Word: ayalon
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...night fell on Mishmar Ayalon, a frontier settlement which stretches to the Jordan wire, 20 miles northwest of Jerusalem, a tired, unshaven man, coated with the dirt of the field, picked up his Sten gun and climbed to the roof of his house. The village generator, silent all day to save fuel, started to put-put, and 73 floodlights splashed light across the rocky fields. So began another night in the siege without respite that has been going on for five years...
...roof peered towards the rude enclosure where the village's sheep were penned. He was the shepherd of Mishmar Ayalon, and the Sten gun his crook. Since 1951, six of Mishmar Ayalon's men had been killed by bullets out of the night. The villagers took to arms and appointed as their captain Shmuel Schiff, a wiry youth with a hussar mustache...
Much of Israel is like Mishmar Ayalon-an armed frontier land where the settlers live in constant dread of a shot, a raid, a sudden grenade. The danger breathes down your neck as you drive to Jerusalem through a road cleft into a gorge, under the eyes and weapons of Jordanians perched on the hills. You feel it on the narrow-gauge railway that winds into the city alongside Jordan territory so close that sunflower seeds spat from the train windows fall onto Arab soil. Where Jordan bulges westward, the Israeli beachhead is barely eight miles wide. It takes less...