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

by Yossi Klein Halevi

  Yoel was head of the yeshiva’s security detail, Yitzhak a member. But the group functioned more by consensus than hierarchy; this was, after all, a yeshiva, not an army unit.

  Optimistic, dependable, Yitzhak Lavi was regarded as a leader among the students. He was the first hesder yeshiva student to become an IDF officer. Yitzhak, friends said admiringly, wouldn’t think twice about charging into enemy fire.

  Yitzhak and Yoel agreed to play the role of guards, and Adi Mintz, another student, the role of terrorist.

  Yitzhak and Adi had their Uzis with them, Yoel his pistol; in these tense days, they carried their weapons at all times.

  Adi removed the bullet clip from his Uzi. He kept the safety latch off, ready to shoot in simulation.

  Yitzhak and Yoel waited near the back entrance to the dining room for the “terrorist” to appear.

  Adi rushed toward them. Yitzhak overpowered him and grabbed the Uzi.

  Adi retrieved his gun and instinctively inserted the bullet clip. He forgot to turn on the safety latch.

  One more time, Yitzhak suggested.

  Adi rushed toward Yitzhak again. Too soon: he wasn’t ready. Adi aimed at his chest and fired.

  Yitzhak fell.

  Students hearing the gunshot rushed out of the study hall. A student, an army medic, removed Yitzhak’s shirt and tried to stanch the bleeding. Yitzhak stopped breathing. Yoel placed his mouth against his, trying to revive him. Without success.

  YOEL STOOD AT THE EDGE of the cemetery, watching the flag-draped coffin being lowered into the ground, but dared not approach the mourners. During the shiva, he stood outside the building where the Lavi family lived, walked around the block, stood again outside the building, and finally left.

  His nights were torments. How could this have happened? During an exercise intended to prevent the death of students? Was it his fault? He should have checked Adi’s gun. But this wasn’t the army; everyone was responsible for himself. Still, technically he was in charge. However inadvertently, he had exposed his students to a fatal recklessness.

  The police investigation absolved him of wrongdoing. When some yeshiva students wondered aloud about the sin that had caused the tragedy, Rabbi Amital denounced such talk as primitive, and the speculation ceased.

  Still, Yoel knew what he must do: if no one would punish him, he had to punish himself. While the Torah didn’t regard an accidental killer as a murderer, he was to be confined to a “city of refuge”—at once to protect him from the avenging family of the victim but also to punish him. Din golah: the law of exile.

  Adi briefly left the yeshiva. Yoel stopped teaching, but then returned. He considered leaving his home in Alon Shvut. Though he wasn’t an accidental murderer, he still felt bound, he confided to a student, by the law of exile.

  A STRANGER IN THE MIRROR

  ALL HIS LIFE Meir Ariel had wanted to be like everyone else. The only way to be normal was to accept the great pretense—to live as if death were illusory, as if this life would last forever. But he couldn’t stop the voice taunting him with his own mortality. When he looked in the mirror, a stranger seemed to stare back.

  Meir wrote a song in which he imagines being released from a psychiatric ward and told by doctors to visit the airport every month. It will help calm you, they say. Meir wanders the airport, disoriented by his kibbutznik provincialness, eyeing the beautiful women and humiliated by desire. The airport is the place of escape; but Meir isn’t going anywhere. He watches the planes land and depart, like souls being born and dying. A Swissair Boeing takes off in an explosion of light. Orgasm, madness, birth, death: airport as world.

  MEIR DISAPPEARED. At first Tirza pretended not to notice. But by the third day she began to worry. Where was the boy? In the hospital, the morgue? Had the earth swallowed him up?

  In fact he was in a lockup in Tel Aviv. He’d been arrested while trying to buy hashish from an undercover cop in a park. He didn’t have money to cover bail, and that was fine with him. Don’t you want to call home? he was asked. Not necessary, he said.

  Being in prison, Meir felt, was like visiting a foreign country. Who knew when he would have this chance again? He befriended the inmates and the jailers, who were fascinated with this strange and lovable kibbutznik. It wasn’t every day, after all, that a kibbutznik ended up in jail. Meir spoke to his cellmates without patronizing them. He knew about human weakness and was no man’s judge.

  A week after his arrest, Meir finally phoned the kibbutz office. Tirza screamed. “I have to get you out of there,” she said.

  “It’s no rush,” said Meir. “I’m having an interesting time.”

  When Tirza arrived at the lockup, Meir greeted her without relief. “Who asked you to get me out?” he said.

  “Autist, mefager, idiyot,” said Tirza.

  MEIR WAS READING PSALMS. The rich Hebrew stimulated him. And David’s faith somehow soothed him. Meir had been raised on the Bible, but as history, not religious truth. As teenagers Meir and his songwriting partner, Shalom Hanoch, would joke about biblical characters, inverting the Bible’s heroes and villains. Goliath was misunderstood, Meir would say, and then he and Shalom would go on about the upstart David who stole Saul’s crown and how Ishmael and Esau were the good guys rather than their wimpy brothers, Isaac and Jacob. Meir would defiantly shout the ineffable name, Jehovah, daring God to defend His honor.

  Meir loved the biblical heroes precisely for their flaws. That the Bible could be so brutally honest about the nation it was intended to celebrate seemed to attest to its credibility. Could its testimony, then, also be trusted about the God of Israel? Was the notion that there is a creator and a plan really more absurd than the notion that reality formed itself, and there was no plan?

  Teach me Torah, Meir said to one of Mishmarot’s founders, Yaakov Gur-Ari, a Talmud scholar in his youth. Yaakov had run the cowshed until the kibbutz shut it down, in part because members hated the smell. “The cow wants to nurse more than the calf wants to suckle,” the old cowhand said to Meir, quoting the rabbis.

  Yaakov suggested that, as a musician, Meir should learn how to read the Torah’s musical notes, the way it is chanted in synagogue. And so, like a boy preparing for his bar mitzvah, Meir sat with Yaakov on Shabbat mornings, singing Torah.

  IT’S ONLY ROCK ’N’ ROLL

  THE BIG ISRAELI rock band of 1976 was Tamouz, founded by Shalom Hanoch. Shalom had returned from London just before the Yom Kippur War. Though he’d managed to release an album in English, it was a bigger success in Israel than in England—no surprise, given Shalom’s heavily accented English. It’s cold in England, he said on his return home; one could die there and no one would notice.

  But Shalom refused to feel at home in Israel. He sang of his alienation from collective identities in the elegant Hebrew of his kibbutz education. Yet Shalom’s songs helped define a new generation’s Israeli identity, at ease with itself and not requiring the constant self-reflection of the founders.

  With its edgy keyboard, long drum solos, and bombastic guitar overtures, Tamouz was Israel’s first great hard rock band—rock music that could have been created anywhere and just happened to be sung in Hebrew. No postwar angst or protest, no national emotions at all.

  Despite itself, Tamouz reflected the new national mood, at least among many secular Israelis—a fierce insistence on normalcy, on getting on with life, pretending that Israel was anywhere.

  Shalom brought several of Meir’s songs into the group’s repertoire, including the band’s most emblematic hit, “End of the Orange Season.” Shalom had composed the music, together with another band member, Ariel Zilber, who grew up on Udi Adiv’s kibbutz, Gan Shmuel, and who left because, as he put it, playing rock ’n’ roll seemed more interesting than picking cotton. “End of the Orange Season” was a paean to kibbutz romance, making love to the smell of orange blossoms, the next stage after the tenuous flirtations among the teenagers piled on the grass. Yet it became a metaphor for the end of the era of Zionist inn
ocence, of the agricultural and egalitarian Israel, one of whose symbols was an orange.

  Tamouz produced only one album before breaking up. Ariel Zilber, angry that the band wasn’t playing his songs, appeared at concerts with a paper bag over his head.

  For Shalom, working as part of a band, a collective, felt claustrophobic. It’s starting to feel like a kibbutz, he said.

  MEIR CONTINUED TO WORK in the cotton fields. Tamouz’s popularity had no impact on his career. A friend produced a demo tape on which Meir sang “Our Forces Passed a Quiet Night in Suez,” but the radio stations weren’t interested.

  Shalom went solo, revered as Israeli rock’s greatest songwriter. But he knew the truth. “I’m good,” he told a friend from Tamouz, “but there’s someone who is better.”

  Yet outside the small circle of rock musicians, no one knew that Meir Ariel, adrift on a peripheral kibbutz, was writing his generation’s greatest songs.

  THE ART OF DECLINE

  “THERE IS NO PLACE more conservative, more irrelevant, than this palace of polished marble,” Avital Geva declared to a small crowd of the curious, about to enter the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. “It is a closed circle, a swamp without oxygen.”

  Avital stood beside a bookshelf filled with moldy books embedded in cement; worms crawled through the pages. He had submitted the work for inclusion in an exhibit of conceptual art, and this was opening night. But the museum director had refused to place the bookshelf within the museum for aesthetic reasons, and in the end compromised by installing it in the plaza.

  Avital was obsessed with decay. In one exhibit he displayed bones and false teeth; in another, a plastic pond filled with fedoras and dead fish preserved in salt. How else to describe what was happening in the country? Leading members of the Labor Party were being accused of bribery and embezzlement. The kibbutz movement, once Israel’s moral conscience, was paralyzed by inertia. The Zionist revolution was founded on Jewish labor; but now Arabs were working the fields and building the houses. And after its victory at Sebastia, Gush Emunim seemed immovable. “Just look at Hanan high on their shoulders,” he told Ada, disgusted. “It’s all power power power. They’re destroying Judaism.”

  “You can’t equate Gush Emunim with Judaism,” argued Ada, who taught Bible in Ein Shemer’s high school. “One of the major concerns of Judaism is the limits of power. The occupation is the problem, not Judaism.”

  “They’re causing me to lose my love for Judaism,” said Avital.

  What was happening to him? He wasn’t only protesting rot but creating it. Only his work with young people still evoked the joy of creation. He was teaching art—“teaching life,” he said—at Ein Shemer’s high school. And young people accepted him as one of their own, sharing their capacity for wonder.

  Avital salvaged a discarded bus and turned it into a makeshift classroom. “What did you think, hevreh, that we’re going to sit in little rows and copy the Mona Lisa? I’m here to teach you philosophy. To challenge basic assumptions. This cup of coffee—is it aesthetic or not? I want you not just to judge but to create. The only way to create something new is to see things in a new way. With the eyes of a child.” Avital knew nothing of Zen Buddhism, but he was talking about beginners’ mind.

  “AND SO, AVITAL, our friend,” began the interviewer from the regional newspaper, “you’ve come to a sad end. You’ve turned into a museum creature. Decadent . . . successful. They’ve given you a prize. How did you fall so low? By the way—how much?”

  “Six thousand lira,” Avital said, embarrassed.

  The Israel Museum in Jerusalem had awarded Avital a prize for his work in collecting books about to be processed into pulp and distributing them in kibbutzim and Arab villages around Ein Shemer, a project he’d begun in 1972. “I began to realize that art isn’t doing provocations in galleries in Tel Aviv,” Avital told the interviewer. “That has no value compared to things that can be done here in the area.”

  “What was the response [to the project] in Ein Shemer?”

  “In recent years they’ve become too sensitive to issues of cleanliness, and I was afraid they’d toss all these [worn books] in the garbage. . . . I put piles of books in Givat Haviva [the educational center of Hashomer Hatzair]. . . . The administrators were outraged. ‘What’s this, you’re throwing books around like chicken feed?’ The ‘cultural avant-garde’ of Hashomer Hatzair was concerned about aesthetics, that the books weren’t arranged orderly like soldiers in a lineup. But no one there thought about salvaging thousands of books that were about to be turned into pulp. . . . This concern for beauty and perfection is making us empty.”

  TWO DUMP TRUCKS filled with compost appeared at Ein Shemer’s high school. Avital guided them through the gate, past the single-story houses that served as dorms to a patch of lawn. “Here, here,” he called out, “great!” The trucks proceeded to dump their loads onto the grass.

  The principal ran out of his office. “Lunatic! What are you doing?”

  Avital tried not to laugh. “It’s an educational tool,” he explained. “We’re working on a project: Can garbage be aesthetic?”

  “This time you’ve gone too far, Avital. I swear to you, you’ll never teach here again. This gets cleared away right now!”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it when the project ends. In two weeks.”

  They compromised on four days.

  THE GREENING OF OFRA

  JUST WAIT AND SEE how many leave when winter comes, warned the pessimists in the not-quite-legal settlement of Ofra. The winter of 1976 was especially bitter: snow covered the valley, and winds seemed intent on uprooting the settlers’ barracks. But no one left.

  Another three families joined, imparting a sense of permanence to the community. Families were allotted their own barracks, while singles lived in rooms lined with cots. Phone calls were made from the coffeehouse near the mosque in Ein Yabroud, the Arab village across the road. A van shuttled members between Ofra and Jerusalem, about half an hour away, driving through Ramallah.

  Ofra was run as a kind of kibbutz, more by necessity than ideology. Though salaries weren’t pooled, the dining room, bathrooms, and showers were all communal. Settlers rotated responsibility for kitchen and guard duty. At the weekly meetings they vehemently debated issues great and trivial. Should Ofra be a mixed secular-Orthodox community or entirely Orthodox? (Orthodox: several secular young people who joined soon left.) And if Orthodox, how open to modernity? (Open: they preferred university graduates to full-time yeshiva students.) Should the community hire a rabbi? (No, because he would likely disapprove of young women wearing pants instead of modest skirts and of married women not covering their hair.) Should they hire Arabs for building and gardening? (No, argued Yehudah Etzion: Jews must do their own physical work.) What should they serve for breakfast? (Yogurt.)

  On Tu b’Shvat, the festival of trees, Defense Minister Peres visited Ofra and planted a sapling. It’s time to end the fiction of Ofra as a work camp, Peres said. Ofra was hooked to the local electricity grid, and the army provided settlers with weapons for guard duty.

  YISRAEL AND SARAH HAREL, with their four children, came often for Shabbat. Here in this hard beauty, in fields of boulders and wildflowers with terraces and wells and ancient ruins, the state of Israel could be reimagined, as if it were 1948 again and the country had not yet been disfigured by corrupt politics and pettiness and hasty housing projects. Here Yisrael’s dream of a religious Zionist pioneering elite was coming to life.

  He belonged among them. But it wasn’t easy for a family man in his thirties to move to Ofra. Sarah had already made enough sacrifices for him, left her ultra-Orthodox family for Yisrael’s world. Now Yisrael would be asking her to become a pioneer.

  Sarah didn’t understand Zionism, the pride of a Jewish flag and a Jewish uniform. But Jews settling the land of Israel: what could be more self-evident? Nor was she afraid of austerity: she had grown up in a house no less cramped that the Jordanian army barracks of Ofra.

/>   “I like the people in Ofra,” she said to Yisrael. “There is something pure about them.”

  A YEAR AFTER its ambiguous founding, Ofra was thriving. There were 140 residents, 80 of them children. There was a workshop for wooden toys and one for ladders (“Beit El Ladders,” named for the nearby site of Jacob’s dream). There was a chicken coop, and forty dunams were cleared for a cherry orchard. Around the concrete bunks were the beginnings of lawns and flower beds.

  Hanan Porat spoke at the first-anniversary celebration: “They accuse us of being dreamers. That’s true. Here Jacob dreamed his dream and his ladder reached the heavens, and he received the promise of Providence that this land would be his. Zionism is, in its essence, the fulfillment of the dream of generations.”

  The newspaper Ma’ariv offered this sympathetic report on Ofra’s first anniversary: “Across from the entrance to Ofra is an Arab house. In the evening the hevreh go there to drink coffee, to improve their Arabic and to connect with the neighbors.” The article quoted one of the young settlers: “If the Jews won’t create ill will between us and the Arabs, we’ll get along fine.”

  By “the Jews,” he meant the left.

  WHAT IS THIS, AMERICA?

  THE FOUR-DAY CAMP for the fatherless children of the 55th Brigade resembled any Zionist youth camp in the summer of 1976. Tents in a forest clearing, hikes, campfires into the night.

  Nearly two hundred children—far more than in previous summers—attended the four-day camp this year. Partly the increase was due to the Yom Kippur War, which made dozens of children eligible. Those included the three children of Avinoam “Abu” Amichai of Kfar Etzion. The increase in population was also because of a decision taken by Yisrael and Arik to open membership to families of fallen soldiers from the IDF’s other two paratrooper brigades.

  Arik served as camp director, Yisrael as activities director. Arik and a dozen fellow volunteers shared a room lined with cots. Yisrael slept in a tent.