In fact, no one but Rabin’s closest confidants knew that the chief of staff had suffered a brief nervous breakdown—acute anxiety, his doctor called it. Israel was facing not just a war but a war of survival, the end of the Jewish dream of sovereignty, and the responsibility had overwhelmed Rabin. Tranquilized, rested, he returned to active duty.
THE RADIO CONSTANTLY played the newest hit, “Jerusalem of Gold.” Written by Naomi Shemer, the country’s greatest songwriter, it had been first sung at the annual Hebrew song festival on Independence Day by an unknown nineteen-year-old soldier named Shuli Natan. Her harplike voice was at once quivering and strong, and a shiver seemed to go through the whole country. Israelis had suppressed their longing for the missing parts of Jerusalem, but now they were singing along with Shuli Natan, mourning their divided capital: “The city that sits in solitude / and in its heart a wall.”
The paratroopers in the orchards sang the refrain over and over: “Jerusalem of gold, and of copper and of light / I am a harp for all your songs.”
Something is happening, thought Yoel Bin-Nun. On the very day that Rabbi Zvi Yehudah had cried out for the missing places of Judea and Samaria, Shuli Natan awakened the nation’s suppressed anguish for the Old City of Jerusalem. What is God preparing us for?
THE MORALE PROBLEM OF CORPORAL UDI ADIV
IN THE HUMID, INSOMNIAC EVENING, Avital Geva joined his men quietly singing around a campfire. Avital found the singing far preferable to the endless arguments about war strategies and government policy. He didn’t believe the country faced destruction, but he feared that the coming war would be Israel’s hardest since 1948, and he expected the fighting to last for months. At best, he thought, the IDF would fight the Arabs to a draw.
Avital noted with concern that one corporal in Company D refused to join the campfire. His name was Udi Adiv, and he was from Gan Shmuel, a kibbutz just down the road from Ein Shemer. Udi seemed to have a morale problem. Some of the soldiers complained to Avital that Udi was denouncing what he called “Israel’s plans for an imperialist war against Nasser.”
Avital was wary of provoking a fight with someone from Gan Shmuel. Though Gan Shmuel and Ein Shemer were both part of the Hashomer Hatzair movement, and were located mere minutes apart, the two kibbutzim shunned each other. The rift had begun decades earlier, when several dozen members of Ein Shemer were expelled over some now-obscure ideological argument and moved a few kilometers away to Gan Shmuel. The grudge had never been forgiven. In Gan Shmuel, they referred to their garbage bins as Ein Shemers. In Ein Shemer, they mockingly called the members of Gan Shmuel —a far more prosperous kibbutz than theirs—Boazites, after the wealthy farmer of the book of Ruth. Even now, the two kibbutzim maintained separate schools. That’s all I need, thought Avital, to reopen this stupid feud between Ein Shemer and Gan Shmuel.
Udi Adiv sat in his tent, wondering what he was doing here. He tried to warn his fellow reservists: We’re being led to the slaughter for the glory of the generals! There is no “threat to Jewish survival,” Israel is in no danger from the Arab world. Nasser is a revolutionary whom progressive Israelis should embrace.
Fellow kibbutzniks berated him: Did “the generals” invent Nasser’s threats and the Arab crowds marching with genocidal banners? What was missing in Udi’s DNA that he’d lost his most basic Jewish instincts for survival? Only Udi’s tentmate, Rami, an aspiring actor, reacted to his politics with equanimity. Udi had brought with him a book of Greek tragedies, and Rami tried to distract him by discussing the plays.
“NEXT WEEK IN JERUSALEM”
ON SHABBAT AFTERNOON, in the waning light, Yoel Bin-Nun and his fellow religious soldiers sat outside the large tent that functioned as a synagogue. They ate cold canned goulash and sang songs of longing for a redeemed world.
With evening, the end of Shabbat merged into the holiday of Lag Ba’Omer and melancholy gave way to rousing song. “Bar Yochai, you are annointed, you are blessed,” the young men sang, celebrating the ancient mystic who according to legend hid in a cave from the Romans, subsisting on water and carob pods, and who died on Lag Ba’Omer.
They formed a line. Yoel Bin-Nun held the shoulder of the man before him. They danced through the tent area and came to a clearing, a makeshift parking lot. Secular soldiers stood on the hoods of jeeps and clapped along. “Next year in Jerusalem,” the religious soldiers sang. “Next week in Jerusalem!” a Mercaz student called out, and the dancers adopted the new lyric. “Next week in Jerusalem—in rebuilt Jerusalem!”
Though ordinarily not an enthusiastic dancer, Yoel was deeply moved by this outbreak of defiant joy. Finally, he thought, a moment of inspiration.
Avital Geva watched the dancers and wondered: How do they manage to go so quickly from anxiety to ecstasy? There was something forced about it, he felt. Untrustworthy.
BOOSTING MORALE
MOTTA GUR STOOD on the hood of a truck, illumined by a spotlight. It was night, and otherwise totally dark in the orchards. Motta had assembled the reservists for a talk, and after a week here, with Arab threats intensifying and no clear government policy in sight, they were restless and demoralized.
“It’s clear to me,” said Motta, “that no matter what I say, you’ll continue to complain. . . . So go ahead and slander—the government, the army, the commanders, everything.”
Laughter.
“Eisenhower writes that a soldier who doesn’t complain isn’t a soldier. So be soldiers, and complain. . . . Argue, analyze, curse, [bemoan] the home and the fields and the studies you’ve left behind. Hit as hard as you like. Just keep smiling . . .
“If we will be summoned to battle, we will go. If we will be sent home, we will go too. We are, after all, disciplined paratroopers.”
OVER THE WEEKEND, parents and wives and girlfriends appeared at the orchards. Guards halfheartedly tried to prevent them from entering, then gave up. The paths through the citrus groves filled with picnickers.
THE PLAGUE OF GNATS drawn by piles of excrement was making life in the orchards unbearable. On May 31, the tent camp was moved to a clearing in a forest of cypresses and pines. The paratroopers began to train in house-to-house combat in an abandoned British army base. But they didn’t fire their guns: the hard-pressed IDF was saving its bullets for the war.
Avital, singing, led his men on all-day hikes across sand dunes and at night on navigation exercises in the hills. They passed untended wheat fields ripe for harvest, casualties of the reservist mobilization. Avital felt the pain of those abandoned fields, of farmers who had sown but not reaped.
JORDAN JOINED THE Egyptian-Syrian military alliance. Israel was now facing a three-front war.
In Jerusalem, a national unity government formed. For the first time, an Israeli coalition included the right-wing party Herut (Freedom), headed by Menachem Begin, whom former prime minister David Ben-Gurion had refused to even refer to by name. The bitter feud between Zionism’s left and right was suspended.
Yoel Bin-Nun was ecstatic. “This is the first national unity government since the days of the kingdom of David and Solomon,” he said. Why had the Temple been destroyed? Not because of a failure of military or political strategy, argued Yoel, but because of a failure of brotherly love. Even as the Romans tightened their siege around Jerusalem, the Jews had turned against each other, burned the granaries of rival camps, and murdered rival leaders. And how will the Temple be rebuilt? concluded Yoel. By the merit of unconditional love of Jew for Jew.
On guard duty, around the campfire, Yoel spoke to secular soldiers about Israel’s spiritual destiny. Some shunned him as a “missionary,” others argued about why a secular state needed religious laws. One kibbutznik asked Yoel to teach him the writings of Rabbi Kook. They studied a passage about the rise and fall of religion, which begins with a vital insight, then decays in institutional constriction—a necessary stage, wrote Rabbi Kook, to purify and renew faith. “Just like dialectical materialism,” the kibbutznik enthused. “Dialectical idealism,” Yoel correcte
d.
When a friend spoke about “religious paratroopers,” Yoel interrupted him. “There are no religious paratroopers or secular paratroopers,” he said. “Only Israeli paratroopers.”
JERUSALEM, JUST IN CASE
THE BRIGADE’S BATTLE PLANS were nearly complete. “I can do a doctorate on El Arish,” said Arik Achmon.
But Motta was uneasy. Now that King Hussein had signed a military pact with Nasser, a Jordanian attack on Jewish Jerusalem couldn’t be ruled out. At the general staff there was concern the Jordanians would attack Mount Scopus, the only outpost in East Jerusalem that Israel had managed to retain after the 1948 war. Every two weeks a convoy of Israeli soldiers was escorted by the UN through Jordanian lines to Mount Scopus. The soldiers were disguised as police, because the armistice agreement forbade an Israeli military presence there. Motta feared that the Jordanians might try to attack the convoy—the next one was scheduled for the coming week—and then overrun the outpost.
“I don’t want to be caught with my pants down,” Motta said.
Motta and Arik drove to Jerusalem in Motta’s “Kaiser,” a big cranky car temporarily requisitioned by the IDF. On the road leading up from the coastal plain, the Kaiser repeatedly stalled.
Not even the brightness of a late spring day could dispel the sadness of the divided city. West Jerusalem’s main street, Jaffa Road, ended abruptly in barbed wire, just before the Old City walls. The housing projects along the border had little windows and sliding metal shutters to protect against snipers.
Motta and Arik drove into an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood. A sign, posted beside a line of laundry, read, Danger! Frontier Ahead. They stopped on the edge of a slope leading down into no-man’s-land, a tangle of barbed wire and minefields several hundred meters long. On the Jordanian side were trenches and concrete bunkers; on the Israeli side, sandbag emplacements.
Crouching behind sandbags, Motta devised a plan for defending the IDF convoy to Mount Scopus. He pointed in the direction of a bend in the road sloping up toward the mount: that’s where the convoy is likely to be attacked. It was precisely the point where a convoy heading toward Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus had been ambushed by Arab fighters in the 1948 war; seventy-nine people, mostly doctors and nurses, had been massacred. One battalion, said Motta, would head straight for the bend, while the brigade’s other two battalions would seize the high ground overlooking the area, warding off Jordanian reinforcements. “A quick operation,” he said.
Motta instructed Arik to present him with a preliminary intelligence report on Jerusalem. “It’s a full night’s work,” Arik noted, a distraction from El Arish.
“Just do it,” said Motta.
Arik drove to the command headquarters in charge of the central front, which included Jerusalem, and asked for intelligence assessments, maps, aerial photographs of Mount Scopus. You’re too late, he was told; intelligence officers from other brigades have taken the best material. Arik, of course, knew someone at headquarters, an intelligence officer who confided that there was other material. “It’s forbidden to remove this from here,” the officer said, handing him two massive folders bound by straps and containing the originals of the most sensitive documents on Jerusalem. “Dir balak”—Be careful—he warned in Arabic, “I can go to jail for this. Have it back here first thing tomorrow morning, before anyone notices it’s missing.” “Al a’rasi,” Arik reassured him, responding in Arabic—“On my head.”
That evening, Arik and his staff sifted through the folders. The material was first-rate: there were street maps, aerial photographs revealing Jordanian bunkers and sandbag positions. By midnight Arik had completed a preliminary intelligence summary. If we have to fight in Jerusalem, he told his men, at least we won’t be going in entirely cold. To himself he added, The difference between what I know about El Arish and what I know about Jerusalem is on a scale of a hundred to one.
SHABBAT MORNING, JUNE 3. In the tent synagogue there was celebration: a medic named Yossi Yochai was to be married in the coming week. Yossi was summoned to bless the Torah. Reciting the blessing—“Who has chosen us from all the nations and given us His Torah”—the groom’s voice caught.
The soldiers showered Yossi with candies and peanuts and sunflower seeds, gathered from gift packages sent by schoolchildren. One big young man named Yisrael Diamant lifted Yossi onto his shoulders and carried him outside. The others followed, dancing and singing: “The rejoicing of bride and groom will be heard in the Judean hills and in the outskirts of Jerusalem.”
Chapter 5
NO-MAN’S-LAND
A CHANGE IN PLAN
THE WAR IS about to begin,” Motta said to Arik.
It was Sunday morning, June 4. “Run over to southern command,” Motta instructed, “for a final update on El Arish.”
Arik drove two hours south to Beersheba. The IDF, he learned, was about to launch a preemptive strike against Egypt, and the paratroopers were being sent to Tel Nof, the air force base from where they would be flown to Sinai. Busy with briefings, Arik forgot about the intelligence material on Jerusalem he’d promised to return.
For the third time in less than two weeks, the 55th moved camp. The men loaded mortars and machine guns and crates of bullets and C-rations onto buses. They relocated to a grove of eucalyptus trees located between Tel Nof and Givat Brenner, Arik Achmon’s childhood kibbutz. Arik couldn’t see the kibbutz, whose lights were blacked out. All these years he’d tried to wipe Givat Brenner from his memory. But the loss of his childhood home remained his deepest grief.
The men were told to dig foxholes, but many found the earth too hard and so simply lay on the ground for a few hours of restless sleep. Some smoked and paced. One young man broke out laughing for no apparent reason.
“Moisheleh,” Arik said to Stempel-Peles with a touch of envy, “how do you feel about being in the first helicopter?”
Moisheleh was scheduled to lead the team that would land near El Arish and mark the area for the parachute drop.
“Here’s how I see it,” said Moisheleh. “The helicopter lands, I step out, take a piss, and then the war begins.”
The brigade’s officers were told to lecture their men about gas warfare. Just in case: the Egyptian army had used poison gas in its war in Yemen. Arik didn’t bother; who had time for such nonsense?
07:10, MONDAY, JUNE 5. Dozens of Mirages and Mystères began taking off from Tel Nof and heading south. The planes were flying so low over the trees that Yoel Bin-Nun thought he could lift his hand and touch their wings.
For the next ninety minutes, planes took off and returned and took off again.
Exhausted, energized, paratroopers gathered around transistor radios and heard the laconic announcement by the IDF spokesman: Hostilities have broken out on the southern front. There was no hint that Israeli planes had almost entirely destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground, and that the war in the south had just been decided.
Some paratroopers tuned into Radio Cairo’s Hebrew broadcast. It urged Israelis to raise white flags before the conquering Egyptian army, which in a few hours would reach Tel Aviv.
On Israel Radio, the military commentator noted that all Israelis, whether or not they normally prayed, were united in the prayer that the “Guardian of Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.”
Motta and Arik were summoned to a briefing in Tel Nof. Ground forces were advancing into Gaza and Sinai faster than expected, they were told. El Arish might well be conquered before the paratroopers even got there. The 55th was no longer needed in Sinai. Instead, the brigade’s three battalions would be separated: one would be dispatched to protect Lod Airport, while the other two would await a new assignment.
Arik was devastated. Nineteen fifty-six all over again, only worse—
As they left the briefing, Motta said quietly, “Arik, I won’t let them do it to us.”
14:00. General Uzi Narkiss, commander of the central front, summoned Motta, along with Arik, to his headquarters near Tel Aviv
. The paratroopers, said Narkiss, were being sent to Jerusalem.
A few hours earlier, Narkiss explained, the Jordanian army had opened indiscriminate fire on the Jewish neighborhoods of West Jerusalem. Hundreds of apartments had been hit; dozens were wounded. The Israeli government had sent a message to Jordan’s King Hussein: Stay out of the war, and we won’t attack. Hussein ignored the offer.
Narkiss had fought in the failed battle for the Old City of Jerusalem in 1948. Then, the poorly equipped and outnumbered defenders of the Jewish Quarter had been overwhelmed by the Jordanian Legion, which expelled the Jewish residents and destroyed the centuries-old quarter, turning synagogues into stables and latrines. Since then, Jordan had barred Israelis from praying at the Western Wall. Now, though, the Old City might be within reach again.
Your mission, Narkiss said to Motta, is to break through the formidable barriers of minefields and trenches separating East and West Jerusalem and reach the Israeli enclave on Mount Scopus. But, he added, “Be prepared to take the Old City. I hope you will erase the shame of 1948.”
Arik wasn’t interested in historical calculations. His only concern was to thwart the enemy, not to regain a stone wall where the pious once prayed. Until explicitly stated otherwise, their mission was to protect the garrison on Mount Scopus, nothing more.
Arik’s new assignment was to fine-tune the rough plan that Motta had devised two days earlier during their impulsive trip to the Jerusalem front. Within the next few hours, the 55th Brigade would be moving to Jerusalem; by early morning, they would be crossing the no-man’s-land that cut across the city. In assembling the data for an attack on El Arish, Arik had had nearly two weeks and access to the most detailed intelligence. To help formulate a battle plan for Jerusalem, he had twelve hours.
Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation Page 9
