Chapter Content
Okay, so, like, Daniel Kahneman, right? This guy, he was super skeptical about everything. And get this, the thing he was *most* skeptical about? His own memory. I mean, seriously, he could give a whole lecture, off the cuff, you know, without notes, like he had the textbook memorized. And he expected his students to do the same thing! But, like, when you asked him about his own life, he was all, "Nah, my memory's unreliable. Don't trust it."
Someone who knew him said, his main thing was doubt. It, like, pushed him to go deeper, you know? Or maybe it was just his way of hiding, of not being noticed. He kind of kept everyone and everything at arm's length.
Okay, so maybe he doubted his memories, but he *did* have some. He remembered, sometime around '41, '42, when the Nazis were occupying Paris. He got caught out after curfew. See, Jews had to wear the Star of David, right, and he was totally ashamed of it. He'd get to school a half hour early so no one would see him wearing it. And on the way home, he'd wear his jacket inside out.
One day, he was late, and he ran into a German soldier. He was wearing a black uniform, which, apparently, was the scariest kind, you know, the SS. So, Daniel sped up, but the soldier, he, like, looked right at him, called him over, and then he picked him up and hugged him. Daniel was freaking out, worried the guy would see the Star of David under his jacket, but the soldier just talked to him in German, showed him a picture of his son, and gave him some money. And that, like, made Daniel think his mom was right, that people are way more complicated than you think.
He also remembered his dad getting taken away in '41 during a "big roundup." Thousands of Jews were being sent to camps. He loved his dad. He said his dad was, like, a shining light, you know? His dad was held at Drancy, which was like a holding pen outside Paris. They crammed, like, 7,000 people into a place meant for 700. Daniel remembered going there with his mom. He said it was this orange-ish building, and you could see people inside, but you couldn't really see their faces. You could hear the women and kids. And he remembered a guard saying, "They don't have it easy here, they're just eating rinds and peelings." Drancy was just a stop on the way to the camps, like Auschwitz.
Luckily, his dad got out after six weeks, thanks to Eugene Schueller. This guy ran L'Oreal, the cosmetics company, and Daniel's dad was a chemist there. Schueller convinced the Germans that Daniel's dad was, "essential to the war effort," so they let him go back to Paris. Daniel remembered the day his dad came home. They went to buy some stuff, and when they got back, his dad opened the door. He was wearing his best suit, but he weighed, like, 100 pounds. He hadn't eaten yet, he was waiting for them.
Then, when Schueller couldn't protect them anymore, the family had to flee Paris. This was in '42. They went south, where the Vichy government was still in charge, at least on paper. It was super dangerous, like hiding in barns, fake IDs with misspellings. Daniel, his sister Ruth, and his parents Ephraim and Rachel, they were all going by "Kader," instead of Kahneman. He had to call his dad "uncle." He also had to speak for his mom because she spoke with a Yiddish accent. Apparently, she never shut up, and she blamed everything on her husband for thinking the Nazis wouldn't invade Paris because they didn't in World War I. Daniel said his mom was pessimistic, but his dad was optimistic. And Daniel felt like he was more like his mom.
They ended up in this town called Juan-les-Pins. Because of Schueller, they had a house, and Daniel's dad had a lab to work in. They sent Daniel to school, but told him not to talk too much or act too smart, so people wouldn't know he was Jewish. He said he felt really old and nerdy. He wasn't good at sports. People called him a "walking corpse." One of the gym teachers didn't want him to get an award because, "there has to be a limit to everything." But he was, like, smart and resilient. All he wanted was to be smart, to just be a brain without a body. He said he felt like a rabbit being chased by hunters.
Then, in '42, the Germans occupied southern France. They started pulling men off buses and checking if they were circumcised. "Everyone who was caught died," Daniel said. His dad was an atheist, and Daniel wasn't ready to give up on God. He said he slept in the same mosquito net as his parents, and he would pray, "I know you're busy, I know it's a tough time. I don't want to ask for much, just let me live one more day."
So, they ran again. This time, they went along the Cote d'Azur to Cagnes-sur-Mer. They stayed with a former French army colonel. Daniel had to stay inside for months, just reading. He read "Around the World in Eighty Days" over and over. He loved anything British, especially Phileas Fogg. The colonel had a whole shelf of books about the Battle of Verdun, so Daniel read those too, and became, like, an expert. His dad was still working in the lab, and he would come visit on the weekends. Daniel and his mom would sit in the garden on Friday nights, watching her mend her socks, waiting for his dad to arrive. He said, "We lived on a hill, we could see the bus station. We never knew if he would arrive safely. I've hated waiting ever since."
The Nazis were getting better at finding Jews. Daniel's dad had diabetes, but going to the doctor was too risky. So, they ran again. First, they hid in a hotel, then in a chicken coop behind a bar in a village outside Limoges. There weren't any German soldiers there, just French militiamen who helped the Germans round up Jews. Daniel didn't know how his dad found the place, but he thought it was because of the guy at L'Oreal, because they were still getting packages of food. They put up a divider in the middle of the coop for Daniel's sister, but it wasn't really meant for living. It was freezing in the winter, and the door would freeze shut. His sister burned a hole in her robe trying to get warm by the stove.
His mom and sister went to church on Sundays, to, you know, blend in. And Daniel went back to school, because it was safer than being in the chicken coop. The kids at the village school were even less smart than the kids at Juan-les-Pins. The teacher was nice, but not very good. Daniel only remembered one lesson, about where life came from. He thought it was so stupid, he said the teacher was wrong. He asked his mom, and she said it was true. He still didn't believe it, until one night, he woke up needing to pee, and he had to climb over his mom. She woke up and saw him on top of her. "My mother was horrified, so I thought, 'I guess it's true!'"
Even as a kid, he was always trying to figure people out, why they thought and acted the way they did. He didn't have a lot of direct experience with people. He didn't really hang out with his teachers or classmates, he didn't have friends, because even acquaintances were dangerous. But he saw a lot of interesting behavior, from a distance. He was pretty sure his teachers and the bar owner knew he was Jewish. Why else would a smart 10-year-old be at a village school? Why else would a well-dressed family be living in a chicken coop? But they didn't let on. His teachers gave him good grades and invited him over to their houses. The bar owner, Madame Andrieux, would give him little jobs and let him keep the tips, even though he had nowhere to spend them. She even tried to get his mom to open a brothel with her! But most people didn't figure them out. He especially remembered this young French Nazi militiaman who was in love with his sister. She was 19 and looked like a movie star. Apparently, she found it satisfying that he was in love with a Jew, after the war.
One night in April of '44 – he remembered the date, his dad took him for a walk. His dad had dark spots on his mouth and looked way older than 49. Daniel said, "He told me that I might have to take on some responsibility. He told me to think of myself as the man of the family. He taught me how to help my mom run the house—he said I was the more rational one. I gave my father the collection of poems I had written. He died that night." All Daniel remembered about his dad's death was his mom telling him to stay with Monsieur and Madame Andrieux for the night. His mom found a Jewish guy who was hiding in the village, and he helped her take the body away before Daniel came home. She buried his dad in the Jewish way, but she didn't let Daniel go to the funeral, maybe because it was too dangerous. "I was angry at his death," Daniel said. "He was never sick, but he was never well."
Six weeks later, the Allies landed in Normandy. Daniel didn't see any soldiers or American GIs throwing candy. He just woke up one morning and sensed the excitement in the air. The French militiamen were being arrested. Some were shot, some were sent to prison. The women who'd slept with the Germans had their heads shaved. By December, the Germans were gone, and Daniel and his mom went back to Paris, to their old apartment. They only found two broken green armchairs. But they stayed anyway. For the first time in five years, Daniel could go to school without hiding that he was Jewish. He became friends with two tall, handsome Russian aristocrat guys. He said it was a good memory because he'd been so lonely before. Years later, he tried to find the brothers to see if they remembered him. One was an architect, the other was a doctor. They wrote back and said they remembered him, and they sent a picture, but Daniel couldn't find himself in it. They must have been thinking of someone else. So, maybe the friendship was just in his head.
In '46, the family left Europe. Daniel's dad's family, who'd stayed in Lithuania, had all been killed in the Holocaust, along with like 6,000 other Jews. Only his uncle survived, because he was a teacher and he was away when the Germans came. He lived in Palestine, like Daniel's mom's family. So, they moved there. People made a big deal out of them arriving, and there was even a short film made, but the only thing Daniel remembered was his uncle giving him a glass of warm milk. "I still remember the color of that milk, how white it was," he said. "It was the first milk I'd had in five years." They moved in with his grandparents. A year later, when he was 13, Daniel broke up with God. "I still remember where I was—on the street in Jerusalem. I remember the thought I had: I can imagine that there's a God, but he doesn't know if I'm masturbating or not. I decided that God didn't exist. That was the end of my religious career."
That's what he remembered, or what he chose to remember. He'd been told not to trust anyone since he was seven, and he didn't. He survived by keeping himself apart, by not letting anyone see who he really was. He became a psychologist, the like top expert on mistakes people make, on memory, and on how people make decisions.
But Daniel didn't see the connection between his past and his ideas. He said his experiences had almost no influence on his worldview, or on how people saw him. He would say, "People think that childhood has a big influence on your life, but I'm not sure if that's true." He didn't even tell his friends about the Holocaust. It wasn't until he won the Nobel Prize and reporters started asking questions that he really talked about it. His old friends found out about his past from the newspaper.
When Kahneman and his mom went back to Jerusalem, there was another war going on. In the fall of '47, the British turned the Palestine problem over to the UN. On November 29, they voted to split Palestine into two countries. The new Jewish state was about the size of Connecticut. The Arab state was a little smaller. Jerusalem, with the holy places, wouldn't belong to either. The people who lived in Jerusalem would be "citizens" of Jerusalem. Of course, some were Arab, some were Jewish, and they kept killing each other. The apartment building Daniel's family moved into was near the line between the two sides. A bullet came through Daniel's bedroom. The leader of his Boy Scout troop was killed.
But Daniel didn't think it was that dangerous. "It was different from before. You were fighting, so it felt better. I hated being Jewish in Europe. I hated being a hunted animal. I didn't want to be a fleeing rabbit." One night in January of '48, he was super excited because he saw Jewish soldiers for the first time: 38 young guys meeting in the basement of his apartment building. Arab soldiers had cut off some Jewish settlements in the south of the country, and these 38 soldiers were going to rescue them. Three of the soldiers came back—one had sprained his ankle, and the other two were helping him. So, there were only 35 guys left, the "Thirty-Five." They were supposed to sneak through at night, but they didn't get there by morning. They ran into an Arab shepherd, and they decided to let him go, at least that's what Daniel heard. But the shepherd told the Arab soldiers, and they ambushed the Thirty-Five and killed all of them. Daniel couldn't understand why they didn't kill the shepherd. "Do you know why they were killed?" he said. "Because they couldn't bring themselves to shoot a shepherd."
A few months later, a convoy of medics drove along a road from the Jewish part of Jerusalem to Mount Scopus, where Hebrew University and its hospital were. Mount Scopus was near the Arab border, and the only way to get there was a mile-and-a-half-long road that the British controlled. Usually, the road was fine, but that day, a bomb went off and stopped the lead Ford truck. Then, the Arabs started shooting machine guns at the buses and ambulances behind the truck. Some of the cars managed to turn around and drive away, but the buses were trapped. When the shooting stopped, all 78 people on the bus were dead. They were shot so many times, they had to be buried in a mass grave. One of them was Enzo Bonaventura, who had come from Italy nine years earlier to start a psychology department at Hebrew University. Now, his wish and his body were in the grave.
Daniel always said he wasn't worried about dying. "We had beaten five Arab countries—it sounds incredible now, but anyway, we weren't scared. I don't remember feeling that the end was near. People were being killed, that's all. But the end of World War II was a real relief." His mom wasn't so optimistic. She took him, who was like 14, and left Jerusalem for Tel Aviv.
On May 14, '48, Israel declared independence. The British left the next day. Then, the armies of Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Lebanon attacked. Jerusalem was cut off for months, and life in Tel Aviv was messed up. There was a mosque tower on the beach, next to what's now the InterContinental Hotel. The Arabs used it as a sniper post, and they would shoot at Jewish kids on their way to and from school. And they did. "Bullets were flying all over the place," said Shimon Shamir. He was 14 when the war started, and he became a diplomat.
Shamir was Daniel's first real friend. "The other kids in the class always found Daniel difficult to approach," Shamir said. "He didn't like to hang out in groups, and he was very selective about his friends. He didn't mind having only one friend." Daniel had arrived in Israel the year before without speaking Hebrew, but by the time he was going to school in Tel Aviv, he spoke fluently. And his English was better than everyone else's. "Everyone thought he was extremely intelligent," Shamir said. "I used to tease him and say, 'You're going to be famous,' but he was very uncomfortable with that. I'm not a fortune-teller, but I did have the feeling that he would go far."
Everyone could see that Daniel was different. Not because he tried to be, but because he just was. "He was the only one in the class who would seriously correct our English pronunciation," Shamir said, "and we all thought that was funny. He was different from us in many ways. In a way, he was an outsider. That had nothing to do with being a refugee. It was his character." Daniel didn't seem like a 14-year-old boy, but like an old scholar in a boy's body. "He was always absorbed in some problem," Shamir said. "I remember once, he showed me an essay he'd written, which struck me as strange, because essays were just a burden for students, something you did when you had to. Daniel had written a long paper on a topic that had nothing to do with school, just because it interested him. In the paper, he compared the character of an English gentleman to that of a Greek nobleman in the time of Hercules." Shamir realized that while the other kids were still learning from the adults around them, Daniel was already finding his own answers in books and in his own mind. Shamir said, "I think he was looking for an ideal, a role model."
The Israeli War of Independence lasted ten months. When it started, the Jewish state was about the size of Connecticut. When it ended, it was bigger than New Jersey. One percent of the Israeli population died in the war, and 750,000 Palestinians were left homeless. After the war, Daniel's mom took him back to Jerusalem. There, Daniel made his second close friend, Eric Ginzberg, who was an English guy.
Life in Tel Aviv was rough, but Jerusalem was even worse. Hardly anyone had cameras, telephones, or even doorbells. If you wanted to see a friend, you had to walk to their house, knock, or whistle for them. Daniel would walk to Eric's house, whistle for him to come down, and then they would go to the YMCA, either to swim or to play ping-pong. They often didn't talk to each other. Daniel liked that. Eric reminded him of Phileas Fogg. "Daniel was special," Eric said. "He could sense the distance between himself and other people, but he also kept it there—almost cultivated it. I was his only friend."
In the years after the War of Independence, the number of Jews in Israel doubled, from 600,000 to 1.2 million. But Daniel could never fit in, not really. He liked the native-born Israelis, not the immigrants like himself. But he wasn't like them either. Like most Israeli kids, he joined the Boy Scouts, but he quit because he and Eric decided it wasn't for them. Even though he learned Hebrew super fast, he and his mom only spoke French at home, and they were usually angry. "It was not a happy household," Eric said. "His mother was very bitter. And his sister escaped the house as quickly as she could." Daniel didn't really become Israeli, he just found a place to live.
It's hard to say what Israeli nationality meant to him, because he was always kind of slippery. He didn't seem to want to settle anywhere. He didn't attach himself to things, at least not for long. Ruth Ginzberg said, "Daniel decided very early on that he didn't want to be responsible for anything. My feeling was that he was always excusing his lack of roots. He was someone who didn't need roots. He thought that life was made up of a series of accidents—things happened one way or another. All you could do was make the most of those accidents."
In a country that wanted land and people so badly, Daniel's distance from the land and the people made him seem really different. "I came to Israel in 1948, and I desperately wanted to become one of them," Yeshayahu Klar told me. He was a geology professor at Hebrew University. "I wanted to wear sandals, and shorts with the cuffs rolled up, and memorize the names of every damn valley or mountain. Most of all, I wanted to lose my Russian accent. I had this unspeakable shame about my past. I worshipped the heroes in my community. Daniel didn't. He looked down on the place."
Daniel was a little like Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote "Lolita." They were both refugees, they both kept their distance from the world around them, and they both had this kind of haughty way of looking at the locals. When Daniel was 15, he took a career test, and it said he should be a psychologist. It was no surprise to him.
He always thought he would be a professor, and he was mostly interested in people. Daniel said, "I was interested in psychology in order to get to philosophy, to understand the world. I tried to understand why people, especially myself, saw the world the way they did. I wasn't concerned with whether God existed, I wanted to know why people believed in God. I wasn't concerned with who was right and wrong in a conflict, I wanted to understand how anger came about. That's what psychologists do!"
Most Israelis have to join the army after high school. Daniel's talent allowed him to skip the army and go straight to college to study psychology. He didn't know how he would do it, because the country's only university was near the Arab border, and the plan to start a psychology department had been killed in the Arab ambush. So, one morning in the fall of 1951, 17-year-old Daniel Kahneman walked into a math class being held in a monastery in Jerusalem. That was one of the temporary locations Hebrew University was using. Even there, Daniel stood out. Most of the students had already served three years in the army, and many of them had seen combat. Daniel was young, and he wore a jacket and tie, which made him seem like a weirdo.
Over the next three years, Daniel taught himself a lot of stuff. "I liked my statistics teacher," Daniel said, "but she didn't know anything about statistics, so I taught myself." He met some people who were all different, mostly refugees from Europe who ended up in Israel. "These teachers were generally charismatic. They had biographies, not just syllabuses. They had unusual stories," said Avishai Margalit, who was soon to leave Hebrew University to become a philosophy professor.
The most unusual one was Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who was Daniel's hero. Leibowitz came to Palestine from Germany in the '30s, by way of Switzerland. He had degrees in medicine, chemistry, and the philosophy of science, and supposedly in a bunch of other stuff. But he couldn't get his driver's license. Maya Bar-Hillel said, "He used to walk with his pants pulled up to his neck, hunched over, with this Jay Leno chin. He was always muttering to himself and making these wild gestures. But his mind captivated all the young people." Whatever he was teaching—and it seemed like he could teach anything, he turned it into a performance. "I took his biochemistry class, and he basically commented on life," another student remembered. "He spent a lot of time explaining why Ben-Gurion was an idiot." He said that a donkey standing between two piles of hay that were the same distance away would starve to death because it wouldn't know which pile to choose. "Leibowitz would say that a donkey wouldn't make that mistake, it would just go to one of the piles and eat. Only a human being would complicate such a simple problem. And then he would say that lots of things happen when a country lets a donkey make decisions that should be made by people. You can see it in the daily news. His classes were always packed."
Daniel remembered something different, not what Leibowitz said, but the sound he made when he hit the blackboard with chalk to make a point. It sounded like a gunshot.
Even at a young age, and in those circumstances, you could see where Daniel was going by what he was turning away from. Psychoanalysis was super popular, but Daniel didn't want to analyze anyone, and he didn't want to be analyzed. He decided not to worry too much about his childhood, or even about his memory of the past—why worry about other people's issues? In the early '50s, a lot of psychologists who had wanted to make psychology a science had given up on that idea. If you couldn't observe the mind at work, why pretend to study it? The only thing that was scientific, and that could be studied scientifically, was the way living things behaved.
The biggest school of thought was behaviorism, led by B.F. Skinner, who had started his work during World War II. The Air Force hired him to train pigeons to find bomb targets. Skinner taught his pigeons to find targets on aerial maps, and he gave them a food reward every time they got it right. Skinner's pigeon experiment was a success, and it marked the start of an influential movement. The idea was that an animal's behavior was controlled by outside rewards and punishments, not by thoughts and feelings. He put rats in boxes he called "operant conditioning chambers" and trained them to pull levers and push buttons. He trained pigeons to dance, play ping-pong, and peck out "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" on a keyboard.
Behaviorists thought what they learned from rats and pigeons applied to people too. They weren't really able to experiment on people for all sorts of reasons. Skinner wrote in an article called "How to Teach Animals," "I should also like to call the attention of readers who are eager to experiment with human subjects to the fact that it is necessary to start with a new project involving both reinforcement and extinction. It is very likely that in this way one might produce emotional disturbances in a human subject. Unfortunately, the science of behavior is not yet able to control emotions as successfully as it controls behavior." The appeal of behaviorism was that it made science simple: you could observe the stimulus and record the response. It seemed so "objective." There was a joke that Skinner used to like: after a couple had sex, one of them asked, "How was it for you? How was it for me?"
It's not hard to realize that, like all the best behaviorists were, like, old stock white Anglo-Saxon protestants. Looking back, you can wonder if there were two different, unconnected disciplines, the American psychologists and the Jewish psychologists. The Americans were wearing white coats, and like wandering the labs, and torturing rats, like, they just never could come to terms with human behavior. The Jews went right for it, even the ones who hated Freud. They revered "objectivity," and they craved the truth that could meet scientific standards.
Daniel revered "objectivity" too. He became interested in Gestalt psychology. Jewish psychologists in Germany had started this back in the early 1900s to study the mysteries of the mind scientifically. Gestalt psychologists did the thing very well, and revealed that the mind had done all these interesting phenomena, you know, like a light on a night sky or something. Gray looks green when surrounded by purple, and it looks yellow when surrounded by blue. If you shout to someone, "Don't step on that banana bug!" they would hear "peel." Gestalt psychologists thought that there's a correlation between a stimulus and the way it's received is not simple, cause of like human mind goes in there in some weird way. The reason why it gets to Daniel so much, is the Gestalt's made the reader become a part of the study, and through that there could be a sense of how their own mind works.
When we look at the stars, we automatically put some together, and leave others out. Constellations like Cassiopeia and the Big Dipper are like examples of this. People have been seeing those groupings of stars for so long, that kids can like instantly spot them. Likewise, he said to the reader, see the graphics down below.
Why two groups, and not six? Or two other separate groupings? Or three pairings? All who see this will instantly identify it as two groups of three.
This is what the Gestalt's were focused on, but the behaviorists were avoided. How does the brain build meaning? Like how does it take fragmented info and make into a clear and continuous picture? Why it is that the mind like imposes these constructs onto the world, instead of the world imposing it onto the mind? How do you put fragments of memory together and make a whole story? Why what you think depends on the setting of the problem? You know, let's ask one thing that makes it easier, when the, you know, regime was ruling Europe, like the regime that wanted to kill all the Jews, why did some of those Jews get out of there, and some stayed in the end, and were killed? And that's why Daniel went into psychology, cause that's the type of questions. And the smartest of rats weren't going to come up with an answer, but the human mind.
Later, Daniel said that science was like a dialogue. If that's the case, psychology was like a crowded dinner party, that everybody was talking loud, and change subjects, like, all the time. When Gestalt's and behaviorists and psychoanalysts all were in one building, they were trying to like take on that one monster, called psychology. No matter what, they would never to try to think of what another thing's person had to say against it. Psychology, like physics, you know, like economics, like it would lack a powerful theory that would go with any standard of thought. The people in the field of the top, in psychology, they would like see someone else's study, it would like be "that's complete BS," they would say, but that would never change what the other person was thinking.
Cause the thing of the matter is, there was a bunch of different people that wanted to be in the field, and for different reasons. There's people who wanted to find the roots of their own unhappiness, there's people who were so sure they could understand human nature, and it's almost like they wanted to be a writer, but couldn't so they studied this. Some others did badly in physics, so they were just trying to find a place to put their math skills to use. Some other people just had empathy, so they went in there to try to help everyone. Another thing is that it was like a granny's attic. The study just could not link with itself, and looked just unorganized.
According to the thing that was there, Daniel would be good to be in either the humanities, or the science. He wanted to work in the science. And that one about people. Other than that, like he didn't really want to do anything else, and he found this out fast. He saw a German man lecture, who went to the school, and he was, like, a neurosurgeon. This guy, he brought out, like, damage to the brain will take away your ability to think abstractly. Turns out this isn't right, but Daniel went in there, and like he thought of like throwing away psychology and went and looked at the brain to see if he could find anything new. A professor convinced him not to, and said that if you don't see yourself as a doctor, don't even bother getting a degree in that. And what's happening here is what he does a lot: go hard into a new idea or goal, but then get disappointed, and just drop it. Daniel said, "There's tons of new ideas, and so you don't fight the thing, you just like give up, and go for the next one."
If he was in a normal place, he wouldn't be like like to become of incredible practicality, but Israel ain't like that. So Daniel when he graduated in psychology, he was called to go to Israeli army. Being, you know, gentle and quiet, no organization, don't like conflict, not in a well body, Daniel would not fit being in an army. Daniel only had like two times that he had face with the enemy. And Daniel will never forget these times. Daniel and another guy went to attack an Arab village. And the unit was gonna surround the village and ambush these troops. Before this, Israel had already killed like so many women and children in this other Arab settlement. And so, Daniel and other guy went to agree, like, what we gonna do if we are asked to do this. The two agreed to deny their orders. And Daniel almost got this. "We weren't to go in," he said, "Someone did it. From what I heard, nobody told them to kill civilians, but no one told them either how not to kill them. And I couldn't go and ask this question, since the goal wasn't for me." So, the goal was thrown off. He and his thing was removed. One team had fallen into like an ambush. If they had done it, "we would have died."
Another time, they were trying to ambush Jordan troops, at the night. He three groups to work with him, he had two go to their spots and let them hide and hold. The third was led to the Jordan border. His leader said that the way to know when the thing is there, is there will be a sign that will be read "border do not pass." When the night was there, he didn't see it. The next day, he saw this troop just standing on the hill, and they're at the Jordan land. ("I had almost started a war.")
He figured that these Jordan snipers were probably in this spot, cause he had easy access, and can kill the Israel army with ease. Daniel and his team were looking to go home, but they noticed that some troop was missing a pack. He had heard so many times about not being able to come with his pack. They had climbed and gone to the border thing. "It was so dangerous. It seemed so foolish. It made me not want to be there. What am I hearing: 'How could you not bring this?" So, the pack was found, so they got outta there. When he had gotten there, he was got yelled at cause of not shooting.
He had thought of himself as always distant from society, but the army broke that. Daniel had said that being a squad leader was able to fix his anxiety and his unfitness. Daniel still could not kill. And he still could not fit in there. So the thing just fixed on him, the army just broke him. He was sent to work in psychology. Israel's psychology dept was that they had no psychologist. And then, a leader who was a chemist. Overnight, this like European refugee, from the hiding and stuff, he was now, like, a top expert. "He was skinny and plain, but very smart," someone who worked said. "I was 19 and he was 21. He would make fun of me at times, and I didn't get it cause I was dumb. He was never in the standard way, but everyone enjoyed him." And they also needed him.
Being brand new country, Israel was in struggle: how do you integrate into a fighting army. It was said in '48, that Israel's open to all Jews. In just 5 years, so many people went to here, they all spoke different languages. And so people who were joining were having unspeakable trauma. There's numbers tattooed on their arms. The moms that think that their children are dead meet on the city streets.
They were not told to mention the past, so the obligation was to forget, what you knew could not be forgotten.
Israel was like a fortress, but it did not come as an army. The army was slow, they couldn't work well with one another. The leader and the thing couldn't speak the same language. They kept failing in the war. The soldiers would run. The chiefs would hide in back. There were attacks done, to take out other groups, but were thrown off. One had spun in circles, and a leader had shot himself, and was on fire. All these things always led to just a tragedy. Just to give an example, in '53 a group had just slaughtered the Jordanians.
After that, the responsibility went to the psychologist. And all this happened cause these psychologist were telling people they're really good. Now if you had to pick tons to form an army, you could be useful to have psychologist, and the only psychologist was this 21 year old who was only studying for 2 years in college. He didn't feel good about it