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

by Yossi Klein Halevi

  SIRENS SOUNDED LIKE a premature blast of the shofar that ends the Yom Kippur fast. It was the fifth war in Israel’s twenty-five years of existence. Israelis assumed it would end quickly, perhaps even more quickly than the Six-Day War. After all, the IDF was stronger now than it had been in 1967. Surely Israeli intelligence had detected the Egyptian and Syrian troop buildup and allowed them to enter a trap.

  But there was no trap. There had been ample intelligence warning; the highly visible buildup had been reported by Israeli soldiers at the front. But military intelligence insisted that the Arab armies were merely engaged in autumn maneuvers, that the Arabs were too afraid of Israel to attack and could never win, and so there was no need to call up reserves.

  The situation could hardly have been worse for Israel. Tens of thousands of Egyptian soldiers had crossed the 195-kilometer-long Suez Canal on rubber boats and makeshift bridges. Facing them were less than five hundred IDF soldiers spread out in sixteen underground forts that formed the Bar-Lev Line. One by one, those positions were falling. Barely 300 Israeli tanks in all of Sinai confronted 1,300 Egyptian tanks; after the first day of battle, less than a third of the Israeli tanks were still operative. On the northern front, the Syrians had penetrated the Golan Heights, and the odds against Israel were only a little less overwhelming than in the south.

  Israeli planes trying to stop the invaders faced Soviet SAM missiles, whose electronic gear, unknown in the West, made them hard to detect. Israeli tanks were crippled by Saggers, handheld antitank missiles, another Soviet-supplied technology for which the IDF had no answers.

  Israel could have lessened the disaster by launching a preemptive air strike on Yom Kippur morning, when Israeli leaders concluded that an attack was imminent. But Prime Minister Meir and Defense Minister Dayan had decided to absorb the first blow, to prevent Israel from being labeled the aggressor.

  ARIK KNEW NONE OF THIS when he drove to his apartment in Tel Aviv to pack. Jeeps and cars sped through the empty streets. People gathered around transistor radios, listening to emergency news broadcasts that began with the solemn Yom Kippur greeting, “Gmar hatimah tovah,” signifying the hope of being sealed in the book of life.

  Arik retrieved uniform and boots from his closet. He debated whether to take the Kalashnikov. He’d acquired the Russian semiautomatic four years earlier, during the War of Attrition, given to him as spoil by one of his soldiers returning from a raid. The Kalashnikov—“Kalach” in IDF slang—was a far better weapon than the Uzi Arik would receive at the base, which lacked the Kalashnikov’s accuracy and range. Fighting with an Uzi, he thought, was like taking a pistol into battle. Arik’s Kalashnikov was especially fine, a lightweight commando-issue model whose handle folded for easy bearing. He hesitated: his men would be fighting with Uzis. He put the Kalashnikov back in the closet.

  IN THE MOUNT ETZION yeshiva, the Yom Kippur tranquillity went undisturbed. Too isolated to hear the sirens, the yeshiva students spent the day in prayer. After leading the prayers, Yoel Bin-Nun felt ill and needed to rest. The sudden fatigue unsettled him. He’d never had a problem fasting before; why now?

  Toward evening an emissary from the army reached the yeshiva. When the fast ended Yoel stood on a chair, and his students, in white shirts and white kippot, gathered around. “The Egyptians and the Syrians have attacked on both fronts,” Yoel said, deliberately matter-of-fact. “Don’t wait for a call-up notice. Start heading toward your collection points.” He ended with the prayer: “May God protect your leaving and your returning, from now until eternity.”

  Rabbi Yehudah Amital, head of the yeshiva and a Holocaust survivor, said, “No doubt the army is already driving them back.”

  “The Bar-Lev Line has fallen,” Yoel responded.

  “How do you know that?” demanded Amital. “You don’t know! Why are you demoralizing us?”

  But Yoel was certain. He recalled a briefing his unit had been given from an intelligence officer, who had insisted that Israel would have a seventy-two-hour warning before an attack. And what if intelligence misread the signals, Yoel had asked, and there was no warning? Impossible, replied the officer. Yoel persisted: What if the impossible happened? It would be a disaster, said the officer.

  The impossible had just happened. Somehow Israel had been taken by surprise.

  Hanan Porat convened a meeting of the Kfar Etzion secretariat to delegate responsibilities, like organizing volunteers to help with the harvest in case the men remained in uniform for longer than a few days. They met in the home of Avinoam “Abu” Amichai, whose wife, Sandy, Kfar Etzion’s American, was in a Jerusalem hospital recovering from the birth of their second child, a boy. Hanan mentioned to Abu that he didn’t have a pair of army boots. Abu had an extra pair. The boots were a size smaller than Hanan’s, but he took them anyway.

  After the meeting, Hanan and Abu stopped by Yoel’s house. All three young men were reservists in the 55th Brigade, though each belonged to a different battalion. Yoel packed his prayer shawl and phylacteries into the small bag he kept for reserve duty. Esther was pregnant with the Bin-Nuns’ third child, but she wasn’t due until January. Whatever happened, he would surely be out of uniform by then.

  They drove to their base. Hanan said, “A war on Yom Kippur isn’t just a war against the Jewish people but against God Himself.”

  Abu had more personal matters on his mind. “At least I know I can rely on the kibbutz to take care of the circumcision,” he said.

  THE WAITING TIME

  THE RESERVISTS OF THE 55TH BRIGADE clustered under the shade of eucalyptus trees, exchanging rumors. Most of them were now in their late twenties and early thirties, married with children. Yisrael Harel, convinced that the IDF was on its way to imminent victory, told Abu, “You’ll probably be home for the circumcision.”

  The men signed for equipment and discovered their first surprise: the stocks were so depleted that many were left without guns. Arik found a pair of binoculars, missing a strap. He affixed a piece of fraying string.

  Why weren’t the paratroopers being sent to the front? Not even the officers seemed aware of a plan. Don’t worry, some reassured, we’re being saved for the best assignment. Just like in 1967. Remember how we worried then that the war would pass us by?

  By day two, the base began to smell like an outhouse. The toilets, meant for at most several hundred soldiers, had to accommodate over 2,000. Food supplies were running low.

  MEIR ARIEL DIDN’T MIND the waiting. What was the rush to get to the front? He felt an exhaustion no sleep could ease. He’d barely recovered from the last war; perhaps a part of him had never recovered.

  On Yom Kippur day he’d been sitting with a friend, a DJ for Army Radio, working on a playlist for an album. At age thirty-one, Meir had finally put the trauma of Jerusalem of Iron behind him and was ready to try again. Then came the siren. “There goes the album,” Meir had said.

  Now, together with a friend, he left the base, walked up to a rooftop of a nearby apartment building, and smoked a joint.

  INSIDE THE PIT, the IDF underground command post beneath the Defense Ministry compound in Tel Aviv, there was scarcely room to move. The low-ceilinged, cubicle-like rooms and narrow labyrinthine hallways were crowded with shouting officers, exhausted assistants sleeping on the floor, retired generals hoping to be useful. There was too much cigarette smoke. Like a nest of nervous ants, thought Arik. The main war room, meant to accommodate perhaps ten people, was filled with four times that number. Arik looked wordlessly at Danny Matt: This was the IDF at war?

  They were searching for friends who could “give us work,” as Arik put it, some assignment worthy of the paratroopers. But no one seemed to know what to do with them.

  The chaos inside the Pit reflected the desperation at the front. By the second day of battle, the IDF hadn’t yet managed to organize. Reservists were heading toward the two fronts, often without waiting for assigned units. In the fallen forts along the Suez Canal, there were rows of Israeli POWs, stunn
ed and disheveled, with hands padlocked over their heads. On the Golan Heights, Syrian tanks were approaching the Galilee.

  Danny and Arik found a friend, a senior commander. “You have twenty-five hundred paratroopers sitting on their asses,” Arik said. “The army is wasting its greatest resource.”

  “You can’t imagine what’s happened here,” the commander confided. “I can’t even get to the chief of staff. He’s surrounded by three circles of clowns.”

  “All we need is to get stuck in this mess,” Danny said to Arik.

  Arik felt grateful for Danny’s presence. Tall, angular, red-bearded, Danny was a “yekke’s yekke,” as soldiers called him, a stickler. But most of all Danny was calm under pressure. He had earned his reputation during the siege of the Etzion Bloc in 1948: as one of the soldiers sent to defend the kibbutzim, he found himself alone against dozens of Arab fighters; he fired his machine gun until the barrel bent from heat.

  At a meeting later that night, Danny and Arik were presented with theoretical options. One plan was to dispatch the brigade into Syria, behind enemy lines, but the idea disappeared as abruptly as it had been raised. Another was to send the brigade across the Red Sea to attack the Egyptians from the south, but that too turned out to be baseless.

  “They don’t know what to do with us,” Arik said to Danny. “They don’t know what to do at all.”

  A SUKKAH IN THE DESERT

  03:00, OCTOBER 9, day three of the war. Brigade officers roused the men curled beneath eucalyptus trees: We’re moving south.

  The soldiers boarded requisitioned tourist buses and were driven to the airport, where transport planes took them to Sinai.

  Yisrael Harel tried to ignore the various pains in his body. There was a throbbing toothache. And a sprained back, result of an awkward fall during his last parachute jump, on assignment for his newspaper. He’d been writing a profile of a father and three sons, all paratroopers, who had jumped together as a family; Yisrael had joined them, and landed badly.

  Yisrael prided himself on his realism, on not being taken by surprise, least of all by the world’s enmity toward the Jews. Israel was fated to periodically fight for its life; that was just the reality of Jewish history. But unlike 1967, this time at least Israel was fighting from secure borders. Surely even the most fanatical leftists would now realize the danger of withdrawing from the territories.

  THE PARATROOPERS ARRIVED in Refidim, the largest IDF base in Sinai, some fifty kilometers from the canal and outside the range of fighting. Dozens of bodies covered with blankets were lined on stretchers across the airfield, then loaded onto transport planes heading to Israel. Helicopters and requisitioned Arkia planes brought in the wounded.

  Paratroopers were dispatched to patrol the desert hills above Refidim. There was talk of an attack by Egyptian commandos.

  Yoel Bin-Nun’s unit was sent to dig foxholes along the perimeter of the airfield. The men were incredulous: Why is the IDF turning us into guards?

  With evening the desert chill set in, but the sand still retained the day’s warmth. Yoel dug a foxhole about forty centimeters deep. How, he wondered, was he to fulfill the commandment to build a sukkah? It was the holiday of Sukkoth (Tabernacles). The sukkah was a reminder of the divine protection that accompanied the children of Israel in the Sinai Desert. The sukkah was also a reminder of fragility, a temporary structure recalling transience.

  The laws for constructing a sukkah are precise: it must have at least two and a half walls and a roof covered with branches or other living material, not so dense that the stars are blocked. Where would Yoel get the material to build a sukkah? A religious Jew is obliged to eat all his meals in the sukkah; at home, Yoel even slept in it. And here he was in Sinai, where the children of Israel had built their sukkahs.

  Yoel wandered the base, collecting material. He planted four sticks around his foxhole, and hung burlap as walls. But what to do for the roof? Since burlap came from flax, he reasoned, it could be considered living material and therefore suitable for the sukkah roof. He cut holes in the burlap so that stars could be seen, placed it over the poles, and recited: “Blessed are You, Lord our God, Master of the universe, Who sanctified us with his commandments and commanded us to dwell in the sukkah.”

  IN REFIDIM, YISRAEL HAREL met a photojournalist he knew, a foreigner working for one of the wire services. “Since when do journalists go to war?” the photographer said, surprised to see an editor in uniform. “This is the Israeli army,” Yisrael explained. “Everyone serves.”

  “I’ve got a spare camera with me,” the photographer said. “Why don’t you take it and see what you shoot?”

  Yisrael took the camera.

  “If you survive, you can bring me the pictures after the war,” the photographer said.

  A GLIMMER OF A PLAN

  DANNY AND ARIK drove to southern command headquarters, some forty kilometers from the canal. They were still far enough from the front to avoid Egyptian shelling.

  At headquarters—a bunker built into the hillside—they found the same chaos that had prevailed in the Pit. Radio operators sitting at a long table shouted over each other to be heard. Officers crowded around a map of Sinai on the wall, trying to determine how far the Egyptians had penetrated and how many reservists had made it to the front. Papers were strewn on the floor. A friend of Arik’s confided, “Dayan was here yesterday. You see these?” He pointed to the scattered papers. “His face was the same color.”

  The southern front commander, Shmuel Gorodish, who’d been appointed to the post shortly before the war, acted as if the IDF were facing the Egyptians of 1967 rather than an effective fighting force that had managed to launch a surprise attack. He said to Danny, “I have a job for you. You’ll swat the Egyptians in ‘Missouri’ for me tomorrow night.” Missouri was an Israeli position that had fallen to the Egyptians, and thousands of Egyptian soldiers were camped there. Gorodish’s language of contempt for the Arabs seemed to Arik one more symptom of the IDF’s confusion.

  Gorodish called to an aide, “Get me Arik [Sharon] on the phone.”

  Rather than lift the receiver, he turned on the speakerphone, allowing everyone in the room to eavesdrop on what should have been a private conversation with Sharon, commander of one of the three IDF divisions in Sinai.

  “Your friend with the beard has arrived,” Gorodish said to Sharon, referring to Danny. Gorodish repeated his suggestion that Danny’s paratroopers attack the Egyptian encampment in Missouri.

  There was a long pause on Sharon’s end. “Shmulik,” Sharon said finally, using Gorodish’s nickname, “the Egyptians have two hundred tanks there, and one thousand armored vehicles, and at least ten thousand soldiers. I don’t think this is a job for my friend.”

  “Okay, we’ll cancel,” said Gorodish, with the same impulsiveness that had led him to suggest sending the paratroopers against overwhelming forces.

  Sharon has just saved our lives, thought Arik Achmon.

  DANNY AND ARIK rode in a propeller plane through the white wisps of a cold, foggy dawn. It was Friday, October 12, day seven of the war, and they had been urgently summoned back to Gorodish’s bunker.

  Sitting around the table were Sharon and his fellow division commanders. Danny and Arik took seats near the wall and listened.

  There was good news. The government had approved a plan suggested by Sharon to cross the canal. Sharon’s forces had discovered a breach between the second and third Egyptian armies camped in Sinai, through which the IDF might slip undetected and establish a beachhead on the other side of the canal. Once having crossed, the IDF would cut off the supply route to the Egyptian forces in Sinai and attack from behind.

  The force that would lead the crossing, Gorodish said, would be the paratroopers of Danny Matt.

  “Let Arik [Sharon] and the paratroopers do the dirty work,” he told a commander skeptical of the plan. “You will cross with your tanks and reach Cairo.”

  Finally, thought Arik Achmon, a mission worthy of
the paratroopers. Once again, they were being given the central task of the war.

  A PRIVATE CONVOY

  AVITAL GEVA FELT STRANDED. Wounded in 1967 before the paratroopers had even crossed no-man’s-land, he’d missed the battle and vowed that would never happen to him again. But it was happening again. He was now commander of Company D, 28th Battalion—which just before Yom Kippur had been separated from the brigade and dispatched for reserve duty in Gaza. When war broke out, the company was told to remain there and enforce an IDF curfew.

  Avital hated reserve duty in Gaza, its refugee camps with sewage running through the alleys and shacklike houses with corrugated roofs held down by cinder blocks. He managed the shift from kibbutznik and artist into occupier by consoling himself that the occupation was temporary, that when the right moment came, Israel would no doubt withdraw from Gaza. Until then, the IDF needed to be kept out of the political debate about the future of the territories.

  But patrolling Gaza now? In the middle of a war? What were he and his men doing policing the shantytown alleys while the rest of the brigade was surely fighting at the front?

  Avital convened his men for a talk. “It’s a disgrace we’re not under fire,” one said, and others agreed. “Get us out of here, Avital. “

  “I’ll try to find a company to replace us,” Avital promised.

  He approached the military commander of Gaza. “I’ve got to get to my brigade,” Avital said. When he saw he wasn’t getting through, he added, “It’s the hevreh that fought in Jerusalem.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” said the commander.

  When Avital told his men the news, they embraced each other.

  A replacement company arrived. The hundred men of Company D loaded three trucks with crates of ammunition and C-rations and crammed inside. Outside its radio range, Avital had no idea where the brigade might be. He assumed he would hear about their exploits along the road. He instructed his drivers to head west, toward the front.