 Many contemporary books about the 1948 War were published at this time : John and David Kimche , The two sides of the hill ( 1960 ) ( the more reliable ) ; Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins , O Jerusalem ( 1972 ) ( the best known internationally ) and Dan Kurzman , Genesis , 1948 ( 1970 ) ( the only one that got reviews in the Israeli press ) . With this political writing , historical research on Latrun tends to concentrate on the 1980s with the work of <unk> <unk> , " Latrun " ( in 2 volumes ) . It gives the exact number of victims , but , at the contrary of Israel Beer ( meanwhile caught as spying for USSR ) , it depicts the battle as " The hardest in the history of <unk> " , and it puts the responsibility of the defeat on Ben @-@ Gurion , who panicked about Jerusalem , and tactical errors on the brigade commanders and not on the immigrants who received ( from his point of view ) a sufficient training . 
