El soldado número once

“El soldado número once,” also recalled by its alternate title, “Los límites de la fuerza,” is an article Shmuel remembers while debating Gershom Wald about Israel’s security and the danger of trusting military power. Its central image—the eleventh attacker who overturns a calculation based on ten-to-one superiority—compresses a political argument into a stark question of numbers. Wald acknowledges the force of the example, but answers that Israel would still have to repel the eleventh soldier if it were to survive.

The article and its remembered parable

Shmuel cannot recall the article’s author, but remembers its title and argument. The story it recounts begins with Stalin’s invasion of Finland in the late 1930s. Finnish commander Field Marshal Von Mannerheim tries to reassure President Kallio that each Finnish soldier is worth ten Russian soldiers: the Finns, he argues, are better, more cultured, and more committed to defending their country. Kallio considers the claim and wonders what would happen if Stalin sent eleven soldiers against each Finnish defender rather than ten. The article gives that thought the name by which Shmuel remembers it: the problem of the eleventh soldier.

The anecdote does not establish that military resistance is pointless. Instead, it exposes the vulnerability hidden inside confidence in superior quality: the arithmetic changes if an opponent can bring enough force to bear. Shmuel applies the parable to Israel, asking what would happen if Arab states moved from threats to a vastly larger offensive. He recalls that, during the War of Independence, fewer than 80,000 soldiers from five Arab armies fought against 120,000 Jewish men and women mobilized from a population of 600,000. He then asks what Israel would do against an Arab army of half a million, a million, or two million.

Shmuel’s warning about force

Shmuel places the question in the political circumstances of the conversation. The Arab states, he says, have spoken for more than ten years about destroying Israel but have not yet committed anything like their full strength to that purpose. He points to Nasser’s access to abundant Soviet weapons and his open talk of another confrontation. Against this possibility, Shmuel sees an Israeli public intoxicated by victory, strength, and biblical rhetoric. The article’s hypothetical eleventh soldier makes that unease concrete: a record of past success cannot guarantee that a future balance of forces will remain manageable.

The exchange begins as Shmuel criticizes Ben-Gurion’s leadership. He contrasts Ben-Gurion’s earlier identity as a labor leader with his current position at the head of what Shmuel calls a nationalist, sanctimonious state, whose language of restoration and prophecy seems empty to him. Shmuel also warns that, without peace, the Arabs may eventually defeat Israel; their patience, he argues, makes the passage of time part of the danger. The eleventh soldier is therefore not simply a tactical figure. It is Shmuel’s way of challenging a political outlook that treats military power and recent victory as sufficient grounds for confidence.

Wald’s answer and the limits of the argument

Wald tells Shmuel that he liked what Shmuel said about the eleventh soldier. His reply, however, returns the discussion to the immediate necessity of defense: if that soldier appears on the battlefield, Israel will simply have to repel him, or it will not remain there. The reply accepts the parable’s unsettling premise without adopting Shmuel’s emphasis on the danger of future escalation. For Wald, recognizing the limits of force does not remove the need to use it when survival is at stake.

Their disagreement sits within a wider argument over Ben-Gurion and the state’s founding choices. Wald calls Ben-Gurion an unmatched Jewish leader and praises his broad understanding of the danger of being counted among the nations. Later, he describes Ben-Gurion as a lucid statesman who recognized that the Arabs would not willingly accept Jewish presence or share territory and power, and that what the Jews did not secure for themselves would not be freely given. Shmuel’s caution about the “eleventh soldier” challenges the security logic that follows from this assessment; Wald’s response insists that the threat cannot be answered by abandoning defense.

The question after Mija’s death

The article’s argument also resonates with the history of Mija, Wald’s only son. Wald recalls that Shmaltiel Abravanel opposed the war and urged young people on both sides to lay down their arms, while Wald himself had argued that the war was a sacred duty. He acknowledges that he helped educate Mija in the tradition of Jewish defenders and that the language of answering a call helped send his son to fight. Mija died in the Jerusalem mountains on the night of April 2.

Wald’s later account of Ben-Gurion’s case for self-reliance does not erase this cost. He recalls Mija practicing with a weapon in the forest at Tel Arza, and remembers that, after his son’s death, an unasked question from Abravanel—whether it had all been worth it—continued to wound him. Against that history, the soldier who might be sent next is not an abstract figure. Shmuel’s parable raises the prospect that no victory settles the danger, while Wald’s answer insists that defense remains unavoidable. The expression holds those positions together without resolving them: force may be necessary, but it cannot promise an end to conflict or make its losses self-evidently worthwhile.