The Kahnemans had arrived in Jerusalem just in time for another war. In the fall of 1947 the problem of Palestine passed from Britain to the United Nations, which, on November 29, passed a resolution that formally divided the land into two states. The new Jewish state would be roughly the size of Connecticut and the Arab state just a bit smaller than that. Jerusalem, and its holy sites, belonged to neither. Anyone living in Jerusalem would become a “citizen” of Jerusalem; in practice, there was an Arab Jerusalem and a Jewish Jerusalem, and the residents of each continued to do their best to kill each other. The apartment into which Danny moved with his mother was near the unofficial border: A bullet passed through Danny’s bedroom. The leader of his scout troop was killed.
And yet, Danny said, life didn’t feel particularly dangerous. “It was so completely different. Because you are fighting. That is why it is better. I hated the status of being a Jew in Europe. I didn’t want to be hunted. I didn’t want to be a rabbit.” Late one night in January 1948 he saw, with a palpable thrill, his first Jewish soldiers: thirty-eight young fighters gathered in the basement of his building. Arab fighters had blockaded a cluster of Jewish settlements in the south of the tiny country. The thirty-eight Jewish soldiers marched off from Danny’s basement to rescue the settlers. Along the way, three turned back—one who had sprained an ankle, and two others to help him walk home—and so the group would become known for all time as “The 35.” They’d intended to march under cover of darkness, but the sun rose to find them still marching. They met an Arab shepherd and decided to let him go—at least that is the story that Danny heard. The shepherd informed the Arab fighters, who ambushed and killed all thirty-five young men and then mutilated their bodies. Danny wondered at their disastrous decision. “Do you know why they were killed?” he said. “They were killed because they could not bring themselves to shoot a shepherd.”
A few months later, a convoy of doctors and nurses under the Red Cross banner drove the narrow road from the Jewish city to Mt. Scopus, the site of Hebrew University and the hospital attached to it. Mt. Scopus lay behind Arab lines, a Jewish island in a sea of Arabs. The only way in was through a mile-and-a-half-long narrow road over which the British guaranteed safe passage. Most of the time the trip was uneventful, but on this day a bomb exploded and stopped the lead vehicle, a Ford truck. Arab machine-gun fire raked the buses and ambulances that followed. A few of the cars in the convoy were able to turn and speed off, but the buses, which carried passengers, were trapped. When the shooting stopped, seventy-eight people were dead, their bodies so badly burned that they were buried in a mass grave. Among them was Enzo Bonaventura, a psychologist imported from Italy nine years earlier by Hebrew University to build a department of psychology. His plans for a psychology department died with him.
Whatever threat Danny felt to his existence he declined to acknowledge. “It looked very implausible—that we would defeat five Arab nations—but somehow we were not worried. There really was no sense of impending doom that I could pick up. People were killed and so on. But, for me, after World War II, it was a picnic.” His mother evidently did not agree, as she took her fourteen-year-old son and fled Jerusalem for Tel Aviv.
On May 14, 1948, Israel declared itself a sovereign state, and the British soldiers left the next day. The armies of Jordan, Syria, and Egypt attacked, along with some troops from Iraq and Lebanon. For many months Jerusalem was under siege, and life in Tel Aviv was far from normal. The minaret on the beach beside what is now the Intercontinental Hotel became an Arab sniper nest: The sniper could, and did, shoot at Jewish children on their way to and from school. “There were bullets flying everywhere,” recalled Shimon Shamir, who was fourteen years old and living in Tel Aviv when the war broke out, and would grow up to become the only person ever to serve as Israel’s ambassador to both Egypt and Jordan.
Shamir was Danny’s first real friend. “The other kids in class felt there was some distance between them and him,” said Shamir. “He wasn’t looking for groups. He was very selective. He didn’t need more than one friend.” Danny spoke no Hebrew when he arrived in Israel the year before, but by the time he arrived at school in Tel Aviv he spoke it fluently, and spoke English better than anyone else in the class. “He was considered brilliant,” says Shamir. “I used to tease him: ‘You are going to be famous.’ And he would feel very uncomfortable about it. I hope I am not reading history back, but I think there was a feeling that he would go a long way.”
It was clear to all that Danny wasn’t like the other boys. He wasn’t trying to be unusual; he just was. “He was the only one in our class who tried to develop a proper English accent,” said Shamir. “We all found that very funny. He was different in many ways. To some extent he was an outsider. And it was because of his personality, not because he was a refugee.” Even at the age of fourteen Danny was less a boy than an intellectual trapped in a boy’s body. “He was always absorbed in some problem or question,” said Shamir. “I remember one day he showed me a long essay he wrote for himself—which was strange, because writing essays was a burden which you only did for school, on the subject the teacher assigned. The whole idea of writing a very long essay on a subject that had nothing to do with the curriculum just because the subject interested him: That impressed me very much. He compared the personality of an English gentleman with that of a Greek aristocrat at the time of Herakles.” Shamir felt that Danny was searching books and his own mind for a direction most children get from the people around them. “I think he was looking for an ideal,” he said. “A role model.”
The war of independence lasted for ten months. A Jewish state that was the size of Connecticut before the war wound up a bit bigger than New Jersey. One percent of the Israeli population had been killed (the equivalent of ninety thousand dead in New Jersey). Ten thousand Arabs had died, and three-quarters of a million Palestinians were displaced. After the war, Danny’s mother moved them back to Jerusalem. There Danny made his second close friend, a boy of English descent named Ariel Ginsburg.
Tel Aviv was poor, but Jerusalem was even poorer. Basically no one owned a camera, or a phone, or even a doorbell. If you wanted to see a friend you had to walk to his house and knock on the door or whistle. Danny would walk to Ariel’s house, whistle, and Ariel would come down and they’d head to the YMCA to swim and play Ping-Pong without uttering a word. Danny thought that was just perfect: Ginsburg reminded him of Phileas Fogg. “Danny was different,” says Ginsburg. “He felt apart and he kept himself apart—up to a point. I was his only friend.”