The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(34)

For a week or so after the war, Amos camped at King Hussein’s summer palace. He was then installed briefly as military governor of Jericho. Hebrew University was turned into a prisoner-of-war camp. But classes at the university started again on June 26, and the professors who had fought in the war were expected to resume their former posts without a lot of fuss. Among them was Amnon Rapoport, who had returned with Amos to Israel, joined him in Hebrew University’s Department of Psychology, and taken his natural place as Amos’s closest friend. When Amos set off with his infantry unit, Amnon had climbed into another tank and rolled back into Jordan. His tanks had taken the lead in breaking through the Jordanian army’s front lines. This time Amnon had to admit to himself that this business of leaping into and out of wars had left him in a less than tranquil state of mind. “I mean, how is it possible? I am a young assistant professor. And they take me and within twenty-four hours I start killing people and become a killing machine. I didn’t know how to put it together. The dreams troubled me for several months. Amos and I talked about it: how to reconcile these two sides of life. Professor and killer.”

He and Amos had always assumed that they would work jointly to explore how people made decisions, but Amos was attached at the hip to Israel, and Amnon, once again, just wanted to get away. The problem, to Amnon, wasn’t just the constant warfare. The idea of working with Amos had lost its allure. “He was so dominating, intellectually,” said Amnon. “I realized that I didn’t want to stay in the shadow of Amos all my life.” In 1968 Amnon took off for the United States, became a professor at the University of North Carolina, and left Amos without anyone to talk to.



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In early 1967 Avishai Henik was twenty-one years old and working on a kibbutz in range of the Golan Heights. Every now and then the Syrians above him fired shells down on the kibbutz, but Avi didn’t give it much thought. He’d just finished his army service and, even though he had been a poor student in high school, was thinking of going to university. In May 1967 he was trying, without a great deal of success, to decide what he would study, and the Israeli army called him back into service. If they were calling him, Avi assumed, there was going to be a war. He joined a unit of maybe one hundred and fifty paratroopers, most of whom he’d never laid eyes on.

Ten days later the war broke out. Avi had never seen combat. At first his commanding officers said that he was going to parachute into the Sinai and fight Egyptians. Then they changed their minds and ordered Avi’s unit to board buses for Jerusalem, where a second front, with Jordan, had opened. In Jerusalem, there were two points of attack on the Jordanian troops entrenched just outside the Old City. Avi’s unit slipped through the Jordanian front lines without firing a shot. “The Jordanians didn’t even notice,” he said. Hours later, a second Israeli paratrooper unit followed and was cut to bits: Avi’s unit had gotten lucky. Once past the front lines, his unit approached the old walls. “That’s when the shooting started,” he said. Avi found himself trotting right beside a young man he liked named Moishe—Avi had only just met him a few days earlier, but he’d remember his face forever. A bullet struck Moishe and he fell. “He was dead in a minute.” Avi moved on with the sense that at any moment he might die, too. “I was terrified,” he said. “Really afraid.” His unit fought their way through the Old City, and along the way ten more men were killed. “It was one here, one there.” Avi recalled images and dramatic moments: Moishe’s face; the Jordanian mayor of Jerusalem approaching his unit waving a white flag, standing beside the Wailing Wall. The last was incredible. “I was shocked. I’d seen it in pictures. And now I am standing right beside it.” He turned to his commander and said how happy he was, and his commander replied, “Well, Avishai, you will not be happy tomorrow when you hear how many have been killed.” Avi found a phone and called his mother and said simply, “I’m alive.”

Avi’s Six-Day War wasn’t over. Having taken the Old City of Jerusalem, the surviving paratroopers in his unit were dispatched to the Golan Heights: Now they would fight Syrians. Along the way they met a middle-aged woman who came up to them and said, “You are paratroopers—has anyone seen my Moishe?” None of them had the courage to tell her what had happened to her son. Once they walked into the shadow of the Golan Heights, they were told their assignment: They would ascend in helicopters, jump out, and attack the Syrian troops in their trenches. Hearing this, Avi became oddly but completely certain that he was about to die. “I had the feeling that if I didn’t die in Jerusalem, I would die in the Golan Heights,” he said. “You don’t get two chances.” His commanding officer assigned him to walk point in the Syrian trenches—he would run in the front of a line of Israeli paratroopers until he was either killed or out of bullets.

Then—the very morning they were to go—the Israeli government announced that there would be a cease-fire at 6:30 p.m. For a brief moment Avi felt as if his life had been handed back to him. And yet his commanding officer insisted on proceeding with the attack. Avi couldn’t understand it and summoned the nerve to ask his commanding officer why. Why go when the war will be over in a few hours? “He said, ‘Avi, you are so naive. Do you think we will not take the Golan Heights even though there will be a cease-fire?’ I said, ‘Okay, prepare to die.’” With Avi in the lead, the paratrooper battalion stormed the Golan Heights in helicopters and leapt into the Syrian trenches. And the Syrians were gone. The trenches were empty.