“You should be thrown out of the army,” the base commander said to the squad leader at the debriefing. Turning to Arik and his friends, he continued, “It’s a shame that this is the example you’ve gotten of an IDF commander. Your mission was to kill anyone who broke curfew. Instead, you fled.”
Two nights later, Arik’s unit hiked up Mount Gilboa, on the Israeli side of the northernmost border with the West Bank. They waited through the night. Just before dawn, they heard sheep. Then a shepherd’s voice. Perhaps five hundred meters away, within range. Arik pointed his light machine gun down the slope and emptied four cartridges. It was still too dark to see whether he had hit the shepherd, but Arik was a good shot, and he assumed that he did.
THE CURFEW POLICY wasn’t working. A young couple was shot dead in a farming community, a girl was murdered by seven terrorists in her home in Jerusalem.
Arik was sent for officers’ training. His commanders noted his steadiness under pressure, his insistence on accurate reporting, even when that reflected poorly on his performance. He was named an outstanding graduate, pinned in a ceremony by the IDF chief of staff. A natural soldier: as if Arik, born in the portentious year of 1933, had intuited his responsibility to undo Jewish helplessness.
In the fall of 1953, toward the end of Arik’s service, Commando Unit 101 was formed by a twenty-five-year-old major named Ariel Sharon. At a time when three out of four of the army’s retaliatory missions were failing, Unit 101 intended to operate with a spirit of mad daring. Sharon drove across the country handpicking 101’s members from kibbutzim and private farms, as if only men who worked the land were able to defend it. The new unit’s missions almost always succeeded. On incursions into the West Bank and Gaza, its members ambushed Palestinian raiding parties and blew up houses in villages that assisted terrorists. One night, three 101 commandos slipped into a Gaza refugee camp, dynamited a terrorist headquarters, and shot their way out against hundreds of armed opponents. Take the war into enemy territory, insisted Sharon: the border was permeable in both directions. One unit member took friends on hikes into Jordan and Syria, a native son’s revolt against siege. For the Jewish immigrants crowding into Israel’s uncertain refuge, 101 confirmed Zionism’s instinct: if you realigned the people of Israel with the land of Israel, the ancient archetypes would reemerge.
Arik, now an instructor at officers’ school, watched 101’s war with longing. It wasn’t only the glory he was missing but a chance to prove his worth as a soldier. What was he doing training cadets when the guys were out on nightly raids, establishing Israel’s deterrence? Joining 101 was by invitation only; unit members voted on each candidate. Many of the unit’s members were Arik’s friends. They sent word to him: What are you waiting for?
But when Arik asked the kibbutz movement for permission to extend his army service and join 101, he was told to demobilize. Kibbutz Givat Brenner had formally split, and its several hundred Mapainiks, including Arik’s parents and three siblings, had found a new home in a kibbutz called Netzer Sereni—literally, “Sereni’s young shoot”—named for Arik’s childhood hero. The kibbutz had been founded by Holocaust survivors in their twenties, and the survivors and the Givat Brenner expatriates were struggling to create a coherent society. The movement needed Arik.
Demobilized with the rank of lieutenant, Arik reluctantly returned his gun and kitbag, packed all his belongings into a small knapsack, and hitched to Netzer Sereni.
KIBBUTZ BUCHENWALD
WITH ITS PALM TREES and sand dunes and red-colored earth, Netzer Sereni, just south of Tel Aviv and not far from Givat Brenner, was a familiar landscape for Arik. Netzer, as members called it, was sparser and poorer than Givat Brenner. But Arik relished the challenge of building a new community. He was appointed manager of the cowshed, and introduced an automated milking system that boosted Netzer’s output to among the highest in the kibbutz movement.
Netzer’s founders had planned their kibbutz while still inmates in the Buchenwald concentration camp. Collectivized for death, they dreamed of starting a commune in the land of Israel. Weeks after liberation, they formed “Kibbutz Buchenwald” and set up a training farm in Germany.
Arik heard their stories late at night in the cowshed, where he was the only native Israeli among survivors. The details were conveyed matter-of-factly, with black humor, like the way they identified themselves as “graduates” of a particular camp. Young people exchanging stories: Arik told them about Givat Brenner, they told him about Buchenwald.
Arik had never shown the slightest interest in the Holocaust. But now, among his new friends, he needed to know every detail of the destruction: How did the system work? How had the Germans managed to deceive the Jews? At what point had the victims realized what was happening? How many guards were there at the entrance to the ghetto, in the camp? The questions weren’t emotive but technical, the probings of a one-man commission of inquiry. He was curious, fascinated. He imagined himself there, at every stage, calmly assessing his options, how to slip out, save his family, hit back.
The guys in the cowshed, Arik discovered, were the opposite of the cowardly survivor stereotype. They’d survived through not passivity but constant alertness. Even in Buchenwald they had functioned as a collective, sharing what food they could and hiding sick friends from “selections” to the gas. And then, barely a month after liberation, they were already functioning as a kibbutz. Sabon: what jerks we were—
ARIK MARRIED HIS GIRLFRIEND, Rina, daughter of a writer whose realistic novels about kibbutz life scandalized his fellow kibbutzniks. Arik and Rina celebrated in the Netzer dining room. The entire kibbutz, some three hundred people, danced the hora into the night. It was Netzer’s first wedding, a sign of hope.
Netzer was beginning to thrive. Its metal shop produced the spring cots the government distributed to new immigrants, and its factory for flatbed trucks was the only one in Israel. Lawns spread against the sand dunes. The former Brennerites, with their work experience, and the survivors, with their determination to prove themselves, made a formidable team.
Yet the more Arik got to know survivors, the more he despaired of creating a common society with them. The survivors had their own codes, and Arik could never be sure what they were really saying. They were either not speaking to each other because of some obscure insult or else ready to die for each other. A kibbutz was supposed to be a place of trust; who could build a commune with such people?
One survivor sifted through the garbage for food. Another stole bread from the dining room. When bottles of wine intended for a kibbutz party went missing, Arik suspected one of the survivors. He searched the young man’s room as the suspect hugged himself and whimpered. Finally the real culprit was found. Afterward, whenever he passed the young man he’d falsely accused, Arik averted his eyes.
When tensions emerged between the survivors and the veterans of Givat Brenner, Arik tried to mediate. But the differences in mentality were too vast. Brennerites tended to be relaxed about egalitarian infringements, like receiving outside gifts, while survivors regarded infractions as a threat to the kibbutz. As kibbutz veterans, Brennerites dismissed the socialist passion of survivors as exaggerated. What do they know about kibbutz life? Brennerites complained. Among survivors, the “experience” of the Brennerites became a bitter joke: Nu, really, what do we know about life? We don’t have their experience.
Survivors noted with resentment that when Brennerites visited Tel Aviv, they were entertained by relatives and even taken out to restaurants, while the survivors wandered Tel Aviv’s streets. Some survivors demanded a stipend for outings to the city. But no compensation could redress the gap that separated those who had come to the land of Israel before the Holocaust and those who had come afterward.
With the best intentions, survivors and Brennerites had tried to form a kibbutz together. But each group retreated into itself. The founders of Kibbutz Buchenwald had survived apocalypse and aspired to utopia; now they were being defeated by ordinary life.
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ARIK DIVIDED HIS LIFE into what he called “missions.” There was the kibbutz mission, the army mission, the family mission. In precisely that order.
Arik and Rina were drifting apart. Arik never put his arm around Rina, one friend noted; Rina would hug Arik’s friends, but not Arik. When they weren’t making arrangements, they didn’t know what to talk about.
Arik sought respite in reserve duty. As an officer, deputy commander of an infantry company, he was frequently called up for maneuvers and planning sessions. But reserve duty too wasn’t satisfying: his unit was mediocre, and in time of war unlikely to see frontline duty.
In those rare moments when Arik looked at himself objectively, he saw a cowhand, without prospects for real intellectual growth, caught in an emotionally dysfunctional marriage and kibbutz. He would quickly dispel that image. How many young people were given his responsibilities? So Netzer had problems; true service meant doing your best in whatever conditions fate had placed you. Arik intensified his commitment to the kibbutz. At age twenty-four, he was elected Netzer’s work coordinator, a position usually reserved for a veteran comrade.
In his annual report to the Netzer community, Arik wrote that the cowshed had yielded a good profit and that its cows continued to produce beyond the national average. We have much to be proud of, he noted. But then he warned: those achievements, “won at great effort, can be squandered if, heaven forbid, we allow our striving to flag.” It was, perhaps, a warning to himself.
IN AUGUST 1956 Arik received a note from Aharon Davidi, commander of the IDF’s lone paratrooper battalion, and Arik’s former commander in officers’ school. “Achmonchik,” the note affectionately began, “we’re starting a reservists’ battalion. Come.”
Unit 101 had been absorbed into the paratroopers, now the army’s elite combat force. The merger happened after 101 was implicated in a massacre. A Palestinian had thrown a grenade into a home in Yehud, near Tel Aviv, killing an immigrant mother from Turkey and her two young children. Unit 101 retaliated by blowing up dozens of houses in the West Bank village of Qibye, killing some sixty civilians hiding in their homes who had either ignored warnings to flee, not heard the warnings, or not received them at all.
The purpose of the merger was to rein in 101 while infusing the paratroopers, until then a lackluster unit, with its fighting spirit. Paratroopers so thoroughly internalized the 101 ethos that one recruit escaped a hospital bed to join his friends on a mission.
Arik went to see Davidi, whose interests included Chinese philosophy and playing mental chess against himself. They met at paratrooper headquarters in the Tel Nof air force base near Givat Brenner. The paratroopers, explained Davidi, were being expanded into a brigade: two battalions of draftees and a third battalion of reservists, to be known as the 28th. Arik was being appointed a platoon commander in Company A, 28th Battalion.
“Davidi,” said Arik, “I’m a deputy commander in another unit.”
“A technicality.”
He sent Arik to a paratrooper officer named Motta Gur. Arik recognized him: Motta had once come to Givat Brenner to instruct its teenagers in hand-to-hand combat. “Davidi says you’re one of us,” said Motta, “so you’re one of us. We’re starting a three-week parachuting course next week. Can you come?” Of course he couldn’t come: he had responsibilities on the kibbutz and at home. But Motta wasn’t really asking. Of course he would come.
He jumped from a Dakota propeller plane, without a reserve parachute. For a few precious moments, he soared above his life, exhilarated by weightlessness. Landing, he felt the earth rise up to greet him.
TERRORISTS DISPATCHED BY the Egyptian government strafed an Israeli wedding. Three children were murdered in an attack on a synagogue. Other atrocities followed. The IDF prepared its response: an invasion of Egyptian-controlled Gaza and the Sinai Desert, the second Arab-Israeli war.
Arik received two draft calls, one from his infantry unit, one from the 28th Paratroopers’ Battalion. He ignored the first and showed up for the second; technically, he was now AWOL.
The 1956 Suez War confirmed the paratroopers’ preeminence within the IDF. In the war’s most famous battle, paratroopers led by Motta Gur were caught in an ambush in the Mitla Pass near the Suez Canal, and shot their way past Egyptian forces positioned on the hills above.
Yet, maddeningly, Arik wasn’t at Mitla. Instead, his unit had been dispatched to deal with Egyptian POWs. One of Arik’s soldiers, manning a roadblock, radioed him that Egyptians were descending from the hills to surrender, “but I’m going to finish them off.” Arik replied, “If you do that, I’ll finish you off.” The Egyptians were taken prisoner.
Arik couldn’t believe his bad luck. He’d been too young for the Palmach, too obedient a kibbutznik for Unit 101. And now, finally, in the right place at the right time, he’d been cheated again of the chance to prove himself.
THE MILITARY POLICE are looking for you, Arik was told when he returned home to Netzer.
Arik reported to the commander of his former unit. “The only reason I’m not putting you on trial is because you ran off to the paratroopers,” the officer said. “But those adventures are over.”
Arik explained his dilemma to Ariel Sharon. “You’re staying with us,” said Sharon, laughing. For Sharon, Arik Achmon’s willingness to risk prison for the paratroopers was proof enough he belonged.
A week later, a plain IDF envelope arrived in Netzer Sereni: Arik Achmon was officially a paratrooper.
THE PARATROOPERS SURRENDER
ARIK WAS APPOINTED commander of Company A, 28th Battalion.
The eighty reservists of Company A included veterans of the paratroopers’ retaliation raids of the mid-1950s, like Arik’s brother-in-law Yosef Schwartz, known informally as Yoske Balagan (“Yoske the mayhem maker”), who was married to Rina’s sister. The veterans loved to tell Yoske stories, like the time he responded to cancellation of weekend leave by setting fire to a field near the base, forcing the army to send the men home.
Yoske’s buddy in Company A was Aryeh Weiner, a neighbor of Arik’s from Netzer Sereni. Weiner, whose family survived the war in Romania, had come to pre-state Israel alone at age twelve on an illegal immigrant boat running the British blockade. He claimed he’d gotten his father’s agreement to leave, thanks to a card game: If I win this hand, his father had said, you have my blessings. His father won, and Weiner set off for the Holy Land.
Weiner and Yoske wouldn’t let Arik forget that he wasn’t a veteran like them. Who does he think he is, they demanded, this guy who’s never experienced real combat? Who is he to tell us how to be paratroopers?
One day during reserve duty, when Arik was lecturing his men on battle tactics, Weiner called out, “And what do you know about that? Did you ever hear the sound of bullets over your head?”
“I’ve been with the battalion from the beginning,” Arik said.
“And I’m one of its founders,” countered Weiner.
They’re right, thought Arik. He hadn’t paid his dues.
Arik tried to win them over by proving his analytical prowess. But he came across as arrogant. “Arik knows everything,” Yoske said. “An ignoramus like me, what do I know? I barely finished second grade and grew up on the streets before the Irgun gave me a gun and the British put a bullet in my stomach. But Arik? No matter what the subject, he knows.”
For all its small torments, reserve duty provided respite from the growing silence between Arik and Rina and the growing estrangement among Netzer’s comrades. He looked forward to the nighttime jumps and sea landings and coordinated infantry and tank assaults in the desert. Often Arik would spend Shabbat, his day off on the kibbutz, touring the border with fellow officers to check the army’s state of alertness. No one asked them to do it. They simply trusted only themselves with Israel’s defense.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1963, the 28th Battalion set up a tent camp in the Carmel mountains near Haifa for a monthlong training exercise. On the first day of mobilization reservists lin
ed up before tables set up in a forest clearing and signed for equipment: Belgian surplus FN rifles, British surplus ammunition belts, American surplus sleeping bags (woolen in the Israeli summer), two-man pup tents, some with missing stakes.
There was a new addition to the battalion: a dozen religious young men in knitted kippot. Graduates of Nahal, they had received some parachuting training. But the paratrooper veterans regarded them as pretend soldiers, better suited for picking tomatoes than commando missions.
“Look at those Nahlawim,” said Yoske Balagan, using a mocking term for Nahal recruits.
“Pathetic,” agreed Weiner.
“They don’t even know how to put up a tent,” continued Yoske. “Imagine going out on a mission with these guys. They’d be more dangerous to us than to the enemy.”
Worst of all were the religious Nahlawim. What, demanded Yoske, were these dosim, these religious nerds, doing in the paratroopers?
When it came to the IDF’s religious regulations, the overwhelmingly secular paratroopers were a law unto themselves. The army insisted that all its kitchens be kosher, so that religious and secular soldiers could eat together; but the paratroopers roasted nonkosher porcupines at their campfires and routinely mixed dairy and meat.
Arik saw the religious reservists swaying together in a tight cluster of prayer and wondered, How were these dosim supposed to become paratroopers?
But the dosim surprised him. He watched them charge and crawl and parachute, and they were as good as any of the other men. If anything, they seemed even more keen on proving themselves. He watched them, too, when they wrapped themselves in phylacteries for dawn prayers, rising a half hour earlier than the others rather than ask for time off from the morning routine—the opposite of ultra-Orthodox Jews, who hid behind their faith to avoid military service altogether.
One Friday afternoon, when soldiers were sent home on leave close to sundown, Arik’s religious soldiers preferred to stay in camp rather than risk traveling on the Sabbath. They didn’t ask to be let out early, Arik noted approvingly.
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