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

by Yossi Klein Halevi

  YOEL BIN-NUN WAS late as usual. It was just past dawn on Rosh Hashanah, and for the past hour Yehudah Etzion had been waiting for his friend in Ofra’s prefab synagogue. Yehudah should have known: Yoel inhabited another time zone, perhaps another era. But how could he be late for this?

  They were planning to tear open the gates of heaven, throw themselves on God’s mercy, and appeal for a reprieve from the coming withdrawal. At Yehudah’s urging, Yoel had agreed to revive an ancient tradition: blowing the shofar on Rosh Hashanah at sunrise, a practice halted during the Roman occupation because Jews feared the Romans would mistake it for a call to war. Sunrise had now passed. But if Yoel showed up soon they could still manage to preempt the morning worshippers and perform their desperate ritual.

  Yoel appeared, without apology. The two young men covered their heads in prayer shawls and approached the Ark. The synagogue filled with early morning light.

  They retrieved a Torah scroll and unrolled it to the story of the binding of Isaac, which is read on Rosh Hashanah morning and invokes a last-minute reprieve. Yoel sang the words in his deep voice. “And it came to pass, after these things, that God did test Abraham, and said to him, Abraham, and he said, Here I am.”

  Yehudah produced a shofar, a ram’s horn, recalling the ram sacrificed in place of Isaac. He blew the shofar, thirty strong and distinct blasts, some staccato, some prolonged.

  “The fate of the Sinai settlements hangs on the scale of judgment,” Yoel said. “If there is a moment where they can be saved by heaven, it is now.”

  TWO DAYS AFTER Rosh Hashanah, on October 6, at the annual parade in Cairo celebrating the Egyptian attack on Israel on Yom Kippur, Islamic fundamentalists assassinated Anwar Sadat.

  In Ofra, the news was greeted as miraculous: The Protector of Israel has saved us from ourselves. That night, in Ofra’s synagogue, worshippers recited a psalm thanking God for destroying enemies: “God of Vengeance, repay the arrogant in kind.”

  Word of the Rosh Hashanah shofar blowing had gotten around, and some regarded Yoel with awe, as though he had manipulated heaven. “Here I am, trying to create a movement to stop the withdrawal,” a neighbor said to him, “and you blow shofar and everything is reversed.”

  “It’s not because we blew the shofar,” insisted Yoel, perhaps fearing to take responsibility for an act of heaven.

  That night Yoel walked in downtown Jerusalem. He looked at the faces around him and saw anxiety. What would happen to Israel now? Would the peace with Egypt hold?

  The dissonance between Ofra and Jerusalem: here Sadat’s death was seen not as reprieve but as threat. And if this was the attitude in right-wing Jerusalem, what must they be thinking in Tel Aviv?

  Back in Ofra, Yoel said, “We’re living in a fantasy world. The people want this peace. We’re alone.”

  A FAREWELL TO SINAI

  EARLY ONE MORNING in February 1982, Eldad Harel, almost eighteen, eldest son of Yisrael and Sarah, left the yeshiva where he was studying and hitched a ride south, toward Sinai. He carried a khaki knapsack, a sleeping bag, and a Kalashnikov, borrowed from Ofra’s arsenal. Accompanying him was a friend named Dudi, who wore an Egyptian army coat his father had brought back from Sinai in the Six-Day War.

  For both boys, this was a last fling before the army. It was also a farewell to Sinai, which Israel was scheduled to return to Egypt in two months, unless Eldad’s father and his friends succeeded in preventing the government from withdrawing. Neither Eldad nor Dudi told their parents that they were leaving yeshiva without permission and planning to hike through Sinai in the middle of winter. Why worry the parents? We’ll be back by the end of the week, the boys reassured each other; no one will even notice we were gone.

  Short but powerful, Eldad would wander, alone, through the Arab villages around Ofra. He often visited a young man in Ein Yabroud, the village just across from his home (though, as Yisrael noted pointedly, those visits were never reciprocated); together they would catch poisonous snakes and sell them to a university laboratory. Eldad would disappear from school for days at a time to rock-climb in the Judean Desert, training to try out for the IDF’s top commando unit. Once, climbing down a cliff, he found himself dangling over a fifty-meter drop without enough rope; friends pulled him back up, and Eldad calmly resumed the climb.

  Near Eilat, Eldad and Dudi hitched a ride with an army truck that took them deep into Sinai’s mountain range, near Santa Katerina, said to be the site of Mount Sinai. Where will we sleep? asked Dudi. Right here, said Eldad. It was so cold that Dudi thought they might die of exposure. They built a fire; when it died down, they buried coals in the sand beneath their sleeping bags.

  By day, they hiked the remote hills. Aside from a few soldiers and Bedouin, they were alone.

  On the last evening of their trek, they came to the southern tip of Sinai, near Sharm el-Sheikh. Total darkness set in. They stood on an unlit road, at an intersection, hoping to hitch a ride back to Eilat.

  A semitrailer approached. Eldad stood at the edge of the road, extended his arm, and pointed toward the ground. Dudi stood a few meters behind. The driver, spotting Eldad, came to a stop. Eldad approached the cabin and asked whether he was heading toward Eilat. Sorry, said the driver.

  Eldad closed the cabin door and walked toward Dudi. The semitrailer, slowly turning at the intersection, swerved and hit Eldad. The driver didn’t notice that Eldad had fallen, and the massive tires rode over his body.

  Dudi rushed toward him. Blood trickled from Eldad’s mouth. “He ran me over,” he managed to say before losing consciousness. Dudi ran after the truck. “Stop!” he shouted. But the driver didn’t hear Dudi’s cries and drove on.

  Dudi grabbed Eldad’s Kalashnikov and tried to fire in the air. But the gun jammed.

  An army jeep appeared. An ambulance was summoned. Eldad’s pulse weakened. By the time the ambulance arrived, he was dead.

  YISRAEL WAS AWAKENED by knocking. It was past midnight, and Yoel was standing at the door.

  Yisrael looked at Yoel’s face. “Who?” he asked.

  “Eldad.”

  “How?” Yisrael managed to ask.

  Yoel told him.

  “Should I stay?” Yoel asked.

  “No need,” said Yisrael.

  “No!” Sarah screamed, and then went still.

  Yisrael hugged her. They wept together, but quietly, so as not to awaken the other children.

  NEIGHBORS FROM OFRA, Sarah’s ultra-Orthodox relatives, paratrooper kibbutzniks wearing handkerchiefs for kippot, gathered together in the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives, just across the valley from the Temple Mount. Arik Achmon noted Yisrael’s restraint: Srulik is strong—

  Black-bordered ads appeared in Nekudah, signed by local settlement councils, repeating the words, “May you be comforted in the building of the land.”

  The seven days of mourning were observed at the Harel home. Motta Gur and Ariel Sharon came, along with Knesset members and journalists. Yisrael maintained composure by playing the host. The only time he broke down was before several paratrooper widows whom he had adopted.

  Arik arrived with Danny Matt. Arik and Yisrael embraced.

  “Tell me what happened, Srulik.” In Arik’s work with the widows, he had learned to avoid empty words of comfort, and focus instead on practicalities: What happened? What do you need?

  Yisrael phoned Eldad’s friend, Dudi. Come be with us, he urged. Yisrael wanted to reassure Dudi that the family didn’t blame him.

  When Dudi entered the Harels’ crowded salon, Yisrael embraced him. When he left, Yisrael urged, “Keep in touch.”

  FROM SAVIOR TO DESTROYER

  IN OFRA, IT WAS a year of tragedies. Two other residents were killed in accidents—devastating for an intimate community. Some suspected a flaw among the faithful that had weakened divine protection or even invited judgment. All of Israel was responsible for one another, the saying went—not only for taking care of each other’s needs but literally responsible for each
other’s sins. Who, then, had brought disaster on them all?

  Someone recalled that Yoel and Yehudah had blown the shofar on Rosh Hashanah morning. Whoever changes the order of shofar blowing, the rabbis had warned, invites disaster on Israel. By what authority had Yoel and Yehudah acted? At one of the funerals, a neighbor said to Yoel, “You and Yehudah blow shofar, and now we go to funerals.”

  “What do I know of God’s calculations?” responded Yoel angrily. “I’m not responsible for Sadat’s assassination, and I’m not responsible for this.”

  Yisrael Harel reassured him, “Don’t worry, Yoel, I don’t accept this nonsense.”

  But Yoel couldn’t be calmed. How dare they! This was superstition of the worst kind. And what did it mean about the cohesiveness of the camp of the faithful if, in time of crisis, some of his neighbors could turn on him?

  LEANING INTO A LECTERN, Yoel looked around at his students, the soldiers of the Mount Etzion yeshiva, and spoke about the binding of Isaac. According to most commentators, he noted, God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son was a test of Abraham’s faith. But one commentator, the Rashbam, had a different view. He saw the command as punishment—for Abraham ceding the land of the Philistines to Abimelech, king of Gerar. “‘And God’s anger was raised about this,’” Yoel quoted the commentator, “‘because the land of the Philistines is included in the borders of Israel.’” Concluded Yoel: “You committed your son to a compromise on the land? Now return him to Me.”

  Yoel drew the inevitable connection. According to the book of Deuteronomy, he noted, the area of Yamit is included in the borders of Israel. “For the first time in the history of Israel, the government is violating its main purpose: protecting the people and the land.” The government of Israel, the very power intended to fulfill God’s will in history, was abusing its authority to undermine divine will.

  A student said he wanted to join protesters planning to barricade themselves inside Yamit. “What does Rabbi Yoel think?” he asked.

  “If it were possible to stop the withdrawal by bringing a hundred thousand demonstrators, who would physically prevent it with their bodies? It would be forbidden, my friends.”

  Yoel tilted his head and eyed with satisfaction the confused looks of his students. “Because,” he continued, “that would mean violating the authority of the state of Israel. If the state cannot sign international agreements, it will be an empty shell.” Preserving the authority of the state of Israel, even when it sinned, was a divine prerogative.

  “Still, I do see value in protesting: to make clear that a part of the people of Israel has no share in this sin. A woman who is raped is permitted to her husband; a woman who acquiesced is forbidden to her husband. We need to say that this is a rape, and that we don’t acquiesce. For the sake of history.”

  THOUSANDS OF MOURNERS were pressed together in the quiet side street before the Mercaz yeshiva, bent beneath a heavy rain. Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook’s body, wrapped in a black-striped prayer shawl, was held aloft on a stretcher. Loudspeakers carried Psalms in broken voices. “Abba”—father—some mourners called out.

  It was Purim, the holiday marking the victory of Israel over its enemies. No one more embodied the spirit of Purim, the promise of a happy ending for the Jews, than Rabbi Zvi Yehudah. Why was his soul being returned to heaven on this of all days? In a little over a month from now the withdrawal from Sinai would be completed. How would his followers endure the brokenness of the land without his militant optimism, his ferocious love for the land of Israel, for every Jew? Perhaps, some speculated, God has taken Rabbi Zvi Yehudah now to spare him from witnessing the imminent uprooting, the beginning of the unraveling of the Six Days. Perhaps, said others, he was taken to appeal in heaven against the hurban.

  He was ninety-one years old, and he had suffered. A leg had been amputated—just as a part of the land of Israel was now being amputated. So it was for a tsaddik, a holy man: his being absorbs the travails of Israel.

  Standing among the grieving students of Rabbeinu, “our rabbi,” Yoel Bin-Nun felt gratitude and distance. He had learned the way of Jewish wholeness from Rabbi Zvi Yehudah. When the rabbi had grabbed his hand, long ago, at that ultra-Orthodox rally in Jerusalem, he’d transformed Yoel into an unconditional lover of the Jewish people, its sinners no less than its pious, perhaps more than its pious. And when Yoel heard him, on that awesome night in Mercaz, cry out for the severed parts of the land of Israel, the rabbi had bound him to its healing.

  Yet in recent years Yoel’s encounters with Rabbi Zvi Yehudah had become frustrating. Yoel had turned to him for guidance in dealing with unimagined complexities: How to act when the government of Israel is opposed to the wholeness of the land of Israel? How to relate to leftist brothers who in their unrealistic but understandable passion for peace were prepared for territorial concessions? Rabbi Zvi Yehudah had responded with the same insights Yoel could recite from memory. The rabbi hadn’t tried to reach out to Yoel, understand how he had grown. He wanted me to stay like the rest of his students, tape recorders quoting Our Rabbi—

  Yoel thought back to that night in Hawara, when Rabbi Zvi Yehudah had stood before an IDF officer, opened his coat jacket, and dared him to shoot. Yoel had wept then—upset, he thought, to see his rabbi so agitated. But perhaps he had realized that his trust in his teacher would never be the same, that he was now on his own. Perhaps, glimpsing his future loneliness, Yoel had wept for himself.

  “THERE WILL BE NO WITHDRAWAL”

  THE SIX-DAY WAR unleashed among Israelis paradoxical longings. Judea and Samaria promised a restored past; Sinai’s vast emptiness promised a limitless future.

  Nine thousand Israelis lived in Sinai’s fourteen settlements. Labor governments had built these settlements, most of them farming villages, with national consensus. After all, Israel had fought four wars in Sinai, and the desert offered strategic depth. Unlike the West Bank, there was no demographic problem in Sinai. And the eucalyptus-shaded villages, built on sand, were small miracles, exporting dates and mangoes and roses.

  The largest settlement in Sinai was the Mediterranean coastal town of Yamit. The sea was barely a kilometer away from the low, whitewashed houses rising from the dunes. At night, as the town fell silent, residents could hear the waves approaching.

  Yamit was to be Israel’s city of the future. Unlike so many Israeli towns, expanded under pressure of immigrant necessity and in seeming contempt of the landscape, Yamit was planned in harmony with its stunning surroundings. Most homes had a view of the sea. Electric wires and cables were underground. Parking was on the periphery; one could walk from one end of town to the other on tree-lined paths without crossing a street. Secular and relaxed, Yamit embodied the Sinai ethos: residents wore bathing suits and walked barefoot in the shopping center.

  As the withdrawal date approached, Yamit began to empty. By spring 1982, most residents, along with farmers of the neighboring villages, had accepted government compensation and left. Refugees of peace, they called themselves bitterly. Their places were taken by political squatters, many of them West Bank settlers. Hundreds of Orthodox families moved into emptied apartments. Religious schools were established, along with separate afternoon study groups for men and for women. Yamit was transformed into a devout community, Sinai supplanted by Judea and Samaria.

  ESTHER BIN-NUN DIDN’T want to go to Yamit. She was for positive action, not futile protest. But Yoel couldn’t keep away, and Esther had long ago determined that no matter what, the family stays together. And so shortly before Passover, Yoel and Esther and their four children arrived in Yamit. They found an apartment stripped bare; even the light fixtures had been removed. They rolled out sleeping bags and settled in for the holiday.

  Yisrael Harel, of course, intended to go to Yamit: the head of the Yesha Council belonged on the front line. But how could he bring the family? Expose their three surviving children—ages fifteen, ten, and seven—to yet another trauma so soon after Eldad’s death?

  S
arah was adamant: We are going to Yamit. “We’re a family,” she said. “Whatever we go through, the children will go through.”

  EVEN AMONG THE messianists of Gush Emunim, Yisrael Ariel, chief rabbi of Yamit, was regarded as an extravagant dreamer. Ariel saw the Six-Day War’s new borders as merely the first step toward fulfilling the biblical promise of borders stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates. He was working on a multivolume atlas that would include all the important sites within that fantasy map.

  A former Mercaz student, Ariel—then known as Yisrael Shtiglitz—had fought in Jerusalem with the 55th Brigade. On the morning of June 7, 1967, as the paratroopers were gathering at the Western Wall, he was assigned to help retrieve body parts of the scouts killed outside the Lions’ Gate. Later that same afternoon, Ariel saw a column of prisoners of war. Moving toward him, single file, hands on head. Who were they? He felt a sudden panic: maybe they were Israeli POWs, and the Jordanians had won the war. How could he be sure? For all he knew, the war was lost and Radio Cairo had told the truth: Nasser’s army had conquered Tel Aviv. He would not let them take him alive. He would die fighting, turn the Temple Mount into Masada . . .

  Now, as Yamit began to empty and the Six-Day War’s borders constricted, something in Rabbi Ariel broke again. As if his vision of destruction in the Six-Day War hadn’t been hallucination but premonition.

  YAMIT’S PROTEST LEADERS argued over tactics. How to stop the approaching withdrawal: With prayer and fasting? Civil disobedience? Violent resistance? Could they really raise a hand against Jewish soldiers?

  Hanan Porat was ambiguous about the limits of protest. He spoke of creating a “balance of fear” to prevent withdrawal, but then warned of violence against soldiers. “We must not injure,” he said, “but we are permitted to be injured.”

  Hanan was now a Knesset member, for a new right-wing party called Tehiya (Renaissance), founded to stop the withdrawal. But the party had won only three seats in the 1981 election. Yisrael Harel had warned Hanan: “Your strength as a leader is to be above politics. You’ll lose your prestige and effectiveness.” But Hanan was convinced that the new party, which united secular and religious in support of the post–’67 borders, was a spiritual achievement.