The Man and his Time *

Reuven Shiloah was the remarkable product of a distinctive chapter in the history of Israel: a unique period of national regeneration that has vanished, never to return. At no other time in Jewish history, either before or after, could he have achieved what he did or become the man he was. He was primus inter pares - first among equals - in a group of 'operations executives', men who were neither policy-makers nor decision-makers, but undoubtedly much more than just 'senior government officials' as they would probably be called today. He was a central figure in the momentous transition from the era of the Jewish Agency, the Hagannah, ¹ and the British Mandate - the period of the 'state in-the-making' - to the era of statehood and a developing administrative and bureaucratic infrastructure. This was a time of difficult and often turbulent growing pains, of innovation, personal initiative and path-finding. It was a period marked by mistakes and mishaps, as well as flights of bold operational imagination. It was in this tumultuous period that the framework of the Israel Defence Forces (the IDF) was created, literally on the battlefield, and the machinery of national government was generated amid the administrative disarray left behind at the end of the British Mandate over Palestine. It was during this time, too, that the foundations were laid for the Jewish state's civilian and military intelligence services, a period of clandestine arms procurement and secret border crossings, of alliances forged despite the hostility of an Arab world still licking its wounds following its defeat in Israel's War of Independence - and refusing to accept the consequences.