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

by Yossi Klein Halevi

  Driving back home, Yisrael felt again that moment of deep satisfaction when he returned to the cool mountain air and glimpsed Ofra’s red-roofed houses rising with the hills. Against all odds, he and his friends had built a thriving community in the land of Israel.

  Yisrael turned onto his street, lined with identical two-story houses, the bottom facade white stone, the top dark wood. He came to a sudden halt: his way was blocked by cars parked across the length of the road.

  His neighbors were waiting for him.

  Yisrael slowly got out of his car. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Who gave you the authority to speak in our name?” one man demanded.

  Yisrael replied deliberately, controlling his anger. “If we are against the people of Israel, then the people of Israel will be against us. We’ve lost their support.”

  “We have a right to defend ourselves!”

  “We have to live with the Arabs,” Yisrael said. “We can’t be a private army.”

  “All you want to do is appease the left!” someone shouted.

  “You shut up,” Yisrael said.

  It was the same accusation he had made against Yoel.

  TWENTY-SEVEN PRISONERS—knitted kippot, sandals, ritual fringes hanging from untucked shirts—entered the Jerusalem District Court, smiling and waving. Of course we’re guilty, they seemed to be saying: guilty of love for our homeland, guilty of trying to protect our people. Family members, including a young woman in a white kerchief on which the word “Yamit” was embroidered, quietly read Psalms.

  It was the largest trial of Jewish terrorist suspects in Israel’s history. Six members were charged with murder at the Islamic College. Others were charged with attempted murder, or membership in an underground.

  Defendants ignored the pleas of their guards and sat among their families, even left the courtroom at will, without permission or escort. One defendant blatantly ignored the procedings and studied Talmud.

  Around the Friday-night family table, on Shabbat morning in synagogues, on Shabbat afternoon in Bnei Akiva meetings, the religious Zionist community confronted itself. In the pages of Nekudah, settlers and their supporters confessed and accused. Religious education was to blame for emphasizing ritual practice more than morality, wrote one. The government was to blame, wrote another, for not defending the settlers more vigorously against terrorist attacks. Whoever wants to fight the enemies of Israel, countered Hanan Porat, should join an elite unit of the IDF or the Shin Bet.

  On the streets of Jerusalem teenage girls in long skirts and sandals collected money for the defense fund of the underground members—“the best of our young men,” as supporters called them.

  Rabbi Levinger was detained, suspected of providing halachic justification to underground members. At a demonstration outside Jerusalem police headquarters, Levinger’s wife, Miriam, declared, “We always have to think about being moral! I’ve never heard anybody, any politician, Jew or Arab, say the Arabs must be moral.” This, from an Orthodox Jew who routinely recited prayers affirming Jewish chosenness.

  IN THE DESERT

  ON JULY 22, 1985, fifteen months after the exposure of the underground, all twenty-seven defendants were sentenced to varying prison terms. Three defendants accused of murder were sentenced to life. Yehudah Etzion received seven years.

  And now, Yisrael wrote in a Nekudah editorial, it was time for a pardon. The defendants had already served over a year in prison; all expressed degrees of regret. Yisrael noted a recent prisoner exchange in which over a thousand Palestinians, many of them convicted terrorists, had been released for three Israeli POWs held in Lebanon. “Failure to temper the verdict [against the underground members] will vindicate those who claim that the Israeli government acts cruelly toward its most faithful sons while revealing weakness toward its cruelest enemies.”

  Yisrael and Hanan and other settlement leaders visited the prisoners. Yoel, though, maintained an implacable distance. But his boycott didn’t extend to the prisoners’ families: every Friday night Yoel and Esther hosted the wife and children of an Ofra resident imprisoned with the underground; Yehudah’s wife, Chaya, attended Yoel’s Torah classes, even though he often used those as a platform to attack political zealotry.

  Some neighbors accused Yoel of betraying his comrades. In the synagogue several refused to greet him. They had built Ofra together, shared guard duty, prayed and studied and mourned together. And now Yoel was regarded by a few of his neighbors as virtually a traitor. He could never know, when he set out to attend the wedding of a student or a meeting of rabbis, whether he would be welcomed or berated or shunned. Even in Mercaz, whose rabbis had passionately condemned the underground, Yoel was regarded warily. His opponents understood what he himself did not: that he had begun to look at his own community from a distance.

  Under pressure, Yoel became even more vociferous—arrogant, some said. At meetings of the Yesha Council he shouted, pounded the table. Listen to him, opponents mocked, he’s even begun quoting himself: “As I said five years ago . . .” At a Yesha Council meeting, Yoel declared, “I’m ready to carry the people of Israel on my back for forty years.” Who did he think he was, Moses?

  Our kibbutznik friends in the brigade think of Yoel as a model of tolerance, Yisrael thought. They should see how he speaks to his own community.

  “There is no longer a unified camp,” Yoel told Esther. “I feel as if my own body is being torn apart.”

  “Maybe we should move,” Esther suggested.

  “Under no circumstances,” said Yoel.

  GRADUALLY, LIFE FOR Yisrael Harel appeared to return to normal. The media moved on to other scandals. New settlements were built. Yisrael continued to divide his time between his two offices, preparing the next issue of Nekudah while running the Yesha Council.

  But, Yisrael knew, nothing would ever be the same again. The trust of many Israelis toward the settlers as the new pioneers was gone. Yisrael had devoted his life to turning religious Zionists from a defensive and peripheral community into the avant-garde of the Israeli ethos. But for all their attempts to appropriate the symbols of Zionist legitimacy, the settlers would likely remain an embattled group, damned by the cultural elite and confounded by their own limitations. There were moments when Yisrael suspected he had tied his life to a failed mission.

  And everywhere there were reminders of his lost son, Eldad. In the young men in uniform returning on Shabbat leave to Ofra, in the Bnei Akiva kids going off to discover a well or an ancient ruin. Yisrael had rarely allowed himself to feel joy, but he had known satisfaction; now, without Eldad, carrier of his ethos, even that was denied him.

  In a rare moment, he confided his despair to one of Nekudah’s young staff writers. “I’m finished,” Yisrael said.

  “WAITING FOR MASHIAH”

  THE WAR IN LEBANON went on. A poster at the Peace Now vigil outside the prime minister’s residence recorded the growing casualty rate—by 1985 nearly six hundred Israelis. The nation lost faith in the possibility of victory, or even in the ability to define victory. Israeli soldiers, targets of roadside bombs and suicide attacks, traveled through Lebanon in convoys. But how to withdraw without leaving the towns and kibbutzim in the north exposed again to Katyushas?

  Inflation reached over 400 percent. Israelis rushed to spend their paychecks. The government printed a five-thousand-shekel note. Pickpockets, Israelis joked, kept the wallet and threw away the money. The Israeli tendency to improvise, expressed on the battlefield as daring, was exposed as mere recklessness in civilian life.

  The radio played a song by Shalom Hanoch, mocking the Likud’s Israel of instant money and messianic politics. The song was called “Waiting for Mashiah” —a Sephardi family name but also Hebrew for Messiah. There’s a big deal in the offing, and a group of anxious investors are waiting in the offices of “Artzi-Eli”—Hebrew for “My land, my God”—for the wheeler-dealer Mashiah. But “Mashiah hasn’t come, and Mashiah isn’t calling.” A policeman appears, i
nforming the men that the stock market has crashed and that Mashiah has jumped off the roof. In a sneering voice, Shalom delivered the line that became the motto for this time: “Mashiah won’t be coming, Mashiah won’t be calling.” It was an anthem that could have been written for Yehudah Etzion.

  STILL, HOWEVER FITFULLY, the country was evolving. National elections brought a stalemate between Likud and Labor, and the two parties negotiated a national unity government, the first since May 1967. Shimon Peres, talented and vain, became prime minister for a two-year period, to be followed by the grim and unmovable Yitzhak Shamir.

  The unity government withdrew from most of Lebanon, leaving a “security zone” in southern Lebanon along the Israeli border, to be defended by a pro-Israel Lebanese militia. Israeli casualties declined, and in northern Israel air-raid shelters were gradually turned into storerooms.

  The unity government took on inflation too. The shekel was devalued, wages frozen, the budget cut, the public sector trimmed. Inflation declined from 400 percent to less than 20 percent. Once again the abyss needed to be in clear view to inspire the country’s next miracle.

  Look what we can achieve when the people of Israel are united, Yoel Bin-Nun told his students. He was speaking not just politically but theologically: Jewish unity—not the fantasies of a handful of fanatics—was the prerequisite for redemption.

  ISRAEL’S IMMIGRANT ABSORPTION CENTERS filled with African Jews. They had left their thatched-hut villages in the Ethiopian highlands, partly in response to famine, partly to messianic expectation, and walked through jungle and desert toward refugee camps in the Sudan. There they kept their Jewishness hidden from the Muslim Sudanese soldiers, until Israeli agents smuggled them out and dispatched them to Israel by plane and boat. Thousands died on the road and in the camps; no Diaspora community had sacrificed so much on its way to Zion.

  Yisrael Harel, emulating the kibbutz movement of an earlier era, mobilized the Yesha Council, and settlements welcomed Ethiopian immigrants. Dozens of Ethiopian families settled in Ofra. Immigrants became regular guests at the Shabbat table of the Harels and the Bin-Nuns and other Ofra families. Eventually, though, most of Ofra’s Ethiopians left in search of jobs.

  The arrival of the Ethiopian Jews, whose tradition identified them as the lost Israelite tribe of Dan, reminded Israelis of the country’s essential purpose of ingathering the exiles. For all the problems facing premodern Africans entering a Western country, their arrival home was, for many immigrants, a sign that Mashiah had called.

  Chapter 25

  NEW BEGINNINGS

  THE ELUSIVENESS OF HOME

  WEARING AN ORANGE T-shirt and jeans, the tall, angular man with short black hair stepped out of the iron door in the prison wall and tried to smile at the small crowd of well-wishers and journalists. It was May 14, 1985, and Udi Adiv had served twelve and a half years of a seventeen-year sentence. The campaign to free him had succeeded.

  “What are your plans?” called out a reporter.

  “I can’t,” Udi pleaded, and raised his hands against his head as if in pain.

  “Let him go to his father!” someone called out.

  “Do you plan to start a family?” the reporter persisted.

  “Yes,” said Udi, “start a family, live my life—”

  “What do you most long for?”

  “Habayta habayta habayta”—Home home home—said Udi.

  Leah put her arm around his waist and led him away.

  First stop, his parents’ home. Back to Gan Shmuel.

  They arrived toward sunset. How the pecan trees have grown, thought Udi. And the lawns: Had they always been so lush? How could anyone who lived in such a place ever be unhappy?

  Slowly, he walked the pathways of his childhood. Gan Shmuel’s beloved son. And then its disgrace. Will they curse me? So let them, I couldn’t care less—

  Middle-aged people in shorts on rusty bicycles, old people in motorized carts. So bourgeois, he thought, but without malice. After all the upheavals of the century, what Gan Shmuel seemed to want most wasn’t utopia but normalcy. And wasn’t that what Udi now wanted too?

  “Udi!” someone shouted and rushed toward him. Shlomit, a childhood friend, fell on his neck. “Come on,” she said, “the hevreh are waiting for you inside.” The hevreh: no matter what anyone else thought of him, for the hevreh from the children’s house he would always remain Udi.

  His parents’ “room”—the kibbutzniks still called it that, even though it was now a two-room apartment—was crowded with childhood friends, with journalists and lawyers who had taken up his cause. His parents had written a “Welcome Home Udi” sign but decided not to hang it outside. Instead, it was stuck awkwardly between plates of cookies.

  Hugs, kisses, but no tears. Udi had learned his restraint among these emotional ascetics. For the first time since his arrest, he was in a room filled with people who accepted him, even loved him, just as he was—not a monster, not a martyr, just Udi from Gan Shmuel.

  The hevreh wanted to know: What was it like? How did you get along with the criminals? How did you keep your sanity? Udi smiled, embarrassed to speak about himself. “I don’t consider the years in prison to be lost,” he said. “I learned a lot about life.”

  The urgent questions went unasked. Could he really start again, find his place in an Israeli society that had transformed him into its symbol for treason? Would the “Udi Adiv affair” ever really end?

  That night, Udi slept in his parents’ apartment. The next morning they brought him breakfast from the dining room. Udi understood: he wasn’t welcome there. What do I care what those hypocrites think?

  But no, that is not how he wanted to return to Gan Shmuel. These people weren’t his enemies. They were family.

  Contacted by a reporter, Udi readily agreed to be interviewed. His parole agreement forbade political pronouncements, and so Udi tried, not always succesfully, to confine his remarks to the personal. It’s important, he told the reporter, that I explain myself to the kibbutzniks who feel I betrayed them. Going to Damascus, he admitted, was “an act which can’t be explained. A sane person wouldn’t do such a thing.”

  Yes, I made a terrible mistake, he continued. But don’t reject me, because I am your creation. After all, where did I learn my longing to perfect the world—my messianic politics—if not from Hashomer Hatzair?

  UDI RECEIVED DOZENS of letters and postcards from well-wishers, some of whom he didn’t know. One postcard had a single line: “Good luck in your future steps.” It was signed Motta Gur.

  There were also anonymous callers threatening to kill him. And every casual encounter contained the possibility of humiliation.

  Leah accompanied Udi to buy a pair of glasses. “Name?” asked the clerk filling out the order. Udi hesitated. Leah broke the silence. “Ehud Adiv,” she said, invoking Udi’s formal name. No reaction: blessed anonymity.

  Udi went from one friend’s home to the other, trying to fill in the missing years, meeting spouses and children, hearing about careers. All that he would have once dismissed as bourgeois distractions: life.

  Some sensed in him a deep confusion: Which of his old beliefs to repudiate, which to uphold?

  Udi went to see a friend from the underground, Mahmoud Masarwa, who had been released as part of the terrorist prisoner exchange that Yisrael Harel had denounced in Nekudah.

  Mahmoud asked Udi a favor: Would he accompany him on a pilgrimage to Cherkas, the village near Gan Shmuel destroyed after the War of Independence?

  “There’s nothing left of Cherkas,” Udi said, “not even ruins.”

  Mahmoud persisted. And so they went to an orange grove across the road from Gan Shmuel, where the ruins of Cherkas had been. As a child Udi had imagined those ruins inhabited by ghosts.

  Mahmoud walked through the grove, trying to remember where his house had been.

  Every nation carries its legacy of injustice, thought Udi. To correct the injustices of the past meant imposing new injustices. But we
need to remember what happened here. At least that.

  “The past is gone, Mahmoud,” said Udi. “This is Gan Shmuel now.”

  THREE MONTHS AFTER his release, Udi and Leah married. “I’m ready for a personal life,” he told her.

  They lived in a working-class Israeli Arab neighborhood in the town of Lod, near Tel Aviv. Leah was studying alternative nutrition. Udi cleaned stairwells, proud, he told Leah, not to have to rely on unemployment payments. “For years I’ve eaten three trays a day at the people’s expense. Now I have to get used to getting my own tray.” Every morning he ran four kilometers, past his former prison in nearby Ramle.

  Udi enrolled at Tel Aviv University, studying history and political philosophy. He wrote a paper criticizing early Zionist pioneering from a Marxist perspective, and no one seemed scandalized. His teachers and fellow students didn’t mention his past unless he did. The anonymous death threats faded. At age forty, normal life seemed possible for Udi Adiv.

  LOSING THEIR RELIGION

  ON KIBBUTZ EIN SHEMER, the good years abruptly ended. The government’s austerity measures to curb inflation led to higher interest rates, and Ein Shemer’s debt was growing at a rate of tens of thousands of dollars a month.

  At the weekly meeting, anxious members debated whether to abandon the kibbutz’s building projects midconstruction. Avital warned against taking out more loans to complete the building. Avital’s father, Kuba, the architect who had planned the projects, glared at him from across the room but kept silent. Kuba let others make the case that Ein Shemer couldn’t very well be left in its present state, disfigured with vast pits. The majority voted to continue building.

  The kibbutz adopted a series of austerity moves, but the debt only grew. Trips abroad were canceled, meat served in the dining room sparingly. Members were told not to paint their apartments. Even travel by public transportation was discouraged; trips to the sea were via kibbutz truck alone. Hired workers were laid off; during the cotton harvest their places were taken by kibbutzniks volunteering extra hours. Avital went to work in the kibbutz’s rubber factory.