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

by Yossi Klein Halevi

  Arik exchanged his predecessor’s big office for a small adjacent room, and in place of the CEO’s Volvo continued to drive his old Fiat. He took a substantial pay cut, earning half the average Israeli CEO’s salary. (He was compensated with shares: he owned 7 percent of the company.)

  In case anyone in Arkia hadn’t yet gotten the message that the era of status symbols was over, Arik moved the company from central Tel Aviv to modest quarters at Sde Dov, a small airfield near Tel Aviv. He bought several mobile homes from an evacuated Israeli base in Sinai and set those up as his headquarters, just like the mobile homes settlers were moving onto West Bank hilltops. For Arik, too, Israel was a kind of construction site, a work in progress.

  Arik routinely left the office past 10:00 p.m. You stay as long as you need to, he told the managers. Some revered him, some detested him. In the end he knew there was only one group of people he could trust: the hevreh from the 55th Brigade. And so he brought in Fuchsy, the brigade’s operations officer during the Yom Kippur War, to head Arkia’s planning. And he appointed as company driver Papino, who’d been wounded in 1967 and adopted by Arik through his convalescence. And Yoske Balagan to head building maintenance. The paratroopers spoke about the Arkia staff as “the fighting family,” and getting the job done as “fulfilling a mission.”

  In a flattering newspaper profile of the new Arkia, Yoske described the tensions between Arkia’s old-timers and the boys from the 55th: “They ask me, ‘Why do you work late at night when you don’t get paid for extra hours?’ The [work ethic] of ‘this idiot’ gets them angry. But what do they want? . . . I come from a different world, a world in which you have to give.”

  ONE BY ONE, Arik invited the pilots in for a chat. The most pampered among Arkia’s employees, pilots evoked in Arik little of his sympathy for workers’ rights. They had all the arrogance of the combat pilots they’d once been, expecting to be treated as a savior elite. Though the company had use for no more than fifty pilots, it was paying the salaries of seventy. They received three times their regular pay for overtime, got paid from the moment they left their homes for work, and were granted extravagant compensation for every minute of delay in takeoff, even when they were initiating sanctions and responsible for the delay.

  Arik’s goal was to dismantle that caste of privilege, replacing the pilots’ collective contract with individual contracts. He needed to wait for the right moment, catch them off guard, look for the breach in their defenses.

  His immediate goal was laying off twenty pilots. That turned out to be the easy part: the Histadrut agreed that Arkia would collapse without the layoffs. “The rules of the game are changing,” Arik told a meeting with the pilots’ representatives. “But we’ll decide on the new rules together, through negotiations.” Until the time came for confrontation.

  TWICE A WEEK, Arik left work early for his other job. He stopped at home, exchanged jeans and sandals for IDF uniform and red boots, and drove an hour north to a base near Haifa. After two decades in the paratroopers, Arik had been entrusted with founding and commanding a logistics brigade, whose task during war would be to supply an armored division with shells and fuel and food, as well as create first-aid stations. Arik, now a colonel, commanded two thousand reservists—drivers, mechanics, doctors—maintaining hundreds of trucks and armored vehicles and storerooms with thousands of tons of ammunition.

  As much as possible, Arik sought to integrate the units under his command. One unit, for example, was entrusted with removing bodies from destroyed tanks, a task that included not only retrieving body parts but also scraping pieces of skin from a tank’s charred innards—because Jewish law, honored by the IDF, insists on the dignity of burial for any bodily remains. Arik paired the body-retrieval squad with the medical unit, so that the dead could be quickly identified.

  Moving back and forth between Arkia and the IDF felt seamless to Arik. Both tasks required commanding large organizations that provided services—in one instance to airline passengers, in the other to combat soldiers. Both systems needed to be at their peak performance, meeting nonnegotiable deadlines and ready for emergency.

  Arik relished the daily test of his competence, his steadiness under pressure. His creativity was expressed by infusing cumbersome organizations with flexibility. He regarded the reservists under his command as “employees,” and in a sense he regarded Arkia’s employees as soldiers in an elite unit. If he often acted like an army commander in running Arkia, he often acted, too, like a CEO in running the brigade. Any soldier could approach him with a complaint or a suggestion. When someone addressed him as “commander,” he corrected: “My name is Arik.”

  BETWEEN HIS WORK in Arkia and his enhanced responsibilities in the army, there were days that Yehudit didn’t see Arik at all. Yehudit herself was working full-time—her therapy practice was thriving—and running the household. But Yehudit complained only when Arik spoke brusquely to the children.

  The Achmons took out a large mortgage and built a house in North Tel Aviv. The area had become transformed from their student days into a center of the Israeli elite. The one-story house was modest, certainly compared to those of their neighbors, some of whom installed marble bathrooms. Arik owned a single suit, which he saved for travel abroad. He and Yehudit rarely vacationed; their children joked that, for all of Arik’s access to free airline tickets, he was like a monkey without teeth, unable to eat peanuts.

  The focus of admiring profiles in the business sections of the newspapers, Arik never felt more fulfilled. The newspaper photographs showed a handsome man in his late forties with thin lips and receding hairline exposing an implacable forehead. Yet his raised eyebrows exposed an involuntary tenderness, as though he were still capable of being surprised by the world, a naïveté disconcerting in a face so single-minded it could be mistaken for ruthlessness.

  He would have laughed at the notion that he—of all people!—was capable of naïveté. He knew his strengths and weaknesses: not the most empathic person, but ready to go through fire for a friend. He wasn’t nice, but he was good. True, he had a healthy opinion of himself. And why not? Everything he touched succeeded.

  ARIK AND HIS PARTNER, Dadi, began turning a profit. Where Arik was precise, scrupulous, Dadi was reckless, grand. Dadi’s expertise was buying and selling planes, and his sense of timing seemed impeccable.

  Dadi had always wanted to be a paratrooper. And so Arik had brought him into the 55th Brigade as a quartermaster.

  “You can’t trust Dadi,” Yehudit warned Arik. “He doesn’t think twice about lying when it’s useful to him. And the time will come when he will lie to you too.”

  “Dadi?” Arik said, laughing. “He idolizes me.”

  “Arik, be careful.”

  OPERATION SELF-SACRIFICE

  ON A BITTER-COLD NIGHT in the Etzion Bloc, with the wind repeatedly knocking out the generator-powered electricity, Yisrael Harel stood before the leaders of the settlement movement gathered in emergency session and summoned all the gravitas his mournful face could manage.

  There can be no settlement without land, Yisrael explained. Yet the settlements were being choked for lack of land on which to grow. Ofra had been allocated a ludicrous few hundred dunams—how could it hope to absorb the dozens of families on its waiting list? The Likud government wanted to create a law that would turn all non–privately owned land in the territories into state lands on which settlements could be expanded, but Begin feared the Americans. If the land issue wasn’t resolved, and Palestinian autonomy declared, then a PLO state, God forbid, would emerge in Judea and Samaria.

  Yisrael didn’t mention the complexity of the state land issue. Many Arabs who couldn’t produce a deed still claimed land their families had worked for generations. The Supreme Court had already uprooted one settlement rising on contested land. Yisrael believed in Arab-Jewish coexistence; yet settlement expansion would intensify Palestinian fears and resentments. Still, weighed against the threat of a PLO state, that risk was unavoidable.
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  Here, then, said Yisrael, was the plan: We will launch an open-ended hunger strike until the government agrees to turn much of the West Bank into state land.

  There was unease in the room. Yisrael was asking them to protest against the most pro-settlement government since 1967. What would the public think?

  “Everyone [in the government] agrees with us, everyone tells us how right we are, and nothing is being done,” said a leader of the Gaza settlements. “That’s why I plan to fast.”

  “I’m already hungry,” said another Gaza settler. “But, seriously, I’m afraid it won’t work. . . . We need to disrupt the public order. Tomorrow I can close the entire [Gaza] Strip. Five, six truckloads of tomatoes spilled on the road, and there’s no construction work in Tel Aviv.” Palestinian laborers would be blocked from reaching their jobs in Israel.

  “At sixty liras a kilo?” someone said in mock horror at wasting expensive tomatoes.

  “A hunger strike is the last resort before a violent struggle breaks out, and I’m afraid that will happen,” said a representative from a settlement in Samaria.

  Someone recalled that during a visit to the Etzion Bloc, Yitzhak Rabin had once expressed support for its return to Jordan: “Rabin said that he didn’t mind visiting this place with a visa. How is it that he didn’t leave on a stretcher?”

  “Under no circumstances will we be dragged into acts of violence,” said Yisrael.

  YISRAEL AND FIVE other men set up a big tent across from the prime minister’s office, laid mattresses on the ground, and declared a hunger strike. “Stop Strangling the Settlements,” read one banner.

  The strikers consumed only water, and on Shabbat, fruit juice. Operation Self-Sacrifice, they called it. A fellow faster said to Yisrael, “It may turn out to be a fast to the death.” “It won’t come to that,” Yisrael reassured him. “They won’t let us die outside Begin’s door.”

  Begin sent his bureau chief to plead with the hunger strikers to end their fast and invited them to meet with the prime minister. Yisrael refused. “We’re not interested in more promises,” he said. His elderly parents also came to plead, but halfheartedly: they’d never had influence over him. Sarah tried another approach: “How will you be able to lead the struggle without strength?” “If I eat,” Yisrael replied, “I won’t be the leader of the struggle.”

  A week into the strike, the fasters agreed to meet with Begin. Yisrael insisted on entering the prime minister’s office without assistance.

  “Stop this hunger strike,” Begin half demanded, half pleaded. “You’re breaking my heart.”

  “You promised us there would be many more [settlements],” said Yisrael. “Why aren’t you fulfilling this promise?”

  “I gave my word to the Egyptians and to Carter,” replied Begin.

  “You keep your promises to the goyim. But not to your own voters.”

  “Until this man apologizes,” Begin said to an aide, “I’m not continuing,” and left the room.

  “How can you speak that way to the prime minister?” a fellow striker berated Yisrael.

  “I spoke the truth,” Yisrael insisted. “I have nothing to apologize for.”

  Begin returned, and the meeting resumed. It ended without agreement.

  The hunger strike continued into its second, then its third week. The big tent was surrounded by little tents: dozens joined the fast. Thousands came to show support.

  On the fourth week, the hunger strikers permitted themselves soup.

  Hanan Porat appeared and began making a speech about faith and redemption. Yisrael cut him off. “Hanan,” he said, annoyed, “this group doesn’t need ideological inspiration.” Hanan offered to speak to Begin on the group’s behalf; Yisrael told him his intervention wasn’t necessary.

  In fact Yisrael saw his fellow hunger strikers—most of them pragmatic young men who headed local settlement councils—as the nucleus for a new kind of settlement leadership, more mainstream, less mystical, than Gush Emunim. When this was over, he intended to form an umbrella council of settlements—expand the settlement leadership beyond Hanan and his friends.

  As a result of the prolonged fasting, Yisrael experienced heightened clarity. He handled media, met with government representatives and well-wishers, and even continued editing Nekudah from the tent. Liberated from dependence on food, he felt exhilarated, seemed to intuit exactly the right response to every problem.

  On the forty-fourth day, an emissary from Begin appeared with an offer: the government would set up a committee, to be chaired by Ariel Sharon, to find legal solutions to the land dilemma.

  “It’s a trick,” a striker warned; “they’ll bury us in committee.” Yisrael disagreed: “It will be a committee with our supporters, most of all Sharon. Besides, you have to know when to stop. People are going to start giving out. This is the right moment.”

  The hunger strike ended the next day. It was the eve of Shabbat. On the door of the Harel home hung a sign prepared by Yisrael’s children: “Welcome Home, Abba!” Yisrael, pale and gaunt, staggered into the bedroom and collapsed.

  HE HAD BARELY SLEPT a few hours when he was awakened by an urgent knock on the door. Standing outside was a fellow hunger striker and one of the few secular Jews among the leaders of Gush Emunim. He had driven from his home in Kiryat Arba, near Hebron, with terrible news. Six settlers were dead, many more wounded, in a terrorist ambush on a group of Jewish worshippers in Hebron. They had left the Tomb of the Patriarchs after Friday-night prayers. The ambush occurred outside Hadassah House, where Avital Geva had burned the calves’ heads a year earlier.

  Nothing, Yisrael knew, would be harder for his community to tolerate than the murder of Jews in Hebron—a new Hebron massacre, evoking the victims of the 1929 pogrom.

  The next morning, after restless prayers, the entire Ofra community crowded into the settlement’s clubroom. On the wall hung a relief map of the land of Israel. Summoning all his strength just to stand before them, Yisrael offered a military-style briefing. “It happened after prayers,” he said, deliberately laconic. “Several terrorists stood on the roof, opposite Hadassah House, and fired into the hevreh with Kalashnikovs and grenades.”

  Despite our outrage, Yisrael continued, we must refrain from vigilante violence and allow the army to work. Those who want to do something constructive should work toward preventing the withdrawal from Sinai. “Every one of us will have to take some role in the public effort. At least something. Look, I’ve taken a leave without pay from my work in Yediot Aharonot.”

  Someone called out, “It seems to me that there are more than enough big shots circulating among us with official cars and walkie-talkies.” Who did Yisrael think he was, presuming to be their leader?

  There it was again, that old accusation Yisrael had heard as a young man. All his rage against those who had confused his passion for the Jewish people for self-aggrandizement focused now on this heckler. “So you found someone to blame,” Yisrael said sarcastically. “Really, I don’t have the strength to argue with you. I’m simply exhausted. . . . I’m amazed at how people who barely came to support us, people who continued going to work every morning, people who did nothing—how they dare at a time like this to criticize us. Chutzpah!”

  A friend tried to calm him: “Congratulations for the hunger strike, but I don’t think you know what every person here does for the community. I ask that every one of us engage in self-examination, not in examining his friend.”

  THE NEAR-SIMULTANEOUS EXPLOSIONS that wounded two Palestinian mayors and targeted a third happened on the thirtieth day following the massacre in Hebron, and that was the first clue that Jews were behind the attacks: thirty days marks the end of a phase of the Jewish mourning period. The attacks happened within half an hour of each other, and in the same way: bombs detonated when the mayors turned on the ignition of their cars. One man lost both legs, another a foot: whoever had done this knew exactly how much explosive was needed to maim rather than kill. A third mayor was spared whe
n an Israel Police sapper tried to detonate a bomb attached to the garage of the mayor’s home; the bomb blew up in the sapper’s face, blinding him. The three mayors had apparently been targeted because they had supported attacks against settlers. The crippled mayors were to be a living warning.

  The attacks were the work of Yehudah Etzion and his friends in the underground. Following the Hebron massacre, they’d decided to temporarily divert their attention from the Temple Mount. Yehudah, though, had been ambivalent: He helped coordinate the attacks but decided not to take part personally, fearful of getting arrested and destroying his plan.

  The bombings were denounced by Prime Minister Begin, by Orthodox Knesset members, by the country’s chief rabbis. Among settlers, though, there was little outrage; many supported the attacks outright. In Ofra some said with knowing smiles, It’s the Shin Bet; who else could be so professional?

  For Yoel, usurping the authority of the government of Israel was to challenge divine authority. Writing in his diary, he described the attackers as “Sabbateans,” followers of a false messiah.

  Yisrael Harel suspected that the attackers might be Arabs trying to discredit the settlement movement. “It isn’t reasonable that Jewish hands committed these acts,” he wrote in Nekudah. “And even less reasonable [to assume] that Jewish residents of this region were involved in the incident. All that [settlers] want is for these parts of the homeland, the heart of the land of Israel, to be under the laws of Israel and part of the state of Israel. If so, isn’t it twisted to undermine the rule of law?”

  On Nekudah’s cover was the headline “Who Harmed Coexistence?” Yisrael meant coexistence between Jews and Arabs. Along with that question appeared a photograph of an old Arab man wearing a kaffiyeh in animated conversation with a young Jewish man in sandals and knitted kippah. The young man was Yehudah Etzion.