“I think the term ‘reluctant soldier’ fits best. We knew he had been through terrible battles. But he was able somehow to lock it away.” Jonathan Dunkelman Ben’s son

The oldest Canadians among us may still know his name. And something of the astonishing campaigns lived seven decades ago by the unlikeliest of soldiers, a gentle giant of a man called Ben Dunkelman.

They may know about his exploits as an infantry leader with Toronto’s Queen’s Own Rifles in the Second World War — a grinding, 330-day slog of ground battles from D-Day in Normandy all the way to the shores of the Baltic, shrinking Hitler’s world.

They may know that before the Queen’s Own embraced him, Dunkelman had already been shunned by the Royal Canadian Navy simply because he was Jewish.

They may even know that Dunkelman could have avoided the fighting altogether thanks to his father, David, whose Tip Top Tailors empire was inundated with orders for military uniforms at the onset of war. The family firm needed him. He volunteered to fight anyway.

Others will know of Dunkelman’s second war — how the battle-hardened Toronto soldier smuggled himself on a fake passport into besieged Jerusalem in 1948, ultimately playing a critical military role in the founding of Israel. Zionism was the lifelong passion of his mother, Rose, and she lived to see her son help deliver statehood.

There remains, however, one epic but little-known part of the Dunkelman story that may well be his greatest glory: how he found the courage to say no, 67 years ago, to orders from his Israeli superiors at the very height of the 1948 war, effectively saving the entire Arab city of Nazareth from unlawful expulsion.

Nazareth is today the largest Arab city within Israel proper because Dunkelman, as commander of Israel’s 7th Brigade, refused verbal orders to uproot a civilian population, whose surrender he secured on the promise that they could stay.

Dunkelman, who died in 1997, seldom told of his warrior past, save for his 1976 memoir, Dual Allegiance. Excerpted in the pages of the Toronto Star upon its release, the book made no mention of the Nazareth episode.

But Dunkelman’s ghostwriter, the now-deceased Israeli journalist Peretz Kidron, later produced a previously unpublished page that Dunkelman edited out of his manuscript, in which the Toronto native describes how he was “shocked and horrified” at the order to depopulate Nazareth, telling his commanding officer, Haim Laskov, “I would do nothing of the sort.”

Dunkelman was relieved of command in Nazareth a day after refusing the order. But he ceded control only after extracting his replacement’s “word of honour” that no harm would befall the population. “It seems that my disobedience did have some effect,” Dunkelman writes in Kidron’s lost page.

“It seems to have given the high command time for second thoughts, which led them to the conclusion that it would indeed be wrong to expel. There was never any more talk of the evacuation plan, and the city’s Arab citizens have lived there ever since.”

Kidron leaked the story to the New York Times — along with an explosive account of how Dunkelman’s brother-in-arms Yitzhak Rabin carried out similar orders, dislodging the Arab civilians from the towns of Lod and Ramle within days of the Canadian soldier’s stand in Nazareth. The Times ran with the juicier Rabin exposé in October 1979, ignoring the Dunkelman story altogether.

Dunkelman ultimately took the reasons for omitting the Nazareth story to his grave. But in interviews with his widow, Yael, the Star was able both to confirm Dunkelman’s stand in Nazareth and to get a better sense of his motivations.

“Ben was a loving person. He was a humanitarian — that was the essence of it,” Yael, now 89, told the Star at her home in midtown Toronto. “The idea of forcing civilians from their homes was never something he would ever be able to do.”

Dunkelman’s son Jonathan, a Toronto artist and one of six Dunkelman siblings, was unaware of the Nazareth story. “He never talked about it — ever. Or anything else to do with the wars. He was just such a very gentle, soft-spoken man,” said Jonathan. “I think the term ‘reluctant soldier’ fits best. We knew he had been through terrible battles. But he was able somehow to lock it away.”

Douglas Gibson, who edited Dunkelman’s memoir for Macmillan of Canada, told the Star: “I don’t think I ever knew the Nazareth story. Or if I did, it’s lost in the mists of time, I’m afraid.

“But I will say, that fits precisely with his moral character, and it just shows again that Ben’s entire story is huge, even if it is largely hidden today.

“What he did was bring his hard-earned Canadian military professionalism to help organize a chaotic fighting force and help set down the rules of engagement. And that included saying, ‘No, we will not expel civilians.’

“My lasting memory is of a big, gentle, soft-spoken man. I remember how amazed I was when I read the first draft. I wanted confirmation, so I asked Ben, ‘Is there anyone in Israel who could write a foreword?’ He answered so softly, ‘Would Rabin do?’ … I almost fell out of my chair.”

Reshaping Israel’s narrative

For all that he achieved during a decade at war on two continents, Dunkelman’s stand against the depopulation of civilians of Nazareth is arguably his greater glory.

He won no medals for refusing to molest civilians, nor any credit from his Israeli superiors. The story of saving Nazareth remains something of a footnote, if that, in most chapters dedicated to the larger Dunkelman story.

Transpose that morality to the modern era and imagine how the U.S. military interrogations at Abu Ghraib might have played out with a Dunkelman in command.

But that rare courage raises other questions. If Dunkelman received verbal orders to expel a city, what orders were other Israel commanders under during the 1948 war? One of Israel’s early foundational narratives — the notion that the Arabs of Palestine became refugees of their own volition, fleeing, rather than being forced out, cracks under the saga of Dunkelman in Nazareth.

Small wonder, then, that Dunkelman left the story out of his 1976 memoir.

A later generation of Israeli historians emerged in the 1990s, willing for the first time to chip away at the early narratives. And they continue to do so. As recently as June, veteran Israeli activist Uri Avnery — a soldier in 1948, a dedicated peacenik ever since — invoked the memory of Dunkelman in an article emphasizing the rarity of such a stand, as seen through the lens of 1948.

Only a few years earlier, Avnery noted, the world saw “the mass expulsion of Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Baltic states, which was accepted as natural.” There was no shortage of atrocities in 1948. On both sides.

But not in Nazareth.

‘He engulfed me’ — Ben and Yael’s love story

The battle-scarred Canadian commander was rude. The big-eyed Israeli didn’t notice. It was war. It was Israel. Rude came with the territory.

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But moments after the terse handover of top-secret orders, Ben Dunkelman thought twice about the beguiling young army clerk he had so contemptuously dismissed.

He made inquiries. She was single. He was smitten. They courted and married, in a whirlwind romance that unfolded even as the Toronto volunteer led his army through a series of conquests that helped shape Israel’s borders.

Sixty-seven years and six children later, Ben is gone. But the native Israeli, the love of his life, is still very much with us, living in Toronto, memories intact. The speed of her tears as she casts back to their courtship in the middle of the war of 1948 is a powerful testament to the life they shared.

“He engulfed me — I don’t know how else to say it,” said Yael Dunkelman. “Not at first. The fact that he was rude made no impression on me — that was normal. It was the way he apologized the next time he saw me that made the impression. He was so big and charming. It all happened so fast.”

She was 22, he was 35. They wedded in the lull between battles. And planned, for a time at least, to stay in Israel. But fate took them instead to Canada, where Dunkelman was needed to help run the family firm, Tip Top Tailors.

“There was no kissing before marriage. You didn’t hold hands. It was a very different time,” Yael recalled. “But I knew Ben had experienced terrible things in war. The first night of our honeymoon, he was up pacing. I thought maybe I had done something wrong. But all he said was, ‘I’m thinking about all the men who are gone, who will never have a chance to be this happy.’”

After a lifetime in Canada, Israel no longer draws Yael as strongly as it once did. The hardline politics, the growing social gaps, the hold of religion on government. She gave her life instead to art, persuading Ben to take the plunge on a gallery.

“One of the things about living this long is you find your friends are gone,” she said. “Ben and I did everything together, everything. Our work, our lives outside work … But I do miss the smell of the earth in Israel. I will never forget it.”

An extraordinary life

1913: Ben Dunkelman was to the manor born, heir to Tip Top Tailors. Home was an English mansion on the sprawling, 40-hectare Sunnybrook Farm, where Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre stands today. Dunkelman described the sumptuous estate as “a dreamland, a children’s paradise.” Summers were spent swimming and sailing on Lake Simcoe at the family’s Balfour retreat.

1920s: For all his father’s business acumen, Ben’s mother, Rose, was formidable in her own right as one of Canada’s pre-eminent early Zionists. Nicknamed “Madame Czarina” by friends and foes alike, Rose turned the Sunnybrook home into a transit station and hospitality centre for visiting leaders of the movement for Jewish colonization in Palestine. Among Ben’s earliest memories were stories about the “mysterious Land of Israel” from the likes of Chaim Weizmann, Louis Lipsky and Stephen Wise.

1931-32: The first withering hard work of Dunkelman’s life, as he traded luxury in Toronto for a year toiling in the orange groves of the fledgling Jewish settlement of Tel Asher, 50 kilometres north of Tel Aviv. “In Canada I had everything I could ask for — servants, cars, horses, spending money,” he would write. “Now here I was working long hours in the blazing sun, subsisting on less meat in a whole week than in a single one of mother’s meals.”

1939: As war descended, Tip Top Tailors ramped up to produce as many as 35,000 uniforms a week for the swelling ranks of Canadian volunteers. But not for Ben, whose initial attempt to enlist in the Royal Canadian Navy was rebuffed. “The navy obviously considered that a Jew was not suitable company in the wardroom,” Dunkelman wrote. “It infuriated me that such habits of mind prevailed in a country supposedly at war against Hitler.”

1940: Toronto’s Queen’s Own Rifles — the storied militia regiment — were more welcoming, putting Dunkelman through the paces to become an infantry officer. After three years of intense training, Dunkelman approached D-Day with a secret weapon of sorts. His specialized training allowed him to apply precision artillery techniques to more rapidly deploy field mortars with swift, sharp aim. Those skills would serve him well in two wars.

1945: Promoted to the rank of major by war’s end, Dunkelman was awarded the Distinguished Service Order. He was singled out for his innovative technique in concentrated mortar barrages, and for heroism in single-handedly taking out two German machine-gun posts in the battle of Balberger Wald. He was offered command of the Queen’s Own upon his return to Canada. Though he wore the regiment’s ring for the rest of his life, he declined, returning instead to the family firm.

1948: Dunkelman led recruitment in Canada, mobilizing Jewish volunteers to join the Haganah, a pre-Israel paramilitary organization. He was the first to arrive in the region, making his way to besieged Jerusalem. He rose quickly through the ranks with the blessing of David Ben-Gurion (who in May that year became Israel’s first prime minister), helping break the siege and later commanding an Israeli army division to capture the upper western Galilee. “Ben’s Bridge,” on the Lebanese border, stands to this day in his honour.

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 Ben 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.

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