Icons of the struggle for independence

This weekend, Channel 1 broadcast the film "He Walked Through the Fields," starring the late Assi Dayan, who will be interred in Nahalal ahead of Memorial Day. The unique artist, haunted by icons, chased by delusive spirits in his life, will finally find peace in his soul as he rests near the icon of all icons, his father former Defense Minister Moshe Dayan -- from whom he was so distant, causing him unimaginable suffering.

In "He Walked Through the Fields," which was filmed 47 years ago, Assi was closer than in the remainder of his 68 years to the admirable-yet-hated character of his father. Fate led to his death last week, just before the day that the memory of the Independence Generation shines, with his father who lost an eye defending the country, and the book-turned-movie that was the first epic about the Palmach by Moshe Shamir -- its title taken from the poetry of Nathan Alterman ("He walked through the fields, he will reach here/ He carried in his heart a lead bullet").

Memorial Day is dedicated to the more than 23,000 fallen in Israel's wars, and to Israel itself. They are the underground fighters, the settlers of the land and the fallen from the entire defense establishment. But in the national consciousness, Memorial Day is especially tied to the War of Independence, which began with the U.N. declaration of the establishment of a Jewish state in Israel in November, 1947 and ended temporarily about a year later. Six thousand were killed in that war. There were only 660,000 Jews in Israel at the time.

The legacy left by the fallen, art and writing collected by Israel's first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in the "Parchment of Fire" books, is testimony that three years after the Holocaust, so much talent and hope was plucked from the hearts of the Jewish people in Israel, and the lost "splendor of youth" mourned in the Yizkor prayer was not simply a phrase. That same struggle left us with names like Hannah Szenes, Bracha Fuld, Dov Gruner, Danny Mass, Rivka Guber and many others, all of them icons.

And what about Moshe Dayan, whose son Assi could not cope with the long shadow he cast? Assi, who waited until his dying day for a simple hug, while doling out mass condemnation that even bereaved mothers of the Yom Kippur War did not dare send Dayan's way.

The warriors of the Independence Generation were not only bold, but they understood their situation well. When they set out on the way to Jerusalem to fight, they saw others digging graves for those among them who would not return at dawn. The tremendous emotional burden that weighed on them there, or at San Simon Monastery, described so cruelly in Yoram Kaniuk's "Himmo, King of Jerusalem," was terrible.

Dayan's extinguished eye that tortured the soul of his filmmaker son Assi added a level to the greatness of the generation. He lost it while fighting on Syrian territory in 1941, and the added value in his personal example was the rigid constitution of someone who does not give up; someone who does not accept the law and does not grumble and cry; someone who refuses to recognize his disability and his limitations; someone who stands on the brink of death and does not cease to taunt it. This is the added value that allows that Jewish state to mark its 66 years of independence with grief and with glory; the added value that must be resurrected to brighten up a dreary future.

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