No Mission Is Impossible by Michael Bar-Zohar, Nissim Mishal

up the road opened fire on the Israelis. Suppapo and his men killed the Egyptians with hand grenades and submachine-gun fire and continued to advance. Very soon they were joined by a column of paratroopers of the 890th Paratroop Battalion. At their head was an already famous officer: Ariel (“Arik”) Sharon.
    Sharon was escorted by two staff observers and his deputy, the calm, bearded Aharon Davidi. Born in Tel Aviv, a volunteer in the Palmach (storm units of the IDF during the Independence War) since the age of fourteen, Davidi had been nicknamed “the coolest soldier in the army.” His tranquillity under fire was legendary. Even in the heat of battle this former Palmach officer would perform his dutiesunruffled, as if the bullets and the grenades and the bombs were not of his concern. Nobody knew that Davidi worked out in secret before every battle, doing physical exercises that helped him hide his fear from his soldiers. His pockets were full of bread and he would munch crusts during the battle, drawing calm and composure from the food. His soldiers admired his serenity and tried to emulate him.
    While Sharon and Davidi led their column into Gaza, another paratrooper unit, led by the battle-scarred Danny Matt, crossed the border close to kibbutz Be’eri, farther to the south. They bypassed some villages and set an ambush on the Gaza–Rafah highway to prevent any reinforcements from reaching Gaza.
    After two hours of strenuous marching, the paratroopers stopped in an orchard that offered a view of the railroad station and a large Egyptian military base.
    On Sharon’s order, the paratroopers charged.
    Operation Black Arrow, also called the Gaza raid, was under way.
    T he Israeli government made the decision to launch Black Arrow after several incidents on the Gaza border. The most recent had been an incursion into Israel of an Egyptian intelligence-gathering detail that had collected information, carried out several sabotage operations and murdered a civilian close to Rehovot. When the identity of the perpetrators was exposed, the IDF decided to deal a severe blow to the Egyptian Army.
    In the last few years scores of incidents had erupted on Israel’s borders, and many infiltrators had entered the country, stealing and murdering civilians. The IDF had tried to retaliate with raids in enemy territory—and failed. The names of these Arab villages and military positions had aggregated into a long list of shame that the IDF tried to repress. Out of all those failed operations, the fiasco that stunned IDF Head of Operations General Moshe Dayan was the miserable failure of the Givati Brigade at the Jordanian village Falame. On January 28, 1953, 120 soldiers attacked the village, which was defended only by locals, shelled it with mortars and after four and a half hours retreated withoutaccomplishing their mission. Dayan, furious, published a new order: “In the future, if any unit commander failed to carry out his mission claiming that he could not overcome the enemy force, his explanation would not be accepted unless he had suffered 50 percent casualties.”
    This was a very tough order. But things did not change until Arik Sharon entered the scene.
    Arik, the son of Russian-born farmers in moshav (“cooperative village”) Kfar Malal, was different. A born rebel, bold and tempestuous, the handsome officer was twenty years old when he was badly wounded in the battle of Latrun. He lay bleeding in a wheat field, watching the Arabs who descended from the hills rushing to murder the wounded Israelis with guns and knives. Another soldier, also wounded, grabbed Arik’s arms and dragged him toward the Israeli lines. The other soldier had been wounded in the jaw and couldn’t speak. The two men silently crawled across the battlefield, while the desperate cries of their wounded comrades, left behind, resounded in their ears. That experience had a long-lasting effect on