Five ways Dunkelman came to Israel’s rescue

Palestinians may welcome the seasoned Toronto military commander’s role in saving the city of Nazareth. But Ben Dunkelman was otherwise a purely Israeli partisan, and a tremendously effective one, delivering crucial victories to the Jewish cause at several key moments during the 1948 war:

1. Breaking the siege of Jerusalem

Outnumbered, outmanned, outgunned, the Holy City was slowly starving when Dunkelman arrived as one of the war’s first foreign volunteers in April 1948. Dunkelman agitated for a breakout, ultimately helping blaze a new route through no man’s land to reconnect Jerusalem to desperately needed supplies from the coastal plain.

2. Mortars

Dunkelman’s military specialty involved the rapid release of concentrated mortar fire. But early Israeli mortars — homemade bombs fashioned from sewer pipes — were deemed too dangerous to deploy. Deputized by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to make sense of the mess, Dunkelman quickly established that the improvised devices were indeed safer than they looked. Training and deployment followed quickly.

3. Rank, insignia, discipline, logistics

The improvisational Haganah militia and its elite fighting force, the Palmach, were both bereft of rank or identifying insignia. Dunkelman realized quickly that rapid codification, with rank, insignia, chain of command and organized supply lines to keep an army on the move, was critical to Israel’s fate. Dunkelman enlisted Yitzhak Rabin, then a brigade commander, to win buy-in for reorganization.

4. Saving Nazareth

No sooner had Dunkelman established chain of command than he proceeded to break it, audaciously refusing an order to unlawfully depopulate the Arab civilians of Nazareth. Finding the courage to say no offered Israel’s fledgling army a vital moral benchmark at the very moment of its birth.

5. Securing the Galilee

Named to lead Israel’s 7th Brigade in the final phase of the 1948 war, Dunkelman pushed methodically — and almost bloodlessly — through the Galilee with a series of nighttime flanking movements, eventually ending at the Litani River in Lebanon. He quite literally shaped borders, delivering territory Israel might not otherwise hold today.