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

by Yossi Klein Halevi

  During Arkia’s good years, the board’s offer would have been absurd. But Arkia appeared to be collapsing, and Arik was desperate. He signed.

  In an interview with a financial magazine, Arik tried to make sense of why he had failed. I gave too much leeway to Dadi, he admitted; it was my responsibility as CEO to maintain closer supervision of his transactions.

  A photographer from the magazine asked Arik to put on a tie. Arik, wearing shorts, went to change into long pants. No need, reassured the photographer; the photo will be from the waist up.

  The next issue of the magazine featured a full-bodied cover photograph of the former CEO of Arkia, barefoot in a tie and shorts. Arik’s severe, slightly bemused expression, intended to convey the impression of a powerful man still in control of his life, only made the humiliation worse.

  JUST NOT THAT, Yehudit Achmon told herself every day as she came home from work. Just let me not find Arik in a state of depression. I couldn’t bear to see this strong man break.

  Arik reassured Yehudit: “I know what I’m worth. I couldn’t care less what anyone says about me.”

  He kept himself busy, painting the house and working in the garden, reading history and military strategy and looking for work. And, as always, keeping in touch with the brigade’s widows and helping with their problems, like employing a troubled teenage son in his skydiving club and then ensuring the boy got drafted into an elite combat unit.

  As a psychologist Yehudit was devoted to helping people change, but she’d never had much hope for Arik’s transformation. Usually for better, sometimes for worse, he was who he was. No one was more dependable and courageous, no one more ethical and trustworthy. And no one was more stubborn, more certain of his superior judgment and disdainful of human weakness. Perhaps in some way the good qualities were protected by the hard ones.

  But lately Yehudit was noticing encouraging signs. When Arik spoke severely to the children, she chided, “You’re using your commander’s tone.” Rather than dismiss her, Arik paused.

  Arik’s son, Ori, was drafted. Naturally Arik expected him to become a combat soldier, an officer. But after a brief stint in officers’ school, Ori hurt his leg and had to leave the course. For Ori, the accident was fortuitous: he realized that his father’s trajectory wasn’t his. Arik called the commander of the school, an old paratrooper friend, and the commander offered to admit Ori back for the next course. Ori demurred; Arik pressed.

  “Let him go his own way,” Yehudit admonished. “You don’t have to live through your son.”

  Arik never raised the matter again.

  “EVOLUTION OR REVOLUTION?”

  A NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD YESHIVA STUDENT named Aharon Gross was stabbed to death in a central square in Hebron, near the outdoor Arab market, in full view of hundreds of shoppers.

  The “Jewish underground”—as the Israeli media was calling the elusive group that had blown off the legs of two Palestinian mayors—struck again, this time at Hebron’s Islamic College. Three young men, faces wrapped in kaffiyehs, entered the courtyard of the school and opened fire, killing three students and wounding dozens more.

  Yehudah Etzion opposed the attack. Not only was it immoral to deliberately kill innocents, he told underground members, but they were squandering their skills on acts of revenge rather than on the one act that could transform history.

  Yet the destruction of the Dome of the Rock seemed more remote than ever. Yehudah had lost most of his fellow conspirators, and there seemed little to do but maintain the hidden stock of explosives for a more promising time.

  One night Yehudah asked Yoel, “What do you think about removing the Dome of the Rock?”

  Yoel was silent. When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet. “It would destroy one of the great miracles of our time—Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty. Jerusalem would come under international control.”

  “That would only be the first stage,” Yehudah replied.

  “How do you know what will happen next?” Yoel said, his voice rising. “If you’re not taking responsibility for the consequences of your actions, you’re a Sabbatean,” follower of a false messiah.

  “You don’t have the courage to take your ideas to their conclusion.”

  “Evolution or revolution?” demanded Yoel.

  “The Messiah won’t come through evolution,” said Yehudah.

  “Then you and I are finished,” said Yoel.

  THE LAST CASUALTY OF THE SIX-DAY WAR

  UDI ADIV HAD reached his limit. The airless cell, the smell of too many bodies, the constant noise of transistor radios. The absence of green. Of Leah.

  Perhaps for the first time in his life, Udi was in love. And he wasn’t tormenting himself about betraying the revolution by yielding to personal needs. His own development, he noted in a letter to Leah, was the opposite of that of most people: where others move from self-centeredness to a measure of altruism, he needed to reclaim a sense of self. Udi allowed himself a warmth toward Leah that he had never shown Sylvia. “I await the time when you and I can be together,” he wrote her. He signed his letters, “With love and embrace.”

  In Udi’s letters to Leah appeared a recurring anxiety about his younger brother, Asaf, who had become a Trotskyite activist. Asaf had been radicalized during Udi’s trial. Udi loathed Trotskyites: Sylvia’s attraction to them was the reason he had divorced her. But Udi’s concern for Asaf went deeper: Asaf, Udi wrote, was suppressing his inner life—precisely what Udi had learned to develop in prison.

  In letters to Leah, Udi now referred to his revolutionary past as “my dark, dogmatic era.” Responding to an interview he read with a former Matzpen activist who now called himself a Palestinian, Udi wrote that he too had once identified as a Palestinian. Now, though, “I consider myself a part of the Jewish society and people.”

  Yet however much Udi believed that his dogmatism was behind him, an old hardness persisted. He had abandoned the fantasy of revolution but remained a Marxist. In a letter to Leah he expressed regret for not having fasted on Yom Kippur—because that only alienated him from the traditionalist Sephardi inmates. “In order to raise the Jews to our level of secular democratic consciousness,” wrote Udi, “we need to at least appear to descend to their primitive religious and nationalist beliefs.”

  TOGETHER WITH UDI’S PARENTS, Leah began a campaign for clemency. It was late 1983, and Udi had served nearly eleven years of a seventeen-year sentence. On the suggestion of his lawyer, Udi requested a transfer from the Arab security cell to a cell of ordinary criminals. It wouldn’t help his cause for him to be identified with terrorists.

  In the criminals’ cell, Udi encountered little hostility, and none of it was political. Prisoners sensed his sympathy and confided in him. One young man told Udi he was planning to attend synagogue to prove he was a model prisoner. Udi chided him: faithfulness to the commandments should be without ulterior motive. Afterward the young man told Udi he was right, and would pray for its own sake.

  Several op-eds noted the injustice of treating Udi as a dangerous traitor, rather than as a naive young man betrayed by ideology. Three of Udi’s childhood friends from Gan Shmuel appeared outside the prison gates with a banner: “Free Udi!” It wasn’t much, but Udi no longer felt alone.

  Udi’s father went to see Motta Gur. “Motta,” said Uri Adiv, “I’m coming to you as the father of one of your soldiers. Udi came back shattered from Jerusalem. He wasn’t the same boy.”

  Uri wasn’t appealing to Motta only as a father but as one soldier to another. Leaving a wounded man on the battlefield was a crime in the IDF. And Udi was the last casualty of the Six-Day War.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” said Motta.

  FOR THE FIRST TIME Udi allowed himself to imagine life outside prison. During one of Leah’s visits, he proposed marriage. Leah hesitated. She had always suppressed her needs for his, she explained. But Udi hadn’t reciprocated. Didn’t he realize how much she had suffered when he’d rejected her and married Sylvia? Leah
could no longer deny her own needs. Marrying Udi when he could still be facing years of prison seemed to her one sacrifice too far.

  Udi knew she was right. In a letter to Leah, he had noted that his father called her “the luck of your life.” Wrote Udi: “He forgot to add that I am the misfortune of your life.”

  Chapter 24

  IDOLATROUS FIRE

  REVOLT AGAINST HEAVEN

  IN THE JEWISH ENCLAVE in downtown Hebron, in the farming communities on the Golan Heights, a dozen young men, including leading activists in the settlement movement, were detained without explanation. It was Friday morning, April 27, 1984. Rumors and speculation spread among the settlements. Was it for the attack on the mayors? The Islamic College? Or something else, as yet unknown?

  Yisrael Harel phoned contacts in the army, the government, the media. All we know, he was told, is that a disaster was averted at the last moment.

  When Shabbat ended, Yisrael phoned prime minister Yitzhak Shamir at home. Menachem Begin had abruptly resigned as prime minister, broken by the ongoing casualties of the Lebanon War and by the death of his beloved wife, Aliza. And Shamir, like Begin a Polish Jew whose family had been killed in the Holocaust, had taken his place.

  “I received very unpleasant information about actions that your people took,” Shamir told Yisrael.

  “What actions?” asked Yisrael.

  “I can’t say.”

  That same evening the news was released: members of the underground had been caught placing bombs under five Arab buses in East Jerusalem. If the bombs had gone off, hundreds might have been killed or wounded.

  Impossible, thought Yisrael. These were sane people. They knew that if those bombs had gone off the settlement movement would have lost its moral high ground. Maybe the Shin Bet security service felt so frustrated by its inability to solve the other attacks that it had contrived an atrocity conveniently averted at the last moment.

  In fact, the security service had been following the terrorists for months. The plot to blow up the buses was the pretext the Shin Bet was waiting for to close in on the members of the underground.

  An angry Yisrael appeared on the TV news. Our friends and neighbors have been arrested and not heard from since, he said. No phone calls to their families, no lawyers. Since when did people simply disappear in the state of Israel? What is this, Argentina?

  On Sunday morning the police came for Yehudah Etzion.

  WHAT MADNESS HAS taken hold of our camp? thought Yoel Bin-Nun. How could disciples of Rabbi Zvi Yehudah, who were taught to sanctify the state as the vessel of redemption and who celebrated Independence Day as a religious holiday—how could they take the law into their own hands and undermine Jewish sovereignty?

  By midweek, the news was out: members of the underground had indeed confessed—to the attack on the mayors, the murder of the students in the Islamic College, even the attempt to sabotage the buses.

  Yoel was interviewed by Israel Radio. “We have to face the enormity of this sin,” he said. “They struck at the very existence of the state. Whoever usurps the role of the army and decides that he is fighting the war against Israel’s enemies according to his own understanding has despaired of the very existence of a Jewish state. . . . There are no private wars. . . . They severely undermined the government’s ability to maintain its sovereignty in the land of Israel. . . . And then of course there is the unbelievable moral degradation, particularly in the two most recent events [the Islamic College and the buses]. This is not only a matter of Jewish law but of natural law, of basic morality.”

  Didn’t this slide into lawlessness begin with the mass squatting in Sebastia? the interviewer asked.

  Yoel wasn’t ready to go that far. “There is no comparison between a public struggle against an order or a law, with what happened here. This is not a case of people taking the law into their own hands but of challenging the essence of the state. . . . For me, a revolt against the state is a revolt against the Kingdom of Heaven.”

  In Israel’s polarized debate, where talk shows consisted of opponents simultaneously shouting, here finally was a voice that couldn’t be easily categorized. The nation began paying attention to Yoel Bin-Nun.

  YISRAEL WAS OUTRAGED.

  “I’m telling you as a friend,” he said to Yoel, “you’re going too far. You can’t keep kicking your own community while it’s lying bleeding in the road. You also have to offer some comfort, some solidarity. Otherwise, you’re going to end up without a constituency. The left will never accept you, and your friends and neighbors will reject you.”

  “I heard what you have to say,” Yoel responded testily. “But you can’t always hide behind ‘protecting the camp’ and ‘unifying our forces.’”

  “I’m no less against what happened than you are. The difference between us, Yoel, is that I don’t crave the approval of the left.”

  THE YOUNG MEN entered the office of the Yesha Council, nodded at each other, looked away. For years they had come together, planning demonstrations and settlements, arguing about how far to go in challenging a hostile Labor government and pressuring a sympathetic Likud government. They had envied each other’s prominence and complained about each other’s arrogance; but those were small disturbances among tempestuous personalities who had managed to stay focused on their shared vision. In the history of Israel, no group of activists had had a greater impact: they had transformed Israel’s geography and politics and society. On the wall was proof of their victory, a map of the West Bank dense with dots marking settlements.

  But now some of them were wondering: Did they still belong in the same camp? Could Moshe Levinger, the radical rabbi from Hebron, and Yoel Bin-Nun, the moderate rabbi from Ofra, continue to be comrades when they saw each other as betrayers of their camp’s deepest values?

  “Friends,” began Yisrael Harel, “I know you’re expecting me to give you information about the recent events. But I’m climbing the walls. No one is telling me anything.”

  “Who was authorized to issue a group indictment for all of us?” one delegate demanded. He meant Yoel.

  Rabbi Levinger shouted, “At least these people [from the underground] did something for the Jewish people, while many here were sitting in cozy armchairs!”

  Yisrael, who rarely raised his voice, shouted at Levinger: “You’re the one who says the state is holy! I don’t use such formulations. But then you go and support a group that undermines the authority of the state? What state can tolerate this?”

  Yoel insisted on an unequivocal condemnation. “A call has to come from here for a general soul-searching in our community,” he said.

  Yisrael turned angrily to Yoel: “How can you go on the radio and make pronouncements? I don’t know what happened, but you already pass judgment.”

  Like Kibbutz Gan Shmuel after Udi Adiv’s arrest, the Yesha Council debated whether to fund the defendants’ legal expenses. Only for those who express regret, said Yoel. The council voted to help defendants who didn’t commit or intend to commit murder—in effect, those who had participated in the maiming of the West Bank mayors.

  After the others left, Yisrael and Yoel lingered. They needed each other’s company, especially now. They shared the same anxieties: How would they face their secular supporters who had trusted them to responsibly carry out the national mission? How would the settlement movement endure if it were no longer perceived as mainstream?

  The phone rang. Yisrael listened silently to the voice on the other end. “God help us,” he said. Yehudah Etzion had been implicated in a plot to blow up the Dome of the Rock.

  LATE AT NIGHT, with only the call of the muezzin to break the stillness, Yoel wrote to Yehudah. “You have brought idolatrous fire into the holy dwelling place,” Yoel accused. Judaism aimed at sanctifying the physical; Yehudah had attempted to coarsen the sacred. “You didn’t blow up the Dome of the Rock, but you did blow to pieces the movement of the faithful that we founded. . . . Repent, Yehudah, for the sake of the true redemption
you long for and tried to quicken (and thereby delayed), so that the idolatrous fire may be re-sanctified through a holiness arising from the courage of patience.”

  Was Yoel in any way responsible? There were nights he was convinced he was blameless. After all, he had taught Rabbi Kook’s writings to hundreds of students, and none but Yehudah had so distorted those teachings. But there were also nights when he sensed he had unknowingly encouraged Yehudah’s recklessness, as though he’d given his favorite disciple a weapon without checking whether it was loaded.

  THE JEWISH UNDERGROUND was banner headlines for weeks. The revelation that religious Zionists—the dancing young men of Sebastia, some of them army officers—had planned to bomb crowded buses and destroy the Dome of the Rock, risking war with the Muslim world, strained even the Israeli capacity to endure the unexpected. Israel’s president, Chaim Herzog, spoke of “poisoned fruit”; leading rabbis condemned the underground as madness. In the newspaper Ma’ariv, Srulik, a beloved cartoon figure in a kibbutznik’s hat who embodied the scrappy Israeli, pointed a finger at himself with a stunned look that said, Who, me?

  “I’m not surprised,” Arik Achmon said to Yehudit. “The signs were there all along. Yisrael can talk all he wants about how they have the best youth. But they remind me of the Stalinists we grew up with, people who despised doubt and had answers to every question.”

  “It’s interesting,” replied Yehudit in her slow, thoughtful way, “that when the left turns extreme we produce traitors like Udi Adiv, and when the right turns extreme they produce murderers.”

  YISRAEL HAREL DROVE to the Israel Television studios in Jerusalem. After the confessions of the underground members and the report of Yehudah’s Temple Mount plot, he could no longer avoid an unequivocal condemnation. They have harmed Jewish morality and most of all the settlements, he told the nation. Even if they are good people, I won’t forgive them for this.