skill with mortars brought him to the attention of the Israeli High Command, and he was instrumental in the breaking of the siege of Jerusalem, which had been besieged by the Jordanians almost since the beginning of the war. Shortly afterwards, he became the commander of the 7th Brigade, the country's best-known armored brigade. Dunkelman and the 7th Brigade were initially sent to Galilee to halt the advance of the Syrians. Under his command, the 7th Brigade stopped the Syrian advance and recaptured much of upper western Galilee. In his autobiography, called Dual Allegiance, Dunkelman tells the story of how, between July 8 and 18, 1948 during Operation Dekel, he led the 7th Brigade and its supporting units as it moved to capture the town of Nazareth. Nazareth surrendered after little more than token resistance. The Palestinians of Nazareth were overwhelmingly Christian. The Palestinian Christians of Nazareth had little interest in being incorporated into a Muslim state, whether under the leadership of King Abdullah I of Jordan, who wanted Palestine for himself, or of Muhammad Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and would-be future Palestinian leader, who was supported by King Farouk of Egypt and King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. The surrender was formalized in a written agreement, where the town leaders accepted to cease hostilities in return for solemn promises from the Israeli officers, including Dunkelman, that no harm would come to the Palestinian civilians of the town. Shortly after the capture, Dunkelman received orders from General Chaim Laskov to expel the Palestinian civilian population from the town, which he refused to carry out. Israeli journalist and translator Peretz Kidron, with whom Dunkelman collaborated in writing Dual Allegiance, reproduced his record of Dunkelman's account of the capture of Nazareth in a book chapter entitled "Truth Whereby Nations Live": "[less than a day later] Haim Laskov [came] to me with astounding orders: Nazareth's civilian population was to be evacuated! I was shocked and horrified. I told him I would do nothing of the sort—in view of our promises to safeguard the city's people, such a move would be both superfluous and harmful. I reminded him that scarcely a day earlier, he and I, as representatives of the Israeli army, had signed the surrender document in which we solemnly pledged to do nothing to harm the city or its population. When Haim saw that I refused to obey the