In the deep shadows of the dimly lit schoolroom, the fifteen-year-old boy faced his interrogators.

“Would you be willing to risk your life?” The question came sharp and sudden.

Yigael thought of his family, his studies, a career in archaeology like his father’s. But what good would it all be without a country? He knew the most important thing he could do was to join the struggle to establish a homeland for Jews in Palestine.

"Yes," he answered, swallowing hard.

It was 1933. The Haganah had been formed as an underground organization to protect the Jews from the Arabs who felt that Jewish immigration into Palestine would upset their power in the Middle East.

From then on Yigael proved a faithful and hard-working member of Haganah. He carried secret messages, learned to signal and to handle firearms. Under the code name of Yadin, he devoted the next twenty years of his life to the War of Independence, rising to the position of Chief of Operations by the time Israel was declared a new state by the United Nations.

But troubles grew with the young country. Neighboring Arabs attacked several kibbutzim—and full-scale war broke out. General Yadin assumed the burden of planning defense operations. It was a heroic struggle against great odds: a twentieth-century version of the biblical story of David and Goliath, as the Israelis used crude weapons to fight off invasions by their well-equipped neighbors. The Israeli Air Force consisted of about thirty Piper Cubs which dropped homemade bombs. The Army fought against tanks and machine guns with rifles and Molotov cocktails.

In 1952, as Israel was making steady progress to stabilize itself, Yadin resigned as Chief of Staff to return to archaeology to carry on his father’s work on the Dead Sea Scrolls. Starting with the procurement of four more scrolls, he went on to uncover Hazor, the biblical city destroyed by Joshua. He also directed the excava- tion of the cave of Bar Kochba, the Jewish revolutionary who led a revolt against the Romans in 130 A.D., and of the fortress of Masada, where, in 73 A.D., 966 Jewish zealots committed suicide when they could no longer resist the Romans.

DESERT FIGHTER is a dramatic and stirring biography of the man who helped Israel become a nation and who is today a world authority on archaeological exploration in the Holy Land. It is also an epic of courage and endurance set in twentieth-century Israel, a land rich in ancient treasure and promise for the future.

From the dust jacket