Meir Har-Zion (Hebrew: מאיר הר ציון; February 25, 1934 – March 14, 2014) was an Israeli military commando.

The character of Ari Ben-Canaan in Leon Uris's bestselling novel Exodus is generally believed to have been based on Har-Zion.

[citation needed] When Har-Zion was three years old, the family moved to Rishpon, where his two sisters Shoshana and Rachel were born.

As a child, Har-Zion spent much of his free time watching nature and taking walks, sometimes crossing the borders of Palestine.

[4][5] Being the children of divorced parents, Meir and his younger sister Shoshana had developed a deep emotional bond with each other, and had become extremely close, often illegally crossing into neighbouring Arab countries together.

[6] During the 1950s around a dozen Israeli teenagers were killed attempting to illegally reach the ancient city of Petra, which is located 40 km inside Jordan.

[7] At the age of 18, Meir and his girlfriend managed to reach Petra at night, after three days of hiking, crossing Wadi Musa, climbing Mount Hor and bypassing an impassable waterfall.

This feat made them legendary figures amongst the Israeli youth of the time, for whom Petra represented an unreachable citadel.

Sixteen men with two jeeps, two command cars, and a reconnaissance aircraft attacked the 'Azazme Bedouin camps around the wells at al Auja.

[11] In another nighttime attack on 18–19 December 1953, two Unit 101 squads led by Har-Zion ambushed a car on the Bethlehem-Hebron road.

The following year, 26 May 1954, Har-Zion was amongst a ten-man squad from the newly formed 890th Paratroop Battalion, led by its commander Ariel Sharon, which carried out a raid near Khirbet Jinba, southwest of Hebron.

[13] On 27–28 June 1954 Har-Zion was in a seven-man squad led by Major Aharon Davidi that launched a surprise attack on an Arab Legion camp at Azzun, 13 km east of Qalqilya.

Three Legionnaires were killed as well as a farmer, Rafi'a Abdel Aziz Omar, who was stabbed to death by Har-Zion to prevent him raising the alarm.

[14] On discovering that Sergeant Jibli had been taken prisoner, Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan approved a series of hostage-taking raids.

[15] On 31 July – 1 August 1954 Har-Zion led a group of ten raiders who attacked two police near Jenin, taking one of them prisoner.

In the middle of February 1955 Har-Zion's sister, Shoshana, along with her boyfriend Oded Wegmeister from Degania Bet, both 18, were captured, abused, and murdered by Bedouin tribesmen from Wadi al-Ghar (the central section of the stream called in Hebrew Nahal Arugot, which ends at Ein Gedi)[18] while on an illegal cross-border hike across the Judean desert on Jordanian territory.

Sharett, who suspected that Dayan had advance knowledge of the raid, and who deplored such actions, noted critically in his diary: "The dark soul of the Bible has come alive among the sons of Nahalal and 'Ein Harod".

[25] During the 1967 Six-Day War, Har-Zion was called up as captain in the reserves, and despite the use of only one hand, took part alongside the paratroopers in the battle for the Old City of Jerusalem.

[26] Har-Zion served again as a captain during the Yom Kippur War, on the Golan front, rescuing injured soldiers behind enemy lines.

[29]He also gives an account of the killing of farmer Rafi'a Abdel Aziz Omar during the 27–28 June 1954 operation (details see above): ... A telephone line blocks our way.

[30]During the latter part of his life he lived in Ahuzat Shoshana "Shoshana's Farm", a 6,500-dunam farm built on a hilltop of Kawkab al-Hawa (Hebrew: הר הרוחות, "Mount of the Spirits") within the Issachar Plateau above the Jordan Valley, just north and in sight of kibbutz Beit Alfa, right next to the ruins of the Crusader's Belvoir Fortress within the Belvoir National Park (Kochav haYarden Park).

[citation needed] In 2005, in an interview he criticized his former colleague Ariel Sharon for his policy of disengagement from Gaza Strip.