deaths of the young Israeli fighters of the Palmach in (1948 and after) who were desperate to keep their new country's civilians safe. If you remember your history, the day after the UN voted for partition, Arab irregulars started shooting in earnest. There was a siege of Jerusalem for months - anyone who took the road up to Jerusalem was in danger of being killed. The Palmach took the responsibility of finding an alternate route later named the Burma Road, so that food and supplies could be transported to the besieged citizens of Jerusalem.

Interestingly enough, this leads back to the Armoured Corps Museum. This museum and memorial inhabits the fort that the British built and used to monitor the road to Jerusalem and surrounding roads. When the British left in 1948, the Arabs occupied it. The location and the safety of the Latrun fort enabled theArabs to shoot at vehicles trying to reach Jerusalem. The fort was not liberated by the Israelis until the '67 War (in spite of 4 tries and much loss of life in 1948) and the Burma Road (and its replacement) had to be used until 1967 to get to Jerusalem. Now the fort has been made into a memorial and museum housing many of the older tanks used in past wars. It is surrounded by quiet, safe roads and villages.

Despite the continuing loss of life in Israel this country has music and singing and Yiddish theatre and Jazz and film festivals. Immigrants are embraced and refugees are permitted to enter. Israelis know their songs and honour their singers; they sing along at every opportunity knowing the lyrics to many of the songs written from 1948 to the present. And though there is a vivid and sometimes realistic fear of a bomber or a ketousha, life carries on - just as in the ghettos of Kovno and Lodz and in Theirenstadt Jewish theatre lives and shabbat candles are lit. Bookstores are filled with hundreds of books published in a language that was modernized less than 100 years ago.

Everyone now living in Israel must know or know of a young person killed, and yet they go on with determination and conviction, courage and necessity. Israel will prevail because it has for thousands of years and it has to. And because of its beauty and modernity it is almost impossible to believe it has been constructed on the destruction of so many.