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

by Yossi Klein Halevi

  For all his efforts, sabra children still regarded him as not quite one of them. They delighted in devising new ways to mispronounce the name Hasenfratz. Yisrael persisted in the reinvention of himself, partly stoic, partly obtuse. Each time he was invited to a sabra classmate’s home—one family in an apartment!—he marked another small victory of homecoming.

  Yisrael was not only a refugee among sabras but a religious boy in “Red Haifa.” Sometimes the kids from the secular youth movement affiliated with the ruling social democratic party, Mapai, and whose headquarters was located on the hill above the Bnei Akiva clubhouse—how symbolic, thought Yisrael—threw rocks at the religious kids below.

  Yisrael detested Mapai. Entrenched in bureaucratic power, arrogant with entitlement, Mapai was particularly corrupt in Haifa, whose mayor even maintained his own private militia. When demonstrators to the right or left of Mapai took to the streets, members of Plugot Hapoel—longshoremen and sportsmen affiliated with the Histadrut union’s soccer and boxing clubs—violently dispersed them.

  IN HIGH SCHOOL Yisrael became a counselor in Bnei Akiva, assigned a group of children to mold into future kibbutzniks.

  Every Shabbat afternoon, he walked hundreds of steps up to the Bnei Akiva branch in the Carmel, the middle-class neighborhood at the top of the mountain. Few Orthodox Jews lived there, and its tiny Bnei Akiva branch was confined to a room in a synagogue. Yisrael led a group of ten-year-olds, teaching them songs and playing games that served his real purpose: imbuing them with a love for kibbutz.

  One especially mischievous member of Yisrael’s group was the young Yoel Bin-Nun. Yoel had little patience for organized singing and dancing, and hovered outside the circle. He seemed to disdain as mere child’s play the games that Yisrael organized, like Find the Flag, and refused to commit himself to regular attendance.

  Still, Yisrael sensed that this clever boy, articulate beyond his years, could with proper guidance become a true Bnei Akivanik. It was hard work transforming a Yoel Bin-Nun from individualist into productive member of the shevet—the tribe, as a Bnei Akiva age group was called. But no one was better suited to meet that challenge than Yisrael, who submerged his own personality into the collective.

  MEANWHILE SCHOOL WAS becoming a distraction from Yisrael’s real life. There were hikes and campfires to plan, new children to recruit. Yisrael and his friends debated the merits of starting their own kibbutz or joining an already existing one. They had no intention of completing their matriculation exams; of what use was a high school diploma for a pioneer? One of Yisrael’s friends broke up with his girlfriend because she refused to commit to life on kibbutz.

  In his junior year, Yisrael dropped out of high school and apprenticed himself to a metalworker.

  His school guidance counselor cautioned: “You’re a smart boy, don’t throw your life away.”

  “But who will build the land?” said Yisrael.

  ON A SHABBAT morning in spring 1956, thousands of religious Jews began leaving their synagogues in the middle of prayers and walked together through the streets of Haifa. Many men still wore their black-striped prayer shawls. Yisrael and other members of Bnei Akiva were up front, singing songs extolling the day of rest.

  They were protesting the municipality’s decision to open an industrial trade exhibit on Shabbat. Though they carried no protest signs—this was, after all, Shabbat—there was anger and determination in the crowd. Even for Haifa, felt Yisrael and his friends, this public violation of Shabbat went too far.

  Secular youth shouted taunts at the demonstrators. Some threw stones. From an apartment above, someone poured out a bucket of water.

  The marchers turned a corner. Straight into an ambush.

  Men with clubs rushed the crowd. They wore dark blue work shirts and khaki shorts. The mayor’s militia.

  Yisrael fell, bleeding from his head.

  When the police finally intervened, it was to disperse the demonstrators. Yisrael was dragged into a police car. He was taken to be stitched—not to a hospital, where doctors would have filed a report, but to a first aid station affiliated with Mapai’s labor union, whose doctors could be trusted to cooperate.

  Afterward Yisrael was shoved back into the car and, despite his objections to violating the Sabbath, driven to a police station and charged with disorderly conduct. When Shabbat ended, an Orthodox politician intervened and Yisrael was released, charges dropped.

  The wound that lingered was betrayal. To be beaten on Shabbat by Jewish thugs protected by Jewish police in a sovereign Jewish state—this was a violation of the most basic requirements of peoplehood. Some of Yisrael’s friends were taking off their kippot, and Yisrael too had considered that possibility. But not now. He had seen the true face of secular enlightened Israel. He would remain loyal to his tribe.

  LEADER, OUTCAST

  IN NOVEMBER 1956, just after the war in Sinai ended, Yisrael was drafted. He and his friends from Bnei Akiva went to Nahal, the unit combining military training with agricultural work. They formed a garin, a pioneering group bound for kibbutz—eighty members strong, including women, drawn from Bnei Akiva branches around the country.

  Following basic training, the group was dispatched to a religious kibbutz called Sde Eliyahu (Field of Elijah), in the Jordan Valley. In summer the Jordan Valley was virtually uninhabitable; even in the scant shade, temperatures were routinely 110 degrees. Just beyond the kibbutz’s wheat fields and date palm groves rose the hills of Jordan and Syria.

  Bnei Akiva had other plans for Yisrael. The army permitted each garin to exempt several of its most promising members from agricultural work and appoint them to the position of kommunar, a leader of one of the movement’s branches, instilling pioneering values among urban youth. Yisrael was chosen. That meant missing those crucial formative months when the garin would be transformed into a collective. But like the young Arik Achmon, Yisrael wouldn’t have imagined defying his movement’s decision. He was appointed kommunar in Haifa, back where he began.

  Yisrael worked eighteen-hour days, sleeping on the floor of the Bnei Akiva clubhouse. On Shabbat afternoons, he stood like a drill sergeant, surveying the lines of young scouts in their white shirts and blue scarves. Yisrael loved his community, its idealism and social solidarity and charitable instincts. But he was frustrated by its limitations. So long as religious Zionists continued to produce more lawyers and accountants than pioneers and commandos, they would remain an appendage to the Zionist saga.

  There was something hard in Yisrael that both commanded respect and repelled. He could be hectoring, even abusive, responding to flagging ideological fervor as though to a personal affront: You don’t deserve to call yourself a member of Bnei Akiva, you aren’t worthy to be one of us. When he was merely Yisrael Hasenfratz, he’d felt diminished by irritations, unworthy ambitions. But as Yisrael the kommunar he was Israel itself.

  ON KIBBUTZ SDE ELIYAHU, the garin was fraying.

  Sde Eliyahu was founded in the 1930s by refugees from Germany, barely out of their teens. Yekkes: diligent, thrifty, stiff. The garin members, who had come expecting a familial embrace, were treated as outsiders. While other kibbutzim routinely sent visitors and food packages to their Nahal groups when they left for military exercises, the secretariat of Sde Eliyahu had to be embarrassed into those gestures. In other kibbutzim, Nahal soldiers were allowed to drive tractors, the most fun job on kibbutz; but Sde Eliyahu didn’t trust the garin members behind the wheel.

  Whenever he could take a break from his duties in Haifa, Yisrael hitched to Sde Eliyahu. He was appalled to discover that some of his friends wanted to dismantle the garin when their military service ended.

  What about our ideology? Yisrael demanded. What about settling the land?

  Forget those big words, friends advised. It’s every man for himself.

  Yisrael keenly felt his distance from the group. In an article for the page in Sde Eliyahu’s mimeographed newsletter devoted to the garin, he sulked about its failure to maintain
contact with its members outside the kibbutz. His aggrieved and sarcastic tone grated on his friends. “You think you’re such a big shot,” one said to him in the presence of other garin members, “but you’re just a refugee from Halisa,” the poor neighborhood near the Haifa docks where Yisrael grew up. “You were never one of us.”

  No one defended him.

  YISRAEL HASENFRATZ CHANGED his name to Yisrael Harel.

  He chose the name Harel after the legendary Harel Brigade, the Palmach commando force commanded by Yitzhak Rabin during the 1948 war. Yisrael Harel: curt, to the point. A name with which to make one’s mark.

  THE GARIN’S MEMBERS voted to disband. The childhood dreams, the teenage plans, the endless hours of argument and song—how had they abandoned it all so effortlessly?

  Many of the garin’s members were now studying for the matriculation exams they had once dismissed, planning to attend university. Yisrael’s parents were pressuring him to do the same.

  In summer 1959 Yisrael moved to Sde Eliyahu for the last phase of the garin’s kibbutz service. By then, most garin members were already gone. Yisrael left just before the High Holidays. He walked out the gate and stood on the side of the road. Behind him the mountains of Jordan and Syria faded into mist. He extended his hand and pointed to the ground, to summon a ride from a passing car, and realized he was crying.

  HUNT FOR THE HIDDEN PRINCESS

  WITH THE END of his dream of life on kibbutz, Yisrael Harel was studying political science at Bar-Ilan University. It was at the wedding of a fellow student, Yosifa, in early winter 1962, that he met Sarah Weisfish.

  Yisrael noticed Sarah, who was Yosifa’s cousin, sitting at a table with her ultra-Orthodox family. Skirt to ankles, sleeves to wrist. The message: Keep away.

  Yisrael was intrigued. Sarah’s modesty only seemed to deepen her beauty—long, dark hair, alert dark eyes. Yisrael did what he had never done before: he walked over to a strange young woman and introduced himself. “My name is Yisrael,” he began. “I’m a friend of Yosifa’s.”

  “That’s fine,” said Sarah, and turned away.

  Yisrael ignored the rebuke and the stares around the table and continued making small talk. Sarah looked straight ahead.

  During a break in the dancing, Yisrael told Yosifa about his encounter with Sarah. “You don’t know what you’re dealing with,” Yosifa said. “She comes from the heart of that world. Eleven generations in Jerusalem.”

  “Tell her I want to escort her to the bus stop after the wedding,” Yisrael persisted.

  “In her world there are no escorts,” Yosifa replied.

  Yisrael couldn’t stop thinking of Sarah Weisfish. Yosifa tried to discourage him. Invite her to your home, Yisrael insisted; I’ll just happen to be there.

  If Sarah was surprised to see Yisrael, she didn’t let on. He did his best to impress her with his propriety. Though he usually wore khaki shorts, he appeared in long pants. “He dressed up for you,” Yosifa said dryly to Sarah.

  Surprisingly, Sarah agreed to walk with him. She listened without comment to his monologue about Bnei Akiva and army and kibbutz. Then she said, “There’s no chance. When I marry, it will be to a Torah scholar.”

  He waited outside her parents’ home in one of Jerusalem’s venerable ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods, long stone buildings built around courtyards with wells. When she emerged, he escorted her through the narrow alleys. “It’s not appropriate,” she said to him, but she didn’t walk away.

  Finally, Sarah’s father hid her in a relative’s home. Yisrael organized friends on a stakeout, following family members until the trail led to Sarah.

  Address in hand, Yisrael set out for Jerusalem. It was snowing. Yisrael waited outside the house until Sarah appeared. They walked through the deepening snow, in secular neighborhoods where her father and brothers wouldn’t likely search.

  At last Sarah began speaking about herself. She told of growing up in a family so poor that ten people shared one and a half rooms; when her brothers returned home from yeshiva boarding school, Sarah and her sisters would move into her grandmother’s cellar. Yet the Weisfishes, devoted to Torah study, considered themselves a kind of royalty. Remarkably, her father had also allowed her to cautiously explore the world beyond her ultra-Orthodox neighborhood. She had joined a library as a teenager, and the librarians, eager to open her mind, had plied her with novels. She was now studying biology in a junior college.

  Yisrael asked if she could envision them together. She hesitated, and then repeated what she had told him before: I must marry a Torah scholar. But in Sarah’s hesitation, Yisrael sensed the beginning of a yes.

  The next time they went for an illicit walk, Sarah’s father followed. When he caught up with them, he offered Yisrael a choice: marry Sarah or never see her again. “I want to marry her,” said Yisrael.

  Even Sarah’s father had to concede that she had fallen in love. In his months of unrequited monologues, Yisrael had managed to convey his love for Israel and the Jewish people. Though he would never be a Torah scholar, Sarah respected his idealism.

  They married that summer. Her family danced, more from obligation than joy. His friends raised bride and groom on chairs high over spinning circles. Yisrael rejoiced in his impossible victory. With enough chutzpah and determination, any border could be crossed.

  THE HARELS LIVED in a small apartment in Petach Tikva, one of the indistinct towns around Tel Aviv. Yisrael had opened a small business importing electronic goods.

  He still hoped to make his mark on Israel. He joined the young rebels of the National Religious Party (NRP), the political wing of religious Zionism. The NRP was run by an older generation of European-born Jews who accepted the party’s role of junior partner to Mapai and who dealt mostly with religious issues, like Sabbath observance in the public space. Why, demanded the young rebels, don’t we formulate our own policies on issues of national importance like defense? The partnership between the NRP and Mapai, said Yisrael bitterly, was like the relationship between a horse and its rider.

  But Yisrael’s path into politics was blocked by his fellow NRP rebels, who regarded him as an opportunist, and he reciprocated their contempt.

  MAY 1967. WHEN Yisrael got his call-up notice to join the 55th Brigade in the orchards, his first concern was leaving Sarah. She was in her eighth month with their second child. Her due date was June 5. Sarah’s parents suggested she move into their house in Jerusalem. Yisrael thought that made sense: If war breaks out, he reassured Sarah, it will be fought in Sinai and perhaps on the Syrian front, but certainly not in the capital. Jordan’s King Hussein would be crazy to start a war in Jerusalem, with all its holy places.

  And so they agreed Sarah would seek safety in her parents’ home, near the border that divided Israeli from Jordanian Jerusalem.

  THE NIGHT OF JUNE 6. Yisrael’s shirt was stained with the blood of the wounded he’d helped evacuate from the medics’ station. Where was Sarah now? The hospitals were filling up with wounded; would there even be a bed for her?

  Yisrael entered a jeep taking a wounded man to the Bikur Cholim hospital. Yisrael explained his situation to the driver, who after the hospital stop-off took him to the Weisfishes’ home. Perhaps two dozen family members were crammed into the small apartment. “He’s alive!” someone shouted. Sarah was there; she hadn’t yet given birth. “We heard rumors that all the paratroopers had been killed,” she said calmly.

  Yisrael glanced around the room. Among the children and old people were young, healthy men his age. Almost every kind of Jew was represented among the paratroopers—except the ultra-Orthodox. And here they were, preparing lamentations for the next holocaust.

  Yisrael offered some words of encouragement to Sarah and fled.

  THE ELITE SUMMONS YISRAEL HAREL

  YISRAEL HAD MUCH to be grateful for in the summer of 1967. Sarah had given birth to a daughter. And he was writing—essays for religious Zionist publications warning against squandering the opportunities that the war
had opened for Israel. Yisrael despised the national euphoria, the notion that Israel had just fought its last war. Precisely when the Jews lowered their guard was the time of greatest danger.

  Yisrael wrote an essay about the need to encourage American Jews to immigrate to Israel. He noted that Arab intransigence might compel Israel to retain the new territories. And that, he conceded, would confront Israel with a severe demographic challenge. Massive American immigration, though, could save the Jewish state.

  Yisrael mailed the article to Ha’aretz, the country’s preeminent newspaper. For several weeks he heard nothing. Then, one Friday morning, he opened the paper and saw an essay with the headline, “The Defeat in the War for the Jews.” And just below it, his byline.

  No one from the newspaper had bothered to contact him, but what did it matter? The article took up nearly an entire precious Ha’aretz page. At that very moment, Yisrael Harel was being read by the nation’s leaders!

  A letter arrived from Eliezer Livneh, one of the Labor movement’s preeminent intellectuals. He had read Yisrael’s article with interest, Livneh wrote, and would like to meet, to discuss a matter of national importance.

  Livneh informed Yisrael that a new organization was being founded to pressure the government into settling Judea and Samaria, the liberated territories. The group included Israel’s two greatest living poets, Natan Alterman and Uri Zvi Greenberg, its leading novelists, Shai Agnon and Haim Hazaz and Moshe Shamir, and leading figures from the kibbutz movement. We would like you to join us, said Livneh.