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

by Yossi Klein Halevi

  Avital could have said, I told you so. Instead, he urged his friends to resist the temptation for mutual recrimination. If we waste our time accusing each other, he said, how will we heal?

  Ein Shemer needed to find new ways to create and produce. And attract new members: the kibbutz, with a population of around three hundred members, not including children, was absorbing no more than three or four new families a year. Meanwhile the kibbutz was losing growing numbers of its own young people to the city.

  But, Avital insisted, the crisis was an opportunity: “Leaving the kibbutz is not a new phenomenon. . . . The problem is—the faith of those who remain, their ability to change and influence. Our tragedy will be if young people stop believing that something can change here.”

  But instead of faith, the mood among Avital’s friends was more ironic and sad. “We’ve lost our religion,” one put it. Avital’s generation—the children of the founders, as they still called themselves, well into middle age—were now running Ein Shemer. They honored the kibbutz as idea and loved Ein Shemer as home. But slowly they were realizing their untenable situation: they were socialists bound to a capitalist system. Some suspected they were caretakers of a beautiful idea that had almost worked, and that their task was to provide a dignified burial for the utopian dream.

  IN THE GREENHOUSE, a team of high school students was working on improving the insulation of the new roof of the cowshed and examining why Ein Shemer’s cows were more productive in winter than summer. Another team was growing roses for export to Holland. A third was creating computer programs for solar energy panels. The teenagers came after school hours and sometimes during school hours, and sometimes they worked through the night. Avital moved from team to team, offering coffee and soup, encouragement and hugs.

  The greenhouse experimented with raising fish in water recycled from plants. Sooner or later Israel would face a water crisis, Avital explained, and raising fish in open ponds would no longer be practical. Irrigation pipes from the fish tanks dripped water onto rows of houseplants laid out on slanted trays. Excess water from the plants flowed down back into the fish tanks.

  Late at night, when the last of the young people had gone, Avital would strip naked and swim with the fish.

  ARIK ACHMON, DEFENSELESS

  CLAUDE LANZMANN’S NINE-HOUR documentary film Shoah was being screened over two evenings at the Tel Aviv Museum, and Yehudit Achmon bought tickets. Arik went reluctantly. More than most sabras of his generation, he knew survivors intimately, had lived with them in Kibbutz Netzer Sereni, heard their stories in the cowshed. He had studied the mechanics of destruction. What could he learn about the Holocaust that he didn’t already know?

  But nothing prepared him for Shoah. Arik knew how to inure himself to the usual horrors. Lanzmann, though, told the story without historical footage, relying only on testimony by survivors, murderers, and bystanders. The film was excrutiating in its slowness: Lanzmann asks a question in French, the translator repeats it in Yiddish or German or Polish, then the answer by the interviewee, then the translation—in fact emphasizing the inadequacy of translation, from “there” to here. Meanwhile the camera lingers on the faces, records every twitch. Interviews take place in the fields and forest clearings where the killings happened, and the bucolic scenes become themselves part of the horror.

  For the first time Arik felt as if he were there. Not trying to “understand” the system in his maddeningly dispassionate way, but one of them. Trapped. Helpless.

  Arik had always assumed there was a way out of any situation. But of what use were courage and will and strategic planning against a state system wholly mobilized to gradually prepare you for extinction, while those who might help turned away in fear or indifference or hatred?

  Arik, the resourceful sabra conceived by Jewish emergency, had intuitively understood: the only way to survive this knowledge and remain intact was to become an emotional Holocaust denier. But he could no longer feign detachment. He had reached the limits of the Zionist capacity to rescue, protect. I know nothing—

  PRAYER FOR RAIN

  WE’RE LEAVING FOR A YEAR, Meir Ariel told neighbors in Kibbutz Mishmarot. Just to try life in the city.

  Few believed it. This time they’re going for good, neighbors said. Tirza had been serious about quitting the kibbutz: she was now managing a private factory for producing eyeglass frames.

  Meanwhile, Meir’s career was stagnating: he had released a second album, another critical success and commercial failure. Perhaps he would have better luck in Tel Aviv.

  But Meir’s disappointment with kibbutz life was also spiritual. The kibbutz had been an experiment in human transcendence, yet it remained, in its way, material, concerned primarily with organizing the physical needs of its members. The kibbutz, Meir believed, had failed to recognize its own spiritual essence.

  The Ariels found a big shabby house with a wild garden on a Tel Aviv street near the sea. Tirza spent most of the week away, at the eyeglass factory in the north. She paid the rent. Meir began recording a third album and promised to maintain the house. But when Tirza returned home on Thursday night, she would find the week’s dishes in the sink, cigarette butts on the floor, dirty clothes left on unmade beds. “Mefager, idiyot!” she shouted. “I work all week to support you, and you leave the mess for Tirza to clean up?” Meir smiled, embarrassed, admitted she was right. “Without you I’m lost,” he said, coaxing her close. Tirza knew she shouldn’t give in, and knew she always would.

  MEIR, NEARLY FORTY-FIVE, was reassigned to reserve duty in the IDF’s entertainment division. Once a week he and Yehudah Eder, former guitarist for Tamouz, put on their old IDF uniforms and traveled to remote army bases. Meir’s ideal reserve duty: instead of guns, they carried guitars.

  One night, driving home from a base on the Golan Heights, Meir said to Yehudah, “You know what my dream is? To do a road show.”

  “A road show?” said Yehudah, laughing. “In Israel?” One could drive the length of the country, from the Lebanon border to Eilat, in eight hours, and cross the width of “greater Israel,” from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, in an hour and a half.

  “Why not?” insisted Meir. “We’ll be just like rock singers in America.”

  “We’ll have groupies,” said Yehudah.

  Yehudah, founder of Israel’s first academy for jazz, was one of the country’s most sought-after guitarists. He could have played with anyone, but he chose to accompany Meir. Aside from Dylan, no one moved him more than Meir, and in precisely the same way, by combining irony and romanticism, in words that seemed to have been said for the first time. So Meir couldn’t fill a club in Tel Aviv, couldn’t afford to pay his musicians: the very lack of success meant singing for the song alone. Someday, Yehudah knew, Israel would regret the way it had treated its greatest balladeer.

  They called it “Meir Ariel’s Election Tour.” Meir, claiming to be running for prime minister, would show up with a makeshift band in a forlorn town—they would only play the periphery, kibbutzim and impoverished towns in the Galilee and the Negev—set up in a public space, and play for whoever showed up. And if no one came, they would play anyway.

  Meir rented a van. Tirza paid—“naturally,” as she put it. Yoav Kutner, the DJ from Army Radio, brought congas. A film crew producing a documentary on the trip rode in a separate van.

  They set out during the harvest holiday of Sukkoth, October 1987. The Wondrous Election Campaign, read a sign taped to Meir’s van. A six-day tour, from north to south, sleeping in the clubrooms and empty children’s houses of kibbutzim along the way.

  The town of Kiryat Shmona, on the Lebanon border. The band set up in a concrete square with falafel stands and cafés where young men played backgammon in the middle of the day and old men in berets drank arak. Most of them ignored Meir as he spoke into a microphone: “Ladies and gentlemen! Happy holiday to the residents of Kiryat Shmona! We are Meir Ariel and the Charisma band. We’re running for office and we want to sei
ze the government and establish the time of the Messiah right now!”

  A crowd gathered. A mother with a stroller, a barefoot boy, a Druse man with a great mustache. An old man in a straw fedora danced gracefully alone, holding high a beer bottle.

  Back in the van, Meir talked about fame. “I wanted to be famous, period,” he said, speaking of his youth. “I don’t care how you make it happen, I just want to be famous. That was then, in those days. And then suddenly Jerusalem of Iron fell on me and spread my name among the public. . . . I was described everywhere as the singing paratrooper who participated in [the battle of] Jerusalem and wrote [the song] in the middle of the battle.”

  Meir raised his arms as if he were shooting a gun, then gestured as if throwing the gun aside, retrieved an imaginary pen from his pocket and scribbled furiously on his palm, then shot again. “In the middle of the battle, as we charged the enemy. . . . Not just writing, but writing with his blood. I’d stab myself with my pen, draw a drop of blood and write with it.”

  A WARM AUTUMN EVENING on the grass of Kibbutz Mishmarot, the lawn made famous by Meir and Shalom’s song. But now, instead of a tangle of teenagers, there were rows of chairs. Almost the entire Mishmarot community turned out for the concert.

  Meir’s father, Sasha, had died three weeks earlier. Meir had written a kind of eulogy for him, a lament for Meir’s failure to live up to his father’s expectations. “The Snake’s Shed Skin” opens with Meir lying under a bridge, chewing on the stem of a wildflower while cars are in constant movement above his head. Where were all those people going? And why couldn’t Meir heed his father’s advice and be more purposeful like them? Meir feared he would always be a kind of fool, brilliant, openhearted, hopelessly archaic. (He calls the cars “wagons.”)

  The language was exquisite, the melody haunting even in major key. But he didn’t sing it here tonight.

  Kutner screamed into the mike: “Where are the Rolling Stones? Where are the Doors? Everything’s dead, everything’s finished!”

  The teenagers on the grass laughed. The old-timers looked at each other and smiled: Nu, Meirkeh and his friends.

  IN BEERSHEBA, AT THE EDGE of the desert, Meir and the band approached the entrance to a prison, explained they wanted to play for the inmates. The guards told them to go away. Beersheba is a good place to put a prison, said Kutner; who would want to escape?

  They drove on the desert road past Sde Boker, Ben-Gurion’s kibbutz. They came to the Ramon Crater, vast and primal. Stop the car, said Meir. Retrieving a prayer book, he stepped outside and quietly read the Prayer for Rain, recited on Sukkoth, when the land of Israel prepares for the first rains of autumn, after months of sealed sky. “Remember the twelve tribes You led through the split waters,” Meir recited. “Their descendants whose blood was spilled for You like water. Help us, for troubles surround our souls like water. For the sake of their righteousness, grant abundant water.”

  For days clouds had been gathering. But no rain had come.

  Back in the car, Meir sensed his friends’ unease. Could it be that Meir Ariel, bohemian kibbutznik, bard of Israeli angst, would become one of them—the black-hatted ghetto Jews darkening the land of the free Hebrews? The possibility was not inconceivable in 1980s Israel. After all, another great Israeli bohemian, the actor and wise guy Uri Zohar, producer of lascivious comedies and winner of the nation’s highest honor, the Israel Prize, for helping create the new secular Israeli culture, had vanished into the yeshiva world and reemerged as Rabbi Uri Zohar, preaching against secularism.

  But no: Meir’s friends knew he wouldn’t betray himself. So what exactly did Meir’s interest in Judaism mean? Was it a whim, one more Meir Ariel challenge to smugness? Or maybe, as Shalom Hanoch assumed, simply an expression of Meir’s deep interest in the Hebrew language, which couldn’t be fully understood without its religious origins?

  Meir tried to explain: “One day I realized that I can’t circumcise my son and marry [in a religious ceremony] and celebrate the holidays without understanding what it’s all about.” But his interest in Judaism was more than a search for identity: “I believe in God, I believe that the Torah is the true version of existence, to the formation of the world.”

  “So why don’t you take it to the end?” asked one of the band members.

  “I don’t understand the concept of taking things to the end.”

  How to explain himself in a society that coped with its drastic human diversity by categorizing? “My faith in God is entirely personal and I don’t feel any need to join any camp,” Meir added. That included the secular camp. “I don’t really feel at home in secular society. I feel we’re missing something.”

  It began to rain. Pour.

  “Wow,” said Kutner.

  Meir watched the rain in silence.

  ARTICLES ON THE TOUR appeared in the press; the film Meir Ariel’s Election Campaign was screened on Israel Television.

  Meir wrote a letter to the Mishmarot community, explaining that he and Tirza had decided to remain in Tel Aviv. “I dare to say we have no real reason to leave the kibbutz,” wrote Meir, “not as an ideal and not as a community of friends. Therefore we see our departure in technical terms only, for the sake of fulfilling our potential in the open market.” Reassuring, he continued, “Needless to say this has nothing to do with any argument or resentment, or any feeling of ill-treatment. Ours is a departure with love for friends and place.”

  But then he abruptly changed tone. “True, there is disappointment, in particular with the way a lie has been accepted”—an apparent reference to the loss of Mishmarot’s egalitarian ethos, especially the benefits, like private cars, accorded managers in the plywood factory, about which Meir had often complained.

  Then Meir changed tone yet again. “We won’t swear to this, but we have good reasons to return [to the kibbutz], if only to fulfill 45 years of investment in friendships and in assets, and the departing grant [we received from the kibbutz] scarcely compensates for all of that.”

  But, he concluded with oblique hostility, “Members don’t only leave the kibbutz, the kibbutz also leaves its members.”

  A FAILURE OF EMPATHY

  DAVID GROSSMAN, the Israeli novelist, stood before the Ofra residents crowded into Yoel and Esther Bin-Nun’s salon. Slight, redheaded, Grossman looked even younger than his thirty-two years. But the appearance of innocence was misleading: Grossman was no less fierce in his ideological commitment than the settlers.

  He had come to Ofra, he explained, as part of a journey through the West Bank that had already taken him to Palestinian towns and refugee camps. Now he had a simple request of the people in this room: that they suspend political argument and try to enter into the consciousness of their Palestinian neighbors. Can you imagine how they see the occupation, what its most hateful aspects would be?

  “The situation isn’t our fault!” someone called out. Others nodded.

  That’s not my question, insisted Grossman. Let’s say you’re right, and history will vindicate you. Still: How do you think your neighbors in Ein Yabroud experience your presence here?

  Grossman was asking Ofra’s settlers for empathy. But the response was more defensiveness.

  Grossman tried again. I can’t bear the thought, he said, that even a moment of my time would pass without meaning or enjoyment. The thought of being detained at a roadblock or locked at home under curfew is unbearable.

  “At the intersection coming into Tel Aviv I also get held up an hour every morning,” someone responded. Laughter.

  Some did try to grapple with Grossman’s challenge. One young woman spoke of her unease at the second-class status of Israel’s Bedouin. A young man said he rebuked soldiers who mistreated Palestinians at a roadblock. But even those well-intentioned responses didn’t answer Grossman’s question. In the end, he noted, the settlers weren’t able to step out of their worldview even for a moment and see themselves through Palestinian eyes. Grossman’s experiment in empathy had failed.

&nb
sp; GROSSMAN’S FURIOUS ACCOUNT of his journey through the territories appeared in May 1987, as a special issue of the magazine Koteret Rashit. A month later it was published as a book, Hazman Hatzahov (The Yellow Time), and then in English as The Yellow Wind. The territories, wrote Grossman, were seething—with humiliation, with rage, with dreams of revenge: “One day we will wake up to a bitter surprise.”

  Grossman’s portrait of Ofra’s settlers was devastating. Though warm and hospitable, he wrote, they were sealed in their own certainties, trapped by ideological clichés that diminished language and thought. “Their houses are almost bookless, with the exception of religious texts, and, in general, they have little use for culture.” The settlers were “historical people, and historical people become—at certain moments—hollow, and allow history to stuff them, and then they are dangerous and deadly.” And, warned Grossman, the next generation of Jewish terrorists, successors to the settlers’ underground, was now being incubated in the settlements and yeshivas of religious Zionism.

  As for Yoel Bin-Nun, Grossman acknowledged his stand against the settlers’ underground, yet dismissed him as a faux moderate, noting that on his wall hung the photomontage of the Second Temple superimposed on the Mount—the image Yoel had created, Grossman wrote pointedly, together with the imprisoned underground leader Yehudah Etzion.

  Yoel was outraged. Hollow historical beings? What was the Jewish people without historical consciousness? And how could he write that the settlers posssessed no secular books? He’d been in Yoel’s home, he saw the library! No use for culture? Sitting in that room were journalists, an art critic, teachers, scientists. And how dare he imply that Yoel was somehow in the same camp as Yehudah Etzion because of an educational poster on the wall?