Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation

by Yossi Klein Halevi

  Arik felt an almost fatherly responsibility toward Meir. Arik believed he was at least partly responsible for Meir having joined the paratroopers in the first place.

  They had met in 1959. Arik was twenty-six, Meir nearly eighteen. Arik had been given time off from his duties at Netzer Sereni to work as coordinator of the youth division of the Ichud (Unity) movement, the social democratic kibbutz federation to which Netzer Sereni belonged. His job was to organize seminars and hikes, and most of all to instill enthusiasm among kibbutz youth, many of whom were showing signs of ideological apathy.

  One evening Arik drove to Mishmarot, a kibbutz on a back road behind the village of Pardes Hanna, south of Haifa and near the coast. Mishmarot, small and peripheral, was considered a problematic kibbutz, lacking ideological passion.

  Arik entered the youth club, but the dozen teenagers playing backgammon and strumming guitars ignored him. “Hevreh,” he called out, “my name is Arik, I’m from the Ichud, and I want to talk to you about some things that could be interesting for you.”

  Arik prodded them into a circle. One teenage boy with curly black hair remained sitting on a windowsill, blatantly disinterested.

  “The movement can provide a range of activities for you,” said Arik.

  “It’s all nonsense,” said the teenager on the windowsill.

  “Why nonsense?” asked Arik.

  “The ‘movement’ ”—he spoke the word with mockery—“is interested in itself, not in us.”

  “Of course the movement has its own interests,” said Arik. “But that doesn’t negate your interests.”

  “And what will happen if we don’t get involved; will the movement throw us out?”

  Arik detected not just contempt but a legitimate anger at the rigidity of the kibbutz.

  “What’s your name?” asked Arik.

  “Meir,” he said.

  “Listen, Meir, no one is going to throw you out of the movement. But you’d be missing out on a chance to connect with young people from other kibbutzim in activities you would enjoy and that would help you grow.”

  “Look, Arik, we’re a small kibbutz, nothing much happens here. It’s a shame for you to waste your time with us.”

  Afterward Arik approached Meir.

  “Tell me, Meir, you’re in twelfth grade, right? What are your plans for next year?”

  “Not sure,” Meir said.

  “A guy like you, kibbutznik, strong spirit, you belong among us in the paratroopers.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  ARIK WALKED OVER to the area where the men of the 28th Battalion had laid their sleeping bags and found Meir.

  “The hevreh want you to sing the song you wrote about Jerusalem,” said Arik.

  “There’s no way,” Meir said. “It’s just something I wrote, stam. I just want to forget the war and get out of here.”

  “Show me the song, Meir.”

  Meir retrieved a sheet from his shirt pocket. Arik read the lyrics, written in small script.

  “Meir?” said Arik. “You have to do this. If you refuse, I’ll order you to sing.”

  “Singing can’t be ordered.”

  “Meir, with everything we’ve been through—you owe it to your friends.”

  Meir nodded.

  TOWARD SUNSET, THE MEN of the 55th Brigade gathered in the amphitheater. In the distance rose the desert hills of the West Bank and the Dead Sea beyond: the new landscape of Israel.

  The heroes of Jerusalem wanted nothing more than to go home. Not even performances by the country’s leading singers could rouse them. One offered an old song of longing for Zion, “From the peak of Mount Scopus, I offer you peace, Jerusalem.” Few sang along or even bothered to applaud. Arik nodded off.

  The MC, an actress named Rivka Michaeli, announced, “There is a soldier here—” Someone whispered into her ear. “Meir Ariel, who is invited to come to the stage.”

  “Me-ir! Me-ir!” friends chanted, clapping rhythmically.

  Meir ascended to the stage. One of the performers, Nehama Hendel, played on her guitar the opening chords of “Jerusalem of Gold.” His voice surprisingly strong, enunciating each word, Meir began, “In your darkness, Jerusalem, we found a loving heart / when we came to expand your borders and disperse a foe / Dawn abruptly rose / not yet whitened and already red.”

  When he came to the refrain—“Jerusalem of iron, and of lead and of blackness / to your walls we summoned freedom”—some in the audience joined in.

  By the next refrain, everyone seemed to be singing. When Meir ended—“Jerusalem of gold / and of lead and of dream / may peace dwell forever between your walls”—the audience continued to sing. Arik, deeply moved by the unexpected power of Meir’s presence, sang too.

  As the crowd began to disperse, Rivka Michaeli approached Meir and asked him to sing again for her tape recorder. Some of Meir’s friends stayed behind and sang along on the refrain.

  The recording was broadcast next morning on the radio. In those three minutes, Meir Ariel became a hero of Israel.

  VICTORS, MOURNERS

  THE THREE BATTALIONS of the 55th Brigade assembled on the Temple Mount for a victory lineup. Only a week earlier they had been boarding buses ascending in a slow convoy to Jerusalem.

  They gathered in the area between the Dome of the Rock and the silver-domed Al-Aqsa Mosque. The ceremony was delayed for the wounded. Motta had given the order that those who could be moved from their hospital beds should be brought to the ceremony.

  Yoel Bin-Nun stood at the foot of the steps leading up to the Dome of the Rock. Any farther, and he risked treading on the area of the Holy of Holies.

  “Why aren’t you going up?” a kibbutznik asked him.

  “This is the area of the Temple,” Yoel explained. “A victory lineup could have been done at the Wall. I see the bulldozers have already cleared the area,” he added sarcastically.

  “But Yoel, isn’t the Temple Mount the essence?”

  Yoel savored the irony: here was a kibbutznik from Hashomer Hatzair berating a Kookian for seemingly underplaying the centrality of the Temple Mount. Kibbutzniks and Kookniks together: that’s what made the victory possible.

  In two days, Israel would be celebrating the holiday of Shavuot, marking the giving of the Torah at Sinai. For Yoel, it was also the festival of Jewish unity: the Torah was received by the whole people of Israel, functioning like a single body with one heart. And not since Sinai had the Jews been as united as they were in these last weeks. The spiritual calculus was self-evident: disunity brings destruction; unity, redemption.

  The midday sun was strong, and men began removing their helmets. One dropped to the stone ground, then another, until there was a volley of crashing helmets. To Hanan Porat, it seemed a spontaneous ceremony marking the end of the war, perhaps the end of all war.

  Accompanied by nurses, the wounded arrived, in casts and on wheelchairs. Avital Geva wasn’t among them: he was recovering from one operation and awaiting the next.

  The intact rushed over to the wounded. There were hugs, anxious inquiries about missing friends.

  Then the men lined up by battalion and faced the Dome of the Rock. Motta, Stempel, and Uzi Narkiss stood before the soldiers. Motta had asked Arik to join them, but he preferred to stand with his staff.

  I would gladly have forgone this victory, thought Arik, had it not been forced on us.

  Motta addressed his men: “Many Jews risked their lives, throughout our long history, to come to Jerusalem and live in it. Innumerable songs expressed the deep longing. . . . In the War of Independence, great efforts were made to return to the nation its heart—the Old City and the Western Wall.

  “To you fell the great honor of completing the circle, to return to the nation its capital and the center of its holiness.

  “Many paratroopers, including our closest friends, the most veteran and the best among us, fell in the difficult battle. It was a merciless battle, in which you functioned as a body that pushes aside every
thing in its way without noting its wounds. You didn’t complain. . . . Instead, you aspired only forward. . . .

  “Jerusalem is yours—forever.”

  THE BRIGADE WAS discharged, but the officers stayed on for debriefings and hospital visits. Motta asked Arik to remain in uniform for another three months, until the fall semester at university, to prepare the final report on the battle for Jerusalem. Arik had had other plans. He needed to make up exams. And he intended to marry Yehudit Hazan. But he couldn’t say no to Motta.

  That night, the two men shared a hotel room. After showering, they sat in their underwear, on the edge of their beds. “Tell me who,” said Motta.

  Until then, Motta hadn’t had a complete list of the brigade’s dead. Arik began reciting from memory the names of their fallen friends, over twenty of the brigade’s veterans alone, with whom they’d served since the mid-1950s.

  Motta broke out in loud sobs.

  Arik couldn’t remember the last time he had wept; that was a privilege denied him. He bowed his head, averting his gaze to give Motta an approximation of privacy, and waited until the weeping passed.

  PART TWO

  THE SEVENTH DAY

  (1967–1973)

  Chapter 8

  THE SUMMER OF MERCAZ

  LIKE DREAMERS

  THE PREDAWN STREETS of West Jerusalem filled with pilgrims. It was the holiday of Shavuot, Pentecost, celebrating revelation. The war had ended five days earlier, and all of Jewish Jerusalem seemed to be moving east. Many too had come from around the country, to be part of the first holiday at the Wall since its liberation—and the first mass pilgrimage of Jews to the area of the Temple Mount since Titus burned the Temple 1,900 years earlier. There were women wheeling baby carriages and grandmothers in kerchiefs and kibbutzniks in floppy hats and Orthodox men in prayer shawls and Hasidic fur hats and black fedoras and berets and knitted kippot. It was impossible, but here they were, sovereign again in Jerusalem, just as Jews had always prayed for and believed would happen. Strangers smiled at each other: We are the ones who made it to the end of the story.

  Ada, on vigil in Avital’s hospital room, heard movement from the street. Through the arched window she saw the vast crowds heading toward the Old City. “There are thousands of people outside,” she told Avital.

  “Go join them,” he urged.

  Everyone seemed to be moving in slow motion. Ada felt as if she were floating. An Israeli crowd could be as edgy as a food line in a refugee camp, yet here there was no pushing, no concern that someone was cutting ahead or not moving quickly enough. They are all my family, she thought; I love them just for being Jews.

  As the crowds crossed what had been no-man’s-land, soldiers urged pilgrims to remain on the road: not all the mines had been cleared. Passersby reached out to shake hands with soldiers or simply to touch them, as if they had personally liberated the Wall.

  From behind the shutters of Arab houses, eyes silently followed the procession.

  Jaffa Gate and the Arab market just beyond were closed by the army, precaution against terrorist attack. The crowds were directed onto the winding road around the Old City wall.

  Despite intense pain in his feet, Rabbi Zvi Yehudah walked with determined steps. There was no traffic and people filled the streets, but the rabbi insisted on remaining on the sidewalk, deferring to the holy soldiers of Israel. Just in case a jeep needs to get through, he explained to the young men crowding around him.

  Only a month earlier, they had heard him lament the loss of Judea and Samaria. On Independence Day, the precise moment when Nasser set in motion the Six-Day War, he had revealed his grief for the broken land. Since then, his students had served in units that had taken Hebron and Jericho and Nablus—the very places whose names he had cried out that night.

  “How did our rabbi know?” asked a student.

  “I didn’t prepare a speech,” Rabbi Zvi Yehudah replied. “I was spoken through.”

  THE SON RETURNS

  HANAN PORAT HITCHED a ride on an army jeep heading south, into Judea, the West Bank. Since spotting Rabbi Zvi Yehudah riding by as the paratroopers moved toward the Old City, Hanan had been overwhelmed by wonder. He rode now through the deserted streets of Bethlehem, just past Jerusalem; torn white sheets of surrender hung from antennas and arched windows. The one-and-a-half-lane road curved upward. Then he spotted a strip of asphalt leading into terraced hills. “Here,” Hanan called to the driver and leaped from the jeep.

  He had been four years old when he last saw these hills. Then, on a rainy winter night, he and several dozen other children, stiff in layers of wool clothing, knitted caps covering their ears, had been lifted into an armored car and squeezed onto benches. The heat was stifling. The mothers boarded an open truck, packed with mattresses and pots. Through a crack in the roof of the armored car fathers peered into the darkness for one last glimpse of their children.

  It was late 1947, and their kibbutz, Kfar Etzion, along with three other kibbutzim in the hills between Jerusalem and Hebron known as the Etzion Bloc, was under siege. The Jewish state was about to be established, and Arab villagers, backed by the Jordanian Legion, were intensifying their attacks. Removing the children and mothers from Kfar Etzion was a last-minute rescue mission. They were driven that night to a monastery in Jerusalem and moved into the basement. Each family’s space was defined by a thin partition. Hanan’s father, the kibbutz’s military liaison, happened to be in Jerusalem, helping organize futile rescue operations for the Etzion Bloc.

  On May 13, 1948, the mothers and children gathered around a shortwave radio, as they did every evening, to hear reports from Kfar Etzion—Malka, “queen,” in military code. The voice of Kfar Etzion’s commander addressed the wives and children: “Our spirits are strong. You too must be strong.” Then they heard popping noises, followed by a long pause. And then another voice: “Malka nafla”—“Malka has fallen.”

  In the basement, total silence. Then wailing and screams. One woman tried to drink a jerry can filled with kerosene, but was stopped by others. Hanan and his friends were quickly dispatched to the courtyard.

  Only afterward did the families learn what had happened that day. In the morning, armored cars of the Jordanian army had broken through the defenses of Kfar Etzion. Into the breach came hundreds of armed men from the surrounding villages. The eighty surviving defenders raised a white flag. And then a machine gun opened fire. The few who escaped into a bunker were killed by grenades.

  In an instant, all the children in the basement had become fatherless. Except, that is, for Hanan and his younger twin siblings, and a few other lucky children whose fathers happened to be outside Kfar Etzion when the siege closed in.

  The day after the massacre, David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the state. Meanwhile, the defenders of the three remaining kibbutzim in the Etzion Bloc surrendered to the Jordanian army, and were taken prisoner to Jordan. After the war, the eve of Independence Day was declared Memorial Day for Israel’s fallen, partly in memory of the fallen of Kfar Etzion.

  The refugees of Kfar Etzion created an urban kibbutz in exile. They moved to Jaffa—into Arab houses built around a courtyard and abandoned by their residents during the war. All earnings were shared. Grief too was managed communally: children with fathers were cautioned by their parents not to say the word abba in the presence of children without fathers. In school, the children of Kfar Etzion formed a pack, excluding outsiders from their games; on the school bus they acted so wildly that the other children didn’t want to ride with them. The Etzion kids wore their own private uniform—khaki pants, work boots, and floppy hat—to school: kibbutzniks against the city.

  Hanan assured his friends with a kind of mystical certainty that their exile from Kfar Etzion was temporary, that one day soon they would return. He led them on endurance tests as preparation for that day, leaping from roof to roof and walking barefoot on thorns.

  The widows began to remarry; the Jaffa kibbutz was fraying. Finally, one night,
after putting the children to bed in their communal rooms, the parents met to vote on dismantling the kibbutz. The children, expert at discovering the secrets of the grown-ups, sensed threat. Stepping quietly to evade the night watchman, they walked single file across the courtyard and slipped into a room adjacent to the dining room where the meeting was being held. There they eavesdropped on the discussion. This is no way to raise children, they heard one of the widows say. Unless we separate them, agreed another, they’ll be beyond control. As the members voted to disband, Hanan and his friends, barefoot in pajamas, pressed together in the dark and wept.

  The families went their separate ways. Some joined existing kibbutzim; some, like Hanan’s family, became private farmers. But the children remained an emotional collective. Every summer they attended their own camp, where the bunks and play areas were named after places in Kfar Etzion—the Hill of Boulders, the Grove of the Song of Songs. One of their favorite games was to recapture Kfar Etzion, sons assuming the names of fallen fathers. “To guard the traditions of the fathers,” they sang, “and not allow the flame to die / to prepare ourselves for the future / and keep together, bind our tie.” Hanan took that as a personal vow.

  On Memorial Day, they gathered with their families in the national military cemetery on Mount Herzl, at the mass grave of the defenders of Kfar Etzion—near the memorial for Enzo Sereni and his fellow parachutists who were killed in Europe during World War II and whose bodies were never retrieved. Then the mourners proceeded to the southern edge of Jerusalem, on the border of Bethlehem, and gazed toward the area of what had once been Kfar Etzion. All that was visible was a lone oak tree, said to be seven hundred years old, and that became their marker and symbol.

  Among the children of Kfar Etzion, none took on its collective identity as fiercely, as totally, as did Hanan. Perhaps that was partly because his life was defined not only by the massacre but by his family’s escape. Only by submerging his being into the identity of the group could he erase the shame of exclusion from its inner circle of mourning. He thought often of that moment in the monastery basement when the voice over the radio announced, “Malka has fallen,” and his friends became fatherless. But Hanan’s loss was, in its way, also acute: he had forfeited his right to a separate self.