Reconstruction of the battle for Yad Mordechai
In 1948, the Egyptians thought it would be easy. The British were leaving the Palestinian Mandate in mid-May. The sparsely populated areas where Jews lived in the south were ripe for the picking. The Egyptian army could quickly wipe out the few Jewish defenders in the Negev and on the Mediterranean coast. In two or three days they would be in Tel Aviv.
On May 14, the Jews declared independence, as of the British departure at midnight. The Egyptian army, gathered on the border in Sinai readied to attack. I’m sure no soldier sleeps well the night before a battle, not even those about to fight poorly armed untrained Jewish farmers and refugees. Still, I imagine Egyptian soldiers dreaming about lying peacefully in the sun with their families on beaches of Tel Aviv within the week.
The new nation of Israel woke up Shabbat morning, May 15, to news of the Egyptian invasion. The Egyptians headed north east towards Nirin and Kfar Darom. Facing unexpectedly heavy opposition from the Israelis, they withdrew after two days. Since the eastern path to Tel Aviv obviously would not work, they headed west, closer to the coast. Several towns posed obstacles, but they remained confident. Tel Aviv would soon be in their hands. Their air force was already dropping bombs on the city. The only real obstruction in their way was Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, located at a crucial crossroad. They had the superior power—two infantry battalions, one armored battalion and one artillery battalion. They thought the fight would last a few hours.
The agricultural kibbutz had been founded in the late 1930s by Polish immigrants. The founders learned apiculture from some British and Australian soldiers. Soon they were selling honey throughout the land. In December 1943 it was renamed Yad Mordechai, in memory of Mordechai Anielewicz, one of the leaders of the uprising against the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto. By 1948, about 130 people lived there. The farmers had dug trenches so they could move about fairly safely if under attack. They had been joined by a couple dozen Palmach fighters in anticipation of the coming battle. Even so, it couldn’t hold out for very long against an onslaught of thousands of Egyptian soldiers.
On May 18 the Egyptians camped around the kibbutz.
The Israelis worried about the children. It would be too dangerous for them to stay on the kibbutz, but it was also dangerous to send them away. The only road to safety led through the Egyptian lines. With much trepidation they decided to evacuate the children. I imagine the parents trying not to show their fear as they bundled their children into vehicles in the middle of the night. I doubt any of them slept that night, as they envisioned the vehicles slowly making their way around and through the Egyptian encampment and Arab towns. As first light dawned in the morning, word came through. All ninety-two children were safe.
Now it was time to prepare for battle.
We heard the story about the battle at Yad Mordechai standing on a small hill in the kibbutz, looking down at the plain which leads to the Mediterranean Sea. The field below was probably covered with new crops then. Today there are cast iron silhouettes of soldiers, a static reconstruction of the battle. Three old
Egyptian tank, at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai since 1948 invasion
Egyptian tanks face us. At the edges of the hill two reinforced bunkers overlook the battlefield, connected by the old trenches. The trenches have fresh gravel on their floors and metal sheeting lining the sides. I watched as young volunteers, dressed in the khaki shorts and kova tembel hats of the period, led a family through the trenches at a run, reminding them to crouch down so the Egyptians won’t see them.
The First and Seventh Battalions attacked. The kibbutzniks repelled them.
The Egyptians attacked again, but again they were repelled. Their artillery bombarded the kibbutz, destroying the water tower and buildings.
The Egyptians repeatedly tried to capture the outpost, and failed. Several thousand trained Egyptian soldiers should not have so much trouble overrunning small farming community. Even their tanks didn’t help. They had plenty of guns and ammunition, but they couldn’t wipe out a hundred and thirty Jews. The Jews were so poorly armed that at night they crept over the battlefield gathering rifles and ammunition from the enemy dead.
Five days later, the Jews were out of ammunition and exhausted. Half the defenders had died or were wounded. They could fight no longer. They crept away during the night, through the Egyptian lines, to safety at Kibbutz Gvar’am. Only Yitzchak Rubinstein and Livka Shefer, who carried the injured Binyamin Eisenberg, on a stretcher did not make it. .
During the ceasefires and then after the armistice, Chief Rabbi of the IDF Shlomo Goren searched for missing Israelis. It was crucial, he believed, to determine who had died, and to give them proper burial. Rabbi Goren crossed enemy lines many times, sometimes walking across minefields, to search battlefields and makeshift graves, looking for the remains of Israeli dead. He spoke to as many fighters, Jewish and Arab, as he could to gather eyewitness testimony. But he never learned what happened to the three missing men from Yad Mordechai. They are still listed as “Open Cases,” soldiers whose death and burial place are unknown, by the IDF MIA Accounting Unit.
On the sixth day of the battle, not knowing the defenders had retreated, Egyptians opened fire again. After about four hours of steady artillery bombardment, they realized no one was shooting back at them. They entered the kibbutz, only to find it empty. Not even bodies remained; the Jews had buried their dead in a mass grave.
The Egyptian army destroyed the kibbutz and continued towards Tel Aviv. In Ashdod the Israeli Air Force attacked them. Egypt hadn’t known Israel possessed an air force, nor that they had already seen it in its entirety—all four planes. Surprised by bombs dropping on them from directly above, they retreated.
Actually, a week earlier the Israeli Air Force had not existed.
After World War II, the Jewish community in British Palestine knew that sooner or later they would have to fight the British or the Arabs to gain a state. Agents were sent to Europe to buy surplus military equipment. One found Messerschmitts in Czechoslovakia, then ruled by the USSR. When the USSR decided to support Israel, the Czechs sold five planes plus spare parts, to Israel. Experienced fighter pilots and airplane technicians were recruited from the US and Canada.
Boxes of airplane parts arrived in Haifa and were taken to Zichron Yakov, a town near the coast. The planes were reassembled in a large wine storage cave. They were not equipped to drop bombs, so they were loaded with hand grenades and bottles full of water.
By this time, the Egyptian army was marching up the coast.
The brand new Air Force took off and flew south. One plane crashed into the sea, but the remaining four planes attacked the Egyptians in Ashdod. The pilots dropped the hand grenades and water bottles out the window. The grenades killed only a few soldiers. The water bottles broke with loud noise. The Israeli air attack was successful only because the Egyptians were surprised and panicked. They turned and fled back to the Negev.
In Ashdod today you can stand on the Ad Halom (“This Far”) Bridge. The Egyptian army got that far north and no farther.
Kibbutz Yad Mordechai paid a terrible price—twenty-three of its members had died and all its buildings had been destroyed. But in the six days it held the Egyptian army at bay, Israel had built an air force which saved its largest city.
About six months later Israel retook Yad Mordechai. The farmers returned and rebuilt. Today, with more than 600 members, it is the largest producer of honey in the country.
Several Egyptian tanks still sit in its fields. Defensive trenches still rim one of its hills. The cast iron soldiers stand where once live soldiers fought. And visitors look at it all, listen to the recorded description of the battle, and learn about the sacrifices it took to make the country.
Location of Kibbutz Yad Mordechai