The Date Tree

 Shortly after the Six Day War, a man named Avshalom Feinberg was buried in Israel. During the tempestuous years of World War I, he was one of a small group of Palestinian Nili spies who, at great risk to their lives, were providing vital information to the Allies. In the dead of night, they would courageously swim to the British ships in Haifa harbor with information procured the same day about enemy troop movements. It happened in the course of their activities, that a few members of this Nili group were entrusted with a dangerous mission in Egypt and set out on foot through the Sinai desert. All but Avshalom were captured, tortured and hung. Avshalom never surfaced. No one knew what happened to him. He never returned to his family in Palestine. No one ever heard from him again.

            At the outbreak of the Six Day War, fifty years later, during the mad dash of Israeli tanks through the parched sands of the Sinai desert to the Milta Pass, an Israeli tank commander noticed a strange sight. In the middle of the desert, there was an oasis of date palms. So unusual was this sight that after the war was over, the commander returned to the incongruous palms, and began to explore the area. He noticed something under the palms and began to dig. From beneath this oasis of trees he disinterred the remains of Avshalom Feinberg. 

            Apparently, during his mission, Avshalom succumbed to his burning thirst and the desert’s devastating heat. His comrades buried him there, in the barren wilderness, beneath the sand. But there were dates in his pockets and they miraculously sprouted into palms. The commander notified the Israeli authorities and Avshalom Feinberg’s remains were reinterred next to the grave of Theodor Herzl in the Jerusalem military cemetery. Never in his wildest imagination did Avshalom Feinberg dream that, 50 years later, tanks of the independent State of Israel, in full pursuit of the Egyptian enemy, would he come to rest next to the founder of the state of Israel.