The writer is an Israeli historian and author of ‘A State at Any Cost — The Life of David Ben-Gurion’
Some time before Israel celebrated its 75th Independence Day in May, I went to the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem to visit my father’s military grave. He was killed in 1948 during the first Arab-Israeli war, when I was three years old. The Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives has existed for about 3,000 years; my father’s grave overlooks a majestic panorama of the Judaean desert, descending to the Dead Sea.
A few steps away I noticed the graves of two Israeli children murdered in the Gaza Strip in 1971. Marc-Daniel Aroyo was about seven, his sister Abigail about five. Both were born in London. The Palestinian terrorist who threw a grenade into the family’s car was around 15. I came down from the cemetery thinking of what David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, said about Gaza before the 1956 Suez campaign: “If I believed in miracles, I’d wish for it to be swallowed up by the sea.”