Top Tweets for #StandWithUS

On This Day — May 28, 1948 Israel appointed a Jewish American badass as its first general in nearly 2,000 years — David “Mickey” Marcus. Marcus was a tough Brooklyn kid, a West Point graduate, and a decorated U.S. Army colonel and war hero who volunteered to help the newborn Jewish state on the brink of annihilation. He had already lived a legendary life: helped take down Lucky Luciano, parachuted into Normandy with the 101st Airborne, liberated Nazi death camps, and worked on the Nuremberg trials. Then, in 1948, he walked away from a promising U.S. Army career, took the fake name “Michael Stone,” and sailed to Israel to turn the ragtag Haganah into a real army. To turn it into the IDF. See him immortalized by the great Kirk Douglas in the clip below from the 1966 movie Cast a Giant Shadow. On May 28, David Ben-Gurion gave Marcus command of the Jerusalem front. The situation was dire: 100,000 Jews in Jerusalem were under siege. The Arab Legion (with British officers) had cut the only supply road, starving the city. Food was rationed to near nothing. Water was cut off. People were eating mallow leaves and facing surrender. Marcus didn’t flinch. He helped design and build the legendary Burma Road — a desperate, hand-carved bypass through mountains and ravines under enemy fire. Convoys, jeeps pushed by hand, and even donkeys carried supplies over terrain many thought impossible. That road broke the siege and saved Jerusalem. He trained fighters, designed command structures, and brought American military know-how to men and women who had just survived the Holocaust and refused to die again. On June 10, hours before a ceasefire, Mickey Marcus was tragically killed by friendly fire — a young sentry didn’t recognize him in the dark. He was wrapped in a white sheet, walking back to his quarters. He never saw the full victory he helped make possible. Israel buried its first general with full honors. His body was returned to West Point, where his tombstone reads: “A Soldier for All Humanity.” Mickey Marcus is the ultimate “Never Again” hero: a man who had everything in America but chose to risk it all so Jews would never again be defenseless. From a Brooklyn street fighter to Israel’s first general since the Maccabees. That’s the spirit that built the Jewish state.