“Give us names,” Yisrael demanded. “If you have proof, I will go with you to the police.”
“I’ll provide names after the shivah,” said Yoel, and left the hall.
FOR DAYS AFTERWARD, Yoel’s pronouncements made headlines. Journalists waited outside his home. The law of rodef—for most Israelis an obscure halachic concept—entered the national lexicon.
Yoel approached the two chief rabbis—one Ashkenazi, one Sephardi—and confided two names to them. Both were leading rabbis within the settlement movement. Yoel asked the chief rabbis to create an investigative committee. And he asked that they keep the names private. Naively, Yoel hoped that the rabbinic community would purge itself, without police involvement. Yoel, after all, had no hard evidence against anyone.
But one of the chief rabbis leaked the names to the media. When Yoel heard the news, he thought, They’ve buried me—
Now the police felt impelled to act. Humiliatingly, leading rabbis were summoned for police interrogation. An emergency meeting of hundreds of rabbis condemned what it called the “incitement” against the rabbinic community, and everyone understood whom the rabbis meant. The Yesha Council denounced Yoel by name.
Yoel received death threats and began wearing a bulletproof vest. Several young men, reservists from an elite combat unit, volunteered to serve as his bodyguards. On Shabbat they accompanied him to the Ofra synagogue. An outraged Yisrael told Yoel: Now you are turning your neighbors into potential murderers. Yisrael stopped speaking to him.
When no indictments resulted, Yoel publicly apologized to “all those innocents who were hurt.” Still, Yoel insisted that, for all his tactical missteps, he had achieved his goal. As a result of his public challenge, even extremist rabbis had been forced to disavow the political relevance of rodef. Yoel was convinced he had prevented the next assassination.
In turning himself, a rabbi from Ofra, into a symbol of the nation’s grief and rage, Yoel helped religious Zionism return to the mainstream. Israel’s healing began with Yoel’s torment.
“IS CIVIL WAR POSSIBLE?” read the banner hanging in the auditorium of the high school on Kibbutz Ein Shemer. The several hundred students who had gathered to hear Yoel Bin-Nun address that question all wore the uniform of Hashomer Hatzair—blue work shirt with white shoelace crisscrossing at the neck. But the austere socialism of Hashomer Hatzair was gone. Instead there were boys with shaved heads and earrings, girls with jeans torn at the knee.
Yoel stood before them: long graying beard and paunch, white knitted kippah, long fringes of tzitzit extending beneath bulky gray sweater. Deep lines marked his forehead, and his eyes were wide with sleeplessness.
“No enemy from without can endanger us more than the split from within,” he began. “The first and second temples were destroyed because of internal conflict. Our responsibility is to emphasize the commonality of the people of Israel and to push the fanatics of all sides beyond the pale. I don’t want to belong to a camp but to the [whole] people of Israel.”
Suddenly Yoel paused. Smiling widely, he gestured to a middle-aged man sitting among the young people. “My comrade in arms!” exclaimed Yoel.
Avital Geva looked away, embarrassed by the attention.
Over a decade had passed since they’d seen each other last, in a Lebanese village on the edge of besieged Beirut. Now Yoel told the audience how during reserve duty shortly after the Yom Kippur War, Avital had demanded that Shabbat rest be granted to secular soldiers too. “Don’t think that Avital and I don’t have arguments,” he said. “But there is friendship. We’ll argue forever, but democratically.”
“How does democracy go with annexing the territories?” a teacher called out.
“Good,” Yoel replied, like an officer speaking to a new recruit. “I don’t believe we can or should rule over the Palestinians, even though I think that the people of Israel has an exclusive right to the land of Israel. After Oslo, settlement no longer means ruling over the Palestinians. They now have self-rule. But settlements will prevent a Palestinian state, which would endanger Israel’s existence.”
“So what status will Palestinians have?” pressed the teacher.
“The solution is cantons—Jewish and Arab areas. It’s not the ideal solution, but since the Palestinians aren’t ready to accept our existence, it’s the only solution.”
Yoel returned to the question of Jewish identity. “You aren’t new creatures called Israelis but a continuation of the Jewish people,” he said pointedly to the students. “You don’t have to be religious to know the Jewish tradition. I talk with Maimonides; he’s alive for me.”
“If I don’t study Torah, then I’m responsible for the schism?” a girl called out.
“The sad answer is yes,” replied Yoel.
“Come here and eat pork and there won’t be a schism,” a boy called out.
Yoel smiled, tried to be patient.
Avital said, “Yoel, you’ve done more to bring us together than anyone else in this country. You’ve stood against your own camp. What do we need to do from our side?”
“Break the stigma that Judaism belongs only to a certain kind of people,” replied Yoel.
Afterward they embraced. Avital held Yoel’s shoulder and didn’t let go, as if to give him strength. “Ya Allah, Avital Geva!” said Yoel, sounding like Avital. For the first time since the assassination, Yoel seemed happy.
They walked around the kibbutz, the earth moist with the winter rains. Avital spoke about his sons. One was a combat pilot, another an infantry officer.
“I have three Golanis at home,” Yoel said, referring to an infantry unit. “They tell me that the paratroopers philosophize, while Golani does the real work.”
They laughed.
ELECTIONS WERE CALLED for May 1996. Yoel endorsed Labor Party leader Shimon Peres, despised on the right as initiator of the Oslo process.
At a meeting in a synagogue in a town near Tel Aviv, Yoel declared that the peace process was the will of God. “Who appointed you a prophet?” one man demanded. “How do you know the will of God?”
“Just as I knew when I went up to Ofra twenty years ago,” said Yoel.
A young man asked quietly, “What went wrong?” Yoel replied, “We didn’t listen to the moral arguments of the left.”
Shortly before the elections, as the country was still grieving for its fallen leader, for itself, Hamas terrorists resumed suicide bombings. Israeli intelligence determined that Arafat was secretly encouraging Hamas—and then presenting himself as the moderate alternative whom Israel needed to strengthen with additional concessions. On car bumpers appeared a new sticker, “Shalom, Haverim” (Farewell, Friends)—all those killed as a result of the Oslo process promoted by Rabin.
Both the right-wing dream of greater Israel, and the left-wing dream of Peace Now, Yoel concluded, were delusions. Instead, Israel needed to seek consensus, source of its spiritual strength, and from that political center manage an insoluble conflict. Just as Rabin would have done.
The suicide bombings destroyed the vast lead the Labor Party had held in polls after the assassination, and the Likud, headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, returned to power. For some on the left, it was the final betrayal.
The Likud government ended the partial freeze on settlement building that Labor had imposed, and resumed large-scale construction in the territories. But a majority of Israelis continued to support the Oslo process. Netanyahu’s mandate from the public was to negotiate more toughly than Labor, but to continue negotiating. More and more Israelis, including many Likud voters, were concluding that there was no alternative to a two-state solution.
THE DISAPPOINTMENTS OF YISRAEL HAREL
YISRAEL’S CLANDESTINE MEETINGS with members of the PLO continued. He even succeeded in involving several hard-liners from the settlement community.
Inevitably, though, in an intimate country with few secrets, the Israeli media discovered the improbable dialogue. When the story appeared, the Yesha Council convened in a
n emergency session. Yisrael was accused of betraying the trust of his colleagues, of legitimizing terrorists. “This is one of the most important steps I’ve taken as head of the Yesha Council,” he countered.
The council condemned those of its members who had met with Palestinians without its approval. But despite calls for Yisrael’s resignation, a majority backed him.
Still, when his term as head of the Yesha Council ended, Yisrael didn’t seek reelection. He needed change, sought a wider scope of influence. His ambitions had always been greater than the religious Zionist community.
Yisrael had an idea: to bring together leading figures from across the political and cultural spectrum to devise solutions to Israel’s internal conflicts. Boldly, the former head of the Yesha Council approached the Rabin Center—founded to preserve the legacy of Yitzhak Rabin—and suggested that it sponsor his initiative. The center promptly hired Yisrael to establish the Forum for National Responsibility.
After a yearlong deliberation, members of the forum released the Kinneret Covenant, which offered a shared vision for a Jewish and democratic Israel. But when the final document was released, Yisrael’s name wasn’t among the impressive list of signatories. He had resigned, following a personal dispute.
Yisrael’s weekly column in Ha’aretz brought him a measure of satisfaction. As the token right-winger, he enjoyed scandalizing the leftist elite. Yisrael’s columns bemoaned the decline of secular Zionism, and especially the kibbutzim. The children’s houses were all closed; even kibbutz dining rooms, center of communal life, were being abandoned. Since childhood Yisrael had venerated the kibbutz. Yet he also resented kibbutzniks for opposing the settlers, for mocking their pioneering credentials. In his mourning and longing for the vanishing kibbutz was also a taunt: Look at the vitality of my camp, and look what’s become of you.
Yisrael found his vindication in the growing influence of religious Zionist youth in the IDF. In Yisrael’s generation, few paratrooper officers had been religious; now, though, Orthodox recruits were forming a new sacrificial elite. On Shabbat mornings in Ofra, young men in small knitted kippot precariously pinned to military haircuts gathered outside the synagogue exchanging army stories, while their younger brothers eavesdropped.
Still, the settlements also threatened the place of religious Zionists in the IDF. If a future government gave the order to evacuate settlements, would Orthodox soldiers obey? And if many refused, how would the army be able to trust its religious recruits? Yisrael understood: the settlements that had empowered a generation of religious Zionists could also destroy them.
A HOLISTIC UNIVERSE
THE GREENHOUSE WAS THRIVING. The young people who came here to learn how to raise fish with minimal water and how to grow lettuce without soil now included girls in kerchiefs from neighboring Arab Israeli villages, Russian immigrant boys from a drug rehabilitation center, shy Ethiopians with few words. The whole people of Israel, as Avital put it. For Avital, everyone was hevreh, even the donkeys and the fish. Two dogs were squabbling in the greenhouse; Avital chided them, “Hevreh, calm down.”
But how much longer could he maintain this vision of a pluralistic Israel imbued with the old kibbutz values of work and improvisation and cooperative effort?
So far Ein Shemer remained true to its egalitarian essence. But even in this strong kibbutz, some were saying they were tired of being an idealistic elite: we’re normal people, just like other Israelis, we don’t wake up in the morning thinking of the big issues anymore, just of how to get through the day. The direction was clear. Other kibbutzim were moving toward private ownership and differential salaries. Privatization: how Avital detested that word! Hurban habayit, he called it, literally destruction of the home, but with a historical resonance recalling the destruction of the Temple. The god of money was penetrating even here. The temple of the kibbutz was falling.
The settlement movement had tried to inherit the kibbutzim as the pioneering avant-garde, but it had only divided the nation. Where, then, would the next vision come from?
Hevreh, this isn’t America, Avital admonished his young people. This land of light and stone would yield blessing only if it was cherished, nurtured. Materialism was as much an existential threat—more!—than all the wars and terrorism. If the Jews lost their narrative, forgot the dreams that had brought them home, how would they survive in the Middle East?
Late at night, kept awake by anxieties, Avital sought comfort in the greenhouse. He sat there with eyes closed, listened to the drip and flow, the sprinklers forming mist across the lotus-covered pool, the rusty fans swaying thickets of reeds. And Avital one more organism in a mutually sustaining whole.
FAREWELL TO OFRA
WITH NEARLY THREE THOUSAND RESIDENTS, Ofra was thriving. There were three elementary schools, three synagogues, the girls’ high school founded by Yoel Bin-Nun, a field school and even a center for cave studies, an art gallery, a library, a supermarket.
But for Yoel and Esther, Ofra no longer felt like home. Yoel’s neighbor Yisrael Harel had resumed speaking to him, but some others continued to shun him. Yehudah Etzion, Yoel noted bitterly, had long since been forgiven, even though his mad plot to blow up the Dome of the Rock would have endangered the very existence of Israel; yet Yoel was despised as a heretic.
Three years after the assassination, the Bin-Nuns left Ofra. They moved back to Alon Shvut, the settlement in the Etzion Bloc that Yoel and Esther had helped found nearly three decades earlier. Back to the national consensus: even left-wingers acknowledged that the Etzion Bloc, close to Jerusalem, would remain part of Israel in any future agreement with the Palestinians.
The Bin-Nuns settled in a modest white stone house, the end of a row of attached single-family homes, with a strip of yard in the back. Hundreds of families now lived in Alon Shvut; thousands filled the neighboring Jewish towns and villages spread among the Etzion hills. Here at least, in its birthplace, the settlement movement had won. Yoel was grateful for what his generation had achieved. Wisdom, he said, required knowing what to leave for future generations to complete.
True, Yoel hadn’t imagined, as a student in Mercaz, being confronted with the unbearable choice between preserving the intactness of the people of Israel and the intactness of the land of Israel. The cruelty of the dilemma: to be the generation entrusted with the wholeness of the land, only to be forced by circumstance to leave it again. But in the hierarchy of Jewish values—people, Torah, land—peoplehood came first. After all, Yoel argued, the Jews had been a people before they received the Torah and possessed the land.
In the patch of garden at the entrance to his home, Yoel planted a willow tree. Long ago he had learned from Rabbi Zvi Yehudah to love the willow, which lacked flavor or scent and symbolized the Jew without redeeming qualities—no less than the fragrant and tasty citron, symbol of the saintly Jew. Every autumn, before the holiday of Sukkoth, when blessings were recited over the four species—palm branch, citron, myrtle, and willow, evoking the unity of Israel—Yoel hung a sign outside his door, urging passersby to help themselves to branches of the willow tree. It was his way of spreading love among Jews.
HOMECOMING
UDI ADIV COMPLETED his doctorate at the University of London. His subject was how Israeli historiography turned Jewish trauma into Zionist myth.
He moved back to Israel. England was cold, he said, its people distant. Udi missed the Israeli landscape, even the intense Israeli temperament. “I’m married to this place,” Udi told a friend. “A Catholic marriage.”
Leah had returned to Israel six months before. The Adivs had adopted a two-year-old boy from São Paulo, and Leah had gone there without Udi, who’d stayed in London to finish the doctorate. Alone, Leah had brought their son back to Israel.
Leah had tried to understand Udi’s need to withdraw, had hoped he would change. But Udi remained distant. Evenings he would leave the house without explanation and return late at night. They shouted at each other more than they spoke. Finally, Leah filed fo
r divorce.
Udi got a job teaching political theory at the Open University in Haifa. He was a popular lecturer, encouraging students to call him with problems. One student was shocked to discover his past. “But he’s so nice,” she said.
He moved into a small apartment in a working-class block near the Haifa shore. Perhaps for nostalgia, he kept his old revolutionary books, like a collection of Castro’s speeches. On the wall hung a satirical poster of Karl Marx as a construction worker, leaning against a rail and smoking a cigarette. The kitchen table was crowded with piles of books, Arabic newspapers, and Palestinian nationalist memorabilia, like a key chain with the Palestinian flag.
Udi regarded the Oslo process as a personal vindication. Not for his radical excesses—he had long ago repudiated the trip to Damascus—but for his insistence that Israel accept Palestinian nationalism. That view was hardly peripheral anymore. Growing numbers of Israelis were accepting the once-daring notion that the conflict with the Palestinians was between two legitimate national narratives. Even Udi’s critical approach to Israeli historiography was becoming mainstream. A new generation of Israeli historians was examining the most basic premises of the nation’s identity; after all, in the era of peace, it was now safe to dismantle myths that had sustained the nation under siege.
Even Udi’s anti-Zionism was no longer taboo. Though the radical group Matzpen had long since dissolved, its antipathy to Zionism was embraced by some Israeli intellectuals. In falling out of love with the Israeli story, Udi had been a kind of harbinger.
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