Word: haganah
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...turn Rabin needed the Chairman. Like Arafat, Rabin had not intended to make a life of soldiering; he too wanted to go to the U.S. to become an engineer. But he had earned a reputation as a gifted military commander in the Palmach, the commando unit of the Haganah underground army. On the eve of his country's war for independence in 1948, Rabin was persuaded by his military superiors to abandon his study plans and join the battle. He was charged with helping to break the Arab blockade of Jerusalem and to keep the road to Tel Aviv open...
...High School, convinced that the best way to serve his country "was to prepare myself to become a farmer." He graduated with that ambition still intact, but World War II forced him to postpone his plans to study hydraulic engineering at the University of California. Instead he joined the Haganah, the Jewish underground army (to which his mother had also belonged), and was swiftly invited by the swashbuckling Moshe Dayan, then a young commander, to join the Palmach, an elite strike force...
...before the outbreak of war between the Jewish militia and Arab armies, there were hostilities between the Jewish and the native Palestinian population. Indeed Yigael Yadin, Acting Chief of Staff for the Jewish forces in 1948, talked about a D-plan based on previous ones drawn up by the Haganah...
...hours that remained before sundown, when the Jewish Sabbath would begin, Tel Aviv's jubilant people danced in the streets, paraded with blue-&-white streamers and Star of David flags, prayed in their synagogues, with tears and cheers waved off truckloads of Haganah youths headed for the frontiers...
Still other Arab contingents were on the move. In southern Palestine, Egyptian troops crossed the border into the sandy wastes of the Negeb Desert to seize Jewish settlements on the road to Gaza. In northern Palestine, where Haganah was trying to secure the Galilee region, Syrian and Lebanese detachments attacked Jewish settlements. Egyptian air force planes swooped over Tel Aviv in the first strafing and bombing raids of the war. Palestine's native Arabs were panicky, almost leaderless...