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

by Yossi Klein Halevi

  YISRAEL HAREL, CEO OF JUDEA AND SAMARIA

  EVERY FEW DAYS, Yisrael visited another settlement. He drove on dirt roads and on fresh asphalt to shaved patches of hill surrounded by ancient terraces. Some communities consisted wholly of rows of mobile homes; in others, rows of small houses with red roofs. Like a lost mythical land, Judea and Samaria was resurfacing. Yisrael was a practical man, concerned with organizational structures and political debates, but there were times when he felt overwhelmed by the beauty of the landscape and the poetry of the historical moment.

  The purpose of his travels was to convince settlers to support an umbrella council of settlements. And the message he conveyed at meetings was as usual grim. True, he said, the hunger strike had been successful. The government was releasing more land, and settlements were being built again—there were now over three dozen in the West Bank and Gaza. But the permanence of those communities couldn’t be taken for granted. What the government intended to do to the settlements in Sinai, it could one day decide to do to the settlements of Judea and Samaria.

  The solution, concluded Yisrael, was unity: “We need an organization to represent us, just like the kibbutzim.” Each kibbutz, he explained, sent delegates to its federation, entrusted with deciding the movement’s practical and ideological direction.

  Yisrael spoke of ensuring that the needs of settlers became part of the government bureaucracy, not granted as political largesse: “We pay national health insurance just like other citizens of the state of Israel, but we have to fight the bureaucracy to get benefits. Every year we have to fight the Education Ministry to build new classrooms. Our needs should be a natural part of the ministries’ budgets.”

  It wasn’t easy convincing the settlers to unify. There were austere kibbutzniks farming in the Jordan Valley desert and “quality of life” settlers living in West Bank suburbs, working-class Sephardim trying to move into the middle class and middle-class Ashkenazim trying to become pioneers. And each group had its own reservations about joining Yisrael’s proposed council.

  At a meeting in Kfar Etzion, the Orthodox kibbutz that was the first West Bank settlement, a member said to Yisrael, “There is a national consensus supporting [the existence of] Kfar Etzion. But if we join the council, and the government decides to dismantle Kedumim [a new settlement in Samaria], we would be forced to support Kedumim.”

  Yisrael could hardly restrain himself. “If there won’t be Kedumim, there won’t be Kfar Etzion,” he said. “It pains me that I have to debate a pioneer in his own house. But I don’t see how I can establish the council without the kibbutzim among us taking a leading role.” Kfar Etzion voted to join the council.

  In the Jordan Valley, Yisrael reassured the secular kibbutzniks that the council would not be a front for the messianists of Gush Emunim. In Kiryat Arba, the settlement near Hebron, he reassured the messianists that he had no intention of displacing Gush Emunim. “I’m not trying to fill the shoes of Rabbi Levinger and Hanan Porat,” he said. “I don’t have the charisma. But I can compensate with organizational skills.”

  Not that he wanted to exclude Gush Emunim, far from it: the messianists, with their capacity for self-sacrifice, were essential to the settlement movement. Moreover, Yisrael was a democrat: the council needed to contain all facets of the movement. Yisrael believed he could control the messianists, tame their excesses, and harness their fervor for the movement, just as utopian fantasies had helped the socialist pioneers overcome impossible obstacles. Far better those who erred in overzealousness than the bourgeois Orthodox Jews Yisrael had grown up with, decent people who would never change history.

  THE STAGE WAS SET with a fan of Israeli flags, a harp, and photographs of Theodor Herzl and Rabbi Kook. The Samaria Girls’ Choir sang an old pioneering song, extolling the spade and the hoe that together turn the land into “green flame.” Aside from the photograph of Rabbi Kook, it could have been the setting for a convention of kibbutzim. A member of a veteran kibbutz who’d come to show solidarity told Yisrael, “Only here are these songs still sung.”

  In the end, most of the settlements sent representatives to the founding meeting of the settlers’ council. The rules were determined by Yisrael. Decisions would be made by consensus. Along with official delegates he invited as nonvoting delegates “men of the spirit, who are essential for an ideological movement”—rabbis and intellectuals, including Yoel Bin-Nun.

  Almost all the delegates were male and—despite Yisrael’s hope for broader secular representation—Orthodox. They could have been divided into two categories: the “beards” and the “mustaches.” The “beards” were Kookians, messianists. They wore big knitted kippot and white shirts and laced black shoes in winter and sandals with socks in summer. The “mustaches” tended to be more nationalist than devout, “religious” an adjective that described their Zionist identity, and redemption more self-generated than divinely imposed. They wore compact knitted kippot and jeans and kibbutz-style work shirts and work boots in winter and sandals without socks in summer. Yoel was closer to the beards, Yisrael to the mustaches (though he himself didn’t have one).

  Yisrael was unanimously elected chairman. No one was more capable of connecting the settlers to the political and military establishments than Yisrael Harel. Among settler leaders, he was the most worldly. The others knew how to organize settlement groups, evade army roadblocks; Yisrael knew how to make important contacts. His work in the media, in the Movement for the Complete Land of Israel, in the paratrooper association, had connected him with the secular elites in a way that few Orthodox Jews had achieved.

  The council’s closing proclamation reflected its desperate optimism, affirming the goal of annexing Judea and Samaria but warning that any other alternative—whether the Labor Party’s vision of dividing the territories with Jordan or the Likud’s vision of autonomy for Palestinians—would endanger Israel’s survival. “Any foreign administration will necessarily lead to an independent Arab Palestinian state in the land of Israel, and threaten the existence of the people of Israel in its land.”

  The settlers called their new organization the Yesha Council. Yesha was the Hebrew acronym for Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. By happy coincidence, the word yesha also meant “salvation.”

  YISRAEL AND ARIK SURVEY THE LAND

  YISRAEL HAREL STOOD on the empty hill and pointed to the hill across the valley, busy with bulldozers and cranes. Beside him stood Arik and Yehudit Achmon. Yisrael was taking his friends on a private tour of the landscape he was helping transform. On that hill, Yisrael said, an agricultural settlement is being built. Over there, an ultra-Orthodox town. And on that third hill, an upscale community of private homes. The land lay open, pristine and beckoning. “Look around you,” continued Yisrael, “everything is empty. There is enough room to settle without dispossessing anyone.”

  Hands on hips, Arik slipped into the posture of a military briefing. Despite himself, he was impressed. Yisrael and his friends had figured out how to overcome the limited pool of religious Zionists and entice whole sectors of the Israeli public to the settlements. You want a big house with a garden for the price of an apartment on the coastal plain? Nofim is the place for you. You want to live in an ultra-Orthodox ghetto, complete with built-in sukkah on the porch? Come to Emanuel.

  “As you can see, there are no Arab villages in sight,” Yisrael said.

  Nu, really, Srulik: that’s your answer to the demographic problem?

  You and I, Arik thought, represent opposite visions of Israel. With Arkia, Arik was trying to extract Israel from an outmoded socialist ideology and create a rational and efficient economy, connect Israel with the world through new air routes, create, in other words, a normal country—goals threatened by the settlements. Yisrael’s outmoded pioneering ideology was building the anti-normal Israel, a Jewish ghetto that would be an outcast among the nations.

  Arik detested the settlements as mimickry of the kibbutzim, the real expression of pioneering Zionism. When his parents and
their friends built Givat Brenner, they had been on their own. But for the settlers, no amount of IDF protection was ever enough.

  Here in this romantic landscape, thought Arik, was rising the greatest mistake in the history of Israel.

  “Tell your father that I’m inviting him on a tour of the settlements,” Yisrael said to Yehudit, referring to Hazan. “I promise to keep it discreet.”

  Sure, she thought. As if anything in this country was ever discreet.

  They drove to the nearby settlement of Kedumim. Yisrael introduced Arik and Yehudit to one of the movement’s rising stars, a woman in a tight kerchief and tight smile named Daniella Weiss. “We’ve won on every front,” she told her Tel Aviv guests. “Except for one: We haven’t yet managed to convince people like you. That will come, of course, the more everyone realizes we’ve reached the point of no return.”

  In the car on the way home, Yehudit said, “Did you notice that she didn’t look us in the eye? She kept staring over our heads.”

  “Of course,” said Arik; “she doesn’t want to lose eye contact with God.”

  Chapter 21

  HURBAN

  “BEGIN, KING OF ISRAEL”

  IT WAS AN early-summer evening in 1981, and Independence Park was filled with celebrants—old women in housecoats and slippers, workmen in undershirts with children on their shoulders. They were mostly Sephardi Jews, and they had come from Jerusalem’s forgotten neighborhoods to celebrate their newfound assertiveness, and to give thanks to the man who had helped them find their voice, Menachem Begin.

  Toward the front of the crowd young men held each other by the waist and sang “Begin, King of Israel,” substituting the prime minister for King David in the old song. On a stage a banner proclaimed, “Peace, Security—Likud.”

  Prime Minister Begin appeared, and the crowd roared. Braced by aides, Begin slowly mounted the three small steps of the stage. “Say ‘Shalom’ to Menachem Begin,” a Yemenite Jew with side locks told his young son. “Shalom,” said the child, laughing.

  It was Israel’s tenth and most traumatic national election campaign. With the economy in disarray, the Labor Party was leading in the polls. The prospect of a return to power of the party that symbolized Ashkenazi paternalism had roused a Sephardi revolt. It felt like the beginning of a civil war. Local Labor Party headquarters were vandalized; Likud supporters attacked Labor supporters on the street.

  “Brothers and sisters,” Begin began, and the the crowd cheered. Brothers and sisters! Labor leaders had rarely addressed them so intimately. They were the wrong kind of Israelis—their music ignored on the radio, their history not taught in schools, their guttural Hebrew mocked. The universities were filled with Ashkenazim, the prisons with Sephardim. In one sense it was a typical story of immigrant dislocation, but there was this unique anguish: the very religious faith that was the core of Sephardi identity and had inspired their return home had excluded them from Labor’s Israel, from being truly welcomed home.

  Labor had wanted, at least in principle, to absorb Sephardim into Israeli society. But Labor had been impeded by its dream of creating a new Jew, secular and socialist. By contrast, Begin’s only expectation of Zionism’s “new Jew” was that he learned how to defend himself. Sephardi, Ashkenazi, religious, secular—Begin couldn’t care less. And so Sephardim loved this Polish Jew who kissed the hands of women and lectured foreign leaders about the Holocaust, because he loved Sephardim for who they were.

  “Saddam Hussein calls on the world to help Iraq build atom bombs,” Begin continued, referring to the Israeli air strike two weeks earlier that had destroyed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak. “We’ll let Saddam Hussein build atom bombs—”

  “Be-gin! Be-GIN!” Hands waved and teenage boys leaped, but most of all there was laughter, sheer pleasure in Begin’s understated Jewish irony.

  “When I was a prisoner in Siberia,” said Begin, and he was again interrupted by chants. “Please, children—” He turned to the row of young men up front, and they instantly quieted to hear his memories of exile. In recounting these stories, Begin was telling the crowd that Israelis were not some new creature divorced from Jewish history. We were Jews first, Israelis second.

  “LISTEN TO THEM,” Arik Achmon said to Yehudit. “They can’t even denounce us in proper Hebrew. A-smol”—duh left.

  Even as a capitalist Arik remained a man of the left, by temperament, voting habit, commitment to social justice. But he was also an Israeli of the left in his sense of entitlement; and the Likud supporters were, as far as he was concerned, upstarts and ingrates. Who had built this country if not left-wing Ashkenazim? Who had suffered and fought and died so that the immigrants could have a home to come to?

  However repulsive to Arik, the election campaign turned out to be good for Arkia. A new and reckless Likud finance minister, Yoram Aridor, had replaced the cautious Yigal Horowitz and sought to woo voters by reducing taxes on imported videos and color TVs (even though the country’s only TV station was still in black and white). The Likud was interested in keeping down prices before elections—no simple matter, given the triple-digit inflation rate—and that included Arkia’s flights to the southern town of Eilat, the most popular Israeli vacation destination.

  A phone call to Arik from the transportation ministry: What will it take to keep you from raising prices?

  A license for charters to Europe, Arik replied.

  The ministry promptly granted Arkia charter flights to Paris, London, and Frankfurt, breaking El Al’s monopoly on Israeli flights abroad. “Out-and-out election bribery,” Arik called it, with the grim satisfaction of someone who was learning to master a game he despised.

  AT A LABOR PARTY rally in Tel Aviv’s municipality square, a comedian named Dudu Topaz mocked Likud voters as second-rate soldiers, “doing guard duty if they serve at all,” while Labor voters served as pilots and commandos. He called Likudniks chah-chahim, greasers. Everyone knew which ethnic group he meant.

  The next night, the Likud held a rally in the same square. Voice quivering, Begin cited the chah-chahim slur. “Until this morning I had never heard the word ‘chah-chahim’ and didn’t know what it meant.” In the underground struggle against the British, he continued, we made no distinctions between Jews. “When that—what’s his name—Dudu To-paz—made his evil comments, the whole crowd that stood here yesterday cheered. Now let me tell Dudu To-paz about whom he [dared] speak. Our Sephardim were heroic fighters”—like the two captured underground members who blew themselves up with a smuggled grenade rather than allow the British to hang them. “Ashkenazis? Iraqis? Jews!”

  Begin continued: “Yesterday, in this place, there were many red flags. Today there are many blue-and-white flags. That is the moral difference, the historic and ideological difference, between us and the socialist Labor Party. They still haven’t learned what the red flag symbolizes in our time. . . . This is the flag of hatred of Israel and of arming the enemies of Israel who surround us. This is the flag of oppression of the [Soviet] Jews and suppression of Hebrew. This is the flag of the Gulag. . . . And this is the flag that was flown yesterday by those who were brought here from all the corners of the land by buses and by the trucks of the kibbutzim.”

  THROWN ON HEAVEN’S MERCY

  MENACHEM BEGIN WAS narrowly reelected.

  In a radio interview on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, Begin repeated his election-eve attack on the kibbutzim. Referring to a TV news clip that showed a kibbutznik beside a swimming pool, Begin contemptously compared him to “some American millionaire.” “Millionaire kibbutzniks with swimming pools” entered the Israeli lexicon.

  Avital Geva was beside himself. The most frugal, the most devoted workers in Israel: millionaires with swimming pools? Yes, Mr. Begin, Ein Shemer has a swimming pool, and let me tell you how it came to be built. The year was 1946. Our parents, who had left their homes in prewar Poland to build Ein Shemer, were grieving the destruction of the world they had left behind, cut adrift
in the new world they were trying to create. Then someone had an idea: Let’s do something that will give us and our children a sign of faith in the future. How about a swimming pool? It seems silly, I know: a swimming pool as their answer to destruction. But they were modest people, our parents, and a swimming pool offered a measure of comfort in this harsh land they were trying to tame.

  But there was no money for a swimming pool, Mr. Begin. And so the kibbutzniks took jobs after a day’s work in the fields, to pay for construction material. And they built the pool themselves, without hired labor.

  And now, Mr. Begin, you want to destroy the kibbutzniks with ridicule, with demonization. What will be left in this country if you turn these good people into parasites?

  ON POSTERS ALONG the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem highway, on banners hanging from porches, a nightmare image spread: a map of Israel and of the Sinai Desert covered with black diagonal lines, symbolizing the dismantling of the country by stages. First Yamit and the other settlements in Sinai, then the settlements in Gaza, then the settlements in Judea and Samaria, followed by the Galilee and the Negev. There would be no end to Arab territorial demands because the issue wasn’t the borders of a Jewish state but its existence.

  According to the timetable of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, the Sinai peninsula was to be returned to Egypt in April 1982, in ten months’ time. Begin appointed Ariel Sharon as minister of defense, and entrusted him with overseeing the evacuation, including the uprooting of Sinai’s settlements.

  Hurban, opponents of withdrawal were calling it. Hurban was the most dreaded word in the Hebrew language: literally “destruction,” but more than physical ruin. Hurban meant the destruction of the Temple, the exile of the Divine Presence. And this hurban would be self-inflicted. It was a repudiation of the gift of the Six Days, a setback to the redemption process, a rebellion against the will of heaven. A spiritual tragedy that called for a spiritual response.