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

by Yossi Klein Halevi

  Grossman, Yoel concluded, had come not to engage the people of Ofra but to judge them. He would never allow himself to write about Palestinians with the same contemptuous stereotypes. Apparently empathy was meant for everyone but settlers.

  Yoel began writing a rebuttal, which he intended to turn into a book, The Blue and White Time.

  Chapter 26

  UNDER SIEGE

  A DIFFERENT KIND OF WAR

  IT WAS EARLY EVENING, and Yisrael Harel was driving home from Jerusalem. Since the outbreak of riots in the West Bank and Gaza—what the Palestinians were calling the intifada, or uprising—that once-routine drive had become a gauntlet. One young man from a settlement near Ofra, whose car was hit by a Molotov cocktail, emerged with a melted face; a boy from Ofra was hit in the head with a rock and became an epileptic. Yisrael drove without a seat belt, in case he had to escape from a burning car. He wore a pistol, just in case.

  Yisrael had been stoned several times, but there was no way to prepare for that moment of shattered glass. Like a car crash but worse, because the violence was intentional. Yisrael would often pick up a hitchhiking soldier or settler, and company helped ease the tension. But now he was alone.

  Yisrael passed IDF jeeps, whose windshields—and even the rotating blue lights on their roofs—were covered with mesh wire against stones. For Yisrael that protectiveness conveyed an unbearable weakness: Since when did soldiers of Israel fear teenagers with rocks? Why was the IDF allowing itself to be humiliated?

  The narrow road approached the village of Baytin. In the fading light, the white stone houses, some with antennae shaped like the Eiffel Tower, seemed to emerge from the hills. Several houses flew Palestinian flags—a defiant gesture, since the red, black, and green colors of the PLO were banned by Israel.

  Yisrael turned a bend. Up ahead, a barrier of stones across the road. And behind it, teenagers and children, some with kaffiyehs wrapped around their faces.

  Crash: splintered windshield.

  Yisrael stepped out of the car. A rock hit him in the shoulder. In the leg. He aimed his pistol at the crowd. A warning: he wouldn’t shoot at anyone unless his life was threatened. Rocks fell around him. He pointed the gun straight up and fired. The young people ran.

  Back in the car, Yisrael swerved around the stone barrier, accelerated, and resumed his journey home.

  IT HAD BEGUN with an accident. On December 8, 1987, a truck driven by an Israeli hit a car near Gaza, killing four Palestinians. A baseless rumor spread that the attack had been deliberate, revenge for the stabbing murder of an Israeli two days earlier in the Gaza City market. Rioting spread through the Gaza refugee camps, and then into the West Bank. The army expected a quick end to the disturbances. But the violence only intensified into an organized revolt.

  Israelis had prided themselves on maintaining a benign occupation. There was, after all, a degree of prosperity, at least in the West Bank; and the army’s presence in the lives of Palestinians had been minimal. Arabs as well as Jews could travel in any part of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. True, there was occasional terrorism and stone-throwing and IDF curfews; still, the territories had been relatively quiet.

  But suppressed rage had been released, and the territories were now a low-level battlefield. Palestinians threw rocks and Molotov cocktails, Israeli soldiers fired rubber bullets. Black smoke rose from burning tires, white smoke from tear gas. Stone walls in Palestinian towns and villages were covered with graffiti, drawings of swords piercing the map of Israel dripping blood. The Palestinian teenager with a slingshot against Israeli soldiers with M16s shattered a cherished Israeli self-image: Who was David, who Goliath?

  The army didn’t know how to cope. Yitzhak Rabin, defense minister in an uneasy unity government of Likud and Labor, told soldiers to “break the bones” of rioters. One commander ordered Palestinian detainees to lie facedown on the ground, then ordered his soldiers to beat them with clubs.

  How to control the violence? Some settlers who shot at rioters, or even fired in the air, were detained by Israeli police. A settler was wounded in a stabbing attack in Hebron and managed to shoot his assailant; police seized his weapon, returning it only after a public outcry. “We are prevented from exercising our right to self-defense,” noted a leaflet distributed in Ofra. “Those who rise to kill us are protected by the Israeli government, and we are required to flee.”

  Yet for leftists, the problem wasn’t Israeli restraint but brutality. Left and right no longer seemed capable of even perceiving the same reality.

  OFRA WAS UNDER SIEGE. School buses were accompanied by armed guards and fitted with plastic windows. On especially bad days on the roads, the army insisted that cars leaving the settlement travel in convoys. A company of soldiers moved in: for Ofra, civilian and military life, always intimate, became inseparable.

  To be a settler now meant risking one’s family’s safety on a daily basis. Yet settlers continued to travel the roads; large families crowded into Subaru station wagons, flying Israeli flags as though every day were Independence Day. They continued to hike to biblical sites. The land of Israel is won through suffering, Ofra’s residents quoted the rabbis, strengthening each other’s resolve.

  Yisrael and Sarah Harel didn’t try to restrain the movements of their three remaining children. Yisrael was moved by Sarah’s courage: she would stand outside Ofra’s gate and hitch a ride to Jerusalem. We waited two thousand years to come home, she seemed to be saying; do they think they can deter us with stones? Yisrael recalled how, after the death of their son Eldad, he couldn’t bring himself to attend Ofra’s Purim party; but Sarah went, dressed in a lion’s costume.

  Not only did almost none of Ofra’s five hundred residents leave; but more families were moving in. The settlement population generally—around seventy thousand at the beginning of the intifada—was expanding.

  Still, settlers were feeling increasingly isolated. The Ofra newsletter noted the absence of visitors—relatives from the other side of the old border who were afraid to come to the settlement for bar mitzvahs, the mailman who refused to come without armed guard. Only beggars, the newsletter added sardonically, continue to come here. In Ofra they spoke with contempt for the fearful Jews of Tel Aviv, compared to their own children, fearlessly walking the land.

  Media hostility intensified the sense of siege. A sticker denouncing left-wing Israeli journalists appeared on settler cars: “The people oppose a hostile media,” with a drawing of a snake wrapped around a microphone. Yoel Bin-Nun argued with his neighbors. It’s our media too, he reminded. If we make our case convincingly, we will be heard.

  A JEWISH ARGUMENT OVER LAND

  WORKING AT NIGHT, the young men uprooted a part of the fence separating Ofra from several hundred acres of unworked, Arab-owned land. The fence was extended eastward, and the settlement instantly expanded. This was no partisan act: Ofra’s leaders had decided to seize the land for a building extension. After all, they reasoned, the land was all but abandoned; and without expansion, Ofra would not survive.

  No compensation was offered the Arab owner, no explanation given to the Israeli authorities. A fait accompli, passed without incident.

  Over the years Ofra’s left-wing opponents had accused the settlers of seizing Arab land, but those charges appeared nebulous. The first settlers, after all, had moved into an abandoned Jordanian army camp. The Jordanians had expropriated private land to build the camp and, it turned out, hadn’t observed their own legal requirements. Still, the army camp had remained empty, unclaimed, for nearly a decade after the Six-Day War.

  Yoel Bin-Nun tried to convince himself that this new expropriation was legitimate. Necessary. And anyway the land was neglected. No one’s livelihood was threatened. But there are some fig trees—

  THE DISTORTION OPENING Meir Ariel’s third album, Yerukot (Yellow Blue), was the first jarring note. Then came Meir’s voice, angry and taunting. The song, “Midrash Yonati”—literally, “Commentary on My Do
ve,” a rabbinic metaphor for the Jewish people—was a vehement attack on the settlers, who seize land “like a thief in the night.” Invoking a saying of Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook about the Western Wall—“There are people with hearts of stone and stones with hearts of people”—Meir lamented, “Stones in the heart of Jerusalem / . . . She doesn’t pursue justice, doesn’t want peace / because there is no peace without justice”—a play on two biblical verses.

  Meir’s critique was no mere left-wing polemic but a religious disputation. Meir was insisting that settlers had distorted the Torah he had come to love. He drew on the Exodus from Egypt, the apocalyptic prophecy of Ezekiel, the love between God and Israel in the Song of Songs. Meir’s protest was so layered with biblical and rabbinic references that almost every line required commentary.

  “Midrash Yonati” was a philosophical argument for how Judaism understands the holiness of the land of Israel. Just as a Jew relinquishes mastery over the world every seventh day, he surrenders control over his land every seventh year. The laws of shmitta, of leaving the land fallow on the sabbatical year, apply only to the land of Israel, a reminder that one cannot entirely possess holy land.

  Meir didn’t minimize the enmity of Israel’s neighbors. The modern exodus of the Jews resembled the first exodus, when the Israelites stood on the shore of the Red Sea, with Pharoah behind them and the unparted waters before them: it was, sang Meir, the same dangerous procession “on the way to the sea.”

  But existential threat didn’t absolve Israel from moral responsibility. The generation of Jews privileged to return home must be especially worthy, because they are the repository of the dreams of the Jews in exile: “The lands beyond the sea are behind us / We are their longing.”

  THE MOUNTAIN AND THE COAST, REVISITED

  GUARD DUTY WAS mandatory for men in Ofra. But not everyone took the responsibility seriously. Ofra’s “security committee” decided to impose fines and publicize the names of shirkers. The protocol of a meeting of the security committee from May 20, 1988, listed the names of four Ofra residents who didn’t appear for their shifts. They included Yoel Bin-Nun, who, the minutes noted, was fined with a double shift. “We apologize about the fines and the publicizing of names—but we have no choice. . . . Shabbat shalom, a peaceful Sabbath to all.”

  Yoel was no shirker; he was simply overwhelmed with other responsibilities. Along with teaching at the Mount Etzion military yeshiva and leading hikes from the Ofra field school and training teachers in Bible studies, he was founder and principal of a progressive religious girls’ high school in Ofra. The premise of the Ofra Ulpana was that religious girls should be exposed to no less a rigorous education than boys. If we keep our young women in the nineteenth century, Yoel argued, we will lose the brightest among them. The girls were taught cooking but also how to change a tire. When some girls said they wanted to study Talmud, just as the boys did, Yoel organized a class in his home.

  Yoel spoke of “the living Torah,” relevant not only to religious ritual but to all of life. Mathematics was the code of God’s creation, history the unfolding of God’s plan. Most of all, Yoel stressed love for the people of Israel in all its diversity. On Memorial Day, the girls went to ceremonies on secular kibbutzim; then they spent a Shabbat with ultra-Orthodox families.

  Yoel emphasized a religious education based on trust, not fear. A key was left hanging outside the school canteen, and any student could help herself to snacks and be expected to leave the proper payment. Yoel tried, without success, to convince the Ministry of Education to allow matriculation tests in the Ulpana without supervision. He trusted, too, his students’ religious and political maturity. He taught not only Jewish but Greek philosophy. And he invited dovish politicians who explained why they opposed annexing the territories, and a prominent journalist who explained why he didn’t believe in God.

  Yoel worked out a compromise with Ofra’s security committee: he fulfilled his guarding responsibilities in the summer. For a full week he sat in the booth at Ofra’s front gate. There he held his meetings—with a journalist seeking out the settlement movement’s most outspoken moderate, with a student confessing a crisis of faith.

  A FRIEND WAS driving Yoel home from Jerusalem. As the car entered the town of El Bireh, past Ramallah on the way to Ofra, a rock smashed the windshield. Yoel saw several teenagers running into a school building. One of them, a big young man, was wearing a red sweater.

  Yoel entered the school. Meanwhile his friend contacted the army—many settler cars were now equipped with two-way radios—and waited for the soldiers.

  Yoel found the principal in his office. “Some young people broke the windshield of my car,” Yoel said, deliberately calm, “and they escaped into this building.”

  The principal, an older man with a gray mustache, examined the bearded settler with the large knitted kippah. Yoel’s soft-spoken demeanor reassured him.

  “Can you identify them?” asked the principal in Hebrew.

  They went from classroom to classroom. The big young man had removed his red sweater, but Yoel easily spotted him. He made no attempt to escape. “Come with us,” the principal ordered, and the offender passively complied. “He’s not one of our students,” the principal told Yoel, as if in apology.

  They waited together until soldiers came. Yoel felt appreciation toward the principal, a fellow educator trying to protect his community from the consequences of its rage.

  IN HIS LATE-NIGHT PACING, Yoel was reaching heretical conclusions about the future of Judea and Samaria. The intifada, he knew, was a turning point. The settlement movement, Yoel was now saying, had succeeded in settling on the ground, but it had failed to settle in the hearts of the Israeli people. Peace Now, Yoel conceded, was partly right: the settlers had never seriously thought about the Arabs living in the land. The Yesha Council had opposed every peace plan, but never offered a realistic plan of its own.

  Desperate plans were being promoted by the settlers’ radical fringe—the mass expulsion of Palestinians from the territories, even creating a “state of Judea” that would secede from the state of Israel. Since the withdrawal from Sinai, and especially since the outbreak of the intifada, it was no longer unusual to hear some religious Zionists proclaim their alienation from the secular state they once revered. If the secular state, heralded by Kookians as the carrier of redemption, was now betraying the messianic process, then religious Zionists needed to present an alternative to the state.

  Yoel was rethinking one of his most cherished metaphors, the relationship between the mountain and the coast. He had taught a generation of young religious Zionists that the responsibility of those who lived on the mountain—in Judea and Samaria—was to bring spirituality to those who lived on the coast—greater Tel Aviv. In ancient Israel, he’d noted, prophecy had come from the people of the mountain, aimed at the mercantile people near the sea.

  But even as the Israelis of the coast were drifting away from their Jewish roots, the Israelis of the mountain were retreating into a self-enclosed provinciality. Religious Zionism had been founded as a mediation between modernity and tradition, but parts of the religious Zionist community were adopting ultra-Orthodox ghettoization. And they were replacing the messy engagement with reality—the essence of the Judaic approach to life—with a purist ideology that bypassed historical process. If the alienation between the mountain and the coast continued, Yoel now taught, Israel would, God forbid, face hurban, destruction. “The body pulls to excessive materialism, and the soul to detached spirituality,” he told a journalist. “For the people of Israel, there are always two trends competing: holiness, and an openness to the world. The question is: What is the relationship between the two?” The coast needed the mountain to remind it of Israel’s spiritual destiny; but the mountain also needed the coast, to remind it that redemption must happen in the real world. Judaism could work only through balance between reality and dream.

  Yoel stopped writing his rebuttal to The Yellow Wind. Though he still
believed that David Grossman had wronged the settlers, Grossman had anticipated the intifada while Yoel, who prided himself on his farsightedness, had not. Yoel’s grievance toward Grossman now felt to him petty. I can’t write propaganda—

  “[WE MUST] REDEEM the Mount from its shame,” Yehudah Etzion told a small group of followers, and pointed toward the golden Dome of the Rock rising across the valley. He was standing on the Mount of Olives, near the spot from which Motta Gur had surveyed the Old City walls just before ordering the paratroopers to move toward the Lions’ Gate.

  It was January 1989, and Yehudah had just been released from Tel Mond Prison, after serving five years for plotting to destroy the Dome of the Rock and for participating in the terrorist attack against West Bank mayors. Instead of going directly home to Ofra, though, he had walked seventy kilometers from the prison gate to the Mount of Olives, carrying a silver-rimmed flag embroidered with the verse from Isaiah, “For Zion’s sake I won’t be silent.” At thirty-seven, his curly red hair was thinning, his beard turning gray.

  The people aren’t ready for the Temple, Yehudah told his supporters. And so he was founding a new “redemption movement” to educate the people about the need to re-create the Jewish state, freed from westernization and run according to the laws of Torah, updated to the conditions of modern sovereignty, and with a rebuilt Temple at its heart.

  In Ofra, Yehudah’s neighbors greeted him with the traditional welcome of bread and salt. Not that they agreed with Yehudah’s politics; they were simply embracing a friend who had made a mistake, paid for it, and returned home. Only Yoel, who lived at the other end of the street, kept away. When the two former friends happened to meet, Yoel greeted him perfunctorily and quickly moved on. And Yoel removed from his living room wall the photomontage of the Second Temple imposed on the Dome of the Rock.